Santa is my homie

For one day I got to be Santa at the local high school Winterfest.   I have asked for absolution for misleading little children ... they loved it.

Santa:   so I'm your homie (glancing at the inscription on the little boy's shirt).

Boy:  yes, Santa, I love you.

Girl:  Santa, is your beard real (as she strokes it)

Santa:  yes of course it is.   Santa is very, very old.  This is what happens to your beard when you're very old.   Do you hear my reindeer prancing on the roof (Santa deftly changing the subject).  Listen carefully and you'll hear them.

Santa:  what do you want for Christmas, little girl?  

Girl:  I want an iphone plus

Santa:  (OMG, peeking at parents, how do I avoid stepping into this minefield).  Do you hear my reindeer prancing on the roof (deftly changing the subject).  Listen carefully.

Santa:  what do you want for Christmas, little boy.

Parent:  (trying to be funny)  He deserves a big pile of coal.

Santa:  No!  No!  No! Santa doesn't do coal anymore.  Climate change is melting the North Pole.

Santa:  (one of the high school kids sneaked into the Santa line)  My how you've grown.  What do you want for Christmas, little boy?   

Boy:  what do you pay the elves?

Santa:  peanuts.

Boy:  stop oppressing the elves.

Santa:  the elves aren't oppressed ... they're Wobblies.

Boy:  what's a Wobbly.  

Santa: Google it (these progressive kids aren't as smart as they think)

The kids may not all look the same, but they all love Santa ... at least the little ones.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

And up the chimney I rose.

There ain't no more we

I grew up in the flight path.   There’d be noise and I’d look up from shooting pucks against the wall and an airplane would fly over, headed for the runway at the Grumman airplane factory.  I wondered if I flipped a puck into the air hard enough if I could hit the airplane’s landing gear.

During the war, Grumman was the biggest employer on the Island, building F4F Wildcats, F6F Hellcats and TBF Avenger bombers.  The Wildcats fought the Japanese to a standstill at Midway and Guadalcanal with the TBFs sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier and battleship.  The Hellcats shot down hundreds of Japanese fighters and bombers during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944.  President Bush and my uncle, who miraculously made it through the entire war without getting shot down, flew the Avenger.

Sounding a lot like a TV evangelist who promises millions to those who pray hard enough, a young progressive politician claimed the US could switch to 100% renewable energy, a Green New Deal:  we can do it … we put a man on the moon.

I wondered about that.  The kids on the pee wee hockey team I coached were the children of the guys at Grumman who built the Lunar Module (LM) that landed on the Moon.  They were led by Tom Kelly and they liked to tell war stories about the internal design competitions.  "Sometimes we wouldn't know there was a competition until we went to talk to someone about a component and they'd say "Strange, somebody on another team asked us about that yesterday.'" The LM guys stood on the shoulders of Leroy Grumman and tens of thousands of highly skilled workers and brilliant engineers who built the F4Fs, F6Fs and TBFs.  These in turn owed their jobs to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which, among things, kept the American aviation industry afloat between the wars.   

Many of us remember 12/7/1941 as the day World War 2 began for America.   It began a lot earlier for Grumman and other American companies when the British and French placed orders for thousands of airplanes like the F4F, P-36 and P-40 in 1939.  Roosevelt put years into making sure there were F4Fs and P-36s for the British and French to order.  The P-36s shot down over 200 German airplanes during the Battle of France in 1940.

My uncle is gone.  President Bush is gone.   Kelly and Grumman are gone.   The plant that built the F4F, F6F and TBF has been turned into an Amazon fulfillment center.   Apollo Way is a condo complex with a community swimming pool.  Across town where Republic Aviation built the P-47 Thunderbolt and Martha McSally’s A-10, the hangers have been turned into hockey rinks where my pee hockey team played.

There ain’t no more we.

Angels in America

Whenever the subject of the death penalty came up, my father would thunder:  

"There is no such thing as equal justice!"   

