Thank you for offering Alone Together this Christmas. I would never have produced a piece of writing without this collective project. The writing made my memory of the experience more alive and poignant in my mind. I liked reading what other people did too. My Christmas was more special because of it.
Fending Off a War
When I was young and my family took long trips in the car – all trips seemed long to little ones. Some were 2 hours and some up to 5 hours depending upon conditions and traffic. Piled into a nine-passenger station wagon and off we’d go. A trip to the beach, or to our grandparents in Massachusetts or relatives cast far beyond on farms in Pennsylvania.
Our parents practiced “discipline by distraction” before it was even a thing. To pass the time and to mainly keep us from killing each other in the back seats – fighting for space and territory – we’d sing.
We’d sing at the top of our lungs. We had quite the repertoire. My dad was in the Glee Club in college, and we knew his entire program. We’d sing it from start to finish. It began with Shine on Harvest Moon and ends with St. James Infirmary.
Then there were the old standards from the popular composers’ songbooks at the time. Some children’s nursery rhyme songs from our home. The patriotic songs of the war’s era before like Yankee Doodle Dandy. Add into that the folk songs like This Land is Your Land – and hootenanny tunes from Pete Seeger and friends. We’d warble. It was lively.
There could be sprinkled in some carols or hymns. We kept adding tunes to test our vocal cords. The trip would fly by driven by our desultory delivery. It brought us glee. And we’d all arrive in one piece.
My particular favorite was when we’d pull into a tollbooth. Now this was way before the days of EZPass. To pay a toll in those days, you’d have the car stop at the booth and hand money to the toll taker.
We’d arrive and everyone would yell in tune, “Hi to the Guy in the Tollbooth!” Then in three-part harmony we’d sing Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Again. Hi!
And the most fun was to take in the reaction of the guy in the tollbooth which was always stunned. We got such a kick out of that. And no one minded we were stuck on a toll road. More guys to sing Hi to in the tollbooth.
It’s the holidays and I’m being driven by my granddaughter to a family celebration a distance away. On the highway, I was hoping we could sing carols and our old “road” songs. She was mainly interested in listening to the playlists she’d devised on her phone patched into the car’s sound system. Amused by my story of my younger years singing in the car, she simply pressed “Play”.
I complimented her on her choice of music and asked her about the artists. She likes the female singer songwriters with clear voices and life’s deeper messages. OK, so we didn’t sing in the car like I’d hoped. I did get to listen to her, learn about new artists, and enjoy her tastes.
My walk or song down memory lane was just that – loving old times in my mind.
Happy holidays everyone.
It’s a balmy Christmas Day in Pittsburgh and my friend, his friend, and I are taking two cars to the movie theater to see Wicked Part 2, after which I will drive 4 hours across the state to my home. Night driving isn’t my favorite but because there’s an ice storm coming and I want to be safe and warm in my own place when it arrives, I’m making an exception.
The two guys are in their truck and I will back out of my friend’s driveway and follow them to the theater. But when I put my car into reverse and press the gas pedal, nothing happens. No movement. No sound. Nothing. I try three more times, not believing what I am seeing. Same results: push the gas pedal to the floor and nothing happens. My car is pointing downhill, nose-in in his steep driveway. I’m going nowhere.
Determined to get home, we all get on our phones on the sidewalk in front of his house calling car rental agencies, airlines, and Amtrak. There’s a car available at the airport. The guys help empty my car completely (in case my 10 year old Volt cannot be repaired within reason), and take me to the airport. I get a free upgrade to a fancy big Mazda with heated red leather seats. There’s an hour until sunset. Off I go, the sunset in my rear view mirror.
The car is so fancy that I can’t figure out how to change the radio station while I’m driving and I will not stop. All I have is a religious station that thankfully is playing Christmas choral music. I sing along. Harmonize. Turn it off when it gets too preachy. I engage my left brain in crafting a multi-branched decision tree related to the car, including that my car will be over 200 miles away when it gets towed to a local dealer I don’t know. Including that I may need to trade it in without fixing it, rendering my car worthless. Including that I wasn’t planning on buying a car this week, this year, or even next year. But it’s Christmas and I’m enjoying the lack of trucks on the notorious Pennsylvania Turnpike and I’m singing Away in a Manger at the top of my lungs going 80.
By: Tzvia Sephard
Afternoon Delight
My radio show which featured mostly Motown hits from the ‘60s went really well this morning and I got some nice kudos from some listeners via Facebook Messenger. I went food shopping after the show and bought some supplies to hold us over through the big mega 10 inch snow storm that’s supposed to start hitting NYC and the Catskill region beginning tonight about 5pm.
I went on my regular Friday afternoon Zoom call with some of my spiritual friends which proved to be a pretty jolly time with everybody feeling very upbeat and enjoying the Christmas holiday in their various parts of the world, whether it be Sweden, Mexico, or Alabama.
