The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Hang In There, Baby!

    I live in utter fear of motivational products—those soundbites of schlocky uplift that appear on calendars and posters, accentuating images of glorious sunsets, soaring eagles, big-eyed children dressed as cute hobos, and kittens dangling precariously from tree branches by their tiny, razor-sharp claws.

    It’s because there lives inside me a deep-seated anxiety that everything I read (except Ann Coulter) must have a grain of truth to it. Or a strain. Like a virus. A strain of virulent truth, inoperable and drug-resistant, that will enter my bloodstream through my eyeballs. There will be no symptoms initially, other than a persistent snickering. One poster, featuring an image of a lush woodland path, says, “Fall down seven times. Stand up eight.” Why? If you’re that clumsy, it’s safer to stay down. Maybe invest in a helmet.

    The snickering eventually clears up on its own, but this only indicates that the infection has progressed to a more dangerous stage. By then the uplifting message has been internalized, gnawing a sanctimonious new neural pathway through my psyche.

    It may lay dormant, awakening only during a flare of activity, such as jogging. I could be half-heartedly chugging around Lake Nokomis, with only the sounds of my leaden footfalls to keep me company, when the endorphins kick in and “Just Do It” repeats in my brain over and over again, licking at my fiery hamstrings like a lash from an inspirational whip.

    Or, as in the case of “WWJD?,” the homilies may go to work immediately, cross-contaminating every thought, word, and deed until I am no longer able to distinguish between reality or Wal-Mart’s professed focus on scriptural principles. (I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t back a company that lines its management’s pockets with gold and drives its workers into poverty, while hiding behind a yellow smiley-face mask. I’m Christian myself. Look it up in our manual. See Revelations under “Great Deceiver.”)

    Actually, if you give them any real thought, all of these sayings are problematic. Take “I grumbled at having no boots until I met a man with no feet,” attributed to “Unknown.” First of all, what does this mean to the guy who has feet but no boots? Stop complaining? Maybe the guy with no feet had feet until his feet froze off because he had no boots. Second of all, if I didn’t have feet, I wouldn’t need any boots. I’d need fake feet, and probably a ride to the fake-feet store to get a pair. And boots at that point would be superfluous, like balloon valances.

    Also, doesn’t the fact that most of these sayings come from some “Unknown” freak you out? The Void is telling us how to live our lives. It’s like taking a prescription drug from a doctor you don’t know. Tell you what; just substitute “Beelzebub” for “Unknown.” It works almost every time. Imagine Lucifer in his blazing pit, pointing his pitchfork at you and cackling, “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday!” And that little kitten hanging from the branch—she’s dangling just above Satan’s head. The white-hot tines of his trident are poking at her furry bottom as he screeches, “Hang In There, Baby! BWAH-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Come to think of it, isn’t it a little suspicious that the kiosks selling these calendars all vanish after Christmas? Admit it, Anthony Robbins looks like the Devil, doesn’t he? How else could he be that big? He’s got paws the size of catcher’s mitts. Brrrr.

    Nobody buys motivational calendars for themselves. They’re always given to you by someone who claims to have your best interests at heart. It’s like presenting someone with a can of Slim-Fast and a mirror and saying, “I know you’re going through a tough time right now. I saw these and I thought of you.”

    Deep down, my real fear of these motivational posters is that eventually, if I’m infected long enough by the germ of truth in their sayings, I will have to face up to my responsibilities. And that’s scary because the answer for me is almost always: No. No, technically, I am not being “All That I Can Be.” I could be nicer, thinner, richer, smarter, and more loving to my fellow man. I could get up at five a.m. and walk my dog around the lake and come home and throw a load of laundry in and do the Times crossword puzzle and sing my children awake and pack healthful lunches and smile at my co-workers for no good reason. I could eschew takeout in favor of home-cooked. I could give up sugar, sugar substitutes, and trans fats. I could think globally, act locally, and visualize world peace. I could do more sit-ups and have more face time and look on the bright side until my retinas are French fried.

    I could probably keep up this kind of schedule for a week, and then I would go shoot up a Wal-Mart.

  • In Memory of Richard Pryor

    I had begun writing on an entirely different subject for this month’s column—plea bargaining—but then a friend called to tell me that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III had died. I put all thoughts about plea bargains aside, went down to my basement, and dug out an old Pryor album. Staring at it, I was overwhelmed by how sad I felt, and overwhelmed that I was so overwhelmed. Why should the death of a foul-mouthed drug addict, who blew through six marriages and self-immolated while freebasing cocaine, matter to me? The answer came before I finished asking the question: For thirty years, going back to the first time I heard a Pryor routine, his comedy soothed my soul and gave me perspective. Not to mention that he was bust-a-gut funny.

