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Connecticut Christmas

I’ve been battling a head cold of sinuses and various other fun for several days now. I can point to when it began, precisely at the end of dinner on Christmas Eve. This being the holidays, and that meaning traveling and a dozen people’s varying schedules and being courteous to the dietary habits of others, that would have been at around 5 p.m.

We’d had dinner with a portion of the family that was just getting over some bug or another. And I thought, for a time, that I’d been given some fast acting strain of a thing that I did not want.

Instead, before I complain about being sick and never eating, let me tell you about the best Christmas present I received on Christmas Eve.

We show up late, because there is being courteous to the dietary habits of others and then there is being alternatively busy and passive aggressive against the idea of eating dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon. So we sit down, all of the family in one big giant circle. For some this is a nice time. For others, perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere. Presents are passed around because one of the kids has to go to his father’s for another meal — the typical modern American Christmas, of course.

So it turns out that all of the gifts are aimed at the children, as it should be. This set ranges from 10 to 17 or so. Being book lovers, and considering these particular kids, The Yankee and I decided we’d simply do gift cards for all of them to a local bookstore.

The 10-year-old, after the haze of Christmas presents presents burns down to a nice, soft, amber glow in his mind, becomes upset. He has gotten me nothing. He disappears. He scours his room. He sends word that I am to join him there. He presents a miniature American flag. And a child’s giving, loving heart.

For the next three hours he proceeded to try to cheat me out of every dollar possible at Monopoly, but, still, for a moment, that was perfect.

Anyway, that was Christmas Eve, where I started coming down with something in his house. When the plane landed the day before yesterday here I couldn’t hear anything because of whatever is going on in my head. I’ve been walking around sniffling and listening to everything as if I’m three feet under water.

So we went for a run this morning. So we walked up the hill to the park where my wife played as a child, the same park where we had our engagement photos taken a few years ago. It is one of those old, large homes turned into a city showcase arrangements. There are dog runs and empty fields and disc golf and a gravel path and plenty of woods.

It was about 39 degrees and I’m going to be that guy, here, but the run helped me feel better. Cleared my head a bit. Now I’m hearing things slightly more clearly, and so on. I got in just over four miles.

We got back to the in-laws just in time to see Uncle Scott, who was up from New Jersey for Connecticut Christmas. How nice of him to wait for us, huh?

Cleaned up, and then Christmas presents, where Santa did an amazing job of bringing wonderful things to everyone. I’m still very much under the spell of that thing parents tell kids just before Christmas, and I’m always sure that I’ve never been good enough to deserve the Christmas gifts I receive. This year, this fine year, was no exception.

We had Christmas dinner, at a reasonable hour. And I calculated this: I believe it has been eight days since I’ve had both lunch and dinner at or near their regular times.

Now let me tell you about the luck of Christmas dinner. My mother-in-law, she’s a fine chef. Christmas in their home is shrimp cocktails and prime rib. Prime rib isn’t the first cut of meat I’d choose for myself, but she makes it happen and it was delicious, as always.

So I helped her clean up afterward and then went to play with my Christmas presents, which are too many and too grand for a boy like me.

Also, at this Christmas dinner, we open crackers. It seems you have this tradition or you’ve never heard of it. There is a cardboard tube with a ribbon coming out of either side. You pull the ribbons and it pops, a mini-firework! The tube opens and you get a paper crown for dinner, a cracker jack-type toy and a joke. These are the jokes we received tonight:

And Christmas still isn’t finished! One more tomorrow …

Auburn / errands / family / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off
27
Dec 13

Back in Connecticut

We traveled all day yesterday. Up and out of my grandmother’s house, skipping breakfast to her mortification, before 8 a.m. Our route took us across regions both populated and sparse and rural. And also down gravel roads. Not even the good stuff, where the creek rocks have been crushed to dust and spit out to the side by previous generations of tires, but loose gravel roads.

Which might be unfair. It was on a detour. A bridge was out, you see, and the local crew that were in the middle of repairing the structure had helpfully hoisted road closed signs and a detour sign, but no actual detour. So we made our own, on roads that looked very much like what we’d traveled in nearly abandoned portions of Ireland this summer.

And from the gravel roads we made it back to the empty county roads and from there through sleepy southern towns and finally into Atlanta and to the place where we parked our car … just in time to miss the airport shuttle.

No matter, there will be another along in 15 minutes, we are right on schedule and so we are really playing with house money for an hour. So we park, unload the things that are going on the next leg of our holiday travels, leaving behind the first stages of clothes and things. The shuttle comes along, we climb on, meet a new young Auburn fan — he’d just chosen sides before Christmas, apparently, and was very pleased to tell us about the shirt he got for Christmas.

These are golden times, my man, and you’ve chosen wisely.

We got into the airport. I instantly lost track of my wife while fiddling about with a zipper or something on my luggage. That took 17 seconds. At 22 seconds, with my thoughtful, staring face firmly applied, a helpful airline employee asked if I was looking for something.

