This is a quiet Christmas for us. Patsy, Maureen’s sister, will be joining us for brunch and opening presents. Maureen made an incredible supper of scallops last night and we watched “The Ref.” We have reservations for a “Christmas” dinner at Giardino’s, one of our go-to restaurants this evening. We will call our daughters, brothers, sisters and their families throughout the day, probably a couple of close friends as well.
That’s it.
It’s okay. i’m not big into getting gifts. Don’t get me wrong. i appreciate the ones i get because it shows the one(s) bearing the gift care for me. The caring is the feel good part. And i have not had a perfect Christmas since back in the late seventies. Someone was not there with me ever since then. i missed my father in 2014 and my mother in 2013, and Christmas was special when i was with them.
In the Navy, i missed several Christmases (and more Thanksgivings) away from my family. They were the toughest. Now, if i began to feel sorry i’m missing someone, i think of all of today’s men and women service members who are away from home and quit my whining.
i find today a time for quiet, reflection, living with a few of the best memories. It appears my two daughters are both in a good place along with their families. That is the best Christmas gift for me. Most of my friends are still around, a blessing in itself considering our age.
Last night, i sat by the fire reflecting these things. i actually read the Matthew and Luke verses of the Bible relating the birth of Jesus. i have the bible my parents gave me when i was a pre-teen. It has my name, “Jim Rye Jewell, Jr.” engraved in gold on the front. But i chose to read from a smaller condensed version my mother gave to my father before he sailed for the Southwest Pacific and World War II. There is no engraved name on the front. But on the first page, a black extension of the cover, she wrote his name and address in white ink and on the following blank page wrote: “To my husband, Jimmy, with Love from Estelle.”
i’m choking up a little bit here. So, i will move on.
After reading Mother’s entries and as i read the passages, i thought of Maureen and i paralleling notes to each other showing the kind of love they had for each other. i kept thinking “love does conquer all.” i believe the man for whom this holiday was created and often forgotten in our celebrations would approvingly agree.
i hope all of you, even those of you in our country’s service who are away, have the best Christmas you can have with lots of love.
Merry Christmas.
P.S. The tree is green, not blue. i remain tech photo challenged.
Since i reneged on rearranging the lights on my sign, this Christmas post is essentially the same as posted last year with a few edits and comments in green font like this intro.
Christmas decorations are going up a bit early again.
We actually put ours up on the first day of the month this December. We were later than a number of homes around us.
It seems to me back home growing up, we cut down our tree on Wynn “Papa” Prichard’s farm about a week before the big day, decorated it that evening, hung the stockings, hung a wreath on the door, put some lights around the door, and took it all down the day after Christmas. In our neighborhood today, about one-quarter of the houses have blow-up dolls, reindeer statues, lights enough to provide electricity for a small city among other amusements. The decorations here went up a week ago and many will likely remain well after the New Year.
But i wanted to get it out of the way. And so begins the Christmas season. And with that, i offer my traditional repeat of a column i wrote for the Lebanon Democrat about a gazillion years ago. Merry Christmas with this year’s version of Noel:
Have you ever had one of those days when everything turned into an embarrassment? I had a champion day like that several years ago.
It started innocently while I hung our outdoor decoration, a home-made “NOEL” sign from the eave of our garage, hoping to get it up before my wife’s friends arrived for their Christmas dinner.
Maureen and her six friends have been meeting monthly for dinners for 15-plus years. They had this December dinner catered, did it up right. It was Maureen’s turn to be hostess.
It was dark when I began. I was at the top of my step ladder attaching the second of two wires from the sign to hooks secured to the eave when the ladder lurched and toppled. I grabbed a metal ornamental grating above the garage door.
There I hung, my arm intertwined with the “O” of the sign. If I tried to drop, the sign could catch my arm and do some pretty bad stuff.
I yelled, but Maureen had Christmas carols at top volume and didn’t hear. I tried to think of what to do while simultaneously wondering how long I could hold on. The dog wandered underneath, occasionally looking up as if I was a very strange person hanging there.
After several minutes, a neighbor’s son and friend pulled into the driveway several houses away. As they emerged, I swallowed my pride and yelled “Help.”
At first, they could not discern who was calling. Then they spotted me and came to help. The dog decided to protect me and began barking threateningly. The boys hesitated. I assured them the only danger was being licked to death. They finally righted the ladder and helped me down.
