Tag: family

The Looking Glass House

April 11th, 2026

“Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there is a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend that the glass has got all soft like gauze so that we can get through. Why it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It will be easy enough to get through—-“

The quotation above is an excerpt of Alice speaking to her cat in the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

I sat in the Nikiya Harris-Dodd Visitation Center, which is part of the Community Reintegration Center (CRC) in Franklin, Wisconsin. The CRC is a jail, and all jails have the same depressing vibe. It’s part of their essence. As far as jails go, the CRC is not that bad, but it is still intimidating. The visitation center is clean and neat and utterly uninviting. When I checked in at the counter for my scheduled visit, I had to show the guard my photo ID, which she kept and explained that I would get it back upon my departure from the facility. I was there early because I didn’t know how busy the place would be, seeing as visits to the “residents” can only happen on the weekend. I had an appointment to see the young woman at 9:15 AM. The waiting area was almost empty, which was a good thing since there are only six chairs available. The walls are painted a dull bureaucratic grey color. There are two vending machines containing overpriced snacks and beverages. There is also one vending machine tucked in the corner of the hall that dispenses Narcan for opioid overdoses, Deterra bags for safe deactivation and disposal of drugs, and fentanyl detection strips. Everything in that machine is free of charge.

The little boy sat near me in a chair with his legs folded underneath him. The young man had never been in a jail before. It was his first time visiting his mama while she was locked up. He was excited about seeing his mama, but he really didn’t like his environment. He and I waited for the guard to call us through the security check.

A Black family walked into the lobby. There was a very elderly woman, a middle-aged lady, and a small child. They checked in with the guard and handed over their IDs. The middle-aged woman asked about getting a locker. This confused the guard. The woman explained that they had to put all their belongings into a locker at a different facility when they visited their incarcerated family member. The guard said they didn’t need one at his jail. They could take their purses and keys with them. I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t know the rules for visitations at the CRC. Every jail and prison is its own little kingdom, and each one has slightly different regulations. A visitor really can’t know what the rules are until they actually get there.

I talked with the family after they sat down near the boy and me. Their little guy was two years old. I told the great grandma that my boy was five. Their two-year-old was there to visit his mama, just like my boy was. The two women were raising that toddler just like my wife and I are raising our boy. Our families are in very similar situations. We are all just doing what has to be done to care for the children.

My little guy and I finally went through security and entered a big room with several long, narrow hallways, each of which had many windows. None of the windows looked outside the building. They all looked into another hallway where the inmates were. The boy and I were assigned to window 51. We sat on a stool apparently molded from concrete. There was an old school telephone receiver attached to a cable. The receiver was made of some kind of dense plastic and heavy enough to be used as a bludgeon. My boy did not want to hold the phone, so I held it for him.

His mama was extremely excited to see her son. She wanted to know everything he had been doing. The boy was reluctant to speak with her. He sat on my lap so that he could see her better through the window. His mama kept joking with him. She kept saying how much she loved him. The boy did not like talking on the phone and he did not like the glass that separated him from his mama.

At one point, he reached out and touched the window with his index finger. His mama did the same, and their fingers almost met. Almost. Almost wasn’t quite good enough. It never is.

“Let’s pretend that the glass has got all soft like gauze so that we can get through.” Alice said that. It worked for Alice, but this boy couldn’t get through the glass into this particular Looking Glass House. And his mama couldn’t get out. It’s probably better that he didn’t go inside.

We left after twenty minutes. The boy doesn’t want to go back. I don’t blame him. Maybe he will change his mind. I hope so for his mother’s sake.

Community Reintegration Center

April 4th, 2026

I pulled into the parking lot of the Community Reintegration Center. The center is a rather ugly brick structure. Its primary purpose is to keep some people inside and other people out. The housing area has translucent windows that allow light inside, but do not allow the occupants to look out. The building is surrounded by high fences with razor wire on the top. The place is no way welcoming, not on the outside and definitely not on the inside.