    I first saw Richard Pryor in the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues. He plays “Piano Man,” Holiday’s main musical sideman, who dies of a drug overdose. I was thirteen then, and to me, Pryor was just another actor. About a year later, however, one of my friends relayed a riff from a Pryor album in which he theorizes about why Patty Hearst ditched her rich family and joined her captors in robbing banks (if you haven’t heard the routine, it had something to do with race and genital size). I was astounded that someone would make a joke like that on a record. I had to hear it for myself. So I bought the album and, early one morning when everyone was asleep, I crept down to the basement. I turned on the stereo with the volume low and traveled to another, more scandalous world. The next day, I bought two more albums.

    In the months that followed, whenever my sister and I felt like living dangerously, we would mix a batch of “special ice tea” (tea and cheap wine), sneak down to the basement, and listen to Richard Pryor albums. Pryor, born and raised in his grandmother’s brothel in Peoria, Illinois, transported us from our middle-class, good-Negro world to one where people called each other niggas, liberally used the f-word, and put white people in their places. Listening to his brutally funny stories made us feel rebellious, cool, and authentically black.

    Some of Pryor’s routines became permanently etched into our memories. His musings became an underground language for us “brothas” in the “soul patrol,” code for cool in what, for us, was often a very uncool world. When we wanted to navigate a delicate social situation—talk our way into a hot date, or out of a big mess—we would use one of Pryor’s skits for inspiration. What we did not fully appreciate at the time was that he had more to offer than dirty talk and vulgarity, though I admit that was a strong part of the initial attraction. Pryor was also a master storyteller who, with impeccable inflection and timing, commented on the daily struggles of life from an unvarnished African-American male point of view. Unlike Bill Cosby, who sanitized his routines to make them palatable to the mainstream (i.e., a white audience), Pryor was raw and real. When talking about his drug addiction, he commented that he must have “snorted up Peru.” He spoke vividly of the emotional pain in having your woman walk out on you and the physical pain in becoming a human torch while freebasing cocaine.

    What my little posse in Denver was doing—incorporating Pryor’s routines and jokes into a vocabulary—was being done by kids, especially black males, all over America in the seventies. Pryor’s stories and quips fueled a national dialect for African-American men. When I arrived at Harvard in 1977, I found that referring to a Pryor routine usually brought a knowing nod from other black students, whether they came from Manhattan’s Upper East Side or South Central L.A. When I dated a white girl and the black coeds gave me the cold shoulder, I took solace in Pryor’s biting remark that, “Black women look at you like you killed your mama when you are out with a white woman … they say, ‘Yeah, why should you be happy?’ ”

    Obviously, it was not only black men who fully “got” Richard Pryor—he sold too many albums and was too big a box-office draw to suggest that. But there is no question that Pryor fully “got” us because he was one of us. He exposed the challenges of being an African-American man with such wit, and such surgical precision, that he became our collective mouthpiece—the ultimate soul brother. Pryor taught guys like me to use humor as both sword and shield as we make our way through a world riddled with pain. Richard, thank you for being you, because in doing so you helped me, more than you’ll ever know, become comfortable being me. Peace.

  • Heavenly Drinking

    Heaven, said the Regency wit Sydney Smith, is eating paté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. It sounds pretty piggy if you ask me, all too like the fellow who said that you should decide what to do in life by following your bliss. And rather odd doctrine for S. Smith, who made his name as a book reviewer but had a day job as a canon of S. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I have naturally no grudge against Canon Smith himself, but his apolaustic attitudes are a bit emetic. Were his sermons, one wonders, wholly concerned with the austere and lofty spiritual discipline of feeling good about yourself?

    Which was hardly an option for the geese from whom the paté came. I cannot imagine paté de foie gras without also imagining how it is made. The reverend canon was able to fill his face with the noted French delicacy because geese had been filled with grain till their livers reached the bursting point. However much you resent the mess wild geese make around the lakes, such bloating seems a pretty unpleasant fate. Their consumerism was involuntary; that of S. Smith was a matter of choice.

    Come to that, unmitigated trumpets might also get a bit trying, even if, like an earlier (and considerably more interesting) cleric from S. Paul’s, you posted the angels blowing them at the round world’s imagined corners. One must, I suppose, give Canon Smith credit for taking the trouble to be a hedonist. Any preference is better than none. But still, one asks, where is he in the heaven which he projects? In the Smithian assertion (or should it be “Smithic”?), “eating” is simply a gerund, or possibly a participle; it has no subject, and the person is absent. He makes it sound as if there is action occurring apart from the existence of the actor. In fact, you could say that the receptacle into which the paté de foie gras goes is less a Blessed Spirit than a Bottomless Pit. (Why does this all remind me of Christmas?)