I thanked them profusely and then studied whether I should tell Maureen or not. Now that I was back on solid ground, I decided it was too funny not to tell her. She was incredulous and not particularly amused.
I did not realize my embarrassment for the night was just beginning.
While Maureen made final arrangements for her dinner, our daughter, Sarah, and I went to a local spot for supper. The little place was an oasis of sorts in Bonita, where there were only Mexican, Italian, and fast food restaurants. The attraction was different, having a wide-range of ales and beers for golfers finishing a round across the street.
When we arrived, two couples were at tables and three guys sat at the bar. As we neared the end of our meal, the largest of the guys at the bar walked to the door and then turned back. I noticed his eyes seemed glazed. Then he walked back to the bar.
Suddenly, this guy and the one on the other side grabbed the guy in the middle off his stool, slammed him into the wall and started pummeling him with their fists. The three male diners, me (instinctively) included, approached from one side and two cooks approached from the back. Sarah had retreated to the door with the two lady diners. I grabbed the big guy. He spun and fell backward, slamming us into our table, knocking it over with shattering glass. It gave me some leverage, and we spun to the floor with me on top and knocking the wind out of the big guy. The other two diners helped me hold him until he calmed down. The cooks had quelled the other assailant. The two left quietly.
Even though the waitress wanted us to not pay our bill, we paid and left for home. On the way, I talked to my daughter about what I should have done (directed her outside before joining the fray) and what she should do the next time if she were ever in a place where a fight broke out (get out and away and not come back until she was sure it was over). i admonished her not to spoil her mother’s dinner party, adding i would tell her mother after the guests had departed. Sarah nodded.
I was feeling pretty good as we arrived home. Then Sarah dashed out of the car, ran into the house and yelled to her mother in front of the caterer and her six friends dressed to the nines amidst fine china, Christmas decorations, and haut cuisine, “Mom, Dad got in a fight in a bar.”
Some days, I just can’t get a break.
May your holiday season be embarrassment free.
May all of you have a most wonderful and amazing Christmas Season, and “Please, Please, Please (as James Brown once sang) remember the reason for the season,
This is a connection of several thoughts of mine. The poem at the end was included in my book of poems, A Pocket of Resistance: Selected Poems (available under the “Books” menu on this website). The introduction is something i came up with recalling Jesse Thompson. Jesse was not the old man in this story. Jesse turned his home into a World War II museum and held meetings each Wednesday for other Pearl Harbor survivors. He had one or two glasses of chardonnay almost every day at the Bonita Golf Club. His entire story is remarkable. i caution that the old man in the introduction or the old man in the poem are not intended to represent Jesse Thompson. My characters came from my head. Jesse was the inspiration.
The old man sat in the darkest corner of the bar on a tall bar stool next to an elevated cocktail table, i think they call it.
He was sipping on his chardonnay. He would have three or four over the course of several hours before driving home in the old Pontiac station wagon. The chardonnay had replaced the whiskey on the rocks or the well martinis or the gin and tonics he used to down when he wasn’t drinking draft beer. His home was just over a block away from the bar, drinking just wine slowly was safe enough he figured.
He had lived hard, wild. Navy, playing dice games at the bar long ago, carousing, fighting for his country and in bars like this one. His first wife left him for an insurance salesman. His second wife died young, breast cancer. One son had moved to Spain. One was a lumberjack in Canada. No one else.
The regulars knew him. The female bartenders and the waitresses adored him, thought he was cute. He despised “cute.” He didn’t partake of the bar banter, just watched, listened while sipping his wine, remembering.
This late afternoon, the young’uns at the bar were grousing about how bad the world was and, of course, they were expounding on how to fix it. This went on for about a half-hour.
In his dark corner, the old man cackled.
The boisterous bar denizens stopped and looked at the old man.
“Why are you laughing, old man? You don’t know nothing about what it’s like today.”
The old man rose from his table tossing his money with a generous tip down by his empty wine glass and starting for the door, turned and said, “You are right, you blithering whippersnappers. I don’t know nothing ‘bout all that crap you are blowing into this bar.
“But unlike you, i’ve been to the dark side of the hill.”
The old man turned, swung open the door, walked to his Pontiac, and drove home.
The crowd was quiet, puzzled.