The Community Reintegration Center (CRC) is a jail. Period. I saw no evidence of anybody being reintegrated into the local community. The whole point of the facility is to keep the folks inside separated from the community. Those who are incarcerated within its walls are referred to as “residents” on the CRC website. Residents? Really? I guess in a strange way they chose to reside there, but they are prisoners, plain and simple. Why not just call them that?

I went to the CRC to pick up a young woman’s personal property. It’s not a major issue to pick up her stuff, but I don’t like doing it. This is not the first time that I have had to recovering her belongings, and it’s always a cause for anxiety and melancholy. The CRC has a visitor center, which is the first stop for anybody entering the building. At least they don’t call it a “welcome center”, because it’s not. The people working there are polite and professional, but the hall is a bit like an ER: nobody wants to be there. Nobody.

Since I was not there to actually visit the woman, I did not need to go through a security check. I did have to show my ID, twice, while I was there. After I told the guard who I was and why I was there, she called the lady in the property department to come on down, and then she told me to sit and wait.

The waiting area was strange. There was a total of six chairs arranged in a rectangular formation, two rows of three. The chairs were spaced well apart. The area seemed to be designed to isolate the visitors from each other. One guy who came into the center initially thought to sit in the row of seats that were closer to the entrance for the security check section. He decided to move back to where I was sitting when he realized that those seats upfront all had handcuffs dangling from them.

I sat and waited. It was kind of like going to the DMV, except more intimidating. Nobody is in a rush and there is no place else to go. I had time, so I gazed at the official bulletins posted all over the walls. Other people came inside. Two of them were obviously lawyers. The man and the woman might as well have worn uniforms. They both had that professional legal appearance: they wore suits and carried serious business paperwork in their hands. They had that look on their faces that said, “Let’s get this shit done and get out of here.” Actually, everyone had that look on their face, including me.

At last, the lady from property showed up. She was a tiny, older Black woman wearing a black surgical mask on her face. She carried a large plastic bag in one hand and some papers in the other.

She asked me for my ID. I fumbled for it. She told me to take my time. She asked me how I was. I told her that I had done this sort of thing before. She gave me a questioning look. I tried to clarify what I meant by saying,

“Not here, but for the same person.”

She nodded. Then she told me,

“When I was young, I made some bad decisions. Then I had time to think about what I had done, and I considered my options. Don’t give up on her.”

I replied, “I don’t. I can’t. My wife and I care for our grandson fulltime.”

Then lady asked me, “How old is he?”

“Five.”

She sighed and said, “Well, maybe he won’t remember any of this.”

I considered that. Maybe she is right. But this stint in jail isn’t the whole story. This is just the start of a long absence. The boy will remember something, even if it’s only a feeling of abandonment. He won’t forget, not entirely.

She had me sign the paperwork. I grabbed the bag. As I walked away, the woman called after me, “Don’t give up on her!”

As I tried to open the exit door, I called back to her,

“I won’t!”



Going Downhill

April 2nd, 2026

I’m old enough to have had friends and family members die from chronic debilitating diseases. A sudden death is traumatic. I know this because one of my younger brothers died in a car wreck at the age of twenty-eight. But a slow death, one in which there is a gradual disintegration of mind or body, is agonizing. It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck. The progress of the disease seems to be inexorable, and human efforts to stop or even to slow it down are often futile.

My mom died from Alzheimer’s disease. I have close friend whose father is suffering from the same tragic ailment. My friend’s father used to be a brilliant mathematician. Now he’s not. Now the man has great difficulty with walking up stairs and performing a number of other everyday tasks. The father, oddly enough, can still improvise music on the piano, but his other mental faculties are slipping away. My friend tells me that sometimes his dad is okay, meaning that his father hasn’t gotten any worse. The disease plateaus for a while and then continues on its negative path. There is not a smooth downward trajectory. The disease attacks the brain in fits and starts, but the overall direction is always clear.

