December 2007 Archives

One of my major excuses for not marrying was that I could never imagine spending Christmas anywhere but at Mom's (and Dad's); no in-laws could possibly come close to what Christmas meant in our family.  In my childhood that meant at Gramma and Grampa Koftan's, with Aunt Audree's family and Uncle Larry's family.  (Grandpa Luckert went to Aunt Lizzie's for a week or two.)  It was understood that we all would be together for the year's supreme holiday--as well as other major holidays but particularly this one--only the weather interfering.  I can recall being crushed when a blizzard prevented going to the farm, that 11 or 12 miles of gravel drifted shut, an Arctic world away.  It rarely happened, though I suspect that the 1948-49 winter might have been likely, the year Center had no travel in or out for two weeks, no electricity for most of that time, the snow up to the power and telephone poles' crossbars, often twice as high as a car, one-way traffic in the worst-drifted sections.  On the other hand, as long as the state-maintenance graders had bladed the roads, we could always put on chains and did, if the snow was blowing or was otherwise over the roads.  When our grandparents lived Up West, on the Peters' home place north of Newport, we all went for the week, to be there from the 24th through the 1st or 2nd, too far to be whipping up and back just for Christmas Eve and Day.  Travel was much more serious then.  And a shovel, extra blankets, and provisions in case we got stuck were standard.

Yesterday when I was cooking and baking, I thought how the season always meant Special Food.  It's a wonder we didn't turn into the blubbery sorts now worrying the health watchers, given all the seasonal richness, except that we were necessarily more active then--no TV--and preparations weren't a matter of ordering online.  Once December rolled around, days were spent in cooking and baking, keeping our buffet full of platters and dishes of cookies, candies, bowls of nuts with nutcracker and picks, sweet rolls for company dropping in.  And neighbors and relatives did drop in, especially with Mom's hospitality and the widespread gift-giving then.  She kept wrapped boxes of chocolate-covered cherries in case someone brought an unexpected gift.  While Freddie, our favored Center store, had the best stock of candies and nuts in the county, as far as I ever knew, we also made all kinds of cookies--the Christmas cut-outs were venerated and hung above the stove--and divinity and fudge from scratch.  As usual, Mom kept me as busy as she was with the candy-making and baking and wrapping presents during full ovens.

This was even truer for Gramma, who prepared for her meat-and-potatoes menfolk and famished grandchildren the way she did for threshers.  That range of hers, fueled by kindling and cobs, went from morning to night, baking kolaches, boiling batches of fudge, cooking white divinity, pfeffernusse, peanut brittle.  Store-bought was expensive, from bread and butter to chocolate chip cookies, so it was all home-made, except for perhaps some chocolate-covered cherries and the nuts.  I have a cherished reminder of those, lots of cheap peanuts in their shells, hazelnuts (which we children thought were acorns) or filberts, Brazil nuts Mom was particularly fond of (but we called them by a very politically incorrect name in innocent racism), almonds, walnuts--pecans reserved for baking, cashews and pistachios in the future.  (I can still remember my first cashews, hot in their own stand in a Norfolk dimestore, a special, expensive treat, sometime in my high school years, I think.) 

This is Grandma Koftan's nut bowl, also home-made, as you can see in the photo below.  I have this cherished memory sitting on Great-Grandma Peters' sofa table.  The nutcracker was in the middle hole of the center cylinder, the nut picks in the holes around the nutcracker.  The bowl was always kept full.  I had thought it lost.  After Dad died and we were cleaning out the north garage, I found it stuck up in the rafters and was incredulous.  My sisters didn't recognize it, but I certainly did.  Here's what the bottom looks like, the marks of the turning lathe clear on the raw wood.

While I'm at it, I do have to lodge one complaint.  Black walnut trees grew around the Bloomfield farmhouse.  Mama loved those black walnuts; I never did acquire a taste for their bitterness, nor did my cousins.  Some of Gram's fudge was ruined because she put black walnuts in it.  Otherwise, it was wonderful chocolate or brown sugar fudge, grainy sometimes because made from scratch.  Using marshmallow whip for creamy sweetness came later and was a town thing Mom introduced to the family. 

Naturally, the three families contributed to the holiday feasts, usually pies, cookies, other easily transported foodstuffs.  Gramma usually had chocolate sheet cake because it was the quickest and easiest and fastest to disappear into our young mouths.  If we were lucky and she had time, we might savor a chocolate layer cake.  After Gram died, Mom continued her mother's tradition of apple, pumpkin, and peach pies, and Sue, my surviving sister, does apple and pumpkin, like Mom's.  (We have her recipes, often Gramma's originally.)  Without realizing it, I emphasized the sweets, because that's what children are the most interested in.  Luckily, I was as active in winter as in summer, maybe more so, because I was a fudge glutton.  And I fought with Denny and Mike over the prune and cherry kolaches.  (We disdained the apricot, poppy seed, and cottage cheese, which the adults, certainly Mom, also liked.)

Actually, the one food most identified with Christmas Eve memories was oyster stew, canned oysters only when no fresh were to be had anywhere.  Milk, butter, salt, and pepper, the milk flavored by the oysters with their juice, the stew even better after a day or two so that it was always made in big batches.  Today only my brother-in-law and I will eat it in my family, my sisters and their children making wretching noises at the very smell.

Otherwise, the Christmas Eve meal was mostly convenience, the good meal for the next noon.  That was obviously in deference to the grandchildren not interested in sustenance nearly as much as in opening presents, the adults piecing all evening.  Because of the number of people, we had to eat in shifts.  The food:  the bread was still baked unless one of our families brought store bread, the ham usually Grampa's--or maybe canned beef from the hillside cave, luncheon meat such as minced ham or liverwurst store-bought, salads which came to mean potato salad and Jello salad with fruit cocktail and nuts, which, after Gramma died, was Grampa's contribution to the Christmas meal, a huge bowl of it.  I seem to remember deviled eggs, plentiful on the farm, because we certainly had them later as "tradition" at our house after Gram died and the families had grown separated in space and time.  Celery with peanut butter, pickles (canned by Gram and Mom) and olives.  I'm not sure when the cranberry-pineapple-whipped cream salad started, but all I recall Gram ever having was jellied cranberry sauce, store-bought, for turkey or duck, which would've been for the big meal, not Christmas Eve.  We did not eat potato chips then, certainly no nacho chips, the way we do now; seasoned potato chips were another innovation of the 1950s.  Otherwise, Christmas Eve was snacktime, hurried along by impatient children.

