On Having Turned 80

 

It seemed odd, even to me, that after posts (or, let's face it, essays) on major and not so major birthdays for the past 20 years, I let turning 80 go by without a word.  The reason is that despite recognizing that this was a big deal, I had nothing in particular to say.  At my 79th birthday, I seemed to be searching for models of how to be 80.  But there are no models of how to be 80 now, for my generation.  We are it.  I think my reticence came from feeling that models were irrelevant.  I am myself at 80.  I have choices within that, but this is simply the reality I am living.  

This year Margaret also turned 80 in September.  She is my partner in this reality we are living.  My friend Mike turned 80 in August.  He came out here to California from Pennsylvania for a week, returning on my birthday. We did my annual walk up Trinidad Head together. We'd been together around major birthdays since our 60th.  We're still here.  Everybody isn't.  Mike and I were also friends with Clayton, who died last year. We'd known each other since high school (I'd known Clayton since 3rd grade), and the three of us had played together in a musical group for a few years.  Mike and I sang some of our old songs, including some that Clayton and I wrote together.  

In September, someone from our high school class contacted Mike and invited him to a kind of group birthday party for members of our class who also turned 80.  It was in Greensburg, where our high school was and is.  He couldn't make it but afterwards she sent him photos.  He didn't recognize anyone.  She then sent him names, and matched some to the photos.  He forwarded them all to me.

 I recognized many of the names.  There was Carol C. who I saw a lot at the  Mountain View Hotel swimming pool one summer when my mother got me a membership.  There was Linda P. who I used to call up for awhile and talk to, the first step to dating.  I never took the next step.  I probably didn't know what it was.  I remember Mary Ann H. who provoked our English teacher Sister C. to flee the classroom when she quoted John Lennon in her oral presentation: "Women should be obscene and not heard."  And there were some guys there I knew as casual friends.  I have more or less fond memories of all of them, and it's interesting that there are at least this many of us still around.

But I didn't recognize any of them in the pictures either, and I tried.  Not even with their names.  We all just look like old people.  I also felt, staring at these pictures, that I wouldn't have fit in at this party, just as I barely fit in while in high school.  I was back in Greensburg for nearly ten years from the late 70s to the 80s, and all of them presumably were around, but I never saw any of them.  Except Carol D., the hostess of the party.  I was there when my book was published, and I had a couple of reasonably publicized book signings--an event admittedly alien to anyone in Greensburg then.  None of them showed up, nor did anyone else from high school.  Mostly friends of my mother (though they didn't go so far as to buy a book.)  But I did see Carol D. walk by me at one, without a glance in my direction. Kind of like high school.

But even so, I was more social in high school than I am now. And I was for most of my life, at least before moving here.  A lot of that was at least slightly forced, out of loneliness and longing.  But much of it was just human interaction and shared activities. Then when I came out here I stopped going to bars, first because of the smoking and then because I wasn't drinking.  Here my social time got taken up with transactional events and relationships as part of or derived from work, as often happens.  Then retirement, the pandemic, and the masks.  

It's kind of usual for relationships to drop away as we get old.  Friends and family members die, or are far away.  Transactional relationships end when the reasons for the transactions end, which is usually the job.  To younger people we become what we look like-- just anonymous old people, of no individual interest.  It's not entirely that we're treated as having the bad taste to not have died by now, but it's something like that.

Fortunately for me, I've always cultivated inner resources.  I'm an introvert, so becoming something of a hermit just means more peace and quiet.  I've recently replaced my flip-phone with a so-called smart phone, but I don't get any more calls or texts from real people than I did before.  The phone mostly stays in the drawer, or in a pocket when I go out.  I am very wary of what reliance on them has done to attention spans--I never would have believed it, but all the evidence and experience confirms it is true.  I want to keep reading long books, and slow poems.  

I am also very fortunate in that I still have a good memory for the past.  I've explored my past for years, so most of my memories are of memories I've already had, and in many cases written down.  But I occasionally get a new one, as when on a visit back to Greensburg my friend Joyce (from high school and many years after) told me one of her memories of me--of how I went out in a snowstorm to pick up medicine for her young daughter when she was sick.  This was in the 1980s.  I did not immediately remember it, but one day I just recalled it--her phone call, my walk through the beautiful falling snow in the night, down to Paul's Pharmacy and over to Joyce's house, because the roads were just too bad to drive and I knew I would love the walk anyway.  

