Friggin' with the Ribbon on Christmas Eve
Hunkered in the Bunker on New Year's Day
The Ministry of Homeland Defense
I forget: is it Oceania or Eastasia now?
Nostalgia Summer
When I was a sophomore in college, I decided I needed to develop a persona, since I lacked much of a personality. Part of my construction was an outfit, clothing that communicated the character I intended to be. Primary, omnipresent, was my hat. It was a cheap cloth summer brimmed hat, beige with a colored band. I called it my Sam Snead hat, although I wouldn't have recognized Sam Snead if I saw him standing at home plate on Sam Snead Day. I just found the name interesting, and the hat reminded me of golf. I decorated it with buttons, emblems that announced my individuality by aligning me with specific groups. A Marvel Comics, a Frank Zappa, and an ironic "Wallace For President" button were ubiquitous; others came and went. At Christmas of that year I decorated it with tinsel. I can prove it.
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It worked, to a degree. My college sophomore year was a galvanizing year of my life. It was the year I was to meet my future bride, the only other woman I ever wanted to marry, and my dearest friend besides those two. That would be Denise Rollman, Kathy Foley, and Stephanie Schmidt. It was also the year I would begin to lose contact with my only remaining high school friend. That would be Donald Gooding. It would be the year I developed a modest ability for writing, or at least enjoyed some recognition for that ability. It was a year I learned the grace of a disarming grin and boyish charm, of being clever without being oppressive. Of being heroic and chivalrous, traits that were attributed to me by women who mattered |
Stephanie Schmidt - now known as Stephanie Doris, but still Stephanie Schmidt to me - found that hat in the corner of a closet of memory. Stephanie straightened the brim and slapped away the dust. She spruced up the tinsel and presented it to me. She journeyed to Denver and placed it on my head. It fit.
It wasn't the death of sweet-swinging Slammin' Sam that initiated this summer's sentimental journey; it was a dream that was likely influenced by our 19th wedding anniversary (summer 2001). The dream was a pleasant and non-specific high school retrospection. I awoke pre-dawn recalling names I hadn't thought of for decades. Woozy with nostalgia, I clicked away and found www.classmates.com. Acting against type, I decided to register, to call out tentative hellos into the canyons of sentiment, to listen for echoes of recognition. I was surprised by the first reflection. Dale Osborn, a high school friend who dropped out our senior year to join the army, a man I had speculated to be dead in Viet Nam long before, revealed more resilience and sense than I had attributed to him by proving himself alive and more firmly in the grasp of nostalgia - or less in the grasp of mammon - than I, since he paid classmates for the ability to email to other registrants. He sent me a howdy, and early this summer dropped by for a visit. He challenged me to a game a chess, on the same pocket-board we dueled across 29 years before. He bent my arm into agreeing to join him at the reunion next year. Dale is a friendly bully, then and now.
Donald Gooding was registered at the web site, but he has yet to respond to first Dale's and later my e-entreaties to contact me. It was of some importance to me, Donald had reentered my life - too briefly - to be in my wedding party. I can prove it.
Steve Rasmussen, Donald Gooding, Kevin Kissel, Stephanie Schmidt, Dennis, Denise, Doug, Beth, Tina, Michelle.
I had it in mind to invite Don to a 20th anniversary celebration. Not to be, not to be.
The first person I looked for on the classmates.com site was Stephanie Schmidt. I had lost her - lost her - mumbleteen years before, somewhere between Florida and Maine. The Fate Of The Navy Bride (by Poe, or maybe Agatha Christie). I made half-hearted attempts to find her, although laziness and low self-esteem prevented me from taking extreme measures. Web inquiries and archive searches proved fruitless. I had even forgotten her married name. It was some importance to me, because there was no then then without her. At one time, she shared my mind, and soothed my savage breast. She had consoled me when Denise left me standing in the foyer of DeSmet Hall for six years, and had shared my exultation when Denise returned to me. Of all my friends, then and now, she was most friendly, fair, and faithful. The more I remembered, the more I missed her.
And there she was. I checked the classmates site every couple weeks, always starting with the Regis College "S" listings. Sometime in the winter of 2001-2002, Stephanie added her name and a short biography to the site. I immediately, willfully, parted with 30 bucks to send her a message. No reply, no reply. I was self-conscious enough to suspect she received the message but didn't want to correspond with me. Ah well.
As the summer of 2002 began and our 20th anniversary approached, it occurred to me to contact others of the wedding party, to thank them for their friendship and to invite those in town for a celebratory picnic. Denise's side of the aisle was easy; my brother Doug had stood in for her friend Arnulfo, then exiled to California and unable to attend, and since dust to dust. The others were Denise's sisters, so of course Tina would represent herself and the out-of-state Beth and Michelle. In addition to the uncontactable Don Gooding and Stephanie, I had college companions Steve Rasmussen and Kevin Kissel. Steve and I maintained a twice-annual correspondence, and although he never responded to my email messages I hope this mention will shame him into greeting me again. Kevin Kissel still lives in town, but I hadn't contacted him in a couple years. I webbed him down, finding his email address on a girl's softball league website (he and his three daughters are mad for the game). Kevin promised to attend, if his daughters' team was eliminated from the weekend's tournament early enough. They were too good, it was not to be, but he still owes me a visitation (the Visitation of Kissel is the 8th Station of the Cantankerous, if I remember my dogma).