We lit the twisted-red-wax candles on the tree for a brief moment in my earliest years.  (REA and electricity didn't come to the farm until the late 1940s.)  I think we had to do some singing before the big moment, gathered around the upright piano, Gram playing.  Otherwise, the climax was opening all the presents heaped up around the tree and wherever there was room, since then everyone got presents from the four families gathered.  (I can still remember being crowded by the boxes of presents in the back seat of our car.)  Later in the evening very early in my childhood, we'd talk Grampa into playing his fiddle, which at that time he could even do behind his back. Finally, we had a visit from Santa.  Gramma had a Santa mask and suit, filled by a neighbor or on that occasion I mentioned by Uncle Larry, but Santa Claus came after we had opened presents.  Except for him, glorious, happy, happy memories!

Later Note:  We were not always at the farm for Christmas Eve and Day.  When the concrete-block house was built in Crofton, we were there at least once when our grandparents lived there and at least once when Earl and Audree lived there. I was reminded by a poll of "What Was Your Best Christmas Gift?" in the newspaper, and my answer was easy.  Not too long after I had lost my dog--as a boy, I always had a dog--and swore never to be broken-hearted over another killed by a car, I was sitting at the corner of the Crofton living room near the entrance to the kitchen when around the corner came this little black-and-white puppy tripping over a big envelope tied on with a big red ribbon.  According to the enclosed document of birth record, his name was Hugo Victor Herbert, Aunt Audree's nod to my musicality.  And the other Crofton time, much later, for sure for sure was when I was working at Tom's Music House in Norfolk and was utterly frazzled by the final week of staying open every night, longer-than-12-hour days, and stayed for the shortest time ever, tired of people and hating carols, going back to Center and watching Christmas shows and St. Patrick's midnight mass from New York City because I'd never seen one, falling to sleep during it.   

While I was thinking about going to Gramma's house--not over the river and through the woods but by gravel roads through snowdrifts in a car--never did get to ride in a sleigh--I was thinking how busy those weeks before Christmas were even for a child.  We exchanged names at school and Sunday school, besides  giving our teachers at both places gifts.  For the most part, in her campaign to make sure I was always independent, Mom left the selection and wrapping up to me.  Of course, we also made gifts at school for our parents, one of the few I can recall a very early one, plaster casts of our hands with red ribbons for hanging.  Our grade room in elementary school was festooned with the usual holiday construction-paper cut-outs in the windows (not the kits teachers buy today), the tree (one of those local cedars) with mostly our hand-made chains of red and green construction paper (white paste to eat), circles of paper glued together in threes or fours, colored to represent balls (more white paste to eat), snowflakes of paper doilies or multi-folded paper carefully cut into and then opened up, strings of cranberries and popcorn--and we made all those for Gram too, which kept us grandchildren busy on pre-Christmas visits.  I was in programs at school and church, meaning pieces to learn, and we usually had to learn songs, a different one for each class.  As I got older, I was always a magi in the church program because Dad had a wonderfully rich-looking maroon-with-red-pattern dress robe of satin.  When Mom taught country school, I got drafted for much more, of course, with the decorating, sacking of candies and nuts as treats for those who came, making programs.

Shopping in Norfolk meant several in a car, neighbors or relatives, not some quick excursion solo as now, since this was special and roads not that good.  Stores then weren't open on Sundays, were only open one or two nights a week until a week or so before the 25th, with department stores and dime stores prime destinations, no big franchises like Wal-Mart, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot then.  I liked Montgomery Wards in Norfolk, then on Fifth Street north of Hotel Madison and the Norfolk Daily News, because it had nice restrooms and was across from the police station, next to which was an open space that, in good weather, had caged monkeys.  I mentioned Sioux City in the previous entry, the really big city where we ordinarily went only with such as the Petersons (the county attorney's family) and always ate at a then quality restaurant, the Green Gables.  I was most enchanted with all the glittering colored lights, far more than Norfolk had, including the huge stylized cat on the Katz Drug Store outlined in blinking red bulbs, the dime stores of three floors rather than just one, department stores of five and six stories, and parking garages.  And Santas all over the place.

I will simply add a note here, as I've written before, I was not a fan of Santa if he was within ten feet or less.  Between the blustery laugh and the obscuring beard, he was better in advertisements than up close and personal.  I generally ran, crying, from him even as I heard nasty rumors from bigger kids who the Jolly Horror was.  In the church it was possible to circle away from him or crawl under the pews; I did both.  Indeed, after I hid, sobbing, under Gramma's buffet one Christmas, Uncle Larry had to come back in and take off his disguise to get me to stop.  (Audree's kids were always more cynically knowing.)  I felt the irony years later when I was asked to belt pillows on and don the beard and suit to play Santa with whiskers in my mouth for the church or families, the most successful time for Hahn High School on the Wayne State campus where I was practice teaching and refused to talk so that the students never guessed who I was.

Didn't realize I'd been sidetracked for a week again, but it's Christmas Eve, time for memories, with nostalgia running down my back like a skunk's white streak.  Because it's the night our family opened gifts, it's the night toward which my whole childhood year tilted, even more important than my birthday, the seasonal magic making me manically giddy.  Also because Mom and Gramma made it so.  To get in the mood, here's a miniature "Christmas Kitchen" from an exhibition at Durham Western Heritage Museum, though it's a far more modern kitchen than Mom's, or Gramma's cramped little space with a single-file aisle between her big cast-iron range and the sink and work table.  But it's cheery, even with the computer, and I liked it, even though I have to apologize for photographing it, not realizing until I left, that area, with three other exhibitions, was off limits to cameras.