One, contemplating his beer glass, quietly commented, “I wondered what he meant about being on the dark side of the hill?”
the dark side of the hill
I was walking down a small-town street a cold, harsh Sunday when from a corner of an alley a huddled, gnarled old man leering from under a soiled and torn fedora spoke to me:
“I have been to the dark side of the hill, my boy, “I can tell by your gait, you are headed there; frivolity and adventure are what you seek, but it’s not there, son.”
I paid no heed, passing away from the old man, continuing to pass through the sun-reflecting snow to the zenith of the hill, and on.
the wind is biting on the dark side of the hill; there is no sun to disperse the cold.
now, on some small-town street on a cold, harsh any day in the corner of an alley, a huddled, muddled, gnarled old man waits.
i have been to the dark side of the hill; my gait is altered.
Things have been happening to me in the last week or so that would make an old man grumpy, and they did.
My clutch went out, which turned into my transmission went out. It happened halfway down the hill from the San Diego Zoo, which is pretty appropriate. i sat there on a Tuesday afternoon for more than three hours, followed by an hour drive in a tow truck, time i had planned for doing something productive.
i won’t go deeply into the repairs but it will take at least a week and north of $5000 to get the car back. i am planning to have this car until i can’t drive anymore because i drive better with a standard transmission and about the only new cars left with standard transmissions are sports cars, and i am too old to drive a sports car. i had four of them in my life, loving every one of them, but i’ve seen old men driving sports cars. They look silly to me. The “courtesy car” the dealership loaned me is new and i can’t find the right button for anything. i couldn’t even turn the lights off at the Naval Air Station’s main gate. i finally found the right buttons and dials to turn off the rap music the previous driver had set on the radio.
This past weekend i had my laptop computer assessed and told it was working great. Of course, they reformatted the hard drive, and i had to restore a bunch of stuff. Then yesterday, it did something strange and i could not boot it up, even though i would have liked to boot it somewhere. With the help of Jamie at Apple Care, it is back. Not fun.
i am finding more things to ache due to my aging. Sometimes, it’s doing things i should no longer do. Sometimes, it’s exercising too much. Sometimes, it’s not exercising enough. Sometimes, it’s just from sleeping the wrong way. And i don’t know what the right way to sleep for me really is. Then, i feel guilty because all of my physical problems are minuscule compared to family and friends with real health challenges.
Grumpy.
But something made it all right.
Somewhere around the tale end of elementary school, my family began a tradition for Christmas. i suspect Aunt Evelyn Orr, my mother’s older sister, started the family doing it. When two of our family saw each other for Christmas, the one who said “Christmas Gift” first was supposed to get a present from the one whom they had met. At least, i think that was what was supposed to happen although i don’t think the “loser” ever gave that gift. Still, it was fun and for some reason when someone said “Christmas Gift” to me, it made me smile, even laugh, and feel good.
That tradition will not be practiced here this year with the possible exception of Maureen and i saying it to each other (and then giggle). One of our daughters will be with my son-in-law and grandson in Texas. The other will be with her man and his family near Las Vegas. We decided it would be best not to go to Signal Mountain this year for the trip we’ve made almost every year since 1992. We will have Maureen’s sister Patsy, and hopefully her son Mike over for brunch.
So, Christmas will be a little lonely this year.
You see on Tuesday, i had just finished my secret run for final Christmas presents when the damn clutch went out halfway down that hill. It was a beautiful Southwest corner day. i was buying special gifts and found myself wanting to buy more, spend foolishly for folks whom i care about dearly. i wanted to give more for all of my friends and family. i didn’t. After all, finances are a bit more critical than they used to be.
But the feeling i got was nothing short of amazing. i felt good. It felt like Christmas. The feeling was like the one i got when i read Judy Gray’s Christmas wish poem to her 1962 Lebanon High School class. No, i wasn’t in that class, i graduated from the military prep school across the street. But the fellow citizens my age of Lebanon Tennessee adopted me. There not too many things that have made me feel better than that in my life. And the poem brought back that sense of belonging. The poem and my last little gift acquisitions truly made it feel a lot like Christmas.
To all of you who read this, i hope you get that same feelings i had come over me, and…
i am sitting here as i normally do. What television we normally watch in the evenings didn’t demand our senses tonight: we left it off.
