Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

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.

OK, so here I am down to getting my fashion tips from the WSJ. Seems that Airpods, that terrific invention that saved us from a Luca Brazzi moment if our corded headphones got snagged by a passing scooter dude, are jumping a shark and corded phones are back in with “influencers”.

I never gave up my corded phones despite the potential promise of stumping a panel of actuaries (and because I’m cheap), and here I am back (?) in fashion.

This quote from the article speaks to a brand of body language that has its attractions. Plus, new Airpods $549; corded headphones $19.

“A cord also projects a “you can’t sit with me” factor that some people find appealing. While AirPods subtly blend into your look, making you at least appear available to the outside world, corded headphones wall you off from others. Natalia Christina, director of strategy and brand for the Digital Fairy, said that contributes to their allure. “It gives the air of ‘do not disturb,’” she explained. “So it’s kind of subconsciously related to that grungy aesthetic, where it’s about being moody and having that physical barrier up.””

and so the pretty part of fall, that caramel-apple lie that masks its underlying bitterness, continues its party-line promise of unsustainable Indian summer, with endless shimmering golds and reds and its misleading cohabitation with a stock market approaching flood tide;

until inexorable planetary mechanics perversely drain the light from each day, uninfluenced by legislative tampering, and we huddle, chastened, hoping only that the recession of the light spares our now-singular investment in one more vernal equinox

The hazards of dotage: so, you’re eating something soft (cheese), and you drop a shard on the floor. It’s your floor, so what the hell, you look down and see something the same size and color. You pick it up and pop it in your mouth and it’s … crunchy.

Not like cheese.

Still, it WAS your floor. How bad can it be? You chew more and swallow.

 Early on in the pandemic I saw the virus as aliens in a game of Space Invaders, missiles to be dodged and ducked by scurrying into the street to avoid people walking in my direction, holding my breath for 10 seconds and presenting my mask if someone passed unavoidably close.

With my first shot of vaccine the imagery has shifted.  I now see a burgeoning atmosphere surrounding me, thickening with each passing day.  By the time of my second shot I expect to see bursts of light and showering sparks as hapless viruses plunge into my impervious ether like so much space junk.

Until then I hunker, and watch the dinosaurs for signs of imminent extinction.

Musings on clutter.

I ran across this piece today in the New Yorker by author Ann Patchett. Her best childhood friend’s father had died, and over the course of several weeks she assisted this friend in breaking down his house and distributing the plethora of stuff.

As that task unfolded, she consulted her husband and they decided on a pre-emptive purge of their own house, which had not changed ownership in 26 years.

If you’ve had a similar experience of ridding out a parent’s house after a death or involuntary downsizing, you’re familiar with the drill. It’s an archaeological expedition whose hieroglyphics are a stream of disassociated objects rather than something meticulously chronicled. One thing might trigger a flood of memory, the next an inscrutible puzzlement.

In engaging her own house, Patchett finds cache after cache of champagne flutes, brandy snifters, flatware, mixing bowls, much of which was still in its original packaging. It seems much of it was self-inflicted and not scapegoated by mistargeted wedding or anniversary gifts. It seems, instead, that they were aspirational purchases:

“I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be. I had taken my cues from Edith Wharton novels and Merchant Ivory films. I had missed the mark on who I would become, but in doing so I had created a record of who I was at the time, a strange kid with strange expectations “

We had a similar experience a couple of years ago when an overachieving toilet was paired with an underperforming side sewer, and our basement was flooded. We’ve lived in our house for 46 years, and you can let your imagination populate this disaster. The basement was chock full of stuff from 1975 on, an uncurated time capsule born of expedience and life’s inexorable velocity.

A team from the insurance company was on hand to remedy, and for each object we were faced with a binary decision: trash it or sanitize and repatriate.

I’ve said elsewhere that this was an exercise in speed-dating my past. As I regarded objects, I felt that in my case they were just souvenirs of a prior self, and not (with the possible exception of a 1980 edition of The Writer’s Market) aspirational. Just life trudging forward.

In the end, I’m mostly happy with the result in the basement, the sight of concrete floor that I hadn’t seen in decades, and I hope to spare our son the horrors of the other two floors. And I think Patchett’s takeaway may seem at first glance morbid, but in fact is liberating:

“I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.”

Quiet and non-dramatic Thanksgiving here.  That’s what happens when there’s only 3 of us left.  Son Andrew came over Tuesday from his home in Twisp (Eastern Washington, Methow Valley) to take his girlfriend to SeaTac and a flight to visit her family, and he’s been hanging here and visiting city friends.

