That Day of the Year

I know I've mentioned this before, but today is my dad's birthday.

He died nearly three decades ago, but not a day goes by that I don't miss him. He wasn't the greatest dad in the world--a lot of years were lost to us due to his alcoholism--but he tried to make it up to me and my brother in his later years, and the effort was appreciated.

He was only 60 years old when he died. I'll be 60 in two years. I'm not looking forward to it.

Every Picture Tells a Story 1/10/20

Yes. I know. I've posted this picture here before. More than once.

But as it's the only one I have handy of him, here it is again:

Dad and me, circa 1980. Photo most likely taken by Mom.

Today would have been his 85th birthday. He died in 1995, age 60. He would have turned 85 today.

Still love you and miss you, old man.

Every Picture Tells a Story 1/10/19

I know I've posted this picture before, but since it's really the only picture I have of the man, it will have to do.

You've been gone nearly 24 years, but I still miss you, old man.

80 Years Ago This Week

It really shouldn't have taken this long for this to occur to me, but it did: Elvis Presley was born two days before--and one state over from--my dad.

Neither of them lived as long as he should have.

Elvis died in 1977. I remember watching the Cubs game that August afternoon when the announcer broke in with the news. It didn't seem real. Elvis was so young. How could he be dead?

Dad died 18 years later. That also did not seem real.

Both would have been 80 this week.

Every Picture Tells a Story 2/7/14

They say that to truly know a man, you have to walk a mile in his shoes.

I don't know quite how many miles I've walked in the Texas Steer work boots I inherited from my dad when he passed away in 1995, and I don't believe those miles gave me any more insight into the man than I already had.

Except, perhaps, for this: The man had good taste in shoes.

It was a matter of self-defense, really. Years of working on his feet--at the railroad as a switchman and at various factory jobs thereafter--had left them in rotten shape, and late-onset diabetes and kidney/heart issues certainly didn't help. Therefore, he bought quality shoes build for comfort and protection, including the Texas Steers that he wore on the job to keep his toes from being busted and in winter to keep them from freezing.

Those same Texas Steers got me through many a winter and more than one blizzard. It had to get seriously cold (well below zero) for me to even feel the January chill, and all I had to do was work them a bit with saddle soap and Wetpruf every autumn to keep them in shape for the cold, salt-stained days to come.

In the end, though, that saddle soap and Wetpruf were probably all that still held the boots together.

The soles had long since lost anything resembling a tread--they gave me no traction in the snow and ice whatsoever--and the leather uppers had begun to crack along the creases. It was only a matter of time before they split open and let the cold and moisture in, no matter how much Wetpruf I slopped on them.

So last week, I officially retired the Texas Steers.

I didn't throw them away. Of course not. They belonged to Dad. They're not going anywhere. I'm not likely to wear them anytime soon, though, now that I've bought a pair of tough, warm hikers with long, deep treads that have kept me from sliding or slipping at all in the week since I bought them at the store-closing sale at the Sears on State Street.

The new hikers may not have the history that the Texas Steers do, but they're more likely to keep me from falling on my ass--always a possibility, no matter what the weather.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Yesterday was the 26th anniversary of the single coldest day in Chicago history (at least as far as the weather records, which date back to 1871, are concerned). The air temperature that day dipped to -27; we will not even discuss the wind chill.



As if to celebrate the occasion, Mother Nature decided to send an arctic front through the city late in the evening, sending the thermometer plunging well below zero, where it remained until this hour. (Now? It's at zero.) As chilly as it has been this winter in the Windy City, this was the first time it had gotten so brutally cold. Time to break out the serious gear.

As I've mentioned before, my Dad was a switchman for the railroad and thus was out in the cold often. He was also a fisherman and had gone ice fishing many times, though I did not join him for any of these excursions. (I don't like seafood and I've never trusted frozen bodies of water, so the combination of the two? Hell to the no.)

My point: The man knew how to dress for the weather. He had a good winter coat. He had leather mittens that look like welterweight boxing gloves. And he had the hat you see above.

I don't wear the hat very often since, like Dad's winter coat, its condition is fragile. The top of its bill is worn, and the seam between the bill and the rest of the hat is frayed to the point that the bill's backing pokes through at the corner--straight into my forehead--making it not the most comfortable headgear.

However, when one considers that my forehead would be numb, if not outright frostbitten, without the hat, the mild discomfort of the poking is remarkably tolerable.

I made it to work this morning in relative comfort, and I'll make it back in the same condition.

Thanks again, Dad.

Today...

Dad would have been 76 years old.

15 Years Ago Today

Dad left this life for a (hopefully) better place.

Every Picture Tells a Story: 6/21/09

Dad and me, circa 1980.