We had a wonderful repast of Maureen’s renderings. She is taking her bath and will retire with her kindle until she falls asleep. The fire is slowly dying as i sit besides the warm remnants. i will not last much longer. The night is calling me.
i just finished Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” It is an amazing, dark tale, captivating to me. Conrad’s talent in deep thought writing continues to blow me away. It occurred to me not many people nowadays would enjoy his work, or even finish it. It takes work. Good work with a reward if you think about it. Conrad takes me to the depths and width of human nature.
i should stay up a little longer to escape an absurd early rising, something for which i have gained a reputation. Nightly old age meds have been taken.
So, i simply am listening to music, my music, i have turned off Apple music and all of the other streaming music services. My library is about 4500 tunes of my music. i am going down the list, picking out the ones i want to listen to this solitary evening — the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream” just finished playing.
Lately, i have found a great deal of comfort in my music. In the beginning of this week, i pulled out the LP “The Essential Hank Williams.” A great playlist including “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “Move It On Over,” “Honky Tonkin’,” and two that mean a great deal with me. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” has been covered by a seemingly unending list of artists and almost every genre and remains one of my all time favorites. It is my “lonely” song. Then, there is “Kaw LIga” about the wooden indian standing outside the antique store who was in love with the wooden indian maiden who was bought by a rich man and taken away. But he stood there and never let it show. Such a wonderful story of human tragedy with so much meaning, deep meaning if you think about it.
And i got to sing it. Knew it by heart. My older cousin, Graham Williamson, who later played fiddle for Roy Acuff, was baby sitting me with his wife Mary Ellen and his band in their home — i think it was over on Sunset Drive — when i was about ten. His band was practicing. Then, he asked me to sing “Kaw Liga” with the band. i belted it out, knew every word, with feeling.
After listening to old Hank, i pulled out my Platter’s albums. Oh, “The Great Pretender” brought tears to my eyes. 1955, i was a blubbering, heads-over-heels in love as an eleven-year old and they played it at the soda fountain. i almost cried. And their songs accented my romances until i was well into my thirties.
And tonight, as i scrolled though my library, i thanked the gods of ancient wax for my appreciation of music.
Most of that story has been told here in various posts of the past. Perhaps the most impact on my music appreciation journey was WCOR. i worked AM, 900 on your dial on the weekends as the “weekend warrior with sounds to lay down…they may sound scratchy but it’s just the gold dust in the grooves.” i also worked 107.3 on your FM dial, which boasted of easy listening music and a plethora of public service announcements. My shift was weeknights from 7:00 to 10:30 P.M. when i shut down the station for the night. i also worked Sunday mornings on FM, following with my afternoon Top 40 stint.
For the first couple of months on FM, i played just what was required. i would pull down an easy listening LP from the shelves surrounding the studio from floor to ceiling. i would put it on the turntable, announce the artist, and let it play. When side one was over, i would play a public service announcement while turning it over and then play the other side. i would read a short news summary and the weather report on the hour and half-hour. i got quite a bit of studying done. i also got a little bored.
So sometime around the turn of the year, i invented the evening show, “A Potpourri of Music.” i played jazz, classical, show tunes, big band, and all sorts of other things i found in those shelves except for country and rock and roll — those records were down the hall in the AM studio. i would announce the artist and read some of the attributes from the back cover of the LP jacket.
In the summer after the station had revised the AM and FM formats, FM had a short headline or weather every ten minutes under the umbrella of “accent” news. i turned my “Potpourri” into “Summer Accent.” i would lead off with Tony Bennett’s “Once Upon a Summertime” over which i related the theme for the next three and one half hours.
It was enjoyable, i was learning a lot, but my studying took a hit. i then had to find time for that in between my work as the Wilson County correspondent for The Nashville Banner in the afternoons as i was commuting to MTSU in the mornings with Jimmy Hatcher and others.
Tonight, i listened to the Platters again. “Twilight Time:” “Heavenly shades of night are falling / It’s twilight time / Out of the mist your voice is calling / ‘Tis twilight time. // When purple coloured curtains / Mark the end of day / I’ll hear you, my dear, at twilight time / Deepening shadows gather splendour / As day is done / Fingers of night will soon surrender / The setting sun…
Ahh, visions of past loves, innocence, the coolness of a summer night in that little town smack dab in the middle of Tennessee.