This is the largest Christmas tree in town, with huge ornaments to match the tree size, also at the Art Deco Durham Western Heritage Museum, which we all know is the old Union Pacific Train Depot in a new life.   Obviously, such a giant dwarfs anything from my childhood, though I threw a fit if ours didn't touch the living room ceiling, at least with the little angel topper on.  (My apartment complex allows no live trees by city fire regulation.)  The church had a tall, live tree and often garlands.  Our trees then were balsam fir.  Gram and Grampa sometimes had a store tree, sometimes a scragglier, scratchy [eastern red] cedar cut in the pasture, especially Up West north of Newport on the old Peters homestead, such as the ones below, hung with food for the birds at Lauritzen Gardens.  (This kind of juniper is now considered a weed in Nebraska pastures and is turning my home landscape dark.)  I didn't run into the most popular Christmas choice now, Scotch pine, until I was teaching at WIU in the late 1960s in Macomb, Illinois, and discovered Christmas tree farms along the Mississippi for the first time, so thrilled that I sped across Iowa on I-80 at 80 mph with a Christmas tree in the passenger seat taking up most of that half of my car, a bit late for the folks and my then-little sisters but a real, live tree I had picked out, not something cut weeks, months earlier and shipped long distances.  Childhood magic persisted.  And I still love the scent and miss it.

A few weeks ago was a news story about a stewardess retiring after 50 years (OW-H, 3 Dec., p. 1D).  One of the paragraphs was :  "A lot has changed since the old days, when people dressed up in hats and bow ties to fly on propeller-powered planes across the Pacific."   That would mean the late 1950s.  It reminded me of how my oldest nephew bristled at Thanksgiving when I mentioned how we used to have to dress up for the holidays--while wearing khakis and a nice sweatshirt over a T-shirt myself on a chilly day.  He retorted that his jeans, boots, and sweatshirt was as much as I could expect.  His wife was funnier--that deft woman's touch--asking me if I didn't like her pajamas.  I was surprised that I had nettled him but shouldn't be.  I come from an alien time and another culture and have the pictorial proof, which I decided to show, after I had watched my Netflix DVD of The Reduced Shakespeare Company's performance for a Vancouver audience.  The Bridgit St. Bridgit theater troupe here has done it twice, so I was familiar with this often funny mockery of our best writer, including a Hamlet repeatedly reduced by speed and cuts until it ends up just a few minutes long.  Anyway, what I noticed was that the whole audience was dressed casually, not a one in suit and tie or fancy dress, when I still treat the theater as a special occasion.  But that's where our culture is now.  And here is where our culture was yesterday.

This is my dad, Jack (John, really) Luckert, with his two older brothers, Richard at the left, Chet (Chester) at the right.  Given the stories how Grandmother Luckert had to hide money to keep my grandfather from drinking and gambling it away, it is impressive that the three boys are all formally dressed--and that my athletic hunter-fisherman father has long curls too.

That's Dad in what Mom called his John Dillinger days (the mustache) when he was at auto mechanic school in Kansas City, and the photo at right has Mom there with him, the mustache gone.  My father wore coveralls for his mechanic and welding work most of the time when I was growing up, but he would always dress up for special occasions, like holidays.

Here is simply a friendship photo, though apparently taken in some sort of studio.  At the back are Mervin Feddersen, Mom's cousin, and Ella Larson, who married Grampa Koftan's youngest brother, Joe, in a double wedding with Mom and Dad on that day too windy to pick corn, though clearly this is before that time.  The front row has James (Buzz) Brown and Lena Bishop, who would marry and be some of the best friends of the Koftan family, with their children.  Note the formality in dress and pose.

As you can read, that's Grandpa Luckert with all his grandsons at that particular time:  Alton (Uncle Rich), Kenny (Uncle Chet), Jimmy (Aunt Betty Vanness), and me.  As you can see, oh nephew mine, whom I love dearly whatever our sharp differences are,I was programmed from a very early age. 

I have mentioned my maternal grandparents often enough that I should let them appear here, since, for some reason, they didn't in the 1948 trip photos.  Albeit I have certain problems with my digital, sometimes it takes fair pictures of pictures, which are what these are, from the family scrapbook (i.e., What I Did with Grandma K.'s and Mom's Photos and Albums).

Fern Effie Adelaide Peters, born 5 June 1895, married Laurence John Koftan (originally Kaftan), born 27 April 1891, on his and her mother's birthday (Mary Jane Maher Peters, born 27 April 1857), 27 April 1914.  You can read her parents' invitation to the bride's reception between the photos of the couple.

The photo at the left is in front of our house (where I was born) in Center apparently in the 1950s.  The photo at the right is at the brick house, the family home in the early part of the 20th century (the 1920s into the 1930s), the one Mom loved the best and Cousin Linda wrote a song about.  The Luckert farmstead was nearby, which is how Dad came to work for Grandpa Koftan, where Grandma pushed for marriage to her older daughter, where Dad recuperated after an accident while working in Omaha, and where Mom and Dad spent their first married days.

When my sister was trying to make sure that all her Omaha family were safely at home after the Von Maur shootings, I was blithely at Beowulf, the most recent film version after the Sci-Fi Channel's Grendel earlier this year, besides all the other versions I mentioned, including the recent opera.

The new movie with the big-name cast is hilarious.  It is a digitalized comic book (fake-looking humans) which I alternately laughed at or dozed through except for one part, the dragon section.  The movie opens with a naked Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar in a kind of sheet toga--you can see that he's naked by the open side, besides which he sheds the sheet entirely after calling for merriment and fornication, looking like a chubby naked Santa Claus with obvious assets, his queen staring down at his front.  The film loves nudity.  Ray Winstone, a paunchy actor digitalized into Sean Bean's body, is a Beowulf stripped down for the long Grendel attack sequence because he's determined to fight the beast on his own terms, as he puts it.  Lots of coy tricks hide his genitalia except for some really fast sequences when it seemed obvious, since he was just one of those virtual-reality video-game manikins anyway, he was sexless the way they used to make dolls.  The most notorious nudity is Angelina Jolie's as Grendel's mother, a monstrous hag in the original, here Jolie at her most seductive, gold flowing down her nude body rising from the underground lake--think of those chocolate fountains at fancy receptions--her single braid elongated into a serpentine tail.  This is undoubtedly the sexiest Beowulf ever, for no good reason other than the usual movie pandering. 