    I guess the first step toward personality, and away from being simply a Black Hole of consumption, could be to discriminate between pleasures. Even a sensualist may refine his appetite; Lucretius, the most materialistic of Roman poets, is notable for the sheer sharpness of his physical observation. I would commend to Canon Smith—and to you, benevolent reader—claret, the red wine of Bordeaux, the thinking man’s wine (though, as a Whig, Sydney Smith probably preferred port).

    Specifically, try Château Greysac from the fine vintage of the year 2000, available around here for less than twenty dollars. The process of discrimination starts even before the cork leaves the bottle. This is French wine in a bottle with proper shoulders, so it is going to be from Bordeaux rather than from Burgundy or the Rhone (which have sloping shoulders, like your pin-headed correspondent).

    Now note the words Appelation Controlée. These are not an assurance that a wild man from West Virginia has been caught by the sheriff but official notice that the wine is part of a quota permitted to bear a particular name and that it has been made in a particular way from grapes characteristic of the region—in this case mostly Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc.

    The word that comes between Appelation and Controlée tells you which region it is. The lesser wines of Bordeaux will say simply Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur (the latter merely indicates a slightly higher level of alcohol). Château Greysac, however, says “Médoc,” which is the area on the left bank of the river Gironde where many of the most famous Bordeaux wines come from—and yet not all wines made in the Médoc are allowed that appellation. It also says “Cru Bourgeois,” a title of honour Château Greysac acquired in 1978, only a few years after modern winemaking began there.

    Having exercised the mind on the wine label (and wished one were striding along the vine-clad gravel ridges of the Médoc), one can then exercise it on the wine itself. One encounters a clear bright red, a pleasing sharpness, and then a concatenation of tannins (the woody hardness) and the taste of oak (the pleasing sweetness redolent of turpentine). You can take mental exercise tasting this wine by racing these two tastes against each other, before swallowing and then maybe sipping a little more. The strength of the tannin shows that it has time on its side. Drink some now and keep some for later. Maybe it will make you a thinking drinker.

  • Giving It Up

    Losing weight and quitting smoking are always the top two New Year’s resolutions for us Americans. Not to brag, but I’ve done both—quitting a twelve-year, pack-a-day smoking habit and losing (and regaining and relosing) a rather substantial amount of weight in my life. I did neither by making a New Year’s resolution. Like most really huge life changes, each event was the result of a series of minor shifts. I’d like to say that these shifts were a series of decisions that I made all by myself. That would be very bootstrappy, don’t you think? In truth, sheer willpower was a shockingly small percentage of the overall picture. In each case, circumstances maneuvered me to a place where change of some sort was inevitable.

    Take smoking. I did decide to quit, that’s true. But not because I no longer wanted to reek of smoke, or because my habit was siphoning perfectly fine cash from my meager bank account, or because people who loved me wanted me to quit before something bad developed. These things were also true. But I only decided I to quit once I started coughing up blood. This was not just traces of pink every once in a while, like maybe with a really bad cold. Nuh-uh. It was more hardcore Bukowski style. Some mornings I’d wake up, shut off the alarm, grab a handful of tissues, and yak up roughly half a teaspoon of blood.

    After six months of this, I knew that the blood wouldn’t just go away like I had hoped. So I decided to quit. But of course, that doesn’t mean that I was able to. Three months after that decision, the best I had done was to cut down to half a pack a day, and the coughing fits worsened, if anything. Instead of hitting only in the morning, they came on any time of the day.

    One creepy component of those last months as a smoker was that I could get the coughing to stop—by lighting up a cigarette. It was as though my very cells were crying out in protest. My body turned traitor, and it wanted its fix, damn it. While I was taking in a drag I could feel some kind of internal smoothing out. Whether this was physical or psychological, I couldn’t tell you. It felt like a vacuum making tracks on a shag carpet. Like something was progressing. Like some kind of change was inevitable.

    Sometimes it takes people that long to realize that even indecision is a decision.

    I quit my job and left my apartment and moved to my parents’ place in Wisconsin for two and a half months. The nearest store was ten miles away. I didn’t have a car, a driver’s license, or the lung capacity for walking more than one city block at a time. The first week, I slept. Then for seven weeks straight I remember having daily screaming matches with my father in his pole barn.

    Every swear word and oath that we belted forth was amplified tenfold by the tin walls and the fourteen-foot ceilings. I don’t remember what we argued about, probably the usual suspects. My lack of direction in life, poor romantic choices, my ever-changing hairstyle. My Dad was a world-class yeller, and I learned the craft at his knee. He could yell about anything, anytime, anywhere. Not everybody can do that, you know.