Then he'd start ranting about how that SOB Roy Cohn railroaded poor Ethel Rosenberg into the electric chair:

"Your Great Aunt Jo, the devout Catholic who sent money to the Jesuit missionaries in China, was friends with Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged Rusky spy.  Ethel used to hang out in Aunt Jo's office while Ethel waited for her little boys to get out of school.   Then she'd take them for religious instruction.  About all she was guilty of was having a husband who may have been a Rusky spy.   The United of America burned a woman with two little boys in the electric chair ... all because Roy Cohn wanted to be a big shot.   That's why I'm against the death penalty!   There is no such thing as equal justice!" 

The first time I was in the Supreme Court I puked all over their really expensive looking rug.   When a guard took me to the court's little infirmary,  Justice Frankfurter popped in.  The guard tried to introduce me to the great man, but instead of shaking hands,  I hid behind the guard,  frightened by a big man wearing a black dress.

Once you are aware that it is possible and the ingredients,   building an atomic bomb is relatively simple.   The hard part is getting enough uranium or plutonium to make a bomb, and keeping the stuff from killing you once you lay your hands on it, as my college physics professor claimed.   The Rosenbergs didn't give the Russians much help with bomb building... if any at all.

Don't Tip the Waitress

In the early days, dinner with my wife was always a treat ... until it was time to pay the bill.  

Predictably my wife audited the check and remonstrated about the size of the tip.

"When I drove a taxi,  I loved getting a nice tip."

"Nobody tips the nurses!"

(Please dear God!   Help me!  I've stepped into it again.)

When I was a candy stripper they put a bunch of demented old veterans in the nursing home!

If you got too close they grabbed you.   

When they couldn't grab you, they'd throw the bedpans at you!

All hell broke loose when they ran out of cigarettes!

Oh, dear.

Try being the only provider in the Bridgeport ghetto clinic 

and having to delouse young teens where the sun doesn't shine.

Ok, dear.   I get it (but now I'm gonna play my last card) ... at least they don't shoot at nurses.

Then I remembered a young nurse who sat down with us for breakfast one morning.   

I'm just back from Vietnam, she said.

Bet you're glad to be stationed at San Diego.

Yes!   I'm headed for the officer's club at Miramar tonight.

That should be fun ...

In ways people can't appreciate unless you've been in the junior officer's club at Subic Bay

with everyone held in reserve for the great battle about to explode, 

the Filipino country starts playing Streets of El Paso and 

young men turn into horses and riders prancing around the floor in front of the band ...

I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle,
I feel the bullet go deep in my chest.
From out of nowhere, Felina has found me,
Kissing my cheek as she kneels by my side.
Cradled by two loving arms that I'll die for,
One little kiss and Felina good-bye.

On our battlefield, there'd be no Felina's to comfort the dying

hell sometimes there wouldn't even be a body to comfort.

And the private school, country club kids think life is tough.

Grabbing Janet Napolitano

We have many fond memories of Arizona Opera,  especially the think-outside-the-box Mariachi Opera, Janet Napolitano and our front row seat on her political rise.  

Janet was a US Attorney when we met.   She was the perennial opera date of the chairman of my wife's company.   Back then nobody knew Janet so the four of us were never interrupted when we chatted between acts.  Mostly my wife and Monseigneur talked about health care.   Janet wasn't curious and we never got around to talking about what my schoolmate Clarence Thomas was like.  Not that that would have been a long conversation -- he never said anything.   I guess I could have explained how  Thomas and another schoolmate, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, the Phantom of Wheeler 5, are connected and the counterfactuals of their intersection.   Never got around to it.   

After the opera, we'd walk Janet and Monseigneur back to the diocese parking lot on the other side of Van Buren Street, Phoenix.   Van Buren was known for its ladies ladies of the evening,  but near the church it was just dark and lonely.   One night,  Janet was walking at the head of the column beside me.   Without looking both ways, and before I could grab her,  Janet stepped into the street.  A bicyclist rocketed from out of the dark and narrowly missed running down the future head of Homeland Security.   I was very disappointed in my performance --  some bodyguard.   The biker looked over his shoulder and yelled .... sorrrrry ... as he disappeared back into the dark.