I really hate those fake digitalized humans in video games, no matter how "real" they look, and so I never could take any of these surly characters seriously and was puzzled at very rare close-ups that switched to the actual humans, the difference obvious.  Then, too, there were the unwitting effects.  When one of Beowulf's Geat warriors plants a battle axe in the middle of Grendel's skull, the look on Grendel's face was like Migraine #547, "Now you've really pissed me off," and I laughed--loudly.  (He bites off the guy's head in spite.)  After Grendel's mother avenges her son's death with an attack on the mead hall, the corpses are hung across the hall like so many long-underwear union suits, which is just what I thought of, Grandpa Luckert's long johns.  There is no explanation for the huge treasure horde in the mother's lair, though it seemed to copy the one in Pirates of the Caribbean. (The ending actually reveals how she apparently amassed all that wealth.)

On the other hand, it got some major points right, very curiously.  And I know because I came right home and started re-reading Seamus Heaney's definitive, much-acclaimed translation in the bilingual edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).  King Hrothgar's shore guard challenges the Geats' landing "in formal terms, flourishing his spear."  Grendel did attack because the mead-hall carousing irritated him:  "Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,/nursed a hard grievance.  It harrowed him/to hear the din of the loud banquet/every day in the hall, the harp being struck . . . ."   John Malkovitch played Unferth the unpleasant, envious braggart just as the epic describes him.  Beowulf does rip off Grendel's limb:  "he left his hand/and arm and shoulder . . . ./He has done his worst but the wound will end him," as it does, the monster dying back in his swampy den.  Beowulf does have to go underwater to kill the mother:  "he dived into the heaving/depths of the lake.  It was the best part of a day/before he could see the solid bottom."  (Some breath control that, but then this is hero worshipping in the earliest form.) 

In the movie all this is treated in stock comic-book terms, against which I have no great complaint, having learned the Old and New Testaments forward and backward with thick comic-book versions faithful to the Bible.  It's just that I was in Disneyland and not the foreboding epic wherein every tribe fears every other tribe in "this unreliable world," "enemies with hate-honed swords" waiting at the borders to attack the minute any weakness is revealed, such as the death of a king, as happens at the terrifying conclusion after Beowulf's death and funeral:  "A Geat woman too sang out in grief;/with hair bound up, she unburdened herself/of her worst fears, a wild litany/of nightmare and lament:  her nation invaded,/enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,/slavery and abasement."   That was the Viking world where vengeance is better than mourning and a blood feud breaks out at a wedding banquet, "the killer instinct/unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant," as one is "wintered into wisdom."  Beowulf comes to Hrothgar to "raise a hedge of spears around you," knowing that one leaves nothing but his fame as a warrior.  In that he sounds like a good Greek in The Iliad, but this is Denmark, Beowulf from southern Sweden, the cold North of stormy seas and dark superstition.  (Coincidentally, one of my favorite sleuths, the equally brooding Kurt Wallander, is from the same area in Henning Mankell's series.)

In the original, Grendel is one of the seed of biblical Cain, who's blamed for all the monsters and demons:  "Cain got no good from committing that murder/because the Almighty made him anathema/and out of the curse of his exile there sprang/ogres and elves and evil phantoms/and the giants too who strove with God/time and again until He gave them their reward."  The movie takes a bold leap off into space, but its creators forewarned no one should mistake the movie for the literary classic. 

The only part of the movie which genuinely made me forget my comic-book-blahs-and-blues was the dragon's.  The dragon and his fire-breathing depredations suddenly lit up the screen, pun intended, with thrilling effects.  Now I can go back to that screenwriting left turn.  It is the movie's brand-new twist to this most ancient of Anglo-Saxon tales that Grendel was sired by Hrothgar's mating with Grendel's mother as the dragon was sired by Beowulf's mating with the mother, who then becomes invincible, has done it before and will do it again.  And her golden horde becomes apparently the treasure heaped into the funeral ships the Vikings used for their greatest warrior kings, sending the body and wealth sailing out in a ship on fire.  (This kind of burial happens to William Holden, as I recall, in Blake Edwards' sardonic S.O.B. and is what the grandchildren insist upon in a more recent movie I can't remember right now, about the dying patriarch of a large American family.)  I didn't mean to spoil anything--as if I really could--but for anyone puzzled, that's why Beowulf is so grieved to slay the dragon and why, when he and the dragon lie dying on the beach, the dragon turns back into a golden-skinned young man, just as Grendel had shrunk back into a small human form at his death.  Naturally, the very Christian poet of the original would never agree to that, besides which Beowulf is cremated on a huge pyre.  Oh, well, it's a novel causation that makes some sense for the hatred the monstrous boys feel for their human daddies.

I urge you to read the original in Heaney's translation, if for nothing else the pleasure of the notorious Anglo-Saxon alliteration and the lines split into two-beat halves:  "He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain,/limping and looped in it.  Like a man outlawed/. . . ."  "bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood/and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body/utterly lifeless . . . ."  Various set pieces deal with true sorrow, the blood feuds, the culture of warriors with its curious formality among allies, an old man's loss of interest in life after his son is killed, the sad, sapping effects of old age.  It even has biblical interest--the writer is Christian but never mentions Christ--with a mention of the Great Flood engraved on a sword hilt:  "It was engraved all over/and showed how war first came into the world/and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants/ . . . the Almighty made the waters rise,/drowned them in the deluge for retribution."   The dragon is described in serpentine terms recalling the Edenic snake:  "He rippled down the rock, writhing with anger" . . . . [in the battle with Beowulf] "while the serpent looped and unleashed itself./Swaddled in flames, it came gliding and flexing . . . ."