We’ve done several urban hikes, and yesterday checked into our gym for a family workout.

Today was just vegging until dinner.  We (well, let’s be honest, Mrs. Perils) didn’t do a whole turkey, instead got a nice breast and thigh from PCC and surrounded it with roasted Brussel’s sprouts, an herbaceous non-cavity stuffing, roasted potatoes and cranberry sauce.

We used to do large, raucous orphan’s Thanksgivings when we first moved here and had no family within 2500 miles, very festive for 20-somethings in the same boat.  We would relish the seeming emancipation from fraught family Thanksgivings and it was lots of fun.

That 20-something crowd eventually had their own kids and made other friends and married other people, and our insouciant, celebratory gatherings dissipated.  I miss that scene, but I love the casual intimacy of our recent 3- or 4-person repasts, and the lack of expectation and drama.  We genuinely like each other and have a wonderful time.

The weekend stretches before us.  Tomorrow morning, way too early, Mrs. Perils and I will don our Rainbow City marching band uniforms for the first time since early August and head downtown to march and play in the Macy Seattle Thanksgiving day parade.

Old news for some, but I began playing in the Rainbow City Band, an LGBTA organization, in the fall of 2009, under some interesting circumstances.  Mrs. Perils and I met in high school band, and she still had her student clarinet, stowed in the closet for 40 years.  She unearthed it and joined the band the next year.

We’re a wind symphony/concert band fall, winter and spring, and become a marching band in the summer, performing in all the major parades in our region.  We love playing together, and the band has become the main hub of our social life. The band also has a mission of reaching out to the community at large, to show that we’re not that much different from other communities in our urban soup, and that’s led us to arise at 6 tomorrow morning for the privilege of shivering in the November Seattle cold and rain.

I kid, I think it will be a whole lot of fun.  We work pretty hard at both our concert and our marching band personae, and like to say that we’re a concert band that marches, meaning that the quality of the music is our first emphasis.

Here are a couple of examples:

Thriller, with dance routine:

Jump:

And one we’ll be playing tomorrow, Shut Up And Dance:

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

I play in an 18-piece swing band and tonight we had a Halloween gig at a retirement center. It was one of those upscale retirement centers where folks can comfortably downsize at age 62 and still celebrate their mobility, whether or not they have an inkling of the physical surrender ahead .

We start playing, a robust round of 40s swing tunes, 60s vocal ballads, contemporary standards, and several couples are dancing away. At one point I espy a woman in the spectator group mouthing the words to At Last as KJ, our vocalist, kills it.

Nothing makes us want to play like people dancing.  There’s a lusty cheer after every number we play, and we feel a glow that we’ve given a lift to what we blithely assume is a mundane day-to-day experience.

As the capable dancers cavort, however, I look at the rest of the audience and take note of the demographics: there are 4 or 5 men to about 35 women, all in various states of physical challenge, and the euphoria of my missionary zeal gets real:.  I realize that I am looking at people who were cheerleaders, homecoming queens, sports heroes, wallflowers and valedictorians (and at least one former PAC10 head football coach), and they’ve all arrived at this inexorably humbling moment where the desire to dance, and live, collides with physical doubt and the formidable odds against garnering a partner.

There’s an intermission and a costume contest, winners are chosen and the mood is jovial. We begin to play again and the personal pleasure I derive from playing with these close friends and talented musicians crests.

Then I look back at the audience and once again notice the woman who was sotto-voceing At Last.  Her Rollater seems from my still-nimble perspective to be a flimsy barrier to the dance floor, but in reality it is insurmountable.  The sense of loss that I project onto her spars with the ever-present euphoria of making music and I finish the set. But if it were me still feeling the beat after the music ends, I think I’d still be left with that yearning.

That inextinguishable yearning.

My dad and his grandfather ca 1944. Click to engorge

Just read a nice piece in Brevity Magazine by a woman reminiscing about accompanying her dad on a hunting excursion when she was pre-tomboy, and it reminded me of similar rituals my dad took me on (although I was probably never as tomboy as the author of that piece, as I reveal later).

My dad didn’t hunt with his father, who was not a real outdoorsy type, he downloaded his hunting and fishing genes from his paternal grandparents. My great-grandmother was a fisherwoman, and often would show me scars on her hands earned decades prior when she cleaned catfish and was impaled by their dorsal fins. I only knew my great-grandparents in their dotage, and only have fleeting bits from anecdotes of my dad’s recall.