Svengoolie

June 16 is, as it happens, a a sad personal anniversary: 14 years ago on this date, my dad passed away while recovering from triple bypass surgery. He was just 60 years old.

Most years, I keep to myself on this day except, perhaps for a brief phone call to or from Mom--it may have been 14 years, but that doesn't mean she misses her husband, her life partner, any less.

This year, though, I'm reminded that June 16 is not just a sad personal anniversary. It's also a very happy anniversary for many other people: Today marks 30 years since Rich Koz first hit the airwaves as the Son of Svengoolie.

For those of you who aren't steeped in Chicago entertainment lore, a brief history lesson: In 1970, local radio/TV personality Jerry G. Bishop began hosting a Saturday night horror movie show called Screaming Yellow Theater as a hippy vampire character named Svengoolie; he had long green hair, wore sunglasses and a red sweatshirt, and bookended the movie segments with goofy skits and occasional celebrity appearances (like comedians Mort Sahl or Pat Paulson). Bishop played this role at WFLD-TV until 1973, when Kaiser Broadcasting bought the station from Field Communications and ended much of WFLD's local programming, including the much, beloved BJ and Dirty Dragon Show and the equally adored Svengoolie. Kaiser replaced the original Sven with another horror host they already had under contract, The Ghoul, who was popular in Cleveland and Detroit. I remember tuning in to catch Sven on Saturday night, as usual, finding instead this brash, obnoxious loudmouth who, as I remember, was dressed like a gangster (because he doing a show in Chicago, ho ho!) and dissed his predecessor. It was the first time I'd watched The Ghoul--and, also, the last. (I wasn't alone--The Ghoul only lasted a few months in Chicago, while his career continued elsewhere.)

Flash forward a few years. Kaiser gave up its ownership of WFLD, with Field taking over again. They wanted a horror host again, and the young man they chose, Rich Koz, had been an assistant to/collaborator with the original Sven, Jerry G. Bishop. Koz's look was different--more like a mortician than a hippy--but the humor and sense of fun were pretty much the same. Koz played the Son of Svengoolie from 1979 until 1986--more than doubling Bishop's original run--and won a few local Emmys along the way before Fox bought WFLD and brought down the axe again.

But, proving that you just can't keep a good ghoul down, Sven rose from the dead yet again in 1995, when WCIU, which had been a Spanish-language/business ticker station for years, switched back to English-language programming and plugged Koz back into a Saturday afternoon slot, this time performing sans the "Son of" in his name; now, he was "just" Svengoolie.

Koz has gone on pretty much as before--his makeup is less elaborate, and he makes more of an effort to provide tidbits of information on the films he shows (from classics like Frankenstein and Night of the Living Dead to disasters like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Robot Monster), but the goofy comedy and song parodies are still part of the festivities. He's on every Saturday night (with reruns Sunday morning on WCIU's sister Station, WWME), cracking wise with his jokes, cracking windows and eardrums with his singing voice and cracking up his viewers. And we wouldn't have him any other way.

My dad wasn't a horror-film fan--he much preferred John Wayne westerns while Mom loved Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan. But both parents encouraged a love of movies in general and didn't stand in the way of spending Saturday nights watching a guy dressed up as a vampire telling groaners to hundreds of thousands of people sitting in the dark, laughing along with him.

Congratulations, Mr. Koz. And Happy Anniversary, Svengoolie!

(P.S.--Sven's 30th Anniversary show airs this Saturday, June 20, featuring the Bert I. Gordon "classic," Attack of the Puppet People. Tune in, won't you? I know I will, if only via the "magic" of videotape.)

The Boxing Gloves

Winter in Chicago can be a nasty thing.

Granted, recent years have featured mild, even tame, winters, with one or two snowstorms per season and maybe a few scattered nights of genuine, Arctic-level cold. Last winter, though, was something of a return to what I grew up with in the '60s and '70s, with deeper drifts, harder freezes and winds that sliced through even the thickest seasonal armor.

The solstice was just yesterday, but already it's been harsh here, with moderate throughout December, mostly noticeable because the city has cut back on snow removal and streets are remaining snow-covered longer. (The city denies this, of course, claiming that they're doing just as good a job as ever of keeping the roads plowed and salted. Anyone who's driven the streets for even the shortest of distances or has attempted to cross an intersection on foot without landing on his or her ass knows otherwise.)

Yesterday was brutally cold--the temperature during the daylight hours didn't even tickle zero, much less kiss it. Mom called at 8:30 a.m. to cancel our dinner that night. "Please don't go out, honey," she said. Who am I to argue with such sage advice?

Naturally, I went out anyway.