Turns out she was in the check-in line. (Who knew?) I’d found her myself. We checked. We made it through security, where we probably got ourselves on a watch list by hopping lines. We’d committed to one line before realizing the people there were still trying to reach their spring break destinations. So we changed to something that looked like your typically efficient government operation, rather than a Soviet toilet paper queue.

So down to the terminal train and then we found our gate, grabbed some food, finally and got on the plane. Our flight was uneventful, save for the three year old kid doing a wicked Billie Jean cover off and on.

And I had so hoped that flight would have a talent show.

We arrived in Connecticut, where it is cold, as you would expect. Good thing I brought two jackets! On the one hand, we drove and flew almost a full day. On the other hand, we covered more than 1,000 miles. It was an easy night after that, dinner with the in-laws, hauling luggage upstairs and so on.

This morning, we ventured out into the post-Christmas wilderness, and this:

They had a white Christmas, and there is still a little bit of the stuff lying around. It doesn’t impede anything, but it is cold enough to sit in one spot for four or five days without feeling like it is in anyone’s way.

So today we shopped. A visit to the empty mall here, a quick stop to the reasonably underwhelmed Apple store there. We got in and out of a high end district and hit a big name cosmetics store. We visited a haute couture kind of place for one thing or another — I was dizzy with it all by then — and the lady who worked there spoke with us like we were long-lost nieces and nephews.

She’d heard of Auburn. And it had registered enough that, isn’t there some sort of big game? And some sort of rivalry? It was interesting. People either live it or know of it. Or they are completely oblivious to it. But she had just the most passing knowledge — which, hey, good for her, I guess, a fashion store girl in New England knowing anything about the South and its diversions — and I had to explain how this silly little thing was so much a part of our local culture.

It kind of makes you dizzy.

We hit another place or two and then got our collective acts together. We went, with the in-laws and some family friends, to New York City, tonight, here:

At the Lincoln Center there is a performance of MacBeth, staring Ethan Hawke as the cursed mad king. They play the whole thing for the poetry rather than the emotion. Hawke is a much better mad king than a reluctant and treacherous one. It was a fun show, seeing Shakespeare is always good.

They rushed through a lot of really great stuff — this is Macbeth, so of course it is great — as if they just really wanted to get to the last battle, which felt thin for different reasons. Perhaps if they’d lose the rapid fire delivery, and let the audience think about the spaces in between the lines, the show would feel stronger.

We finally had dinner sometime around midnight, at some cafe on the way back home. My body has no concept of regularly spaced meals any more. We’ll get that fixed tomorrow.

family / Friday / video — Comments Off
15
Nov 13

On superheroes and the style of substance

Busy day, and so just two days.

First, Batkid:

San Francisco did it right and it looks like everyone turned out. That’s just incredible. I think because, in part, we all want to be Robin. We all want to help the good guy win.

The San Francisco Chronicle did a special layout for him. It was so well-received they are reproducing it tomorrow.

And, also, this: 60 percent of the time …

I got home tonight and there was steak and in-laws waiting. Not a bad way to start your weekend.

family / history / journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
12
Nov 13

What do a 1977 news clip and a 2013 report have in common?

No one could fault you for waking up and thinking it was colder. Cold, even. It was time. You somehow knew it. Probably because meteorologists had been telling you this for several days.

So you put on a sweater and then a jacket and then you still remark on the brisk coldness of it all. Knowing, because you’ve been listening to meteorologists talk about the weather, that the real cold is coming tomorrow during the pre-dawn hours.

Because arctic blasts the day after a pitch-perfect, cloudless sky, 72-degree afternoon aren’t enough. No. You need to get into the 20s.

So I’ve been doing what everyone does in the cold: staring at the forecast for the next warm day. This afternoon the Saturday projections started at 75. It dipped to 69. And then it went back up to 72-partly cloud, where the forecast sits now. The signal is clear: Prepare for rain to fall from the ground into the sky.

And now for something completely different. My mother sent me a link to a decades-old newsreel. The lead story was an airplane crash, one that killed my grandfather and 71 other people. There were 22 survivors and five local hospitals were engaged. It remains the worst airplane disaster in Georgia’s history. I’ve written about all that before, but the first 60 seconds of this video are different. This is an accidental documentary on the Tennessee Valley in 1977. (WHNT took the air in 1963, founded by a former WAPI man, Charles Grisham. I also once worked at WAPI. It seems everyone in broadcasting did at one point.)

Anyway, the first 60 seconds of the newscast, the day after the big crash:

Dig that slate! The data says 97 percent of American homes had televisions by 1977, but only 77 percent were in color. Consumers had in 1972 started buying more color than black and white sets. This period is often called the initial “replacement period.” Older 1950s sets are first being discarded and upgraded with modern sets.