It was my sister Wilma who suggested the form of our anniversary celebration. For their own 20th anniversary, my parents held a pig-roast BBQ at their home that propagated family legends to rival Cuchulain (as a drunken neighbor running full-force into the solid iron clothesline pole, only to rise from certain death unscathed), Tantalus (as the woefully undercooked pig was consumed with inebriated gusto with no reports of Trichinosis, or even indigestion), or Tristram (as my father fenced with his own tipsy nature and emerged from carving the undercooked swine with another scar on his hand from a deep and bloody wound). Wilma suggested we reenact the scene at the scene, 29 years later. With mom's blessing, I agreed, with the provisos that the cooking be handled by professionals, and the carving be performed by the sober. The clothesline pole had long ago disappeared, done in not from attacks by besotted foreheads but instead by falling out of fashion.
As the day approached, I made a final effort to contact Donald and Stephanie, but my entreaties seemingly drained into a bit-bucket in the back corner of the classmates.com dead letter office. Ah, well. We would have to do what we could without them.
The roast was a moderate success. Even the pig seemed to enjoy itself. I can prove it.
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Thus we mock what we want to eat. Thus we attribute cartoon personality to creatures we claim lack self-awareness, to deny their real personality, their creature personality, their animal awareness, so we can kill them and roast them and ingest them without consuming our own souls in the process. Thus we placate our civilized nature and allow ourselves to eat things with a face, to indeed eat the faces of things with a face. Dentine is destiny, Denise is fond of saying, and thus we attribute barbaric ancestry, visceral appetites, and puny canines to justify enjoying the dead flesh of the formerly alive. Thus do I pad out a paragraph to make the copy better line up with its accompanying photograph. |
That celebration was on Saturday, June 22nd. The anniversary it commemorated was Wednesday, June 26th. Nostalgia Summer was christened on the following Saturday, June 29th, when I received another echo from the classmates.com soundings. The maiden who tamed my unicorn, sweet of my sour, lily to my tiger, Stephanie Schmidt checked a dormant email address and found a crystal key to a mnemonic timesled. "Hey Dennis!", she wrote, and I was immediately enveloped by the warm vapors of selective recollection.
I ate the lotus leaf of nostalgia for weeks thereafter. We e-chatted often, warily approaching each other like we would a stray kitten. "Are you the Dennis I remember?" Stephanie asked in myriad ways. "I think so, I think so," I would reply in my own fashion, "you tell me". I opened a bag of literary laundry I usually save for this annual airing. I donned my allegorical tap shoes, hoping to dance away two decades of deterioration and distraction.
It wasn't until the Doris family (Stephanie, husband Frank and daughter Heather, 16 - oh my!) came to visit in late August, however, that she was convinced I could remember the manners and mannerisms that endeared me to her in 1976. It was as if she had stepped out long enough to get a haircut. Although I thought I had a vivid recollection of then, she reminded me of people and events long ago fogged in the mirror of my cranial bathroom. We had composed a song about her first cat, Athena, and she remembered both words and melody. I had explained the tiny dark specks in my irises as CIA-implanted micro-dots, sinister information smuggled at perilous risk from hostile embassies. Heather had micro-dots, too, and Stephanie had assigned her a song, just like I had matched songs to friends back then. We revealed to each other the tiles we had kept from then, and together we reconstructed a colorful and complex mosaic, now with extra nuance thanks to Frank and Heather Doris, thanks to Denise and William Pimple.
I'm not much of a hugger. Relatives from both families know not to approach me with arms outstretched, looking for a little phony-baloney human contact just like they see folks do on TV, lest they get a sneer and pull back a stump. But after her two-day visit, when we were saying our farewells, I hugged Stephanie desperately, clinging to her as if she were the last lifesaver from the Titanic.
I remain tilt-a-whirl dizzy from these events. Others have warped through the portal. Some - Kathy Foley (now Walls), Patty Evans, Kevin Kissel - have been companions, off and on, for the long ride. Others - Kathy Redgate, Becky Rehm (now Bransley), Mark Ozog - are hailed, well-met, and brought up-to-date. I continue to send out soundings, seeking new familiar radar blips.
Stephanie remains a graceful and receptive audience. I've been writing more, particularly to her and Kathy Redgate, because they're the ones who play along, they commit to the respond of correspondence. I'm nowhere near the three-page-a-day letter writing binge I maintained for three years while Denise was in Los Angeles, but many mornings and some evenings find me tippy-tapping away on my ergonomic keyboard, trying to keep my tap shoes tight and tuned and ready to perform.
Denise tolerates my increased whimsy with the same bemused grace she has accepted my cranky perpetual-ego for half her life. Although I still can't write with her looking over my shoulder, she remains the jump of my joey, tick of my Timex, brillo of my Camarillo, snap of my dragon, beep-beep of my jeep, howl of my Ginsberg, cocoa for my foam, spark of my Tesla, lip for my stiff upper, willikers of my gee, Shah of my na-na, fold in my roadmap, dory for my hunky, Yo-Yo of my Ma, volcano of my virgin, salsa for my cilantro, pussy of my willow, sage of my sausage.
You get the idea.
The Ministry of Veracity
Nothing burbles the journalistic stew more than a politician caught in a lie, except one caught telling his heart's truth.