    Blessedly, it turns out this was just what I needed. Like a priest performing an exorcism, Dad shouted painful truths in plain language and my demons came roaring out to meet him, gnashing their fangs, matching him round for round with sickening retorts. Devious comments were designed to mirror, escalate, and confuse, thereby ensuring the marathon duration of our contest. It got to the point where I could no longer tell what was burning, my chest cavity or my rage. Dad, meanwhile, stood strong. He took what I threw at him and dished out some more.

    People who knew me in those days sometimes marvel at the fact that I no longer smoke. When they ask me how I quit, it’s difficult to explain. Too embarrassing, you know? Admitting the complete loss of control. The terror of the bloody coughing fits and the shame of still being unable to stop. My big bear of a worried Dad tearing into me. So sometimes I tell them the complicated truth. And other times, I smile and say I did it cold turkey, even though I’ve learned that there is no such thing as cold turkey, just like there is no such thing as overnight success. Major change doesn’t happen without many, many minor shifts. I moved myself away from cigarettes. I eventually put myself far away from them, like a child who can’t get to the candy jar. In a way, I didn’t really quit—I just don’t smoke anymore.

  • Busted and Disgusted

    —

    People are talking about whether Rev. Randolph (Randy) Staten will run for his old seat representing North Minneapolis in the Minnesota House of Representatives. If he did, and won, he would become Minnesota’s version of former Washington mayor and convicted felon Marion Berry: a political player who went through a very public crash-and-burn, followed by a triumphant return to prominence. African-Americans are a forgiving group (just ask Bill Clinton), but would black Minnesotans re-elect a man who so publicly betrayed his community?

    Staten was one of the first African-American recruits for the University of Minnesota’s football team in the early 1960s. After a cameo appearance in the National Football League, he returned to the Twin Cities and dabbled in Republican Party politics.

    Then he found a home in the DFL and in 1980 became the state’s lone African-American legislator. Staten used his natural eloquence and visibility to push for programs to help his economically challenged district. Along the way, however, he made powerful enemies who were waiting to pounce on any misstep. Staten was soon tripping up all over the place. He faced criminal charges for writing eighty-two hundred dollars’ worth of bad checks to finance a drug habit. Then he was accused of filing late and incomplete campaign expense reports with the Minnesota Ethical Practices Board. After narrowly dodging expulsion, he became the first legislator in state history to be publicly censured. He eventually did jail time.

    By the late 1980s, Staten found himself, in a phrase, “busted and disgusted.” He refused to fade off into oblivion, however, and instead took to heart advice from Broadway lyricist Dorothy Fields: “Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. And start all over again.” Like other disgraced politicians before him, it was religion—more specifically, the black church—that provided a road map to redemption for Staten. He eventually became an ordained Baptist minister.

    Since then, Rev. Staten has reconnected with many of the North Siders who once shunned him. He is now chairman of the Coalition of Black Churches and spokesman for the African American Leadership Summit. He led the successful fight to block David Jennings’ permanent appointment as superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools. (Incidentally, Jennings, a former Republican speaker of the House, was one of Staten’s chief tormentors during his 1980s fall from grace.) The major local dailies regularly look to Staten for quotes, and even his detractors concede that he is extremely articulate and knows how to play a political crowd.

    Booker Hodges believes that a run by the sixty-one-year-old Staten for his old House seat would be a huge mistake. “Randy’s time has passed,” said Hodges, who is a columnist for the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder and a member of the rising generation of North Minneapolis political leaders (he recently made an unsuccessful run for a seat on the Park Board). “It would open up a lot of old wounds. Many of us have not forgotten the shame he brought on our community. We need to bring up some young people—some new blood.” Hodges then went one step further. “Randy and the Coalition have follow-up problems, particularly on economic issues confronting our community. It’s easy to put up your hands, whoop and holler, and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ What has he done to help the brother in the street?”

    There is no question that Staten has pulled off a Lazarus-like resurrection. Both Don Samuels and Natalie Johnson Lee courted his support in their battle for the Fifth Ward City Council seat. Certainly, one could understand why a Staten candidacy might appeal to some North Siders, especially those struggling to move past criminal convictions and/or overcome their own personal demons. However, while the number of those folks may be greater in House District 58B than other parts of the Twin Cities, they are still not the norm in that part of town. And, more important, they historically do not turn out in great numbers to vote.