Missy Ming in New Hope! She’s going to talk to a survivor who crawled out of the wreckage. She sits on the Commission on Higher Education today. She still gets asked about the story.

Michael Lamothe on the existential beat. Why, indeed. Lamothe is now retired and doing a bit of freelance work. He’d been out of school just two years when he filed that report. His last job was at a Rochester, N.Y. station.

JACKIE KENNEDY IN FAYETTEVILLE WISHES SHE COULD HAVE BEEN THERE BECAUSE THIS STORY HAS NO TEASE AND BAD AUDIO. Someone from Huntsville is going to have to tell us about where Kennedy went. She has that common problem among simple Internet searches: a famous name.

Quick cuts: Fire! A body! The Iron Bowl!

Some things will never, ever change.

A trailer torn apart. A road grader. Really big race cars at Talladega (probably). An ambulance. Jimmy Carter! That guy! From California. Didn’t he used to act? And wasn’t he just the governor out there? Boy, aren’t you glad that’ll never happen again. And, yet, there’s something about him …

A kid swimming! A crop duster! The News Station graphic, supered over the coolest looking fire truck ever. “A complete report of this day throughout the Tennessee Valley.”

Did you catch that great old Arby’s sign in the background of the night-traffic shot? A perp is going to the pokey! Don’t look at the face. And in case you missed that one, here’s John Law cuffing and stuffing another. An accident report. Another person on a gurney. Random golf-track-basketball’s first flop! Don’t forget sports! Did we show you the Iron Bowl!?

What in the name of Uncle Walter is that cubist set?

A little much for 1970s rural Alabama, don’t you think? Oh, sure, they had the rockets, but that didn’t make their DMA cosmopolitan. And yet you’ve got the Action News team standing there just … standing, showing off those sharp blazers.

Their slogan back then was “Keep Your Eye On Us.” That was shot on 16 mm, as all of the WHNT broadcasts were until 1979 (“The News People”) when they went to 3/4. All of the old archives had been lost and forgotten. Someone had stored them away at the University of North Alabama, and now they are back in the station’s hands and some of them are making their way onto the Internet so we can say “Look at those clothes.”

The station’s imaging slogan today is “Taking Action. Getting Results.”

I’m not sure the slogans are important — I always thought there was such a thing as over-imaging, which means I could never be a consultant, since they’ll brand the Action Victim if they thought it would let them get the calls in there one more time — but I reprint them to be thorough.

Things to read …

But first! Another video. This has been making the rounds, via Independent Journal:

Also about Veterans Day: A compilation of heartwarming (and clever) homecoming videos. And did you know that a Birmingham man is a big reason we have that day? True story.

Somehow this doesn’t sound good: Even doctors in dark on health plans. And, meanwhile, Bill Clinton is back, and he’s determined to make all of this very awkward for the current administration. Clinton to Obama: Let Americans keep canceled health plans:

Former President Bill Clinton said that President Obama should honor his oft-repeated pledge and allow people to hang on to health care plans that are being canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

“I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got,” Clinton said in an interview at OZY.com published on Tuesday.

Quick hits:

Hancock Bank brings corporate hub, 200 jobs to Montgomery
Growing number of federal workers say they’re unhappy on the job
Alabama investment by Japanese firms tops $4 billion
Google is now bigger than the magazine and newspaper industries
To find real value in digital media, look for the bandwidth hogs

And, finally, here’s a video of a buddy of mine from way back in school. We played soccer together and reconnected online this year. His accent is thicker, but he looks almost exactly the same, half a lifetime later. He’s good people. And now this story:

I like how the reporter, Johnny Archer, let his subjects’ technology work as his visual element. Anyway, I found that video on David’s wife’s Facebook page. My old friend’s bride and son are OK. But the situation in the Philippines is dire. How bad? CNN sent Anderson Cooper’s eyes.

“I fear anarchy happening in Tacloban City,” said CNN iReporter Maelene Alcala, who was on vacation in Tacloban where the typhoon struck and was evacuated to Manila. “It’s like survival of the fittest.”

Tacloban, the provincial capital of the island of Leyte, was ground zero for the typhoon that struck Friday, leaving the city in ruins and its population of more than 200,000 in desperate conditions.

“The whole scene was like something fresh out of a movie. It was like the end of the world,” Alcala said.

The estimates are that the storm pushed more than 580,000 people out of their homes.

family / Monday / photo — Comments Off
11
Nov 13

Veterans Day

Since I wrote all about him this weekend, here’s a picture of my great-grandfather Tonice before he went off to war:

You can read about it here and here.

Just for fun, this is, perhaps, the first picture he took with me. The back of the photo says this was in a state park in Tennessee. We sure knew how to dress back then, didn’t we?

I know quite a few veterans. I’m related to even more of them. Every time I read something about gallantry I think of at least one of those people. I’m fortunate, then, in a lot of respects.