It wasn't for very long and it wasn't very far--just to Walgreens and back (hey, I had a headache and no Tylenol in the house)--but because of the extreme cold, it was necessary to suit up properly. On went the Texas Steer boots. On went the the Christmas scarf. On went the knit stocking pullover hat--not nearly as fashionable as as my gray tweed cap, but far less likely to be blown off of my head when walking into the 20+ mph winds. I slid the parka over my shoulders and flipped the hood onto my head.

Last, but far from least, I pulled out the boxing gloves.

The boxing gloves are not, as you may have already surmised, literal boxing gloves, but rather leather-clad mittens that used to belong to my dad. I don't know when he bought them--whether it was during his years when he worked as a switchman on the railroad or sometime after--but after he died, they were passed on to me, along with his winter coat, which has reached such a state of fragility that it can only be worn once in a great while. The boxing gloves, however, are in fine shape and could be worn every day, if I so chose.

I don't choose to, though, because it's usually not necessary to break out such polar gear. The boxing gloves are thick and heavy; it's virtually impossible to pick up anything when you're wearing them. And they're not really necessary for the average December day in Chicago, where a standard pair of woolen gloves will more than suffice against ordinary chill.

But on a night like last night, when the winds did howl and the snow did blow, or a morning like this morning, when the sun, bright as it was, offered no warmth, the boxing gloves came in awfully handy (pun intended).

Thanks again, Dad.

Tigger

Not long after Dad died, Mom took a job as a cashier at a neighborhood grocery store.

It wasn't so much because she needed the income, although the extra cash didn't hurt, but because she didn't want to sit at home, thinking about the fact that her life partner, the man she'd been married to for 30-plus years and raised two children with, was gone.

The store she worked at wasn't one of the national chains, but a much smaller local chain that had a couple of locations in the city and at least one location in the suburbs, which apparently still exists. The two city locations, including the one Mom worked at, are long gone. (One was razed ro make way for a Dominick's; the other is a parking lot.)

She didn't work there long--something under a year--before moving on to another cashier job, this time at a large drugstore chain, where she's been ever since. In her short time at the grocery store, though, she came away with something most people don't get on the job: a cat.

The cat in question, a female tabby, was small and young--perhaps a few months old--but evidently quite loud. She had gotten into the grocery store's warehouse, and other, less feline-incline employees were planning on capturing the kitty and, at the very least, throwing it out, if not removing it in a much more permanent fashion.

Cats, though, are, for the most part, smart critters. They know when someone likes cats and when they don't. Mom was able to coax the tabby to her, earn its trust, and eventually bring it home.

Mom named the tabby Tigger--not the most imaginative name, I know, but our family will never be renowned for our ability to give intriguing appelations to pets (examples: our Black Lab mix was named Blackie; my Russian Blue, Gray Cat).

She almost wound up being my cat. When I moved out of the apartment on the second floor of my parents' house and into the first La Casa del Terror, I definitely wanted to have cats with me, but Gray Cat was quite elderly by that point and would need more attention than I could give her; Mom and my brother would be home much more and could keep a better eye on her. (She lived a couple more years, to the ripe old age of 20.) Mom very much wanted me to take Tigger, a very personable (and now much better fed) feline, and another recent acquisition, a female gray-and-white kitty called, er, Kitty-Kitty. (See what I mean about the names?) I had already committed to take on Lottie and Ms. Christopher from JB, though, so I got the Girlish Girls and Mom kept her two new furry friends.

Mom wasn't too thrill about that at first. Or so she said--she'd agreed readily to the idea of me taking Olivia off her hands, but when the day came, she had tears in her eyes.

It didn't take Mom long to get over "being stuck" with Tigger, though, as she found that the young kitty was friendly, affectionate and, unimaginative as her name was, appropriately bouncy. Other cats came as older cats went away, but Tigger and her new friend, Kitty-Kitty, made Mom smile many, many times, as beloved pets always will.

In the last couple of years, Tigger had her medical challenges, as all elderly kitties will. Her joints were creaky, her kidneys were less than bouncy, and her weight, never great, dropped noticable. However, Mom often said, as long as Tigger ate, pooped and was in no obvious pain, there was no reason to have her put to sleep.

I visit Mom's house for dinner as often as I can--weekly if possible, though work and weather sometimes get in the way. Last Saturday was Mom's birthday--no way I was missing that. I brought dinner (Mom's meal of choice, Popeyes chicken) and two pair of brand-new gloves (she'd requested one pair, but the sales in the department stores are so "pleasepleaseplease!" this year that I was able to buy her two pair for less than the regular price of one). We ate dinner and watched TV for a while, and various cats paid me visits, including Tigger. She was walking unsteadily, reminding me uncomfortably of Christopher's uncertain gait in the couple of days before I had to take her to the vet one last time, but she managed to jump onto the loveseat, walk tentatively onto my lap and stay there much of the evening.