It was the last thing Joyce said to me, face to face.  She died a few years later. But I have memories of her and many others as part of my everyday life. 

I usually have a book that I can associate with a particular birthday but I didn't have one for 80 until recently.  Once again (as it was for my 72nd) it is a book by Dorion Sagan (son of one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, Lynn Margulis, and the definition of a scientist icon, Carl Sagan.)  It's his deceptively dull-titled Notes From The Holocene published in 2008.  In terms of the breadth of its ideas, I see it further along the continuum of books like Ed Yong's An Immense World and James Bridle's Ways of Being (which I wrote about here), as well as the earlier work of James Lovelock and both his parents.

Yong and Bridle showed that we know very little about how animals and plants experience and influence the world, and Sagan takes that further to the level of microorganisms and chemicals, but back up to the idea of a living organism we call Earth.  Apart from expanding my purview, it reinforces the sense I got from those other books: a mandatory humility.  Here is Sagan:

"The vast complexity of Earth's environment, like the ultimate nature of the universe, eludes simple human minds; perhaps our cognitive lack, our finally coming up short, in trying to find the grand design or story, is a structural necessity.  We are only a miniscule part of the vast colossus we examine. To even begin to comprehend that which contains us, and so much more, we caricature, simplify, and distort."

Hubris is so human, and so silly. And yet, I am reminded in this regard as in so many others in my daily life, of something my grandmother often said in her 80s: "We do the best we can."  

Another book I'm reading (or actually re-reading) now is one in a series of police procedurals set in Venice starring Commissario Guido Brunetti and written by Donna Leon, that in the past few years have become my favorite comfort reading.   In A Sea of Troubles, Leon uncharacteristically steps back for a moment to sum up Brunetti's character.  "Incapable by both nature and inclination of worshipping at the altar of the bitch goddess, Success, Brunetti had more modest desires.  He was a man of short views, interested in the here, the now, the concrete.  He left larger goals and desires to others, contenting himself with smaller ones: a happy family, a decent life, the attempt to do his job as well as he could.  It seemed to him little enough to ask of life, and he settled for those hopes."

That's pretty much where I find myself.  I've written in earlier birthday accounts of my fixation on the future, and how frustrating that's become.  I maintain an interest, and I keep listening to people like Kim Stanley Robinson talk about it in practical terms (these days he's defining Utopia as getting to the end of this century without fully plunging into a mass extinction event.)  But I feel in concert with my age, for the future belongs to others, and though I offer what I can, it's up to them to consider it. What's left to me is a deeper present.  Even though my present has within it my memories, which emerge whether I want them to or not (Paul McCartney calls this "the ever-present past") and my concerns and imaginings for the future, including the lost futures of my youth, I feel more comfortable--and more appropriate-- foregrounding the here and now.

 "Life is what you do everyday," Jim Harrison wrote, and I find myself living more in that everyday.  I don't need a conceptual context in which to experience it.  I simply am living it.  Maybe a little more consciously, and a little more fully.  For instance, I am more aware of how much I like the feel of wool, and corduroy. I value in every way the moments I sit on our comfortable old leather couch next to Margaret, with our dog Howdy between us. 

We have our age-related problems, and spend more time and resources than we'd like in the bizarre corridors of the healthcare complex; and our days include news of people we know in deeper trouble, and falling away.  Of course we worry, we fret, and I miss the birds that have already disappeared.  But we have a lot of good moments.  And we do the best we can. 

Singing It Now

 

Come on all of you big strong men

Uncle Sam needs your help again

He's got himself in a terrible jam

Way down yonder in I-ran

So put down your books, pick up a gun--

Gonna have a whole lot of fun!

Well it's one-two-three what are we fightin' for?

Don't ask me I don't give a damn

Next stop is I-ran

And it's 5-6-7-8 open up the pearly gates--

Ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee

we're all gonna die

Well come on generals, let's move fast

Your big chance has come at last

Gotta go out and get them ragheads

Cause the only good heathen is one that's dead

You know that end times have just begun

When we've blown them all to kingdom come!

Well come on Wall Street--don't move slow

This is war a go-go

There's plenty of money to be made

By supplying the army with the tools of the trade

Just hope and pray when they drop the bomb

They know who the hell they're droppin it on

So come on mothers throughout the land

Pack your kids off to I-ran

Come on fathers don't hesitate

Send them off before it's too late--

Be the first one on your block

To have your kid come home in a box!