My wife left for work and the dogs went into their favorite cubby holes and are now sleeping soundly. It won’t last for long, I know, so I am hellbent on enjoying every precious minute that they are not up begging for treats or wanting to go for a walk, I mean a ride, since I am not going to actually walk the dogs until Jan1 when my NewYear’s resolution #2 begins to kick in.
I’m heating up the black bean soup I made last week to which I added some small chunks of ham a few days ago. It looks and smells good, so I’m going to have at least one big bowl of it.
At the same time, I’m frying up a pork and chicken medley with onions and green pepper to be served over brown rice and green peas which is also on the stove simmering away. I’ll probably make a salad later on, but there’s no urge to do so right this minute.
I’m about to start a fire in my wood burning insert and sit back and do nothing for the rest of the day.. The Christmas lights are glowing all over the place and the view of the mountains from where I sit in my all-purpose recliner looks verybleak and solemn: a classic Catskill winter scene, which is just the way I like it, especially at this time of year. A blue jay just landed on a barren branch right outside my window, did a double-take noticing something on the ground, and then took off again.
The title of a song pops into my head: There’s A Kind of Hush All Over The World.
I’m not exactly sure what the song refers to, but I do know it was a big hit for Herman’s Hermits around 1968 or so.
There’s definitely a kind of hush going on here, though, that’s brilliantly evident, Hush. Silence. Stillness. The room, the dogs, and the Catskills. All perfectly quiet. Not a hair or a muscle moving even slightly. The perfect winter afternoon if there ever was one.
Sure it won’t last for very long. Nothing does. But it’s here now and that’s all that counts.
I’ll simply sit back and enjoy it until something breaks the silence and the serene and blissful mood it brings with it every time, without fail.
This is the real afternoon delight. That’s another song. I’m not exactly sure what that refers to either, but who cares? Let everyone discover their own version of afternoon delight. It doesn’t have to take any particular form.
It’s just that this one, the silent one, suits me the best.
And now the dogs are up and stirring at my feet. It’s time to take them for a ride to the Kayak Center which is 2 miles from home and then back.
I’m sure the ride will be a treat as well. Both for me and the dogs.
My Passage to India
Over 50 years old, my India origin story stretches the bounds of memoir and appears to cross the frontier into metafiction. I insist that the core elements remain mostly true even as the details have faded into the mists of memory.
Join me in the attic of my home in Woodstock. My wife and I have owned the place for almost a decade. We are each in need of a Marie Kondo-style reality instructor for our clutter. Practiced procrastinators, we have not put out a help wanted ad. I recently opened a metal filing cabinet, and found, not mouse droppings, but file folders of bank account and credit card records that predate our occupancy. I brought then downstairs, ripped them to shreds, cast them into our paper garbage, and emptied them into the maw of the paper garbage collector at the nearby Saugerties transfer station. I feel like I lost a few pounds.
On a previous exploration, I uncovered rubber-banded editions of a year or so of India Abroad. Thanks to the recruitment efforts of Pranay, a Bombay-born Brandeis scholarship student whose career peaked at The New York Times, my friend Jon and I, colleagues on the editorial board of The Justice, the student newspaper morphed into cogs on the mandala wheel that ran India Abroad for over a year.
Gopal, the Indian-born travel agent who saw India Abroad as a loss leader sideline, found himself as a publisher devoid of editorial staff after a falling out with his journalists. Enter Pranay, who blended South Asian charm with immigrant hustle. He cast a line towards Jon and me on Gopal’s behalf, and we took the bait. We worked out a quickie quid pro quo with Gopal: he paid us chump change free-lance money but promised us round-trip tickets to India if we stuck it out.
Jon and I had refined respectable, if amateur, journalistic skills at The Justice. He had served as the News Editor, and I had a long stint as the Sports Editor. He could write to meet deadlines and had accumulated sufficient editorial and lay-out skills. My prose could be more feature-style and, when needed, academic.
But the hole in the doughnut was India. What did two Jewish guys from metropolitan New York, an economics major and an American Studies major, know about India? You guessed right. Except for a brief trip to Montreal after my college graduation, neither of us had been overseas. As for our knowledge of India and its neighbors, we embodied “Mu,” the Zen Buddhist sign for emptiness.
When we accepted Gopal’s deal, Jon was finishing up law school at NYU and I was starting a year of graduate school at The University of Chicago. Like our predecessors, we had a falling out with Gopal after about a year at the helm. But he delivered on the promised tickets.
And in March of 1974, a few days after submitting a draft of my master’s thesis to The University of Chicago, I boarded a Pan Am flight one bound for Bombay. I stayed with Pranay’s parents in his bedroom and soon launched an improbable two-month long world traveler-style odyssey that took me to the southern tip of India as well as Calcutta, New Delhi and Agra. Unlike many members of my generation, I did not go to India as a devotee of a maharajah or a seeker of mystic truth in an ashram. But I did forge personal connections and make discoveries that were life changing.