Mom regarded Tigger sadly. "She going to be the next to go," she said.

"I think you're right," I replied, stroking the kitty's head and trying to feel her purr--it was there, barely audible.

When it was time for me to head for home, I gently lifted Tigger out of my lap. "Put her on the warm spot," Mom instructed, pointing at the ass imprint I'd left on the blanket covering the loveseat. I placed the elderly tabby there, and she immediately curled up and went to sleep.

On Monday, Tigger seemed to be having even more trouble walking, and Mom decided to take her to the vet Tuesday morning to see what, if anything, could be done. Monday night, Mom was in her bedroom, watching a bit of TV before retiring for the night, as is her custom, when she heard a cat pawing at the closed door and crying. She got up and opened the door. It was Kitty-Kitty making all the noise, but she didn't come in. Instead, it was Tigger, also standing there, who made her way into the bedroom. Kitty-Kitty then turned and walked away. She hadn't wanted into the bedroom at all; she just wanted her longtime friend, too weak to ask for herself anymore, to be able to go where she wanted to be, to go sleep with Mom, who picked her up carefully, placed her on the bed and kept her company until they both fell asleep.

Tuesday morning, Mom got up early to take Tigger to the vet. There was no need--Tigger had passed away peacefully in her sleep. She was 14 years old.

Dia De Los Muertos

This poem was written some time ago, but on this day when one pays tribute to those who have moved on, it seems appropriate. Enjoy.

My father's skull was
never made of sugar,
never reclined in an alter
surrounded by candles
and candies, fishing poles
and plates of buttermilk
biscuits and pan gravy,
never had much of anything
but holes augered for two
green eyes, one of which
had been disconnected
when, while parked on
a barstool after another
tour of duty as a third-shift
railroad switch man, he got
flung skull-first through
a South Side bar's plate-
glass window and his
railroad nights were
done. He never did slip
on the parka he wore that
night again, as if it had
been to blame and now it's
hanging in my closet loose
and blue and strategically
gashed on the arms that
used to cover the arms that
used to carry worm beds
out to the back porch,
six-packs back from
the corner grocery store,
Grandma's casket to
the herse from the same
funeral home where our
arms carried his casket to
the herse that carried him to
a rectangular hole in the soil
in suburban Chicago where he
wouldn't have to carry any more.

The Orange Tree

On the small rectangle of decaying, gray-painted boards that passes for my back porch stands an orange tree. An odd thing to find in Chicago, which is not know for its citrus groves. A small thing, too--it stands around two feet tall, counting the pot, but manages to tower over the shamrocks and cacti that stand atop the alley-acquired end table that all the plants in the house stand on from as early in April as they can be set out (in other words, once the snow has stopped) to as late in October as they can safely stand it (in other words, until the snow shows up again).

The orange tree belonged to Dad, who grew it from a seed. Really, he did. Ate the orange. Laid the seeds out on a paper towel. Laid the paper towel out on a shelf in the basement, safely away from the cats, to dry them out. Planted each seed in its own small pot. Set the pots out on the deck atop the back porch (a proper, full-sized back porch). Let them grow.

Most of the seeds didn't take. No news flash to Dad. he was always trying to grow odd things. Cherry trees. Pineapples. Avacadoes. Rasberry bushes. (Those actually grew--you can still collect quite a harvest in the fall in Mom's backyard.) A tomato tree bought out of the back of a seed catalog. Dad liked to experiment with many things. He was a carpenter. An electrician. A baker. (His doughnuts were more fit for pounding nails than for dunking in coffee.) A horticulturalist. Jack of all trades.

Most of the seedlings didn't survive. Again, no great surprise. One did, though. It grew steadily during its first season. I lived in the second floor apartment at the time, so the orange tree wintered with me among my plants. It not only survived, but thrived with regular watering and northern exposure sunlight. During the summers, it sat out on the deck, anchored with bricks all around its base to keep it from rolling over on windy afternoons. (the deck rests between two taller brick apartment buildings; on breezy days, especially when a front strolls up from the south, a wind tunnel effect kicks in and tosses around anything not nailed down.)

Five years later, it bloomed for the first time. Tiny white flowers dotted its green branches. By the end of that summer, the damn this bore fruit. Nothing edible. Nasty, bitter stuff. Oranges. Freshly grown on the cusp of Ukrainian Village. In Chicago. Amazing.

After Dad passed away--two days before Father's Day of that year--Mom gave me permanent custody of the orange tree. Made sense. It spent the winters with me anyway, and the deck was technically part of my apartment (since I lived on the second floor). When I moved into La Casa del Terror later that year, the orange tree came with me. It winters in my office (soon to be converted back into a bedroom). It summers on the back porch. It blooms small, fragrent white flowers. And it bears fruit that, someday, may be edible.