I had two friends from work, both of whom died from cancer. One of them suffered from a type of blood cancer. The other had a brain tumor. Both of them received treatments, chemical and/or radiological. Each of them rallied for a while. I remember in visits with each of the two men how their wives would light up at any good news. The wives encouraged their partners and told them that they were getting better and it would be okay. My two friends did get better, but that was only a brief interlude, and eventually they both succumbed.

I had another brother who died from complications of alcoholism. Officially, he died of a heart attack, but it was more than that. He didn’t take care of himself, and I don’t think he wanted to live. His mental and physical decline were in many ways similar to that of somebody with Alzheimer’s. My brother would have a severe medical crisis, then he would recover, but he never quite recovered to the previous level of health. He always dropped down a step. I, along with many other people, hoped that he would turn things around one day. Other folks with addictions have been able to do that. My brother didn’t.

I sometimes speak of watching somebody else slowly die. I don’t think anybody actually just “watches” somebody whom they love die. To me, it is impossible to simply observe the destruction of someone else in a disinterested way. It’s not like going to see a Greek tragedy in a theater or binge watching a slasher movie on Netflix. The person who cares about the individual who is desperately ill is not just a spectator. That person is also a participant in the drama.

I am currently a participant in the struggle of a young person who seems to have the same disease as my brother. I love the person and I cannot separate myself from their suffering. I hope for their recovery, but I often feel completely helpless. I know I cannot save the individual.

So, what is left? There is hope. It is perhaps a forlorn and irrational hope, but it’s all I have. I cling to that hope despite all evidence that it is pointless.

That’s what I do.

A Squirrel and A Six-speed

February 17th, 2026

We own a 2017 Toyota Corolla iM. It’s a good car. We’ve had it nine years and logged 119K miles on it. The Corolla has taken us all over the United States: Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Niagara Falls, you name it. Our insurance totaled the car after the Corolla got pummeled with hail last May, but we kept it anyway, because it runs great. Or at least it did.

The Corolla is not the only stick shift that I ever owned. Back in 1982, when I was stationed with the Army in West Germany, I bought a brand-new BMW 320i. That car was a silver two door with a four-speed transmission. It was truly a sweet ride. When I was dating my wife, I used to drive to her parents’ home in the Beemer along the autobahn. It handled well at 100 mph.

I got the BMW because at that time in history cars with automatic transmissions in Germany were about as common as unicorns. True, there was sometimes a rare American-made car on the roads, but that was because GIs could bring their POV over from the States. Once in a while, the troop sold his car and left his vehicle in Deutschland. So, it was perhaps possible to find a ’77 Chrysler Newport or some other gas-guzzler the size of a pocket battleship. However, if a soldier wanted a German car, especially a sportscar, he or she needed to know how drive stick, or quickly learn how to do so. I learned. It was ugly. Germans had no patience with a bumbling “Ami” who stalled out his vehicle in the middle of a busy intersection. German babies don’t play with rattles. They are all born with a stick shift in their hands.

I am convinced that it is impossible for a person to teach somebody how to drive a stick shift. It’s like learning to swim; you learn by doing. A person learning to drive a car with a standard transmission has to fully become one with the vehicle. The driver has to feel how the gears mesh when they work the pedal. They have to listen to the sound of the motor RPMs. They have look at the traffic around them. Sometimes, they have to smell the stench of burning clutch. It’s a total Zen experience. No thinking. Just doing.

I like driving a stick. This is not to say that it is always a fun experience. When I was stationed at Fort Ord, California, I took a trip to San Francisco. I had stop on a steep incline right at the top of a hill. When I looked out of the windshield, all I could see was the stop sign and blue sky. I had the parking brake yanked up into my right armpit. I was wondering if I could move my right foot fast enough from the brake to the accelerator to avoid rolling back into the Bay. I did. Barely.

I brought the BMW to America, and we drove it for eleven years. Finally, the transmission went to hell. Also, Karin and I had three little kids, and it’s hard to get three children in the back of a 320i. We needed a bigger ride. I sold the BMW to a guy for $400 cash. That stung. but the car was out of my life, or so I thought. Years later, each of my two sons cursed me out for selling the car. They told me,

“Dad, why did you sell the BMW!? I could have pimped it out! Do you know how much a car like that is worth?”

