Christmas Morning in Lockhart

MERRY CHRISTMAS MORNING TO ALL YA’LL.

I’m writing a couple of hours before sunrise on Christmas morning, sitting on the back deck with my laptop, shivering a little. Nita’s still asleep, but pretty soon I’ll awaken her with a kiss, roamin’ hands, and the temptation of hot coffee.  

I’m one of those guys who sometimes goes into a funk around sunset. I remember the old Kingston Trio song lyric, “about this time of day I gets to feeling low, wondering who’s my baby’s latest beau.” After 45 years with Nita, that’s not my personal sunset remorse, but that time of day still grabs me sometimes. Pretty sunset colors aside, late afternoons often leave me moody.

On the other hand, I love being awake and outside for sunrise.  Awake and outside at sunrise every now and then, that is. Today is such a day. I love birthdays, and Jesus’ birthday works fine for me as a get-up-early-day, even with no toys to set out under the tree.

And today, Christmas Morning of 2015 has significance to Nita and me. It will the very first Christmas morning since we started this shared-life gig in 1972 that we have risen in a house with just us two in it.  Huh, how about that.

I expect we’ll sip that tempting coffee, open each other’s gifts, and then just sit,talking about our sons, daughters-in-law, and grandkids for a bit with no one else around.  We’ll see lots of family later today and in the days ahead, but this morning it’s just us two. In other circumstances, I’d be depressed about a Christmas dawn without the chaos of kids, but today, I’m rejoicing at the chance to walk a new path with NitaBird, no one else in sight.

Even as newlyweds, we traveled to parents for Christmas--and then we were parents, and still traveled to our parents' homes during the holidays. We’ve hosted parents and grandparents in little Lockhart for Christmas, we even went skiing in New Mexico with kids and family one Christmas. But we’ve never awakened and been just Phil and Nita on Christmas morning for the opening of gifts to each other. How’d we miss that?

Speaking of 1972, our first Christmas together, that was the year we gave our parents what we thought was the coolest gift ever. We were smug and naïve, but at 23 and 24, smug and naïve was the norm in our day, and likely still is. Regardless, here’s the gift:

 

That photo is of the cover of the extremely limited edition of the record album we “cut” for our parents as Christmas presents.  Nita sang, and I was the sound technician and graphic designer of the cover. She was the flower, I was the gardener. Worked for me just fine back then, works for me just fine 45 years later. She’s still singing and I’m still grubbing away.

We recorded the songs with Nita sitting on the floor in the living room of our apartment in Austin, hence the album name. Clever, huh? We’d bought a cheap microphone at the University Co-op and plugged it in to the reel-to-reel tape deck we’d bought earlier in that first year of our marriage. Nita accompanied herself on her guitar, bought by a friend in Mexico a few years before, and on the old upright piano that her mother bought used in the 1950’s.

The album is eighteen songs recorded by solo lady folk singers of the era. Joan Biaz was probably Nita’s favorite. We took our newly made amateur tape to a recently-opened professional recording studio in Austin. The owner was polite, humoring us, I imagine, and quoted us a decent price for making two master records from our tape, stressing each would be fragile and would scratch very easily. 

Then he put our tape reel on his machine and listened to the first song. Then the second. Then he started looking sidelong at Nita while he kept listening.

Finally, he clicked off the machine, spun around on his stool, and asked if we could afford to come in and record the songs in his studio. He knew a good guitar player who would charge much. He sounded like he was impressed with Nita’s voice. 

We were living on $450 a month then, and after bills had about $50 a month for groceries. Though Nita was properly flattered, she declined.  In the end, he ran the tape through some sound filters to clean up the background static, and made the two master records for $80. To this day I don’t know if he screwed us or was exceedingly kind.

 All that to say, one tune is my favorite: Amazing Grace. That’s about as good a song as there is to consider on Christmas morning. This was before Judy Collins included Amazing Grace on an album the next year, beginning the song's journey to become THE national anthem for Christian America. Didn’t hurt, I suppose, that Spock or somebody was buried in space in a Star Trek movie with Amazing Grace being played on a bagpipe.