I guess the next best thing would be to read John Garner's short novel, Grendel (1971), taking the monster's point of view, which I first heard, hypnotized, being read over the radio and so bought the book.  Or you could watch another far-out version because of its bleak Nordic violence, like a variation on a theme, The 13th Warrior, with Antonio Banderas thrown into the mix as a Moslem needed to help fierce, husky blonde Vikings overcome the cannibalistic Wendol, "creatures of the mist,"   terrorizing the neighborhood.  But I'll stick with Heaney's.  
   

I've already repeatedly said I wing this impromptu, so naturally, being somewhat finicky, I have to add what I forgot.  In the case of the famous 19th-century American gun makers' list, I forgot the Philadelphian, Deringer, who had an extra r added to his name for inventing the miniature gun so easily concealed in boot tops and garters and cleavages.  I was also startled to read "and the Concord Gun Manufactory, where you could get everything from fowling pieces to six-barreled pistols"--this is in 1840--another testament to New England's place in gun history, in Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau:  Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006), p. 15 (which sets some sort of title record).  And it was Emerson's famous line in "Concord Hymn" about the neighborhood colonials firing "the shot heard round the world." 

By mere coincidence, I was watching The Rundown again for the ? time, wherein Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) repeatedly protests he doesn't like guns, and caught Christopher Walken sneering, "Never met an American who didn't like guns," proving my cultural point.  Later, after Seann William Scott asks him, "What's your problem with guns?" The Rock replies, "Let's just say they take me to a place I don't wanna go."

I don't know where we got the phrase, but in my childhood we called westerns significantly shoot-'em-up-bangs.  We did, we really did.  Of course, the very first western was Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) for Edison, based upon an actual 1900 event when Butch Cassidy's gang robbed a Union Pacific train near Table Rock, Wyoming.  Only 12 minutes long, setting several precedents, the film ends shockingly when one of the bandits turns and fires point-blank at the audience.  I saw it in one of the best classes I ever had, on Silent Cinema, starting my aborted doctorate at Bowling Green.  And it still shocks.  As does one of the most recent westerns, No Country for Old Men. Cormac McCarthy's superbly written novel was so violent when I read it upon its publication, it left me stunned enough to forego seeing the film for now, said to follow the book closely.

Besides the three international records for the U.S.--us--I mentioned, I should've added that the rest of the world is still highly conscious that the U.S.--us--created nuclear power and the first atomic bombs and is the only nation ever using them in warfare, twice, which we also conveniently ignore.

Finally, the new issue of The Week (21 December, p. 19) deals with the Omaha shootings as a media frenzy, that the media should somehow not give celebrity to killers after just that:  "Now I'll be famous."  Uh-huh.  I'd already decided that the following zoo photo served well metaphorically for the W-H's effort to maintain some professional dignity among the TV feeding frenzy.

Perhaps all those koi should be piranha?

The day after the slaughter at Von Maur's out at Westroads, it snowed all morning, a wonderfully fluffy snow skiers like as powder, and naturally I got out my camera.  I decided to make contrasting photos, because I'd taken some about two weeks before of the views from my aerie/eyrie, as I think of my plain longtime home of 28 years, on the top floor on one of Omaha's highest hills with a great view northward.

It's obvious our apartment complex sits on a steep hillside, for I look over the top of our matching counterpart on the north toward Crossroads, the shopping mall at 72nd and Dodge, once considered the city's midpoint, a mile away.  The white mass stabbed by the power pole near the eastern (right-hand) end of the building is Crossroads. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The same scene, the morning after the snow,  looked like this.  The overcast caused the strange blue tint.  And it's snowing heavily enough to completely block out the view beyond Pacific Street at the bottom of the hill.  I was especially happy because the forecast wasn't for as much as we had.  Whenever snow is forecast, I wish for at least six or seven inches.  That's been true from my childhood.

Here's my view to the northeast, toward the University of Omaha at the left-center horizon.  The buildings across the street were originally the headquarters of the D.O.E.s, the women's branch of the Elks, now an insurance agency.  Even though they're bare, the number of trees Omaha has is evident.  And the snow transformed the scene handsomely.

 

Without removing the screen or opening the window, my view out the kitchen window was this, showing how my backdoor neighbors, above our line of garages, are on a level with me by being on the hilltop.

 

Where am I?  Oh, I'm at the top of this end of our building, as I said, the street end, those windows under the eaves over to the porch.  The "sun" is a snowflake too close, caught in the backflash, I guess.  I like it.

 

 

 

 

"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thought on the unthinking."  John Meynard Keynes

What happened in 1957 couldn't happen today.  Starkweather probably would've taken the fastest route, I-80, across the state, which would've been blocked off.  He would've been tracked by media and police helicopters and vastly improved law enforcement methods from computers to GPS to nail-studded boards, to name only a few of the changes.  But what happened 5 December 2007 out at Westroads happens all the time now, it seems.

The killer, Hawkins--and I am among those who would prefer not giving him a name nor any other kind of celebrity--wrote, "Now I'll be famous."  Infamous is a light year from famous but celebrity of sorts, and heaven knows we've all kinds of negative examples of that.  He also called his potential victims "peices [sic] of [expletive]," as the Internet quoted.  They weren't, of course, as the newspaper's repeated photos and biographies emphasized.  The store employees certainly weren't among the rich and privileged against whom he apparently was as resentful as Starkweather had been.  He also had a much-improved weapon Starkweather would no doubt have made good use of.  It was an assault rifle, capable of 650-800 rounds a minute, improved models already on the market.  Our killer stole it from his step-father.  If his step-father is like my nephew, he has several other guns and no possible excuse for an assault rifle other than macho moronic pleasure in the gun most likely to be seen in movies and TV series and used daily whether in video games or geopolitical or gang warfare.