All because a man from Alabama living in a cold northern town wanted to see what would happen if he planted orange seeds. Maybe that's what he and Mom were thinking when they decided to have me. They wanted to see what would happen. That would make the orange tree my litte brother. Or not.

I think he was pleased with the progress of both though. Proud, even.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads I've known. Especially one.

Cash On Demand

My dad was originally from a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. he moved to Chicago sometime around 1960 and spent the rest of his life here. He changed quite a bit in that time--his Deep-South drawl softened; his attitudes toward minorities did a complete 180, to the point where, in the end, he counted some of his African-American and Hispanic co-workers among his closest friends; and he eventually gave up drinking and smoking, though too late to reverse the damage he'd done to his body.

Some aspects of his upbringing, though, never did go away. He liked pan gravy and biscuits. He put Louisiana Hot Sauce on everything, from scrambled eggs to perch to the aforementioned biscuits and gravy. He wore increasingly brightly colored floppy hats so that Mom could find him in a crowd. He enjoyed fishing, even if it was just spin-casting off of the then-abandoned Navy Pier with a transistor radio hooked to his belt and at least one of his young sons at his side. And that transistor radio was usually dialed to one of the local country/western stations, thus increasing the odds substantially that he would hear a Johnny Cash song.

Dad liked many C&W players, from Willie Nelson to Loretta Lynn to Hank Williams (Senior, NOT Junior), but he loved Johnny Cash. The only LPs I can recall him owning were discs like Live from Fulsom Prison. And when he got a CD player for Christmas, I bought him a collection of Johnny Cash's greatest hits (re-recorded in the 1980s, a curiously common practice then, but still close in tone to the original recordings), which he played more than any of the other C&W CDs he received afterward.

Dad's love of "The Man in Black" was not unconditional, though. In 1994, the year before Dad died, Cash and producer Rick Rubin collaborated on American Recordings, an album that featured songs (some originals, but mostly covers of other artists' songs) stripped down to the very basics: An acoustic guitar and JC's baritone and that's about all. Most of the songs were recorded in Rubin's living room and Cash's cabin, with a couple of entries taped live at the Viper Room in LA. The result? A collection of spare, darker-than-dark recordings that packed an extraordinary emotional punch capable of blindsiding the casual listener expecting good-ol'-boy country-fried sentiment. I bought the CD as soon as it came out, gave it a listen or two, liked what I heard, for the most part (though Cash's cover of Louden Wainwright III's "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" is a lousy way to end the album, if only because the song itself is so annoying), and passed it along to Dad, with the proviso that if he enjoyed it he could keep it for his own.

The next day, he handed the CD back to me, shaking his head. He hated it.

It wasn't that he hated Cash's singing or Rubin's production. It was the nature of the songs themselves, which focus so acutely on anger, sadness and violence that Dad just got worn out by the downbeat tone of the whole project. I understood what he meant, as did others: When the video for "Delia's Gone" was shown on Bevis & Butthead, one of them asked, "Is this Gangsta Rap?"

I can't help but wonder how Dad would have felt about Johnny Cash's more recent album's, though. I never bought or borrowed American Recordings II: Unchained, so I can't speak to its quality or lack thereof. However, I do own his last two albums--American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around--and each has moments that can pry open the floodgates and reduce me to heaves and sobs (not as difficult a trick as it used to be, but still...).

Cash has suffered through numerous health crises the past few years: he was misdiagnosed as having Shy-Dager Syndrome, a neurological disease akin to Parkinson's; he's had multiple bouts of pneumonia, one of which dropped him in a coma for eight days; and he suffers from diabetes, glaucoma and asthma. All of these physical difficulties have informed his last couple of albums, making them thematically more meditative, reflective and, at times, downright angry--as if he knows that each album might be his last. His voice has also changed with age and illness: What once was a booming baritone how falters and wavers with regularity. Rather than detracting from the music, though, his vocal strain almost seems to enhance it, make it more emotional, more sorrowful. It sounds more often than not like either he's on the verge of tears or he's trying to get the listener on the verge--and, for the most part, he succeeds.

American III: Solitary Man, which was released in 2000, is an oddball mix of Cash originals, traditional hymns and covers of other artists' songs: He opens the album on a note of defiance with Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" (with Petty himself singing backup). Cash also borrows from Neil Diamond's songbook for the title cut and damn near takes ownership of U2's "One" and Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat." That latter song is what got me to buy American III in the first place: It's laced with pain, resignation, acceptance of fate, hope for redemption. Other titles--"I See a Darkness," "I'm Leavin' Now"--would suggest that, if this had indeed been Cash's last album, he was ready, if not entirely willing, to accept that.