-30-
TRUE FAMILY HAS YOUR BACK
Another wonderful Christmas day! Today (26th) I visited another Purification Space friend with her son and got spoiled into oblivion. 😀
First, an amazing, vegan stuffed cabbage lunch, a jar of the best ever roasted hazelnuts as a gift, poppy seed bejgli for dessert, amazing cups of teas,
fruity nut snack, Doterra Aroma Touch!!! Walk in the sunshine, laughter, peace, uplifting vibes!! My tiny anxious mind is blown and all I feel is calm, open brightness and so much gratitude as I’m writing these lines! Because this day was another great reminder that there’s no need to stress when you co-create with your friends – who feel like real family! Relaxing just. 🙂
It’s only yesterday (25th) that I took a small dip out of paradise into something else when I called my elderly biological mum in the morning to wish Merry Christmas and got triggered as usual. Same old, same old, a road to nowhere new. But the day was saved by my friends who returned for Xmas lunch and we went for a walk in the Castle afterwards. Super surprised by the amount of tourists flowing through the bridge and in the sightseeing areas, we sometimes found a quiet spot and got comfort from hot apple juice and other xmas market treats. My friends are both foreigners, who recently moved to the countryside but even I learn so much new from them about our capital! They read books, do research, learn the language, are into arts…
They also have a very good pronunciation of this crazy, lovely language and can say so much! I’m impressed!
So here I wanna share a bit about the days leading up to Christmas too, because they were too good not to mention. Friends arrived before Christmas already so we could go to Tres Chats Multicoloré bakery for breakfast only to discover the best hot chocolate in town! And onto 2 more cafes which had a lot to do with books and art! The Three Ravens even had a dedicated corner of one of my favourite poets of all times! And another mind blowing surprise was when the author of a tourist guide book suddenly greeted my friend reading his book and offered to sign! Have to say though that around some people ‘magic’ happens all the time: right people, opportunities turn up, timing aligns, playlists change, music quiets down, silence sets in…
And of ‘utmost importance’ 🙂 real gofri waffles covered with chocolate pudding and raspberry whipped cream made it on the menu twice giving us moustaches! As I said to my friend yesterday before the goodbye: I only had to wait 40 years for the best Christmas of my life, but then it blew my mind.
Much love.
Whose Human Are You?
This morning I saw Lipton, Gretl, and Freya. Today is Boxing Day and although most of the country is experiencing drastic snow and rain and cold, where we are it’s a balmy 78°F although somewhat overcast, so everyone is out for a walk.
It’s always wonderful when we have time for a chat and a pat. Lipton is an elderly daschund who is blind in one eye and his hips appear to be giving him problems again. But he’s eager to be out and about, sniffing around to see what’s new since yesterday. Gretl is an elderly yorkie who, according to her human, is very sad to have recently lost her brother. She’s walking slowly and stopping frequently, but at least she’s outside getting some exercise for her human. Freya is an energetic Portuguese Water Dog who loves to hang out of a second story window to observe those passing by. Obviously when she’s on the second floor we don’t have petting time, my arms can’t reach that far. But sometimes she’s on the walking path and I get to say hello up close. She likes it when I skritch her ears.
I find myself puzzled by how easily I remember their names but not the names of the human on the other end of the leash. Lipton’s person, for example, I have chatted with him repeatedly for years. He’s a wonderful man with a bright smile and a cheerful nature. His wife, whose name I don’t remember either, is equally lovely. But their names escape me. After five years and countless conversations I’m too embarrassed to ask again what their name is. Gretl’s owner is another nice seeming human who shall forever be known as Gretl’s person. I’ve only met Freya’s person a couple of times. Actually she has two, a woman and a man. They always seem delighted to see me and we enjoy our conversations. After which I walk away remembering only the dog they belong to.
I’m tempted to fake some kind of injury or a strange reason to ask for their names. But I’m not convinced I’d remember. It’s easier to stick with the dogs.
Why did I choose “Exiled King” as my name for this three-day anonymous writing exercise? It was an impulse, unexamined. It just popped into my head. Which does not suggest it’s a throwaway—on the contrary, it says, “this hints at something hidden; it deserves examination.”
I often feel myself to be a stranger in a strange land. I have grown to love the wooly green hills and tumbling brooks and winding roads and little towns of the Catskills, and I love the smart, creative people who surround me here in this northeastern milieu. But the wide-open desert vistas and jagged snowy peaks of the west will always be the landscape that formed me. I can no more deny that than I can deny I am a man. Today’s society would suggest I can deny such truth if I please, but we all know that’s a lie.