My first experience with this monstrosity, the AK-47 assault rifle, was the slaughter of a young father out barbecuing on a fine, sunny day with a few friends, his two little daughters running around the front yard where he was.  A relatively no-account drug deal produced a vengeful drive-by, the victim mistaken for a very similar-looking friend, who, coincidentally, happened to be there, which may have been the reason for the mistaken identity.  The autopsy photos were so ghastly that I cringed when I read that's what Hawkins had used in Von Maur.  As the young father, in his early 20s, tried to get his little daughters into the house upon the first firings, one shot hit him in the head and another in the leg lengthwise after he fell on the walk.  Entrance wounds are always ugly, but these bullets create terrible, terrible damage on the way out.  The whole back of his skull was gone, as was most of the leg below the knee.  I will never forget that case.

Of course, we had too many other cases involving guns, so many that Judge Murphy and I were ardent opponents to the NRA nuts with their most powerful lobby in D.C.  At one time I considered getting a bumper sticker, "NRA nuts should be shot," but that undoubtedly would've gotten me shot.  But that's what happens when you suffer the excess of our favorite tool:  the bar owner who did everything a robber demanded, still shot while lying on the floor, paralyzed for life in a wheelchair; the convenience store clerk who tearfully told the robber with the sawed-off shotgun she didn't know the combination to the safe and still had most of her face blown off, still deformed after several plastic surgeries, still terrified of the defendant as she testified.  Naturally I am a wimp to my hunting family and relatives.  My dad was an ardent hunter, but he never had anything but rifles and shotguns for shooting game, which went on our table, whether I disliked the gamy taste or not.  My mother, on the other hand, hated guns, and I was a mama's boy, as I've freely admitted.  Dad did not have the handguns, let alone the numbers of them, and assault rifles my brother-in-law and nephew own.  You can guess the familial arguments.  I have all the evidence on my side just from the hundreds of cases where we had to deal with the appalling results in the courtroom.

So I snarl when I hear that stupid "Guns don't kill people.  People kill people."  "It's in the Constitution."  First of all, our founding forefathers could not possibly have envisioned the weaponry we have when they wrote, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  I will not argue the National Guard implications nor states' rights.  In the late 18th century they couldn't have, in their wildest dreams, envisioned automatic weapons, let alone airplanes, bombs, tanks, lasers, computers, all the other paraphernalia of modern warfare. 

Secondly, I think everyone will agree that the U.S.--us--has always been the leader in technology since it got going and kept war outside its borders, once the Civil War had ended.  I attribute our vast inventive creativity to the mixture of peoples making up our population since our revolution.  We lead in the number of Nobel Prizes, and our industrial R & D made us the obvious superpower ready to take over after Europe and Asia suffered the destruction of World War II.  Hang on.  My argument depends on the gun as simply a tool.  Just because its intent is killing does not make it less a tool.  And we have always been marvelous at constantly improving our tools, tinkering with our favorite toys, like Tim in Home Improvement revving up his mowers and washing machines, like 1950s teenagers working on their cars, bigger and better crucial to our commercial consumerism.   (With all the car ads besieging us, all those big ol' pickups kicking more than dust, understandably I laugh when we talk about ecoautos, green cars that run a whole 40 miles on one charge.  As the world understands, we don't really care about being the world's leading polluter as long as we have our quality of life.  And that doesn't include wimpy cars--or guns.)

So let's consider a list of All-American names, most surprisingly coming from New England.  Smith & Wesson out of Springfield, Massachusetts, with .38s and Magnums among their many gun credits.  Colt, who invented the revolver and the .45, in Hartford, Connecticut.  The Henry becoming the Winchester, with repeating and Browning automatic rifles, out of New Haven, Connecticut.  Not in New England but in Ilion, New York, Remington, who makes the most shotguns and rifles today.  Other key American gun names:  Sharps carbine (rifle), hence the sharpshooters.  Gatling invented a primitive machine gun for the Civil War that he hoped would make war so horrible, his weapon would be a peacemaker.  Maxim was the first automatic machine gun; add the Thompson submachine gun, hence Tommy gun.  Granted, the AK-47 came from Russia and the Uzi from Israel, but we naturally have our versions now.  Our presidential assassinations and others like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King have been by guns.  Most of our suicides are by guns.  Allegedly, 30,000+ are killed annually by guns here.  I was going to log all the gun crimes, killings, in the daily newspaper but decided it was futile.  Guess who has the world's largest defense budget, the most arms manufacturers, and is the world's leading arms exporter.  U.S.--us.  With that technological knowhow and those names, who could possibly be surprised that, besides a Car Culture, we are pronouncedly a Gun Culture, our popular culture saturated with both.  And both have been our gifts to the world, as the news announces daily.

The next time some idiot belligerently whines, "Guns don't kill people.  People kill people," remind him that he would hardly be satisfied with a Daisy BB gun, the kind I wanted and finally got as a boy.  He wouldn't even spit on an air gun that fired marshmallows or water or M&Ms.  It's the firepower that counts, after all, just like it's the size of the engine that counts, just like it's the size of the dick that counts.  (And apparently these guys don't realize guns are commonly considered phallic weapons, which is why I vulgarly included that last part.  Vulgarity for the vulgar.) 

Various sources have posed the question of whether we adopt airport security for our daily life or continue as we have been, when one of these mass shootings like ours occurs.  Well, sorry, I take as much risk driving on Omaha streets as I do getting shot by some psycho for whom I have nothing but contempt.  I do try to avoid areas where notably high disrespect for life exists, where gangs and other thugs prey on each other and strangers who don't know their areas.  Other than that caution, given that we kill more by cars every year and nobody does anything about that, I don't expect us to do anything about this.  This U.S.--us--is, after all, the Gun Capital of the World.