Nita sang it in three-part harmony, doing each part herself, a feature allowed by our miraculous Japanese tape recorder. That is, it would record three-part harmony if I was deft enough to rewind the tape and restart it at the exact right spot each time for the new overlay of sound,  keeping the recording volume not too high and not too low, while Nita wore big headphones to hear the previously recorded parts while she sang. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

Of course, I’m real biased, but I think my girl’s version is better than the one Judy Collins recorded. But, to be fair, Judy’s lovely song of grace sold several hundred thousand copies and Nita’s was restricted to two gift records. It’s tough to be a pioneer.

As to the cover, 1972 was before any computer-assisted-design software. Hell, it was while Michael Dell and Bill Gates were little shrimps. They probably were bullied geeks in grade school about that time.  Anyway, I took the black and white photos, profile and front, of my new wife with an old 35 mm Minolta SLR camera I’d bought used. I blew up the negatives on a borrowed enlarger in the kitchen pantry of our apartment, and made the prints that went into the two-perspective image on the cover and cut out Nita’s profile. And lastly, I covered two old album sleeves with yellow kitchen shelf paper, and used stick-on architect letters for the cover title. Twice for all this stuff, and the back of each album cover.

I guess our parents were pleased with the gifts. I was impressed. Nita was humble, but secretly proud, I think.  No career as a folk-singer followed, but a lifelong love of singing has. Nor did I become a professional graphic designer or sound technician.

Good memories, but none of that really matters now. It happened a long time ago, and since then Nita and I have had 43 years of happy shared lives. We have three grandkids now, and maybe one of them will pick up musically where Granny Nita left off.

And now, the sun is up, it’s Christmas morning and I have a gal to smooch, gifts under the tree to give her, and gifts from her to unwrap.  The kids and grandkids can wait a bit.

Merry Christmas!

Broken Bones and Filling Quivers

My weekly writers critiquing circle yesterday took their red pens to my newest chapter in Defiant Honor,  the third and concluding book in my McBee Civil War saga. This chapter contained nothing but Major McBee in the battle of The Wilderness, which was another of those mega-battles during which the fate of the Confederacy hung by a thread.  Borrowing the over-quoted words of the Duke of Wellington after the battle at Waterloo, The Wilderness was also “a near run thing.”

Anyway, the good news about the chapter’s peer review was that my fellow writers all said nice things about it. They did not even object to my including a few paragraphs focused on a cannon ball.  It was a small cannon ball, but I still fretted that the group members would lose their bearings when I shifted my narrative from the main character they’ve come to know, to a chunk of iron.

The bad news is I fear that after two and a half books of battle after battle, I may have jaded my critique group members and they are really saying, “OK, that’s fine, another battle, I get it. Now take me back to the ladies and the personal conflicts.” I’ll just have to trust they really did get involved with the drama of the battle. 

To finish the chapter, I spent an hour researching the history of Plaster of Paris as a medical technique used to treat broken bones. The gooey stuff really does apparently have a provenance in Paris, France.  It seems that after the Napoleonic Wars, during the ongoing violent rioting in Paris, a few military doctors experimented with wall-plaster-soaked-gauze as a wrap to hold broken bones in place. The British army then picked up the technique during the 1850’s Crimean War.

By the time our Civil War started in 1861, word of Plaster of Paris’s success had crossed the ocean, and a few forward-thinking doctors began trying it. Of course, awareness of Plaster of Paris wraps didn’t slow down the standard treatment of amputating damaged arms and legs, hands and feet. And I doubt any of the plaster casts were red, blue, or green like our son’s leg cast was once upon a time.

Last weekend, Nita and I attended a Christmas play at the local community theater. It’s a purely Texas play, west Texas, at that. The name is “A Tuna Christmas.” It was written some 25 years ago and first performed by two Austin actors who grew up in very small towns in west Texas. All dozen or so of the characters, including women, were done by the two men in the original performances in Austin.

