So. We’re three days from Christmas. These last couple of years the holiday, like everything else, has gotten a bit deflated as two presidents and a lot of medical bureaucrats, liking the feel of unexpected power, have succumbed to the irresistible compulsion to do something, whether it was advisable or not. The effects were troubling to some people more than they were to me, because for a number of years now I’ve enjoyed low-key Christmas celebrations.
George McEvoy always had the best stories. He was a reporter at the old Fort Lauderdale News the same time I was. Though while most us thought of ourselves as young reporters on our way up, George already had enjoyed (mostly) a rich and colorful career. He’d been a police reporter at the New York Daily Mirror alongside the likes of Walter Winchell and his circle had included Damon Runyon. When The Mirror closed down, George moved to Phoenix, where he was a reporter, of course, and where he met his wife, Ruthie. After a while, Fort Lauderdale became his home.
Nice notes having arrived about my reminiscence last week, I thought I’d continue with some family traditions that were once common but that seem now to have all but disappeared, and some community ones which in many places have suffered the same fate.
Do people still have warm, memorable Christmas traditions? I wonder. We used to. Here’s part of my family’s, when my family lived on our little farm in Missouri at a time that doesn’t seem as long ago as it was.
Tomorrow being Thanksgiving, chances are good that most of us will in fact pause to give thanks for the many blessings that are undeservedly ours, possibly while surrounded by the aromas of rich and tasty foods. Good for you, and good for us. Perhaps you can pause for a moment and think of the people — there are many of them — for whom a blessing denied them is one we take for granted: a glass of clear, clean water.
We’re in a mess. The country is in the weakest place it’s been in a very long time. If what I suspect and fear comes to pass, it could soon be far worse.
You may have seen “America’s Sweethearts” the 2001 movie about the life of a motion picture publicist. To most people it is a cute and funny romantic comedy. To anyone who has ever been in the publicity business, it is a documentary.
J.D. Hutchison has died. For those of you not familiar with the Appalachian music scene, particularly as manifested in southeastern Ohio, a small introduction to that culture is probably appropriate.
It’s a feeling that comes on, the way you can tell the night before that when you wake up tomorrow you’ll have a cold. Only it’s worse. It’s not a cold, it’s a book. When one writes a book, the last thought that one has, right after the sign of relief that the damned thing is finally done, is the firm vow never to do such a foolish thing ever again.