That happens to be the title of my favorite Gerry Mulligan album, but it has taken a completely different meaning after last week.  A week ago Sunday The World-Herald did a feature story on "The End of Innocence" for the 50th anniversary of 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather's murder spree with his 14-year-old girlfriend across Nebraska into Wyoming, beginning on December 1st, 1957, ending January 29th, 1958, 11 deaths later, generating an enduring popular culture fascination, partially because "Nebraska was an unlikely place for such a rampage," "the heart of 'Ozzie and Harriet' country."  (How do you make a musical, "Love Kills," out of this?  Six movies, a TV miniseries, Springsteen's "Nebraska"--originally titled "Starkweather"--but a musical??)  Stephen King kept a Starkweather scrapbook, uses Charlie as a villain, and is quoted:  "The very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future.  His eyes were a double zero. . . . He was like an outrider of what America might become." 

Seven months older than this brutal murderer, I was a junior, in Tom Osborne's class but not his league, at Hastings College in south central Nebraska and remember well the excitement of possibly having the couple pass through on what became a violently bloody road trip, road trips sacred in our culture, whether Kerouac's "On the Road" or "Smokey and the Bandit," "Dude, Where's My Car?" "Thelma and Louise," and dozens of other "road" movies.  Rumors were abundant in a traumatized state, and we deliberately hung out at a different cafe than usual, on Highway 6, because that was Starkweather and Fugate's most likely route through, as it truly was.  

The newspaper pictured all the victims with short biographies, ran a sidebar on the 1950s, wrote about the burgeoning passion for cars and car culture with teenagers, even resurrecting James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause."  Starkweather represented himself as "alienated," so a professor who studies serial killers was quoted, "a boy feeling oppressed and downtrodden with no chance of making it, and he takes the violent way out,"  (As I remember the period, the existentialists such as Camus and Sartre were very popular then, alienation a key word among them, though Charlie Starkweather was hardly any kind of a reader--or thinker--in his murderous resentment.)

Of course, three days later on Wednesday, December 5th, after splitting up with his girlfriend and losing his job at McDonald's, 19-year-old Robert Hawkins used an automatic rifle in a posh department store to slaughter eight Von Maur employees and Christmas shoppers and then himself.  It took only six minutes of terror to generate national media frenzy and add Omaha to the national list of gun massacres.

Tonight, December 10th, The World-Herald ran an article about the gory violence of video games, opening with "Graphic scenes of gunshot victims spurting blood and a man urinating into a prisoner's cell . . . ."  I've hated such video games since my nephews were little and killing nasty little video creatures with battle axes, automatic guns, and lasers, and I had saved a November 2nd story about the new "Manhunt 2":  "In the game, the player guides two people who escape from an insane asylum and go on a killing spree with a variety of implements, including axes."  But this is the culture of the "Saw," "Hostel," and "The Hills Have Eyes" series, not to mention Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger stalking into our nightmares. 

As the newspaper editorialized about Hawkins' slaughter:  "An alienated young man . . . deciding to strike a pose by laying his hands on a commando-style firearm and then killing innocent men and women in video-game fashion. . . . The pain of the situation was heightened, too, by so many press organizations, local as well as national, that rushed forward breathlessly on Wednesday with unsubstantiated claims, misleading rumors and incessant, repetitive coverage rather than reporting professionally and responsibly."  The W-H later demonstrated its responsible, professional behavior indeed by "not reproducing the suicide notes" to avoid a model for similar sorts and because "The notes contain vulgarities.  One is insulting to the people who were killed."  That was true, but, of course, I easily found the notes verbatim (and just as the W-H described) on the Internet, today's Celebrity Gossip Asylum.

My sister phoned from our home area in northeastern Nebraska to check on all the Omaha family, but I, as mentioned often enough, don't watch TV news and was, in fact, at a late-afternoon matinee of "Beowulf" out of English-major dutifulness, and didn't get home until around 7:00 to her voice mail.  I discovered the "horrific"--much used but aptly--news from calling her back, after which I switched on the TV, terribly saddened and deeply depressed.  Coincidentally, I had been contemplating forcing myself into joining the many mall walkers at Westroads, which even has special early walking hours, because I need the exercise.

The blanket media coverage by the three local stations inched forward over the two days or more of relentless, fatiguing, finally irritating repetition on the same order as the election ads already airing, the saturation called--bad word choice--overkill for good psychological reason.  Consequently I resigned myself to losing all regular programming (including my very favorite "Life") and to watching other, unaffected channels, which I generally do anyway, though the situation was much more intensely close emotionally, after all my years in Douglas County courtroom criminal proceedings, with my deeply abiding respect for the police and fire departments.  But I was thrown back to the endless, frustrating, boring saturation of O.J.'s SUV wandering under news helicopters and the monstrous 9/11 horrors that reduced me to sobbing so that I could not watch.  The disservice of saturation media coverage over such terrible events actually is unhealthy ugliness to contemplate at any length. I'll have to deal with the gun later.

I've been watching the new post-apocalyptic-dark Wizard of Oz on the Sci-Fi channel,  Tin Man, the now teentwenty heroine reduced to her initials, very much a grown-up version with firm fairy tale roots.  It's probaby not as bleak as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I have been avoiding reading because he, superb writer that he is, traumatized me enough with No Country for Old Men, now apparently a brilliantly savage movie, but you can tell when a culture is depressed from its books and movies, the gritty look of Dark Angel from Blade Runner days/daze, Torchwood trying to save the world, Will Smith's new I Am Legend.  Well, you can list your own ruined-city movie, whether it's Peter in Heroes saving New York or New York frozen in The Day After or 28 Days Later in London or Children of Men or TV's Jericho, on and on.  Tin Man must've had some strange effect on my psyche, for I dreamt of tornadoes erupting around me, an awesome dream with one rising spectacularly out of a tower, four weaving around whatever town I was in, my outrunning a very angry one pursuing me.  (I have to say that one of the apparent benefits of accumulated old-age knowledge is wonderful, wonderful dreams, so engrossing I hate to wake up, though sometimes a shock or a shout from me breaks my intentness.) 