Yes, it's 1-2-3-, what are we fightin for?

Don't ask me I don't give a damn--

Next stop is I-ran

Now it's 5-6-7-8 open up the pearly gates--

Ain't no time to wonder why--

Whoopee--we're all gonna die

R.I.P. Country Joe McDonald.  I altered your song but I did it from memory.

Starting With Stoppard

Tom Stoppard died in November 2025.  From his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- to now, I followed his career and his work longer and more consistently than I have of any other playwright. (One bit of evidence: most of my copies of his plays are first edition paperbacks.) 

So beginning in December I have embarked on a reading (and viewing) project, exploring his life, thoughts and work.  I did something similar starting at the end of 2024 when I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists but known to me and self-selected enthusiasts for his unique police procedurals, which happened to be situated in a somewhat fictional version of my hometown of Greensburg, PA.  This resulted in two essays posted on my books blog.

This time I'm likely to spread this project over more time, and it involves not only reading plays but seeing as many as I can that have been filmed (for example, the BBC version of Every Good Boy Deserves Favor) or were originally TV plays (for example, Professional Foul), and seeing as well as reading appropriate interviews.  My procedure so far has been to start re-reading Hermione Lee's fine biography of Stoppard, and stopping at the points where a play is discussed, to read that play first.

Already I've had the luxury of simply dipping into my own library for some associated material.  For example, when Lee mentions Kenneth Tynan's profile of Stoppard for the New Yorker, I pulled down my copy of one of three Tynan profile collections, including the one with Stoppard in it, called Show People.  When Lee writes about Stoppard meeting Vaclev Havel, the playwright and essayist who would eventually become the president of the Czech Republic, I found the Havel essays she refers to in my copy of his collection  Living In Truth.

From the first I knew Tom Stoppard was a writer after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time.  I came to admire other dramatists of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard. 

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: the word play, the ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams.  These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts.  Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook. (Of course they all had further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy (and the appropriate British double acts.)  These influences show up in Stoppard's work as well.)

 Even the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience. 

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.

Especially in those early years, what I was reading or had read showed up in his work, along with less familiar stuff, like Lenin's writings.  We seemed to have similar literary tastes.  That we may not have agreed on political questions in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and we might not agree on some larger subjects, not only didn't bother me, it didn't occur to me.  These were beside the point.  (Besides, the whole left/right thing was more extreme in the UK than the US at the time.) Then by the time his work overtly took sides in favor of free expression in Eastern Europe, we were on the same page.

 From the first also, there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories, that were sometimes overlooked--even by the playwright.  Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Our lives have been quite different, of course. But that unbeknownst to me, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared Cancerian night owl, with even less digital tech than I have, is now a little eerie.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer.  Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information.  He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write."  That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion."  I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event."  That event is the production, the performance.  It's a complicated subject.  There are playwrights, like Shakespeare and especially Chekov, that provide a full reading experience with their texts alone, which performance sometimes does not match.  A good deal of Stoppard does repay reading, but it's also true a lot can be missed.  Not just the many sight gags (they can be at least imagined) but nuances and even narrative moments that are hard to pick up or to be given their proper weight by reading only.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few of his plays performed: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.) 

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil,  the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and  his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard also wrote the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.)  Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End.  I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

Besides some TV plays and even a few radio plays done early in his career on YouTube, and more available from the BBC,  there's a late radio play on YouTube called Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (This play also concerns the struggle to define the good.)  For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time.  But all his plays had laughs.  The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."  

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town.  What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays.  I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one. 

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust.  The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.   Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself.  He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go after that crowning work.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88.  "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..."  He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone.  He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment.  A lot of people are missing him.  He's not coming back.  Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future. 

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words.  The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams.  In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy.  To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime. 

 Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son.  Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?"  Herzen replies:

 "No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?...   Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question." 

Origins: The Winter Solstice

 

The Winter Solstice is considered the most celebrated annual event in the history of human cultures around the world.  Ancient structures survive in many of today's countries that seem designed to funnel the solstice sunlight, from the Great Pyramid and the Karnak temples in Egypt to Stonehenge in England, but also in Turkey, Germany, France, Mexico, Wales, India, Zimbabwe, Peru, Easter Island, Cambodia, Japan, Canada, India, Bulgaria, Sweden, Russia, Brazil and the USA, among others.