We saw it, loved it, recognizing too many of our own small-town family members in the Tuna, Texas characters. We howled and chuckled. Damned clever. Damned insightful. So much so, A Tuna Christmas left Austin and went to Broadway where it gained national acclaim, and now A Tuna Christmas is done all over the country. I reckon small towns, north, south, east, and west, share a lot of traits.

We also loved our local amateur performance, even if it took a lot more than two gifted actors to pull it off. It helps that one of the original two writers and actors, Jaston Williams, moved to our little town of  Lockhart a few years back. He and his partner had gone to China and adopted a son, and likely wanted to shift to life in a small town. They have become welcomed “Lockhartians.” Jaston didn’t act in our amateur production of his own play, but he did show up at rehearsals from time to time to cheer them on.

One of the first things I noticed in A Tuna Christmas this time was an oft-overlooked eccentricity of small town dialect that happens when the two conversationalists know each other very well. The second speaker doesn’t need to say much, but understands it would be rude to say nothing in reply.

Person One: “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there.”  Second person: “It is.” That’s all. “It is.”

Or, first person, “That boy is dumb as a stump.” Second person, “He is.” Of course, if it were a girl being called dumb in the South, “Bless Her Heart,” would follow just sure as stink after a fart.

Leaving Tuna, Texas behind, I hope you all are shopping for that just-right gift for your sweetheart and family members. I hope you all are remembering the gift of a donation to any of the deserving charities in your part of the world.

In this season, where we pay homage to the child of a teenage mother who miraculously had a son, even though a “virgin,”  it seems a good time to reflect that families grow in all sorts of unconventional ways. 

Nita, the love of my life, is an adopted daughter.

We have a grandson who came into the world through an “in vitro” pregnancy.

Two months later we gained two wonderful granddaughters when our other son said, “I do,” to a beautiful young woman whose first marriage didn’t work. 

Finally, just yesterday, our nephew and niece and their three biological kids who live in Atlanta, Georgia, returned from China with an adopted fourth child, a son named Caleb. 

All of those "second-chance" means of filling the family quiver are wonderful things.  They are.

Fording Rivers

For the past twelve years during the weekend before Thanksgiving, I’ve taken part in a Civil War reenactment at a place called Plantation Liendo, about fifty miles north of Houston.  A creek that is normally dry or a little more than a step-over trickle runs through the property. This year our preplanned battle scenario on Saturday included all the reenactors crossing the creek. The problem was we had a good hard rain storm early Saturday morning so that by 1 pm when our two columns of reenactors needed to cross the creek, it was running maybe fifteen wide and a foot deep at the spot where we all intended to cross.

Some reenactors didn’t want to get their feet and trousers wet, and retraced their route to the concrete bridge we’d used to first cross the flowing creek.  That added about a mile of cross-country marching to their day. Most of us, though, decided we were OK with having wet feet, and slogged across. The water came over the top of my ankle-high brogans and reached about to mid-calf.  The deep gooey mud at both banks was worse than the cool water which actually felt pretty good on my sore feet.

In Redeeming Honor, there is a historically-founded scene where the soldier characters have to cross the  Potomac River shortly before the battle at Gettysburg. The fun part was that many of the soldiers took off their trousers for the crossing of the waist-high ford, and some had long drawers on and some did not. Lots of Rebs apparently went commando.

During the actual river crossing in 1863, and in my novel, at the same time as the Texans were wading, a buggy carrying several young ladies crossed the same ford going in the opposite direction. You can imagine the excitement that caused at a time when women dared not display even their ankles in public, and young men did not ever appear shirtless in public, much less without their trousers. But war changes the rules, then and now.

The photo here is of a different bunch of reenactors fording the Potomac River near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia during a pre-reenactment march. While this photo is G-rated, perhaps it gives a sense of what the soldiers looked like holding all their gear and weapons above the water.