Just before this past Thanksgiving, though, the Cash and Rubin team presented their latest gift to the music world, American IV: The Man Comes Around. Like its predecessor, American IV is a grab bag of new Cash songs, like the apocalyptic title tune and the sweet, sad "Give My Love to Rose," traditional ballads like "Danny Boy" and "Streets of Laredo," and more recent pop fare. Some choices work better than others. Cash's voice is almost too weak to do proper justice to the Beatles' "In My Life," cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" (one of my all-time favorite songs) just doesn't translate to Cash's country/folk style, even if it does fit thematically with the rest of the album, which touches on religion, redemption and passage from one state of being into another more than a few times.

Other choices, however, blindside you with their power. It might seem mad for Cash to cover Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," but as you listen to it you realize that Cash's voice lends move validity to the pain, regret and frustration expressed than even Trent Reznor did. His baritone is just right for "Danny Boy" and Streets of Laredo," giving each song the right mournful pitch. His duet with Nick Cave on Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I could Cry" is a great meshing of two rough-edged voices, and closing the album with "We'll Meet Again" implies hope, at least on the surface. (Cash could just as easily have been making sly reference to Stanley Kubrick's use of the song at conclusion of Dr. Strangelove, thus giving American IV apocalyptic bookends of two very different kinds.)

But the song that gets to me the most here is one that's always been able to get to me anyway: "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Cash and Rubin take the Simon & Garfunkel classic and transform it into something closer to a hynm, Cash's voice lending uncanny authority to the sentiment expressed--who would know more about "troubled water" than someone who'd sailed on it so many times and survived? Cash is joined here by, of all people, Fiona Apple, whose breathy, almost ethereal backing vocals don't seem right at first, but blend better upon repeated listens; the two dissimilar vocal styles manage to complement and support one another like the emotional support offered in the song. The pairing also fits the thread of passage that runs through American IV: A music rebel from one generation passing a sonic baton to another

I'm not sure what Dad would have thought of either of these albums; he may have been too turned off by the first American Recordings to give the subsequent albums in the series a try. I do think, though, that he would have found things to like here. Dad spent many of the years after he quit drinking and joined Alcoholics Anonymous trying to make up for what he'd done or hadn't done for or to his family in the years before. His regrets, his experience, his pain--they all informed his journey to redemption, acceptance and forgiveness. When he died, he and I were at peace with one another, even if neither of us talked about it much and neither of us wanted him to go as soon as he did. And I believe Johnny Cash is at peace with himself and his kin now, too, though he doesn't sound like he's ready or willing to go just yet.

Today would have been Dad's 68th birthday. So I'm going to play American IV: The Man Comes Around sometime tonight, and Dad can listen in from whatever vantage point he'd be listening from. And maybe, when Johnny Cash gets to "Bridge Over Troubled Water," we can all have a good, hard cry together once more.

Dad's Winter Coat

Lately, I've been restless, prowling. I don't like to go straight home after work anymore. I have to get there sometime, of course--at least until Lottie and Ms. Christopher figure out how to open the tins of Friskies Senior themselves, anyway. But these days, I make stops on the way home: at book stores, record shops, movie theaters, bars. (Yes, restlessness can get expensive.) But last night, after a quick sightseeing tour through Borders at State and Randolph, I wandered over to Daley Plaza.

Daley Plaza, named for the longtime mayor of Chicago (and father of the current longtime mayor of Chicago), is best known for the Picasso sculpture that stands there--a sculpture so initially befuddling to natives that there was a strong temptation to send it back for a refund. In the summer, farmers markets are held there--great source for fresh apples, spices and catnip (not to be used all at the same time, you understand). And at this time of year, an enormous tree (itself composed of 80 or so smaller trees) stands at the south end of the Plaza with a German-style marketplace occupies much of the rest of the space. The marketplace consists of small shops selling seasonal goods, traditional foods and drinks to either warm you (cider) or make you not care so much that you're cold (beer).

I walked around the Plaza for a while, the scents of brats and cinnamon weaving around me, the sight of glass angels tempting my wallet and my heart, the sound of couples cooing over the size of the tree sending my hands ever deeper into my pockets. Snowflakes tumbled down around the Christmas tree, through the ribs of the Picasso and onto the Plaza, its booths, me. I barely noticed. Maybe because I was lost in thought. Maybe because the smells, sights, sounds distracted me. Or maybe because of Dad's winter coat.

Dad's winter coat is an ugly brute. It must have been a deep blue bordering on navy at some point in its distant past, but now it's faded almost to the point of pastel. Its lining isn't much better: what had once been dark red was now more of a medium-rare pink. And the overall condition of the coat? Like its wearer had tumbled down a hill, gotten up, and repeated the process--a few thousand times. Small rips in the corners of the pockets. A bit of insulation dangling from the medium-rare lining. A 90-degree gash on the left shoulder (more on that in a moment). And the right armpit has a split that I have yet to sew. (Yes, I can sew. Why do you ask?)