Most of the traditions still found in the grab bag of modern Christmas observances come from Winter Solstice rituals, including the evergreen tree, holly, candles, the Yule log (and Yuletide itself) as well as stories of the birth of a divine son, usually in a cave or other dark place. Even the red and white outfit of Santa Claus mimics the red and white ritual garments of various cultures, including far northern cultures (think North Pole) for the Solstice. 

Many surviving indigenous cultures still celebrate the Winter Solstice.  In many indigenous and ancient observances the emphasis was on the light and dark, with attention not only to it being the shortest day of the year but the longest night--and so the stars were important.  It was at the same time the beginning of winter, which--for one thing--was the traditional time of story-telling.  In some tribes, the most important stories, such as the creation, could be told only in the winter season. The stars in the winter night sky could also be important in these stories.

For many, the Winter Solstice was the rebirth of light, and so of birth.  But for others the emphasis was more earthy, and not on birth, but on a kind of pregnancy.  For example, in rituals of the Caney Indians of Central America that I participated in a few times in the past, the central figure was a Mother Earth symbol, becoming pregnant and beginning the gestation of the new life that would appear in the spring, especially the plants growing up from the earth. As the days grow slowly longer, the life that appears in the spring grows slowly, unseen, in the dark earth.  It is a celebration of that promise.

I think of all this when the celebrations this time of year seem increasingly distant from the natural world which first inspired them.  That includes many of the remaining religious expressions, which are largely elements of institutions that, deliberately and not, have distanced themselves from these ties to natural cycles, the mysteries of the planet's life.

But mostly we see this in secular observances. Of course, gifts are always symbols of the heartfelt intent of the giver, regardless of what they are. But when we consider gifts we buy, the term "materialism" is often bandied about.  But it's not precisely materialism.  Commercialism maybe--the commodification of everything, and the emphasis on products and constructions that are largely abstractions, symbols of something--if nothing else, of successful advertising and momentary fashion. The real material, the real physical, is of the Earth.  

The material, the realities of our own planet becomes ever more distant each year, except as imagery manipulated by technologies. What we experience is becoming mostly what we see on those tiny phone screens.

As for the stars in our skies, who can see more than a few, if any at all? Smothered by electric lights, blocked by buildings, the night sky that was mightily present to our ancestors has just about disappeared.  And when I searched for photos of evergreens against a starry sky, most of what Google showed me were very enhanced, and many were already generated by A.I.  (I can't vouch for how altered the image above may be, but it purports to be an actual photo taken by Ryan Hutton in Wisconsin on the Winter Solstice.)

In the end nature won't be denied.  Deep cold, wind, rain, snow in unusual proportions and ferocity, that visit us with increasing frequency as partially the effects of climate distortion, will make themselves felt, if not known.  Stay safe, and remember the original: the Winter Solstice.

Origins: Thanks--and Franks--Giving

[Above: painting of Pueblo Green Corn Ceremony circa 1930 by Opwa Pi (Red Cloud)

The first ceremonial Thanksgivings in North America occurred before history was written on this continent.  Such individual ceremonies were part of daily lives for most if not all Indigenous hunters and gatherers, such as giving thanks to the animal that gave its life to the hunter, or a constant consciousness of sacredness in gathering and crafts like basket-weaving.

It is certain that even in historical times, group ceremonies of thanks in Native tribes included giving thanks for the harvest.  Tribes in the Eastern Woodlands and Southwest in particular celebrated Green Corn Ceremonies or festivals (and many still do.)  

It seems likely that the most famous "first" Thanksgiving in Patuexet (Plymouth), Massachusetts in 1621 (or 1623)  was at least partly inspired by such an event among local Native groups such as the Wampanoags who attended--and reportedly outnumbered the Pilgrim colonists.  Like traditional Green Corn ceremonies, it lasted three days, beginning on June 30.  This cooperative venture was not repeated.  The next harvest was bad, and eventually the Pilgrim fathers slaughtered the same tribal peoples, setting a horrific but often followed precedent.