    Most of Staten’s past and future constituents are job-holding, tax-paying, drug-free, law-abiding citizens. Hodges is right—for many of these folks, the old wounds run very deep. They might be empathetic to Staten’s midlife religious conversion and be impressed with his political savvy, but still find it difficult to completely forgive him, or to trust him with one of the few reliably African-American seats in the Minnesota Legislature. Getting the solid core of 58B to give him another chance is probably a political miracle that even the resilient and charismatic Rev. Staten would be hard-pressed to pull off.

  • In the Bleak Mid-Winter

    Our century has been remarkably efficient in the manufacture of wastelands. In Uptown you can still experience the sort of passageways down which Mr. Eliot smelt steaks, but nowadays they seem to have almost a period charm. It is the same reading about the Algiers described by Albert Camus; the delicious colonial loucheness of the setting tends to put a pastel patina on the jolly old alienation. It won’t be long before someone turns L’Étranger into a colorful Hollywood costume drama—what price the inner life when Passage to India can become a parade of parasols and solar topees?

    To be truly bleak, a landscape must be both familiar and fairly freshly created. The connoisseur might try standing at the entrance of Edinborough Park in midwinter and looking across the glass and concrete tundra of South Edina, all abandoned motorcars and dirty snow and the now-defunct cinderblock multiplex where you once saw flickering pictures of more colorful climes, some of them unspoilt (“Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere,” as the writing on the wall used to say as your train pulled out of Paddington Station, taking you from London to the good green meadows of the West Country).

    But for sustained depression, try one of those self-storage places. Concealed in a dip, to avoid blotting the landscape too obviously, ranks of abandoned garages provide the perfect setting for the unsolvable crime at the center of a detective novel. In the alleys between them rattle the skeletons of last year’s leaves. Cryogenics comes to mind. The only people around are keeping warm in the office, and perhaps a bloke working on his vintage Chevy. As you leave, the automated voice that thanks you at the barrier appears to be that of the late Count Dracula.

    It is warmer inside these small storage rooms than out in the alleys. One imagines them (for one has seen only one’s own) strewn with the remains of lives, things ugly in themselves (the hideous lampshades, the awful ornaments), which might once have meant something if someone had made them mean it—the gewgaw given as a Christmas joke. Here lies the Nachlass of the maiden aunt whose relations have never got round to sorting out her things; here men (it must surely be mostly men, because the women have the houses) hoard the keepsakes from failed marriages, furniture which no longer lends help or comfort because the couples who owned it are unable to forgive. And the cardboard boxes in which all this is kept give off the sweet but unmistakable smell of decay, as if the things inside were slowly losing the warmth they once acquired from being associated with human life, and are reverting to a mere mineral existence.

    Such gloomy ruminations suggest the need for some concentrated sweetness to share with those you love this Christmas. Try liqueur glasses of a 2003 Muscat from Bonny Doon Vineyards in California; it is called Vin de Glaciere, and a small flask will cost you about eighteen dollars. There is a pleasant goldenness and a sweet nose, then, as you sip, a smooth velvety sensation of dried apricots and slight oiliness.

    This is not sticky sweet wine; the taste reminds me of nothing so much as Setubal, a fortified wine from Portugal made from a different combination of Muscat grapes, which I favored as a dessert wine in my misspent youth. The Bonny Doon would make good dessert wine in the American sense of dessert—not fruit and nuts nibbled after the ladies have withdrawn to the drawing room in the eighteenth-century manner that so annoyed Virginia Woolf, but “afters”: mince pies, plum pudding, even something creamy like bread-and-butter pudding (with many plump golden raisins, known in England as sultanas from their resemblance to sultans’ wives) or a crème brulée.

    Here is no false promise of spring, simply a level winter sweetness. Rabbie Burns walked by the original Bonnie Doon river near Ayr in Scotland and wondered why the birds could sing so sweetly when he was so weary, full of care, having lost his girl (though he seldom seemed to have any trouble finding another). If the bleakness is inside and not simply in the landscape, this Muscat taken as a cup of kindness might cheer things up. What sweeter music can we bring?

  • A Working Christmas

    Pat was my boss at the diner. I’d say she was around fifty years old, but I don’t know for sure. That’s just not the kind of question you ask your boss. Donnie the dishwasher was thirty-five, with the mental capacity of an adolescent. Then again, how many teens do you know who could work a forty-hour week and pay their bills on time?

    I was seventeen when I started working there. The second shift, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., meant no late nights and, more important, no early mornings. The diner was open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. On Christmas that year, we got our first real snow of the season. No accumulation, just swirly snow-globe snow. My walk to work that day seemed longer than usual because of the quiet. You’ve never known quiet until you’ve walked downtown St. Paul on Christmas Day. Actually, this wasn’t just downtown St. Paul Sunday quiet, this was a higher grade of silence, like the difference between gold and platinum. It was ominously beautiful, like an act of God or something. Like the Rapture. I could see the diner up ahead, glowing dimly in the snow, the Pancake House of Purgatory.