No, I don’t know, and I don’t care.

There is a movie called Boyhood, starring Ethan Hawke. The movie chronicles how a boy ages and matures. In the film Hawke plays the father of the boy. Hawke foolishly tells his small son early in the movie that he can have his daddy’s muscle car when he is older. Later in the show, the boy becomes a surly teenager and reminds his father of that rash promise. Hawke tells his son that he sold the cool car to buy a minivan. The adolescent son is not amused. I remember this part of the movie because the scene is spot on.

Oh well, I was going to tell a story about the Corolla. I got sidetracked.

Here we go…

Three days ago, I was driving the Corolla and discovered that it was really hard to shift gears. I had sudden flashbacks of the dying BMW. Fixing or replacing a transmission is expensive. I was irritated because the car is a Toyota. The engines and trannies in a Toyota are supposed to be bulletproof. They last forever. That’s why I bought the car in the first place.

I took it into the dealer for a maintenance inspection. I talked to service manager who was a good ol’ boy. He was baffled by the problem. He encouraged me to keep the car and fix it. That’s what I wanted to do anyway. He promised to call me back when he had an answer for me.

He called me while I was driving Asher home from school in our RAV4. He told,

“Francis, you’re going to be tickled when I tell you what the problem was.”

“Try me.”

“Well, the mechanics found a walnut wedged in the lineage between the shifter and the transmission.”

I thought to myself, “Those fucking squirrels.”

Actually, I was tickled by his answer to the problem. The mechanic removed the walnut, gave the car a test drive, and as the manager told me, “Now, it slides like butter.” It cost me $200. A bargain at twice the price.

So, I still have a working six speed.

As Neil Young said, “Long may you run.”

Reunion

February 8th, 2026

I received a letter a week or two ago from a couple high school classmates. They are busy organizing a 50th anniversary celebration for the Class of 1976. I find it almost impossible to wrap my head around this development. Based on the letter, there has already been a massive amount of planning and preparation involved with this event. They have arranged a tour of the old high school. The organizers have a dinner and party set up at a local hotel. There are detailed instructions in the letter about how to pay for reservations. Still, I have lingering questions:

“Why? Why do all this? Why bother?”

At the risk of stating the obvious, fifty years is a long time, and at least in my case, a lot has happened during those years. What do I have in common with these classmates from five decades ago? What do I even have in common with the person I was back then?

Probably not much.

I have kept in contact with a grand total of three of my high school classmates. I’ve only seen two of them during the last decade. If I went to this soiree, I doubt that I would recognize anyone. I expect that nametags will be necessary for any sort of socialization.

The letter asks people to “meet us in the Grand Ballroom at 4:30 for dinner, conversation, reminiscing, dancing, cocktails, meeting old friends, and making new ones.” Dancing? Seriously? How many cocktails will people need for that?

What about reminiscing? This implies that a person wants to talk about what it was like back in high school. I am hard pressed to recall much that is worth remembering, much less discussing. Do I really want to converse about the days when I was young and stupid? I once read an interview within which John Lennon was asked about getting the Beatles back together. He sarcastically replied to the interviewer that it would be like going back to high school. I can understand Lennon’s viewpoint.

When I look back half of a century, I don’t feel nostalgia. I recall most of all that burning desire to get the fuck out my hometown. I wanted to see the world and have adventures, and that I definitely did. When I really think about it, it is clear to me that almost everything I did while in high school was part of an effort to go somewhere else and to be somebody else. Paul Simon best described my feeling at the time in his song, “My Little Town”. The lyrics go like this:

“In my little town, I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all.
And he used to lean upon me as I pledged allegiance to the wall.
Lord, I recall, in my little town,
Comin’ home after school, flyin’ my bike past the gates of the factories,
My mom doin’ the laundry, hangin’ out shirts in the dirty breeze.
And after it rains there’s a rainbow and all of the colors are black.
It’s not that the colors aren’t there, it’s just imagination they lack.
Everything’s the same back in my little town,
My little town, my little town.

Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.

In my little town, I never meant nothin’,
I was just my father’s son. mmm.
Savin’ my money, dreamin’ of glory,
Twitchin’ like a ginger on the trigger of a gun.

Leavin’ nothin’ but the dead and dying back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.”

That song tells part of my story. Eventually, years later I returned from California to my place of birth. I came back a very different person. I came back mostly because my wife and I had a baby boy and he needed more family than just us. Was it a good decision? I have no idea, but that’s what we did.

We live within ten miles of my old school. We live within ten miles of the hotel where they want to have this shindig. I could easily attend. Sure, Karin and I would have to find a babysitter for our little grandson, Asher, but we could figure it out if we wanted to do so. I don’t want to.

Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. The past isn’t even past.”

He’s right. My past is an integral part of my identity.

I don’t need to go somewhere and wallow in it.

Hold You

February 3rd, 2026

There are times when out grandson, Asher, wants me to carry him. That is usually not a problem. He’s just over five years old, and he tips the scales at just over forty pounds. The thing that I have to keep in mind is that, with each passing day, Asher is a bit bigger, and I am a bit older. At some point, perhaps soon, I won’t be able to carry him. That’s just reality.

Last night was a rough one for Asher. He sleeps with me. He has done that for years, and he dozes off with his heavy head lying on my left bicep. When he came to bed yesterday, his legs were hurting. He had been playing and kicking a lot earlier in the evening, but I don’t think that’s why his legs were bothering him. He has sudden growth spurts, and when those occur, his legs ache. Sometimes, the soreness is mild. Last night it was fierce. He quite literally had growing pains.

Asher fell asleep in my arms, but he was awake again after only an hour or so. He was crying and moving around. I got up to find him some Children’s Tylenol. My wife and I asked him to take the Tylenol for his pain, but Asher wanted no part of it. He doesn’t like to take pain meds. That might be a good trait for later in his life.

Eventually, Asher settled down and slept again. About two hours later he was up again, once more crying. My wife came to bed to comfort him. Asher laid between the two of us. The tears flowed for a while, and then he calmed down and slept.

This cycle went on for most of the night. Asher would sleep fitfully for a while, then wake up and cry because of his aching legs. Each time, I held him close as he wept. I could feel his body slowly relax and his sobs fade away. I couldn’t think of anything to do anything to ease his pain. I could only hold him so that he would endure it. He did.

The last attack came before 3:00. It wasn’t as intense as the previous bouts of pain. His body was finishing its work extending his bones and muscles. Asher eased on to my shoulder and closed his eyes. He finally slept peacefully.

I stayed awake. I stared at the skylight and thought about the words of a song:

“I can’t carry you forever, but I can hold you now” – lyrics from, Hold You Now by Vampire Weekend

Making it Work

January 24th, 2026

I visited my friend from the synagogue a couple days ago. We did what we always do: sit around, drink a beer or two, and commiserate. It is a cheap form of therapy, and it works. We try to meet for a session once a week if we can.

One of the topics in our discussion was my friend’s upcoming fortieth wedding anniversary. He was wondering out loud what to do to celebrate the occasion with his wife. Forty years together is not as big a deal as fifty, but it is still a major milestone, and it should be recognized as such. My wife, Karin, and I had our fortieth in August of 2024. I told my friend,

“Karin wanted us to get a blessing from our priest during Mass, so we did that.”

My friend thought that was absolutely hilarious. He was imagining an Orthodox rabbi he knew marrying him and his wife in a Jewish ceremony and he burst out laughing. As a note, his wife is not Jewish and has no intention of ever becoming Jewish. I can see how my example of how to commemorate a wedding would seem absurd.