Other religious ceremonies of thanks to the Christian God had already been held among colonists in Newfoundland (1578), Jamestown, La Florida and a colony in Maine.  The first national day of thanks was declared in 1789 by President George Washington, in gratitude for the Constitution.  It was held that year on November 26.  Other Presidents declared national Thanksgiving days, one year at a time and on various dates, though some Presidents didn't at all. 

Beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale began a 36 year campaign in favor of an annual and official Thanksgiving Day.  Today's tradition was established by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863, just weeks before he gave his historic Gettysburg Address. In part he wanted the nation to give thanks but also pray for healing after the Civil War.  He'd already declared a day of thanksgiving for that August, but then made Thanksgiving an annual holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It was only the third annual national holiday to be declared.

But the calendar is a tricky thing: sometimes the last Thursday of the month is the fourth, and sometimes (roughly two time out of seven) it is the fifth Thursday of the month.  It was the fifth Thursday in 1939, and retailers begged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare that year's Thanksgiving for the fourth Thursday, the next-to-last, because they were afraid of a foreshortened Christmas shopping season.  He agreed.

National pandemonium ensued, which only got worse in 1940 when FDR again designated the next-to-last Thursday, which that year was the third.  Republicans in particular derided him, and called it Franksgiving.  Some 16 states declared their own Thanksgiving day to be celebrated on the last Thursday, so there was no longer a national day of thanks.  In 1941, Congress passed a resolution assigning the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which FDR signed into law. (Retailers had not shown any appreciable change in sales with the earlier date.) 

 Some states continued to designate the last Thursday, and celebrations were muted during World War II, but by the end of the war, almost all of the nation celebrated on the new Franksgiving of the fourth Thursday. The last holdout was Texas, which did not change its law from the last to the fourth Thursday until 1956. (Then of course there's Canada, which holds its Thanksgiving the second Monday of October.)

Though it is unlikely that the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving included pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and even today's breeds of turkey, most of the day's food traditions do seem to come from New England.  Recipes for most of the traditional meal are in the first cookbook published in America, in Connecticut in 1796. 

The Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York has been an annual event since 1930.  Coming near the end of the collegiate football season, Thanksgiving has been a tradition for rivalry games. (Hence the Great Turkey Heist at Knox College I participated in, oh long ago.)  The Detroit Lions began scheduling a game on Thanksgiving also in the 1930s. 

It all began with gratitude for nature's sustaining gifts.  But beginning with those first ideologues in New England and Virginia, Americans relationship to nature has been more hostile than grateful. Settlers and their descendants have been busy ruining the land and waters and now even the air for centuries, and we are close to finishing the job. Maybe we can at least acknowledge this with a little grace as we're saying grace, and try to do better.

  The natural world is the source of all life, including our big and dubious brains. The rest of nature would be grateful if we'd start using them wisely. "It is an error to say that we have 'conquered nature,'" FDR said in 1935, in the midst of an ecological crisis called the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression caused largely by wanton exploitation and destruction of land, forests and waters.  "We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Lots of other things are associated with family gatherings on Thanksgiving these days.  Those retailers have largely absorbed the holiday, with their extended pre-Christmas sales. Dispersal of families has meant travel has gone far beyond over the river and through the woods, and now involves the added tension of the busiest air travel time of the year. Thanksgiving also begins the holiday season when people measure themselves against a Norman Rockwell ideal, and find there are angry words, sulks, disappointment, bewilderments and tears as well as the occasional radiant smiles and gratitude.

Whether gratitude is part of the mix anymore is perhaps a matter of personal choice.  This year we may be thankful that things are not worse than they are, which may well itself become a Thanksgiving tradition.  

Origins: Peanuts

 Americans for more than a century have known peanuts primarily as a snack food, but it didn't start out that way.  Harvested by indigenous peoples of Peru, Brazil and elsewhere in South America, they arrived in North America well before Columbus.  Eventually they spread to West Africa and to China.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, peanuts in the US were cultivated mostly in the southeastern states such as Virginia and Georgia.  They were known then as goobers, or goober peas--a more accurate name since they are legumes, not nuts. They were probably named goobers by slaves, from the Bantu word nguba. It's possible that peanuts came to the South from West Africa along with the slave trade.  Grown at first as animal feed, they were also fed to slaves, who were literally working for peanuts--though that's probably not the origin of the phrase.

But then came the Civil War, and goobers became an essential food for Confederate soldiers, because they were plentiful and nutritious.  Invading and hungry Union troops found little alternative to them left in the South, but developed a taste for peanuts that they took with them to the North.  Peanut vendors began to appear on city streets.