    When I got there, Donnie was quartering chickens back at the prep table, singing and dancing and slipping around on chicken guts on the floor. I put on a clean apron and took my station behind the counter. It never dawned on me that Christmas might be dead on top of everything else. Pat slapped a Phillips screwdriver in my one hand and a bleach-soaked towel in the other. She said, “No way you’re gonna sit on your rear all day and moan, kiddo. We all got other places we’d rather be. You’re gonna take apart the pie case and scrub it down.” Three hours later, Donnie had moved on to chopping onions, I had the pie case put back together, Pat had the meat cooler sparkling, and we got our first customer.

    Al Vanoni was a fat cab driver who always carried his own insulated coffee cup with him. That thing was about the size of an ice-cream bucket, suiting the scale of his body. If Vanoni tried to drink out of one of our coffee cups, he would have looked silly, like a fairy-tale giant. He came in wearing a Santa hat and ordered a double patty melt to go, on the double. “I’d love to stay and talk, but I got volleys all day between the senior high-rises and the suburbs.” When Vanoni went for the ketchup, he pounded his meaty hand on the bottom of the bottle, sending a fair-sized splat onto his patty melt, and a fair-sized one onto my pie case. Before he left, I saw him sneak a small brown paper bag to Pat.

    Pat said I might as well order my shift meal as long as the grill was dirty, so she wouldn’t have to clean it twice. She yelled back to Donnie to do the same. Ten minutes later, she told us to have a seat in one of the back booths. “Today, we can eat like human beings at the table, at least.” I plugged the buck that Vanoni gave me into the tableside jukebox, and entered some Mitch Miller tunes.

    Pat brought over three cups of coffee; when I sipped mine it turned out to be laced with Wild Turkey. I looked at her in surprise. She smiled. “Doncha know that Santa always comes on Christmas?”

    Pat closed her eyes and bent her head to pray. I thought it was a joke at first, what with the whiskey and all. Donnie followed her lead. I looked down, but admit I kept my eyes open. I still heard the words.

    “Heavenly Father, thank you for this day, and this good food.”

    The whipped cream on Donnie’s sundae smelled wonderful as it melted into the waffle squares.

    “Thank you for our families. At home, at work, and in Christ your son our savior.”

    I looked from Pat’s strong face to Donnie’s earnest one, and I felt as close to them as anyone else in my life.

    “Search our hearts, God, and please bless and keep us in the path of your everlasting light. Amen.”

    In that instant, before either of them opened their eyes, I felt if God had searched my heart, he would have found it as spotless as the pie case. It felt new, and shiny.

    In the past twenty years, I’ve had family Christmases and orphan Christmases. Work Christmases, hospital Christmases, Christmases when the tree fell down and the turkey caught fire, and Christmases when everything went just right.

    My Christmas at the diner taught me that Christmas is transferable. The only responsibility you have to Christmas, wherever you are, whoever you’re with, wherever you’re headed, is to put it in a to-go box.

  • A Jury of One's Peers

    Sitting on my desk is the final “absolute, no kidding, no extensions possible” request for my submission to the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1981 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report. After twenty-five years, Harvard wants an accounting of what I have done with my life. I ignored the three or four previous requests because I had trials to work up and columns to write.

    Yeah, right.

    Here’s the real reason. I am scared to commit to paper a life story that—let’s be real—almost certainly will not be as impressive as those of my classmates. Scarier yet, am I really prepared to stack the reality of my forty-six years up against all those expectations and lofty dreams I had when I marched out of Harvard Yard in June 1981?

    In high school, I was a strange amalgamation of Steve Urkel from television’s Family Matters and Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Klump, with a touch of Richard Roundtree in Shaft. I was nerdy, but also cool (well, at least I tried to be). My classmates toted backpacks through the halls and wore jeans and T-shirts for their senior portraits; I proudly carried a briefcase to class and wore a tuxedo in mine. My parents, battle-scarred veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, were native Mississippians who moved our family to Denver in 1964. They were educated professionals, but both had grown up enduring the daily indignities of the old Jim Crow South. They very desperately believed that the “talented tenth,” as African-American scholar W.E.B. du Bois termed the best and the brightest black folk, had a moral duty to “uplift the race.” Therefore, my sisters and I were raised, as were most black middle-class kids in the late sixties and early seventies, to get the best credentials we could, so as to continue to carry out that duty.