As the years passed and Janet rose through the ranks to governor,  our opportunities to chat became less frequent.   They ended when Janet got a car, driver and a detail of burly DPS bodyguards ... who wears a bulletproof vest to an opera.  We didn't get near Janet again until one day waiting at an airport gate in Boston I looked up and there's Janet sitting right in front of us in the seats perpendicular to ours.   Janet didn't remember us or was just too busy to kiss the baby.  If she'd been Bruce Babbitt,  she wouldn't have missed the opportunity to chat up a constituent  ...  like Bruce did one day when I found myself sitting next to him and McCain.  I was a baby back then ...  thank God he didn't kiss me.

Sleeping in Joseph Smith's great-great-granddaughter's bed

I've slept in bunkhouse with the other cowboys and on a shelf next to an Alaska seiner's 646 diesel engine.   Somewhere in Southeast Asia I slept through Easter.   I sleep next to an artillery gun that shot 70 pound high explosive bullets.  You know you're tired when you can sleep through a battle when they're firing that big old sucker.  

For the longest time I slept in the Joseph Smith's great-great-granddaughter's bed.   That's right the Prophet Joseph Smith.   It was back in Independence, Missouri, where the various Mormon factions were squabbling over who owned the patch of land where Jesus Christ was coming back.   There may have been a lot more greats involved ... she was a gorgeous young thing.   Now that I'm married to a beautiful and smart women,  I have to say I do not regret that it wasn't a package deal.   In fact, when Ms. Smith and her husband split,  all I got was a mattress, which was perfectly functional as far as I was concerned and a lot more comfortable than the shelf next to the 646 diesel.

Lightning at Yaqui Point

It took awhile to make up my mind, but when I did I didn't want the love of my life to feel cheated.

What to do?  There were complications.   Just go down to the courthouse and see the justice of the peace?

The Grand Canyon's only a few hours away.  I called them to see if we could get married there.

Sorry, sir, we don't do weddings ... but the justice of the peace from Williams does and he comes up here a few times a week.  Why don't you call him.

Hi, this is Jim.  My gal and I'd like to get married at the Grand Canyon can you help?

Sure.   You're in luck.   I'm scheduled for a wedding at Yaqui Point overlooking the Canyon on Friday.   I'll do you when I'm finished with the first couple.

My gal calls her friend and she and her husband volunteer to go and be witnesses.   Friday rolls around and sure enough there's a justice of the peace hanging around Yaqui Point waiting for us to show up.

Pictures.   We're posing with the JP and our friends keep saying back up, back up, so they can get everyone into the camera's field of view.



STOP!!!!!!!!!!!    The JP's wife screams.   He's gotten a little too close to the edge of the canyon. It is ... a long ... long way ... down to the bottom ... from the edge of Yaqui Point.

Things go well enough from there.   Then the clouds start rolling in predictable in the Arizona high country when the sun gets tired of heating things up and the storm clouds take over.

Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife.

CRACK flashed the lighting.  BOOM went the thunder. 



Yes.

Afterwards we sat on the porch of the El Tovar hotel overlooking the canyon and drank champagne.  El Tovar, the crown jewel of National Park lodges, built by Fred Harvey, a cross between a Swiss chalet and a Norwegian Villa, out of Arizona limestone and Oregon pine.

Shoes of the Fisherman

My buddy's dad, Red, was a disciple of all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.   He could also swear like a fisherman ... which he was.

Well fuck me silly, you god damn, two-bit whore, %@#*% piece of shit.

Then he'd kick the winch and it would start working again.  You wondered if the winch just needed a kick or if the profanity just scared the crap out of the thing.

In addition to having a way with words,  Red was an entrepreneur.   He ran a fishing boat during the season and a had triplex with three apartments and a laundromat on the bottom floor.   The laundromat made pretty good money in the summer when the tourists arrived.   Red lined the wall with limericks.   In the back, Red's landromat had public showers.