By the end of the century, peanuts as snack food began an association with two major forms of mass entertainment: the circus (and its cousins such as the carnivals, where "Peanuts, popcorn, candy apples!" became the concessionaire's cry) and baseball.  But the cultural association with black Americans continued, so that at public entertainments the seats in the back reserved for them were called The Peanut Gallery.  That was broadened in vaudeville times to simply mean the cheap seats. The reference to it as a children's section began  in the 1940s,  immortalized in the 1950s for my generation by the Howdy Doody Show on the new mass medium of television. The association may be that children are small and so are peanuts.  But today there is some pejorative association with sniping "from the peanut gallery," as by the vulgar crowd.  The idea that hecklers threw peanuts at the stage may be part of it, or more probably invented later.   

Peanuts at first were sold in the shell.  Cora Bunch, a concessionaire with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show began selling them by the bag, which caught the attention of the fledgling Pennsylvania concern transplanted to Virginia called Planter's Peanuts, where she was hired.  Planter's was started by Italian immigrants, the Peruzzi brothers, who roasted peanuts with a hand-cranked machine for their fruit and nut stand.  Obici Peruzzi tinkered together an automatic peanut roaster, and the brothers were in business.  Their "Mr. Peanut" logo--created when a house artist added a monocle and cane to the sketch by a fourteen year old contest winner--helped sell peanuts as a fun snack.

As for baseball, the story goes that an early baseball entrepreneur sold advertising space on the scorecards given out to patrons, but one of his advertisers, a peanut company, paid him with their product.  He began selling these peanuts at baseball games in 1895.  In 1908, two New York songwriters who had never seen a baseball contest, wrote a song called "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," still sung by the entire stadium of fans during the seventh inning stretch at Major League games.  "Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks--I don't care if I ever get back," expresses pure infectious joy.

Later in the 20th century the peanut took on other roles--some say mostly through the efforts of pioneer botanist George Washington Carver, who worried that the South was killing its fertile soil by planting way too much cotton, and only cotton.  He advocated crop rotation, and peanuts was one of the crops he favored.  Carver eventually came up with more than 300 uses for peanuts, including salted peanuts, and two more variations that entered the American food canon: peanut ice cream, and especially peanut butter cookies.  (Peanut butter had been known for a long time--though Carver developed several variations himself.  It had been popularized by John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal king, who patented a process for making a smooth peanut butter for his sanitarium patients.)  

Certainly by the 1950s and probably earlier, salted peanuts became staples at bars selling beer and liquor in England as well as the US, often available in little bowls on the bar, for free. That they might increase thirst of course did not occur to the bar owners.  

For whatever combination of reasons, peanut farmers like James Earl Carter (who became Georgia's Governor and then President of the United States in 1977) elevated peanuts as a crop in Georgia, which leads the nation in its production--so much so that it established a nickname as the Goober State, though officially it preferred to be associated with the peach.

As for peanuts and baseball, that association was still very strong in the early 1960s when I started going to Pittsburgh Pirates games at the venerable Forbes Field.  Most concessions were just outside the ballpark gates, so most food inside came from the roaming vendors.  I would leave the game with a pile of peanut shells on the cement in front of my seat.  Peanuts  were very popular with adults as well, who liked them with beer. They were easier to manage then when the ballpark beer came in bottles and cans, and at my first night games I would hear the frequent sound of them being opened, and see the spray rise into the haze of the lights.  

Now that ballparks are green fields surrounded by food courts, with entire restaurants hidden within the stadium, the lowly peanut wouldn't seem to have much of a chance.  But according to the National Peanut Board, the leading peanut supplier still sells more than four million bags of peanuts to MLB parks each year.   Still, in general the rise of peanut allergies has probably taken its toll.

As for the phrase "working for peanuts," there is no agreed-upon point of origin, though two possibilities are connected to those two traditional venues for peanuts sales and consumption.  By one account, it referred to circus elephants, who worked all day "for peanuts."  By another, it came from an early ballpark peanut vendor who joked with friends that he was working for peanuts.  But whatever the derivation, it likely refers to the fact that peanuts are inexpensive, and if you work for them, you aren't being paid very much.  This suggests that there might be something to the association with slaves in the South. In general, peanuts had a remarkably consistent association with poor people, black or white, with all the attendant contempt. 