It reminds me again why I think Joseph Campbell and mythology should be required reading in our schools and why I have an enduring interest in comparative literature/movies.  Certain stories are so good that we keep retelling them, seeing what newness we can uncover or what oldness we can polish up like fine silver.  That has to partially explain why there's a spate of Beowulf versions from Elliot Goldenthal's 2006 opera Grendel based on John Gardner's 1971 short novel taking the monster's side to the splashy new digital Zemeckis movie doing well currently.  It is the oldest piece of literature Anglo-American culture has, and I'd recommend the new side-by-side translation of the alliterature Old English by Nobel Prize-winner, the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney.  The oldest literary work is usually considered to be the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which includes the very earliest version of the Great Flood, a story so profoundly important to the Near East that several later cultures, including the Hebrews, adapted it.  Anyway, it is why I keep watching old and new versions of Greek and Shakespearean plays, Japanese samurai movies remade into American westerns.

Tin Man has the ancient duality prototype, the good twin-bad twin (adopted by cops, of course), Cain-Abel, Cinderella and Cordelia picked on by elder sisters, step and real, Odile/Odette in Swan Lake, and this is a major change, to make our Kansas Sunflower part of a family affair.  But then the Greeks knew the family was really the best home for stories anyway, certainly for wrenching tragedies, Oedipus and Antigone and Agamemnon and Orestes, and American soap operas continue to agree.  So we have D.G., the waitress, and Azkadellia, the sorceress, in sibling rivalry for the O.Z., the Outer Zone, though it wasn't always that way.  Daddy doesn't count, though Mommy's still around but imprisoned by her daughter with the magic-spells name, as the younger sister goes through her apprenticeship in witchcraft on the job, so to speak, aided by her still-damaged  entourage, very severely damaged in very modern ways but the whole still needing all the parts.  The scarecrow, Glitch, is a former courier to the Queen Lavender Eyes (all I could think of was Elizabeth Taylor in The Last Time I Saw Paris, the most beautiful lavender eyes I'll ever see), an engineer with a giant zipper as a hair part because half his brain was removed.  The cowardly lion is Raw, with ESP, specifically psychic abilities to peer inside others' brains, one of a hairy species tortured to force them to use their ESP.  The tin man, Tin Man, the O.Z. nickname for a cop with a tin badge, was imprisoned in a kind of Iron Maiden/robot case torture device without spikes but a hologram loop of his wife and son being brutalized and taken, the loop repeated enough to damage his psyche.  (He's revived from "death" by D.G.'s kiss, a Snow White/Sleeping Beauty reversal of roles.)  Can't get much more modern than this trio in their old-fashioned garb.  So far, this lavish new version works in entirely new directions.      

From the 11 August 2007 Creighton News, p. 3A:  "Remember When . . . 1897 - One Hundred Ten Years Ago":  "Three little boys about ten years of age thought they would take a tour.  Going down the railroad track they got as far as Plainview finding lodging in a hay stack.  Missing supper and breakfast they returned the next day."

From the 11 October 2007 Verdigre Eagle, p. 2, "Glancing Back" by Jodi Wiese, "73 Years Ago, Sept. 13, 1934":  While Earl Boldenow and Miss Eda Bohren were returning to Center from a dance at Verdigre Thursday night, they failed to make the turn at the Felix Stoural corner and the car left the road turning completely over twice.  The occupants were not seriously injured.  The car is said to be okay except:  one front wheel is badly twisted; the doors won't shut; the radiator won't hold water; the turtle-back won't close; the window and windshield glass are rather scarce; still it is a good car for the shape it is in."

From the 28 October 2007 Sunday World-Herald Parade, p. 14, "Ask Marilyn" by Marilyn vos Savant:  "Why do nearly all the stories on newscasts focus on negative events?  There are plenty of feel-good human-interest stories to be told.  Is it because viewers feel better about their own lives when they see the bad things that happen to others?" [Answer] "I don't believe these stories make viewers feel better.  I think they make people feel worse:  sad, fearful and more.  Despite that, I believe the news is full of negative events because bad things often happen suddenly, so they seem more newsworthy. . . . Limit the news you get from TV and focus on newspapers instead.  You won't miss the bad stuff--and can read it if you want--and you'll find many positive, interesting stories."

From the 26 October 2007 The Week, p. 45, "The folly of multitasking" by Walter Kirn:  Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways.  At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires--the constant switching and pivoting--energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to short-change some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. . . . Even worse . . . multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones . . . and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us.  In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy. . . . [After citing the high percentages of junior high-high school students who multitask, using two or more media at once--" 'I get bored if it's not all going at once,' said a 17-year-old"] They're the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it. . . . It begins by giving us more tasks to do, making each task harder to do, and dimming the mental powers required to do them.  It finishes by making us forget exactly how on earth we did them . . . which makes them harder to do again."

From the 9 November 2007 The Week, p. 16, "How I outsourced my brain" by David Brooks:  "I no longer need a brain. . . The beauty of the Information Age . . . is not that it enables us to know more.  It enables us to know less, as we outsource most mental activity to the great 'external mind.'  [his GPS system for directions, his iTunes for songs, his TiVo for TV shows] . . . . The job of remembering names and key facts, which my aging brain finds difficult, has been outsourced to Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia.  My Blackberry keeps track of anything else I might need to know. Who needs to meditate in order to achieve oneness with the universe?  I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere."

From the 7 December 2007 The Week, p. 5, editorial note by William Falk:  He writes of depression at how few fellow commuters are reading, much less reading books.  "The rest are either dozing or entertaining themselves with iPods, laptops loaded with TV shows and movies, and hand-held devices that their owners peck at frantically, like pigeons in a Skinner box. . . . A new report found that 15- to 24-year-olds spend an average of just seven minutes a day on voluntary reading. . . . Young people are reading plenty on the Web, and texting, and expressing themselves on MySpace and Facebook and 10 million blogs.  But on the Web . . . . You 'forage,' jumping from link to link, entry to entry, message to message.  It's a world of fragmented attention and immediate gratification.  Reading a book . . . you have to focus.  That practice develops concentration, and the capacity to follow--and express--complex thoughts and ideas.  Not surprisingly, national tests have found that the ability to write and read complex materials is withering, even among graduate students.  Read a whole book?  R U serious?  LOL."