  

The bottom photo is lifted somewhere off the internet and is just for fun since it involves a Civil War soldier fording a river and probably reflects how most teenage boys think about going to war. It took me a while to notice that the lovely lady has a bandaged leg, so the scene is not entirely contrived. Right.

Finally, keep in mind that all three of my Civil War novels are available on Amazon and would make good Christmas gifts for the Civil War nuts in your family, ages 15 to 95 – my dad’s 95 now and is reading the third one.

Happy shopping to you all.

McBee, McGee, and TMI

Beginning in my teen years in the 1960’s I read every paperback novel I could find written by John D. McDonald. Mostly I found his books on the twirling metal racks in 7-11 type stores or in the news-stall downtown that was popular with teenage boys because the guy would sell us Playboy magazines.

McDonald wrote pop crime fiction and was best known for his serial anti-hero, Travis McGee, whose book titles each included a different color. (Pale Gray For Guilt; The Girl In the Brown Paper Wrapper; A Deadly Shade of Gold) If you pick up on the similarity of my main character McBee to McGee, I assure you it's coincidental. :)

I’ve read that VP Dick Cheney got Prez W. Bush hooked on McGee novels while Bush lived in the White House.  I’ve never been comfortable with that bit of information, as I’m not sure I want a President who puts himself to sleep reading the same fluffy-sexy-violent paperbacks that I enjoy. I mean, the President has important stuff to think about.  On the other hand, maybe W needed to escape reality for a while each evening more than I did. At our professional peaks, he was running a war on the other side of the world, while I was running a high school just around the corner.

The image here of The Deep Blue Goodbye is of one of the very first McGee books. It’s not hard to tell what about this cover appealed to me, and it wasn’t the 40 cent price. In fact I bought a Spanish version of this same paperback during my only trip to Mexico City during spring break of 1970, but it didn’t work to self-teach me the language, since I rarely got past the A’s: Adios Azure

One of McDonald’s traits as a writer besides the inevitable gruesome death and his occasional great wit was his tendency to go into minute detail when describing random things. Things like stereo systems or boats or even the interior of a restaurant. As a teenager, and even in my 20’s and 30’s, I usually scanned over those details as TMI-Too Much Information. I was much more interested in getting to the sex, violence, and wit.

Last night, on the Facebook page of a reenacting friend, a lady, I read a new term that I can relate to every week during a part of our church service. When the pastor asks the congregation what prayers need to be collectively offered, the result is often an organ recital. Not music, but a string of people who stand and describe the dysfunctional organs of someone in their family, or a friend, or co-worker, or a Christian on the other side of the world. We all seem to enjoy voicing grim details, when just a name would do nicely. Again, a case of TMI. We don’t want or need the bloody details and the Lord already knows them, so just a name would do nicely.

I’m facing the same issue that some paragraphs in every chapter are either Too Much Information or Really Neat Facts, depending on the reader. As a writer of historical fiction, I’m prone to want to educate the reader about the 1860’s, to teach them how different life was before the essential inventions we take for granted, like air-conditioning, cars and refrigerators, not to mention computers, cell phones and Twitter and so on. And that’s not even getting into the military side of my novels, where solders’ ranks and organizational terms like brigade and division confuse readers.

So, I walk the fence and depend on my critiquing group of non-Civil War enthusiasts to help me keep things simple. But I still yearn to describe how many brass buttons of what kind were on the wool frock coats of a certain shade of gray worn by the Fifth Texas Infantry in 1861. And I want to elaborate on the differences between 1853 British Enfields, 1861 American Springfields, and 1854 Austrian Lorenz muskets. But that’s TMI, for sure. If you really want to know that arcane stuff, you can google damned near anything.

And honestly, I’m still more interested telling the reader how Faith, John, Levi, and Edwina sort things out among them while they cope with the hardships of 1864 in the last of the McBee trilogy: Defiant Honor.