50 cents per shower.
$2 for two at a time ... double the price for double the fun.

We were a day out on our run to Prince William Sound and came up on Seal Rocks outside of Resurrection Bay and the Town of Seward.   Couple miles offshore.   Red pulls up near a charter boat fishing at the rocks.   We're watching from my buddy's boat and wondering what the hell is going on.  Red pulls out a rod and reel and throws a line into the water.   Pretty soon Red is pulling fish out of the ocean one after another.   Amazing.   No one on the charter's having any luck. 

I look at my buddy:  you're dad's amazing.

Not really.   He's gone high tech and bought a sonar gadget for his boat.   He can see exactly where the fish are.

Pretty soon Red got bored with amazing the people on the charter boat and we went back to heading for Prince William Sound to catch some salmon.

Do the Fish Shoot Back?

Long before there ever was a Forrest Gump my Navy buddy said ...

When I go home to Alaska, I'm getting myself a boat and going fishing for salmon.  Call me if you need work.

It was a good bet.  His dad and mom had practically been original homesteaders when they went up there after WW2.   They fished for salmon the old fashion way pulling in the nets by hand without the help of a hydraulic power block run off the boat's diesel engine.   Hell, back in the day they were probably rowing the boats. 

My buddy and his brothers grew up working for his dad on the fishing boats.   They lived off what the land and sea provided.   The oldest brothers slept in a lean-to next to the house. 

In the winter ... in Alaska????????????

We had sleeping bags and blankets.   It doesn't get that cold down by the water.

That translates to

Most of the time in the winter it stays in the teens and twenties at night ... and for a few nights when the cold blows in from the north ... only five or ten below.

If they were lucky,  they'd shoot a moose.   They probably didn't think of it back then, but moose meat pepperoni works pretty good on pizza ... with an couple of a Olympias.

My buddy said:  I hate oysters.   My mom would harvest oysters from the Homer Spit at low tide and can them for the winter.   One winter pretty much all we ate was canned oysters.

Now they advertise:

These oysters grow in clean, cold glacier pure waters and taste like the waters they grow in.  The finest oysters in the world.

I doubt my buddy's mind's been changed by the sales talk.   I'll have to ask him some time.   I wonder if he's on Facebook.

One of the manly fishermen who'd been around for awhile asked me:

This is work is pretty hard?   Do you think you'll be able to keep up. 

(Let me retort)

Do the fish shoot back?

He was puzzled.   Perhaps I should have added the part about recently being in firefights with the North Vietnamese for weeks on end with little or no sleep.   I never even got around to telling my buddy about that.   Instead I went back to the truck and got some more eggs to put in the boat.

Beer Pancakes

So why do you make beer pancakes when you're the cook/deckhand on the MV Mugwump.

Numero uno:  because it's fun.   Numero dos:  milk doesn't keep that long.

We're loading supplies for our trip to Prince William Sound.   I got the part about we don't take milk.  It doesn't keep ... even if the MV Mugwump had a refrigerator.  We loaded lots of beer and some whiskey for emergencies.   If the fishing was bad, we'd at least be happy.   The fishing was good and there wasn't any time to sit around and drink so most of the beer went into the pancakes.   I think Olmypia was Alaska's favorite beer back then.   Now it's probably an IPA.   It's bewildering to think of fishermen drinking an India Pale Ale in Prince William Sound these days ... but what's a guy gonna do ... they closed the Tumwater, Washington, brewry ... now Olympia "It's the Water" is brewed in Southern California where the water is no longer supplied by "artesians."

Then we got to loading the eggs.   No milk, but we're loading lots of eggs.   Calhoun (my buddy who owns the boat), how come we're loading eggs?.   They'll go bad like milk ... no refrigerator.   Nah, Mac, the eggs will be fine.  It's Alaska (stupid).