I fled the west as a fugitive, running for my life. I imagined that if I stayed in the near vicinity of a vindictive ex-wife, two angry children, a gang of judgmental relatives, and a culture of repressive religion, my future would be depression and suicide. I felt truly cast out.
But it’s a paradox, two opposing truths at the same time. Not merely fleeing execution, I was also taking care of myself, running toward love and adventure, toward creativity and a more authentic self. Toward a new kingdom.
Was this story the source of my “Exiled King” identity? Certainly I can make it seem so. It’s all in the angle of view.
Instead, maybe it was my love for the Vladimir Nabokov novel, Pale Fire, which, among many other things, addresses the question of whether the literature professor and poetry critic Charles Kinbote is actually the exiled monarch of Zembla or merely a delusional madman. An elegant 999-line poem is interwoven with foreign court intrigue, an exciting escape, a mysterious assassin…and poor John Shade, the poet, is still dead. The book’s opening couplet is among my all-time favorites: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.”
Could it be that a beloved story deeply planted in my subconscious tossed one of its plot elements into my awareness just as I was wondering about my hidden identity?
Life story or literature… could it be both those things at the same time?
Or maybe it’s a third… returning to the little thing I wrote here two days ago… I once felt powerful in the realm of writing, king of all I surveyed. But the subversive faction that wants mindless submersion in the detritus of pop culture gradually infiltrated the court and wrested away the throne. Information overload carried out a successful coup. The writer king has lost his crown. He’s gone into hiding.
But once he rests and gets his strength back, he’ll plan a triumphant return. Have a little faith. Please.
It wasn’t just me.
When I look around and think that I’m not where I should be in life, I know that I’m not alone. I give myself grace, because I know that I was wrestling with difficult life circumstances. Still reeling from the aftermath of my own family trauma.
But I also realize that the world was not a great place for young people. The economy wasn’t conducive to young people getting their lives off of the ground. It wasn’t just me, it was alot of young people. And the pattern is repeating for Gen Z.
I was poorly prepared for life in the real world.
The first year of college can be extremely stressful for the student who has still not emancipated himself from the parents. The college milieu usually requires new defenses, although some students manage to survive by refining and implementing their former high school defenses. They continue to act out and settle for mediocre school work in a kind of extended adolescence, which merely postpones the inevitable rupture to the final year in college. It is not uncommon for some college students to flunk senior courses, with the semi- unconscious intention of staying in school another year.”
–Masterson, pg 86.
For me, college was a stop gap. Instead of preparing me for life in the real world, it just became a holding space, a place to delay that inevitable rupture from the safety and protection of childhood, where I was taken care of and told what to do, and launch into adulthood.
But then, again, that was the case for many millennials.
Some of it was the college that I chose. I chose a prestigious liberal arts college, with a very open ended major system. Everything was taught in a lofty, intellectual, overly erudite way, instead of grounding me in core concepts and principles. I would eventually go on to take college classes elsewhere and found the information presented in a much more straightforward way. I needed that.
They say in academia, “Stay in your lane.” If you’re in psychology, focus on psychology. If you’re in History, focus on history. If science, science. Cross-disciplinary thinking was discouraged.
This was limiting for global thinkers, people like Joseph Campbell, who I recently learned camped out in a cabin in Woodstock for a year, studying history and mythology. There’s more space for people like this nowadays.
But I wasn’t ready for that. I needed a lane. I needed guardrails, boundaries and guidelines. I needed my dad.
The day after Christmas
It’s the day after Christmas. Now I can get back to my regular chores. Intrigued by all the smug Christmas holiday comments (that I heard at work and around the stores and streets) of “we”.
“We’re doing a small Christmas this year, because the kids are all doing their own things”.
Or
“We only exchange a few gifts just for each other now; it’s a calmer and quieter holiday now”
And what about the people like me who don’t open any gifts on Christmas?
What about the people who are not a “we”?
I find the people who are in a “we” to be self-centered and smug and lacking any empathy.
And I find myself this Christmas to be bitter. But it feels good to embrace my bitterness.
I missed the memo when I was in my 20s that told me that to guarantee that you’re not alone ever on a holiday and that you get at least one present from somebody- then you should get married and have kids.
In my 20s, I was taking care of my sick mom. My dad had completely checked out and was not a caregiver and it was left to my sister and I. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mom. She was a pleasure to be with, unlike my dad, but still I was in my 20s— when I was supposed to leave the nest, spread my wings, and meet a man or a woman and plan a wedding and have everything and everyone be focused on me, me, me, me, me.
I’m 53 and I want my 20s back. I wanna be selfish and self-centered. I want a bunch of gifts on Christmas, I want a bridal shower, a bachelorette party, a wedding, I want someone to cook for me (and I would gladly do all the washing up), and I definitely want someone to finally throw me a surprise birthday party. Is that too much to ask?
Merry fucking Christmas to all you smug “we”s.