    When I got into Harvard, my father promptly plastered five Harvard bumper stickers onto our two cars. The Denver Post ran a story headlined “Collins Headed to Harvard.” The assistant principal at my high school asked me to forget the times he had reamed me for various transgressions and to instead remember him fondly when I “became somebody big.” And when I arrived in Cambridge in September of 1977, the entire Class of ’81 was shepherded into the Harvard Square Theatre, where we were told that we were the most brilliant and talented group of young people ever assembled in one place, destined to scale great heights in recorded human history. Of course, we knew that was a slight (but only slight) exaggeration.

    Placing a kid like me, one already infused with an inflated sense of my own importance, in an institution like that was very dangerous. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad I went to Harvard. I did learn that there were people—many people—smarter than I was. Unfortunately, I also believed that most of them were at either Harvard or similarly self-absorbed elite institutions.

    I remember a late-night discussion during my senior year that involved deciding, only half jokingly, who in our little group would be best suited for which Cabinet post. We not only believed that great power and riches awaited us somewhere over the Ivy League rainbow, we were also all afraid of facing each other if, years later, we ended up back in Kansas—not powerful, not rich, just, well, ordinary.

    Ever since my college days, I have heard, sometimes softly and sometimes quite loudly, an incessant murmuring in my head. Sometimes it comes just from my parents, asking, what have I done “for the race”? At other times, they are joined by the chorus of those damned Harvard ghosts, taunting me with my own boasts made long ago and with expectations that were never fulfilled: The fancy political appointment that never quite materialized. Those unmade millions resting in someone else’s bank account.

    The truth of the matter is, I am not a master of the universe—far from it. If I follow the script for columns like this, I am supposed to say that I have come to terms with how my life has turned out, I no longer am tormented by those voices, and I cannot wait to see my fellow members of the Class of 1981 next summer. But I know that’s not entirely true. As much as I tell myself that I am content with my rather ordinary life—and, for the most part, I am—I still hear the voices, albeit not as forcefully as in years past. And if I am “real” with myself, I gotta admit that they can still push my buttons.

  • Fine Bright Red

    The Orient, said Metternich, begins at the Ring. It is hardly surprising an Austrian statesman of the early nineteenth century should think the Near East was as close as the suburbs of Vienna. The Ottoman Turks besieged the Austrian capital at least twice and the favor was returned each time an Austrian army, arrayed boldly by batteries, besieged Belgrade.

    Not that the symbiosis of the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires was all horror and confrontation. Even their hostilities had some cheerful consequences. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 (the year before Bach was born), the retreating armies left behind sacks of black beans the size and shape of rabbit droppings, though a good deal scrunchier. A Viennese entrepreneur ground them into a powder and opened Europe’s first coffeehouse. Can you imagine Vienna without Kaffee und Kuchen? Would you not think J.S. Bach just a polyphiloprogenitive sobersides (like Organ Morgan of Llareggub–it’s organ, organ all the time with him) if there were not those bubbly bits in his Coffee Cantata?

    In any case, distinctions between west and east are always arbitrary–they vary as you go round the globe, whereas those between north and south are absolute. And this part of MittelEuropa, whether ruled by the Hapsburgs or the Turks, is a magnificent macedoine of ethnic eccentricity.

    Read all about it in the trilogy of travel books by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts, Between Woods and Water, and a third volume eagerly awaited by admirers. This is the record of a young man who set out, in 1933, to walk from Canterbury to Constantinople. He meets all sorts of men, from barons and rabbis to gypsies and the country gentry of the Pannonian Plain, who are said to enjoy the best partridge shooting in the world. The more spirit one has oneself, the more one finds other people original. The author is the same P. Leigh Fermor who kidnapped a German general on Crete during the Second World War and solemnly exchanged with him lines from the Odes of Horace as they passed by the snow-capped summit of Mount Ida on their way to a British submarine and safety. In Austria and points east, the Leigh Fermor liveliness matches that of the people whose land he was passing through.

    For the Romans, it was certainly the north-south distinction that mattered. The beautiful Blue Danube was their frontier facing north toward Central Europe and its ferocious Iron Age warrior aristocracies. Romans, naturally, drank wine; the folk beyond the Roman border liked beer or mead (though they would do as Romans whenever they could get wine). Emperors and armies campaigned along the Danube to keep the empire safe. Marcus Aurelius, after a hard day’s soldiering, would come back to the stronghold of Carnuntum, withdraw into himself, and stoically compose his Meditations. (The opening scenes of Gladiator are as good an evocation as I know of the hard business of campaigning in these dank northern forests.)