Overall, the poor thing is by no means fashionable and looks like the Salvation Army would reject it.

Then again, it doesn't look that much different than it did 30 years ago--when Dad stopped wearing it entirely.

Back then, Dad worked as a switchman for one of the major rail lines, usually pulling second or third shift. Even with that schedule, though, he always found an open bar to spend some time at before coming home and having a few more brews. Sometimes the bar was a neighborhood joint, like Tuman's Alcohol Abuse Center (no, really, that's what it's called), but sometimes he'd sit in whatever was open at those less-than-godly hours. He was an alcoholic, and it cost him big time in the end, with his body giving out on him at age 60, even though he had been clean and sober for more than a decade beforehand. The damage had been done--it just took that long to catch up.

But his drinking cost him in the short run, too, putting him in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

One winter morning after finishing his shift, Dad was in a bar on the South Side--don't ask me the name of the place, because if I ever did know it I forgot it long ago--when a fight broke out, as will happen after too many hours of too much drinking among too many with too few brain cells when they're sober. Dad wasn't the barroom brawl type. Just not his style. No doubt, he was just drinking quietly and not bothering a soul when the fists started to fly.

And it didn't matter a damn anyway. Somebody still grabbed him and threw him head-first out of the plate glass window at the front of the bar.

He didn't spend much time in the hospital. Didn't need to. He got cut up pretty well on his hands and was still pulling stitches out years later. His face didn't get slashed, but a piece of glass found the optic nerve of his right eye and severed it. (At least I think it was his right eye--he didn't lose the eye itself, so no one would know he was blind in either eye unless he told them.) The rest of his body was fairly well protected--by the winter coat. Only that 90-degree gash on the left shoulder remains as evidence of what happened to Dad that cold morning.

Without the sight in his eye, Dad couldn't work as a switchman anymore. Never mind that the man could see better with that one functioning eye than most folks can with two good ones--he somehow always saw the bus coming before I did at the stop and could eye a storm on the far horizon hours before a single raindrop fell. But rules are rules. Dad got a pension and went on to do other things with his life, chiefly working jobs in factories where his lack of vision wasn't an obstacle to doing good work. And he did well enough, helping to support his family and put one child all the way through college.

But the winter coat? It didn't fare so well. After the incident at the bar, it was relegated to a hanger at the back of the closet in his bedroom. And when we moved into our house, the same coat stayed on the same hanger and went to the same position of the new closet, which is where Mom and I found it after he died in 1995.

I guess I understand why he didn't want to wear the coat anymore after that night. The coat as a whole, and the gash on the left shoulder in particular, no doubt reminded him of what had happened, what he had lost, what that night had cost him--even though the coat had likely saved him from further debilitating damage, if not death itself. Why, then, didn't Dad just throw the coat away? Or donate it to charity? Or give it to one of his strapping sons? Was it a reminder of good times as well? Did he not want to throw the good away for the sake of the bad? I'll never know--Dad took that tidbit, and so many others, to his grave.

Once Mom and I had found the coat in the back of that bedroom closet, though, she had no objections to letting me take it, if I wanted it. And it wasn't like I didn't have winter coats of my own. But it was his. It had history, both good and bad. And it was warm.

So as I did circles around Daley Plaza last night, I might have felt melancholy or restlessness or happiness or whatever. But I sure as hell didn't feel cold.

Thanks, Dad.

Silent Night

A friend/coworker of mine recently wrote on her Web site a long, detailed account of what it was like to experience Christmas while growing up Catholic. Another good friend, JB--one of my oldest and dearest friends, in if truth be fully told--read that account and agreed with much of its detail.

My holidays had no such structure. Mom was a "lapsed Catholic"--a necessity, as Dad had been married and divorced before and the Church frowned upon such unions. So we never went to Christmas Eve mass or sang carols with the choir or any such community activity.

Instead, we had simple rituals. We'd open our presents Christmas Eve morning, amassing enormous piles of wrapping paper and bows for the (many) cats to savage. Then, Christmas Day, we'd go visiting. Grandma lived in a small cottage off of Western Avenue in Bucktown--a ten-minute bus ride on a good day, a half-hour walk on a bad one. Mom would bring dinner. If we were lucky, it was just ham or turkey. But if we were truly unfortunate, it was the kidney stew that took hours to cook and made the whole house smell like a sweaty foot. And Grandma would spend most of the time offering her food to me, my brother and her cats.