The origin of Crackerjacks is more specifically known.  A German immigrant with a popcorn stand in Chicago, F.W. Rueckheim, concocted a variation of the molasses-coated popcorn ball, and added peanuts--then mostly a circus snack.  He premiered his "candied popcorn and peanuts" at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

The Crackerjack name probably came from two slang expressions of the time, "cracker" meaning excellent, and "Jack" as a slang name for any man.  So "that's cracker, Jack" may have led to the combination.

But the Crackerjack logo--prominent on the boxes we got as kids, and almost as famous as Mr. Peanut--has a more definite and melancholy origin. The boy in the sailor suit with his dog was a likeness of Rueckheim's beloved grandson Robert, who died of pneumonia at the age of 8.

On Turning 79 in 2025

Top of Trinidad Head June 30, 2025. My climb dedicated to my friend Mike and to the
memory of Jim Harrison

On one of his birthdays, writer Jim Harrison pointed out that he was exactly one day older than he was the day before. That’s one interesting perspective on a birthday’s significance, and here is another: for the next year after my birthday I will give my age as 79, but in fact that birthday marked the end of my 79^th year of life after birth (or as adherents of some belief systems would say, of this life). The moment after the anniversary of my birth, I will be living in my 80^th year.

So it’s not too early to consider this threshold. For all of my childhood and adolescence, I did not know anyone as old as 80. All but one of my great-grandparents were dead when I was born, and the last great-grandfather died when I was 4, and he was 79. (Though he lived nearby, I don’t believe we ever set eyes on one another.)

My three surviving grandparents and those in their generation I always thought of as old, but they were mostly in their 50s and 60s when I was a child.

My grandmother and me 1972 when she was 76 and I was 26.

My grandmother Severini turned 80 the year I turned 30. She’s my only real experience with that age. I happened to be nearby for most of her 80s, and spent a fair amount of time with her. The family stories she told me (or repeated from earlier years) I used much later in my Severini Saga.

That was my last frequent, sustained contact with anyone in their 80s. I saw my Uncle Carl on visits to PA a few times in his 80s, and was in touch with him by email especially in the last year or two of his life in his early 90s. I was in touch by phone and email with my Uncle Bill in his last year—he was 96.

Most of the conversations with all of them involved them talking about the past. It was fascinating first of all to hear what they remembered and what they didn’t. But the information, the feeling of their time, added depth to my life. It was I think an important and a satisfying experience for both of us.

For our past and what we recall, what we’ve learned from our experiences and observations are reflected in our stories, and our stories are increasingly what we have left to give as we grow older.

But the young (a category that now encompasses almost everybody) have to be ready to receive those stories. I marvel with some chagrin how uninterested I was in my parents’ lives, and then it was too late. It seems we must ourselves have a past we recognize as such, before we become interested in the pasts of others.

My grandmother got through some of my cognitive blindness by being a beguiling storyteller. And I was in a sense a captive audience. She did not hesitate to evoke my guilt and shame to ensure that I visited her often. She arranged endless memorial Masses for my mother so my sisters and I would dutifully attend, and of course go by her house afterward.

I am too distant from the younger generations of my family and too diffident to insist on their attention. I’ve taken on the work of telling my stories, of writing what I remember and what I know, to pass on to younger people by making them available, mostly on the Internet, so they can find them whenever they are ready to receive them. That’s as much purpose as I can find that gives me pleasure enough that I actually do it, however incompletely.

Of course at this age it is more comfortable to spend time with the past than to focus on the future. Apart from the mysteriously timed but inevitable denouement, we face at minimum a gradual decline in health and energy, so our days—and nights—can become at best a less than predictable adventure. So the present demands its attention—bad moments definitely, but with effort, good moments, too.

In these times it is good to have old friends to talk with about the new things happening to us. Besides my very-slightly-younger life partner, I have an even more slightly-younger friend I’ve known since high school. Our phone conversations are becoming paradigms of old people cliches in the greater proportion of time we spend each successive year on comparing health notes. At least we’re not competitive about it (“you think that’s bad, the pain in my...etc.”), the basis of comic bits about old people from at least vaudeville times.