One such anecdote has stuck with me. One time my dad and his grandfather were going hunting, and my dad borrowed a hunting jacket from his grandfather. As they proceeded, my dad reached into one of the myriad pockets on the jacket and pulled out a substantial roll of (late 1940s) $20 bills. As he gawked at it, his grandfather sternly admonished, “Don’t you ever tell your grandmother about that!”

My dad continued to hunt after I was born, and took me along a few times, perhaps thinking to kindle a relationship similar to what he had with his grandfather. He did, for a brief period, call me his hunting and fishing buddy. For duck hunting forays, he would wake me before 5am, and we’d head to the Maumee River, where he had a rowboat chained up under the Ohio Turnpike bridge. He’d row us across the as-yet-unfrozen river to a spot below the old Children’s Home, place his decoys and set up the duckblind that he’d pre-fabbed using burlap and dowel rods.  Then we’d hunker as day slowly broke over the fog-enshrouded decoys and wait, Dad sipping hot coffee from his thermos and offering me a bitter slug now and then.  And, as was the father in the Brevity article, Dad was a Jim Beam loyalist, and I’ll bet he had a grog ration of it secreted in one of his jacket pockets

Dad had preparation rituals the night before. His grandfather had handed down a flotilla of wooden decoys, and I recall him melting lead and pouring it into a mold in order to fashion anchors for the decoys. He also at some point bought a duck call from Herter’s, which came with a 78-rpm record, and he would spend nights practicing calls along with the record, probably with more commitment than I have practicing my trumpet.There was a certain call that was to be used when the ducks were far aloft, in order to entice them to descend and check out our delectable collection of decoys, a call that sounded a lot like Phyllis Diller laughing. A whole lot. As the ducks approached our feathered rave party, a different, sort of low chuckle was meant to seal the deal.

As much as I wanted to assimilate the manly mantle that I was being offered, it was freaking cold sitting in that duck blind with not much to do, and my only takeaway was hypothermia and a dose of guilt.  Dad never did teach me to shoot, which was probably wise, knowing me, but that may have been the one thing that would have piqued my interest.

I remember the last time we went duck hunting together, and I believe the last time he ever went.  That morning he employed his duck-call virtuosity several times and had some birds circling in.  Each time, however, other hunters started opening fire while they were well out of range. We packed up in disgust, and that chapter closed for good.

Our angst-of-the-weekend is how to parse the words “cocktail attire”, a requirement embedded in a rare, exceedingly rare, invitation to a wedding tomorrow.

I guess this exposes the paucity of our social life.  The only times since 2000 that I have worn other than jeans or cargo shorts outside the house have been Rainbow City Band concerts and parades. Yes, the tuxedo is a pretty high bar of dressiness, but it was totally a uniform, and not representative of our social status.

Subsequent to early-on marital bargaining, “cocktail attire” around the house at minimum requires underwear, and this stricture is almost universally observed.

The search for how to satisfy the emergent requirement sent me first to, of course, Google, which apprised me that it entailed:

He should wear: 

A suit and tie. Lean toward darker hues in chillier months, and feel free to opt for lighter grays or blues in warmer weather.

She should wear:

A cocktail dress or dressy suit or jumpsuit.

Speaking only my side of the closet, there are easily 40+ years of garments hanging there, many of which think Reagan is still president.  There are suits hanging there that I wore in the late 90s for work, and perhaps a few from the 80s that my mother, an excellent seamstress, made for me, also for work.  The Smithsonian would make my side of the closet an exhibit, perhaps a feature in the magazine.

So, on the surface, it seemed that I might be able to comply with Miss Google’s requirement.  However, this broached a topic that was not merely sartorial: the corollary requirement that the garments, regardless of current style considerations, could actually be donned, zipped and buttoned some 20 years later.

So I began to wonder if the requirement somehow might not be as east-coast, Men’s-Wearhouse-restrictive, and I consulted some of my few acquaintances that might not be as socially clueless as I am.  And “suit-and-tie” gave way to options that might incorporate some of my more recent relaxed-fit options: khakis, open-collar dress shirt, and a sport coat that I bought at Nordstrom many years ago and have never worn, but won’t actually have to be buttoned in extremis.

And Voila!  I have a combination that, as long as I restrict my visits to the hors d’oeuvre tray, might get me through the evening.  Keep your eye on the fashion pages, and beware of buttons ricocheting off the walls and chandeliers.

The word from Mrs. Perils’ side of the closet is that any such angst was totally on my side, and she has a lovely option to don.  Lucky for me - all eyes will be on her, and I will slink gratefully in her penumbra.