The Big Shot

Many years ago when I was a young smart aleck (which probably has something to do with me being an old smart aleck),  my dad and another alum father took a group of us to dinner after a hockey game in Boston.   The other alum father was at the top of his profession... Harvard Law Review,  senior partner at a Wall Street law firm, good buddy with the Supreme Court Chief Justice.   He regaled us with his eminence and how his poker game at the national ABA meeting was the place to be.   Then he turned to our affirmative action schoolmates, eg, Clarence Thomas and Ted Wells,  who had just led a uprising at our college.   "Why do they need help.  My father worked his way up like everyone else and so did I.  Why can't they?"   The smart aleck at table piped up:  "There weren't laws preventing your father from voting or learning to read."   My father might have added that if the boys in the Fordham "mafia" hadn't of put Wagner in the Senate and Sylvester Ryan on the federal bench,  the Wall Street law firm might never have gotten around to making the Irish kid a big shot.   Instead, my father watched the fun in silence ... later he observed ... "If that guy's such a big shot, how come he split the dinner check with me."

Wells and Thomas were, in fact, very bright and would have done well anywhere.   When they led their uprising, it wasn't a fair fight.   The college wasn't entirely wrong in attempting to punish the protesters,  but Wells painted the college into a corner so fast and so completely that the college surrendered ... unconditionally.   I'd never play poker with Wells.

Man of La Mancha: The Misappropriation of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

They walked the rounds in on us

methodically adjusting the range

just like we'd been trained to do.

TANKS!  Sweet Mary! Mother of God!

They have TANKS!

-- Rue Sans Joie, 1972

Dear Phil, Editorial Page Editor of the newspaper formerly known as the Arizona Republican:

Speaking of historians (Phil Boas on historians and oppression, 1/21/18),   I took wife and child to see Man of La Mancha Friday last.   It was a good show.   Not as electric as Hamilton,  not as rich with snappy tunes as Les Mis.  The Herberger's a good size for a Broadway show.   At the 3000-seat Gammage here in Phoenix, you're lucky if you can hear what the cast is singing ... assuming everyone in the cast can sing ... which isn't a Gammage guarantee.   My wife and child had a real good time.

I knew something was up as soon as I walked into the theater.   There was big picture of dictator Franco hanging in the background.   "Nuts, this is gonna be political."  Pardon me if I'm late on figuring this out.  I've been busy.

Man is a play within a play.   Miguel Cervantes has been arrested by the Inquisition and while he waits trial he improvises a play about Don Quixote for the other prisoners.  They sing a little.   They dance ... very well.   The demented old man (Don Quixote) who thinks he's a knight loses a fight with a windmill.    As the play ends the guards announce that Cervantes is to be tried by the Inquisition of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.   While Cervantes is dragged off stage by the guards,  the cast defiantly sings:

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go...

The performance got a standing ovation.

Imagine the fuss in town if the play hadn't misappropriated the life of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and had been candid about who actually oppressed him.   Cervantes was never tried by the Inquisition.   He was a devout Catholic and fought as a Spanish marine at the famous Battle of Lepanto against a Muslim invasion fleet -- the Crusaders' Last Battle.   He was wounded three times and permanently lost the use of a hand.   Some time later his ship was captured by the Barbary Pirates (subject of the US Marine Corps hymn) and Cervantes was held as a Muslim slave for five years in Algeria until his family was able to ransom his freedom. 

My oppressed daughter, whose dad took her to see Hamilton on Broadway the summer before last, is at the Women's March this morning.

Your pal,

Gilligan 

North SAR, Linebacker Strike Group,  Pocket Money Strike Group

PS:   Cervantes also authored The Seige of Numantia, a play about the destruction of the Celtic settlement on Spain's Duoro river by a Roman army.  The play was quite popular back in the day.   I wonder if it will come to the Herberger here in Phoenix anytime soon.

PPS:  I took my daughter to the Hillary rally at Central High in the fall of '16.   Adrian Fontes gave a real stem-winder on oppression -- our new County Recorder can really pound a podium.  But no Hillary.   We had to settle for Bernie.    On the way out we were confronted by real live, placard carrying Communists screaming:  "America was never great!"   Reminded me of the 60s ... except the Russians are the enemy this time around.

Crusader Pop Quiz

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