Mom and Grandma would spend much of the time bitching at one another. Grandma was a master packrat, saving the likes of toilet paper rolls and empty cat food cans in drawers, under dressers, etc. And Mom would go on continuous "search-and-destroy" missions, throwing out the salvaged bits of plastic wrap and the wrapping paper carefully preserved from the previous Christmas and whatever else she could find. (Yes, theirs was a complicated relationship, and my mother has, in her later years, become much more like Grandma than she'll ever admit.)

After such frolic, the family (minus Grandma, who had badly swollen legs and rarely left her cottage) would walk over to the house of some family friends who also lived in Bucktown. They often had large gatherings on Christmas Day, with children tearing through the house while adults stood in clusters, beers in hand, telling dirty jokes and laughing about how much bigger the kids were this year than they were last. And every year, the family friends would set up the coolest Christmas tree on the planet: a tall, wide aluminum tree with a color wheel rotating at its base, making the whole living room sparkle in blue, then red, then yellow, then its natural silver. (Try going into a hipster vintage store these days and buying an aluminum tree; if there's anything left in your wallet when you walk out, I'd be damned surprised.)

Our tree, by comparison, seemed downright frumpy. Mom always picked out a nice "live" tree (as "live" as any tree that's been cut off at its trunk, stuffed in a truck and sold in a grocery store parking lot could ever be), but then attacked it with lights, beads, tinsel and ornaments until the tree itself was no longer visible to the naked eye. Our cats still managed to find it, though, swatting at the lower branches and knocking loose glass balls or unlucky angels.

One year, my own personal cat, a Russian Blue who never did have a proper name beyond Gray Cat (a long story for another time) and managed to live to be 20, clambered up the middle of the tree and, being surrounded by a veritable fortress of festive decoration, couldn't quite make good her escape before Mom, returning home from her job at the plastics factory, stared into the center of the tree, only to find it staring right back at her. (All of our cats were declawed shortly thereafter.)

We followed this routine, year in and year out, through bountiful holidays when we young ones got whatever toys we'd pleaded for (like the Mego Fonzie doll with "thumbs-up" action, or the huge rubber gorilla that my brother later operated on with a very, very sharp knife) and through lean holidays with gifts wrapped in aluminum foil and the mistletoe-accented carton of Salems waiting for Dad under the decoration-clotted pine.

But years passed, as years have a way of doing, and things changed, as things always must. The mom-half of the family friends passed away, and the dad-half, some time later, remarried (to her twin sister--yeah, that sounds weird, but they're happy to this day, so who am I to say shit?) and moved to Iowa. Grandma died not that long after, and the little cottage was gutted by fire the following February.

So we just spent the holiday with ourselves, worried that each would be the last with Dad who, after too many years of too many beers and almost as many cartons of Salems, was in fragile health, with his heart rebelling every few months or so and his kidneys trying their damnedest to give notice as well. For Christmas in 1994, I gave Dad a couple of CDs: Hank Williams' Greatest Hits (Hank Sr., NOT Hank Jr.) and a collection of songs by Johnny Cash. Dad was from Alabama, so country music had always filled our house. And since Dad couldn't get out much anymore--he walked with an aluminum cane, and just making it to the end of the block was a chore--he'd often just rest in bed, Hank Sr.'s voice warbling out "Your Cheatin' Heart," singing my father to sleep.

Those CDs wound up being the last Christmas gifts I gave Dad. He died the following June.

Now, the routine is simple: Go to Mom's house Christmas Day, spend a few hours petting the cats and hugging her when she cries because she misses her husband and her mother, and head back north with a bag full of leftover ham or turkey (never kidney stew). I walk up the three flights to my apartment, shoo the Girlish Girls out of the way on my way in, and head for the living room, where I turn on the red pepper lights and the small, fake pine tree Grandma always had in her window. Then I light a candle, say something as close to a prayer as an avowed agnostic can manage, and feed the Girls before they attempt to gnaw off my leg.

And, usually, I sit in the dark for a while, letting the red glow of the pepper lights duke it out with the twinkle of the tree and the unsteady flicker of the flame. Maybe I'll spend a few minutes contemplating the years already passed and the one about to join them in memory. Or maybe I'll feel like I'm being a fucking drama queen, blow out the candles and surf the Web for porn. But in those few minutes in the not-quite-dark, memories will come and go, and I'll either laugh to myself or cry to myself, all the while petting Lottie and Ms. Christopher, who no doubt concluded long ago that their guardian is either an idiot or a weirdo--or, most likely, both.

But when all is done and said, I can't complain too much. I'm alive, employed, and blessed with wonderful, eloquent friends. No, things aren't what they used to be and can never be so again, for bad or good. And no, things aren't as good as they can get. Not yet, anyway. But things aren't too bad over all. And that's good enough for me.

Happy holidays, people, and peace in the approaching New Year.