    Carnuntum today is the center of a thriving wine region, making both red and white wine from French varieties as well as from grapes that have grown in the long hot summers here since the Middle Ages. Production is protected by particularly strict purity laws, introduced twenty years ago, after it was discovered that some Austrian wines contained a chemical called diethylene glycol, added to increase body and sweetness (not to be confused with ethylene glycol, a substance that belongs in the radiator of your motorcar). I cannot imagine why anyone ever thought such adulteration desirable, given the excellence of what they make here naturally.

    Try, for instance, a 2003 red from Weingut Glatzer made from the Blaufrankisch grape, available locally for about twelve dollars. Blaufrankisch is the grape Germans call the Limberger; its name comes from the blue of the berries and frankisch, a term used since the Middle Ages to indicate superior quality. The wine is lively, clear and bright with an initial bite like mild black coffee and a fine fruity flavor, concealing hints of that pleasing wateriness that comes from really ripe blackberries. One can imagine it in the company of anything you might eat with a rather alcoholic Pinot Noir–even a Thanksgiving turkey. Though perhaps it might feel more at home with a Pannonian partridge. Prost.

  • This One's for the Ladies

    It’s time to take that other monthly business more seriously.

    Yeah, I know this is the November issue. But, gentle readers, I am speaking to you from the recent past of October third! Boooooooo! I am the ghost of October third! And where I’m coming from, it’s still National Breast Cancer Awareness month.

    So let’s take a minute here to be aware of our bajungas. I know some of you are male, and I do always try to play to a mixed crowd. But it ain’t gonna happen this month. You fellas can still read on if you’d like; just be aware that I’m going to be talking about woman stuff, and what the hell, as long as you’re still reading, take a minute to be aware of your breasts. You guys can get breast cancer, too.

    This reminds me of the time back in the seventies when the boys and girls in fourth grade were separated for that special gym class. The boys went to their talk with Mr. Leinfelder, the gym teacher. We girls were ushered into the multipurpose room to watch a filmstrip about private parts. The Kimberly-Clark Corporation gave us gift packs of U-boat sized “mini” pads. Just about every female teacher was present to make sure there was absolutely no giggling. Even a couple of the lunch ladies were there. I don’t remember what the filmstrip detailed, exactly, except that we all were supposed to expect to become women soon, and when one became a woman, there were certain accoutrements that you had to keep on you at all times. Things that you would keep in your purse, because you were now a woman and women carried purses just for this purpose, to carry things in them for a while and then put them in their underpants. Things to contain the flow. After the filmstrip, to our collective horror, and with all the enthusiasm of a flight attendant demonstrating the nearest exits, Mrs. Chevalier, the most soignée member of our faculty, held up a pair of giant practice ladies’ briefs, unwrapped a mini, and pulled the adhesive zip strip off to show us all how to stick that bugger on target.

    “Like a diaper?!!” Deanna LaMenga yelled out. And then there was giggling, and plenty of it. Nonstop, irrepressible giggling—from the time the filmstrip ended, throughout the painfully awkward “Question Asking Time,” and during the bathroom break, when Deanna ripped open her Kimberly Clark Gift Pack and stuck mini pads all over her face and chased a guffawing Jenny Tooley out of the girls’ room and down the hall, arms stretched out stiff in front of her, groaning like the Mummy.

    I laughed that day until my sides ached, and then I laughed some more. Everybody did. The lone exception, curiously enough, was Gina Venutti. Gina was in our grade, ten or eleven years old, but she had C-cup boobs and a figure that would make grown men look the other way fast. Gina didn’t laugh that day. And now I understand why.

    When you’re a young girl, accepting the responsibility of your changing body is so thrilling, so new, that you don’t take any bit of it for granted. Then you grow up, live a little in your skin, and it’s just another damn thing on the to-do list.

    For women, there’s always a party in our pants. Menarche and menstruation, childbirth, perimenopause, menopause, cramps, aches, pains, not to mention yeast infections, bladder infections, and all the rest. You couldn’t ignore it if you tried. In the upper berth, meanwhile, your buoys bob calmly, isolated from the relative storm of the southern hemisphere. As long as they look good, they are pretty easy to forget about. Until there is trouble.

    So, as the ghost of October third, I’ve come to haunt you into performing your breast self check. Not just this month, but each and every month from here on in. Pick a day each month and stick to it. Do it a week or so after your period. Think of it this way: You got your oil changed, so now it’s time to rotate the tires. Do what works for you. My friend Kiki uses the arrival of the telephone bill as a reminder to do her self check. This wouldn’t work for me, as I studiously disregard the arrival of all my bills. I’m the type of person who needs something more dramatic to jog my memory. So I use the air raid siren that goes off the first Wednesday of the month. I immediately take cover, and take my health into my own hands.