And we are aware of the increasingly strange and threatening context around us, a world that no longer seems to be ours. He and I were partners in high school debating something called “medical care for the aged,” around the time that early Medicare began in 1965. Now not only Medicare and Medicaid are needlessly and cruelly endangered, but the generation-older Social Security. This being only the most specific anxieties, as we are forced to watch a painfully built protective context being angrily dismantled, with cruelty, brutality and contempt for the non-rich as official policy maniacally pursued.

It’s hard also not to notice that this society has blithely accepted (by blithely forgetting or denying them) over a million deaths of mostly older Americans from Covid, which continue with thousands a month. You might get the idea that what old people are expected to do is die, as soon as possible.

Assimilating the past adds depth to the present, but telling our stories from our past can also be a link to the future, and to the young. I usually have a book or two that inform my birthday thoughts. This time it is Horizon by Barry Lopez, which is the summary and final of his many books.

I’ve read several of his earlier books in the past year, including the best known: Arctic Dreams. Though I’ve had some of his books around for years, I did not appreciate until recently that he is one of the best, the greatest writers of my times. (When at the age of 80 Bill Moyers decided to retire from TV, he carefully selected his last interview for his Bill Moyers Journal. It was with Barry Lopez.)

At some point I grazed YouTube for any interviews and events Lopez did that might be preserved there. The first I came upon was at the end of his book tour for Horizon in 2019, and he began his talk with an urgent message. “Hell is coming,” he said. “Not hell with a small h, not something we’re going to solve with technology, or certainly not an election. It’s coming, and we have to figure out how to take care of each other...and provide for our children and grandchildren, so that they have the opportunities to exercise imagination that we have had. Then maybe we have a prayer.”

“If you’re looking for something to do in the time of climate change and ocean acidification and methane gas pouring out of the tundra, and [the Sixth Extinction]: Make common cause with young people.”

They can use the experience that their elders can communicate to help them tell the stories and find greater imagination to apply to addressing what’s coming very soon, he said. They need to imagine not what is pushing us into the future, but what is calling them into the future.

Others reaching my age have grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren with whom they have ongoing personal relationships. I do not. My grandmother in her last years had a mantra: “We do the best we can.” Partly because I didn’t know anyone past 80, and partly because—thanks to the hydrogen bomb, the military industrial complex, the poisoning of the planet and its effects on health, as well as my dubious earning ability—I never expected to reach 79. But I have, in relatively good shape it seems.

So even with what seems like fewer good hours in my day, and more time and attention taken by health matters, an old introvert night owl hermit like me can do what wants to be doing. In my case it’s the same old, same old. I make sentences.

I often post a poem on my birthday.  Here is this year's, by Jim Harrison.

 

The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.

 I’ve made this path and nobody else

 leading crookedly up through the pasture

 where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.

 It is here where my mind begins to learn

 my heart’s language on this endless wobbly path,

 veering south and north

 informed by my all-too-vivid dreams

 which are a compass without a needle.

 Today the gods speak in drunk talk

 pulling at a heart too old for this walk,

 a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth

 of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

 Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names of a dozen friends

 who have died in recent years,

 names now incomprehensible as the mountains

 across the river far behind me.

 I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.

 Perhaps when we die our names are taken

 from us by a divine magnet and are free

 to flutter here and there within the bodies

 of birds. I’ll be a simple crow

 who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

--Jim Harrison

Very recently, researching the writers who clustered in Key West in the early 1970s for my latest "History of My Reading" post, I watched on You Tube a film made about them.  Jim Harrison was one of them, but he'd died before the film was made.  Towards the end of the film, writer Tom McGuane, his close friend in Key West and elsewhere, read the first part of this poem to the camera.  Then suddenly his voice overlapped with Jim Harrison reading the rest of the poem, filmed evidently for a PBS segment years earlier.  He was standing in front of Antelope Butte in Montana.  

As I looked and listened, I noticed the orange logo on his t-shirt, which looked familiar.  And then I looked down at myself: the orange logo was on the pocket of the dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt I was wearing as I watched, the exact replica of Jim Harrison's.  So this was another reason this poem seemed appropriate for my 79th birthday.

Harrison was 79 in 2016 when he died from a heart attack--instantly, according to his daughter--with pen in hand, while writing a poem.  Not the worst way for a writer to go.  By then he'd known his heart was weakened, as the poem indicates.  Besides becoming a simple crow, he also had wished to be reincarnated as a tree.