Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

For a sliver, at least, of my midwesterner generation she made us citizens of California, or perhaps wish we were.

By the strength of her prose she took our adolescent Beach-Boy puppy-love and gave it an intoxicating depth and sense of physical, cultural and metaphoric place for us folks who had left home and were looking to plant roots somewhere.

I never ended up living in California, the spell lost its grip as my roots lodged and occupied me in the Pacific northwest, but there’s an aura to the south created by Didion (and Chandler and Stegner) that still retains its allure.

When I was a child, Christmas Eve was an occasion for our extended Philbin family to gather at my great-grandparents’ place, to meet or reacquaint with relatives we both knew, and hadn’t known we had. There was a huge ham in the kitchen, and at some point a visit from an uncle-Santa (there were a few over the years) in full regalia, with just a whiff of something flammable in his beard.

At some point in the evening it seemed that the only people who were in the room were women and children.

My great-grandparents’ property had a main house, where the festivities were held, and a second house back in the lot where an uncle and his family lived.

One year I realized that there was a very jolly party happening in the back residence, and I snuck back to see what was up. Turned out that the bulk of the male Philbin population was back there playing cards and having the kind of fun that the uncle-Santas, at least momentarily, had to eschew.

I certainly can’t say that these Christmas gatherings were a Philbin Woodstock. I’m certain that there was classism and old grudges roiling just below the surface, but I find it remarkable that we nonetheless came physically together once a year and, in a way, accounted for each other.

How I wish I could walk back in there as an adult and hear the stories that in our diaspora have slipped under gravestones, unheard by those who could have related them.