However, my point in mentioning the blessing in church wasn’t really about celebrating the anniversary in a religious way. It was about celebrating the event in a communal way. Yes, Karin and I wanted the priest to pray over us, but we also wanted a public display. We wanted other people who knew us to share our joy (and surprise) at making it for forty years as a couple.

I could write a long essay on how to make a marriage (or any other type of relationship) work, but I would be talking out my ass. Honestly, I have no idea how Karin and I made it four decades. Our struggles were numerous and sometimes overwhelming. My words and actions often made it more difficult for us to stay together. Yet, somehow, here we are, still married after nearly forty-two years. It’s amazing.

I want to go back to the communal aspect of a relationship. For those who are film buffs, you might remember a scene from The Godfather where the young Michael Corleone marries his Sicilian bride in her home village. In the movie the couple has a wedding procession through the little town and are surrounded by boisterous well-wishers. I mention this because Karin and I had a similar experience on our wedding day.

We were married in a small centuries-old chapel in her hometown of Edelfingen in Germany. We walked at the front of a procession through Karin’s village from her parent’s home to the church. Friends and neighbors cheered for us. I had my pockets full of candy and pfennigs to toss to the little kids lining the Strasse. It was a communal event.

Why were the people shouting and waving? Well, Edelfingen was a sleepy little community, and our procession was a show, like having the circus come to town. On a deeper level, I really believe that the people gathered there cared about us. The unspoken message was, “What you are doing is important. It matters to us. You matter to us.”

American culture considers marriages and other intimate relationships to be private affairs that are nobody else’s business. To an extent that is true, however, to make a relationship work in the long term, outside support is needed. A couple usually cannot do it on their own. Other cultures make it clear that the health of a marriage has a powerful impact on the entire community. We have lost that sense of being part of a larger whole. In America it’s raw individualism with little thought for anybody else, and we are poorer for that.

Christmas Cards

December 21st, 2025

I send Christmas cards. Lots of them. I think that my wife and I have mailed over seventy cards this year. I have posted most of them. Almost every day I wrote notes in some cards, put stamps on their envelopes, and dropped them into mailboxes.

Why do that?

The main reason that I send out Christmas cards is because I like doing it. I suppose that is the main reason for me to do anything. In this case, I do it in order to maintain the tenuous relationships I have with far-flung friends and family. I write cards to people all over the world, and with some of them I haven’t seen their faces or heard their voices in decades. Yet I still feel a connection with them. Sometimes we get responses to our cards, but often we don’t. Writing a card is a lot like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. The recipient might get it, and they might read it, and they just maybe might write back. Writing and sending physical messages is an anachronistic practice, one that is nearly lost in our age. However, it a means of communication that has soul. There is something almost magical about sending or getting a handwritten card.

It should be noted that I am choosy about what kind of card I send to an individual. Some folks are very focused on the religious aspect of Christmas, and to those persons I usually send a card with a Christian theme. However, I know Jews, Muslims, Buddhist, and atheists who don’t give a hoot about the birth of Christ, yet they celebrate during the season. They get other types of cards. My Jewish friends all got Hanukkah cards. We are celebrating different festivals, but they long for the same things: love, joy, and peace. I try to express similar hopes and wishes in the cards I send to other non-Christians. My family celebrates Christmas, but the message of the Incarnation is universal.

I know people who are insistent that Christmas be solely about Jesus. These are the ones who believe there is a secular war against Christmas. There may in fact be a war, but the real enemies of the holiday are consumerism and greed. Christmas has always been tied with paganism in some way, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Years ago, we had a real tree in our house and burned real candles on it. That’s a very old German tradition that harks back to pre-Christian times. Christmas has a deep connection with ancient feasts that celebrated the winter solstice and the rebirth of the sun. The holiday is fundamentally about the return of light and warmth in a world that has become cold and dead. The symbolism is all around us this time of year. I have only to look out my window and see all the Christmas lights trying to bring a bit of joy to my part of the world.

When I send a card, I write a message in it tailored to the recipient. I seldom just scribble my name on a card and call it done. Do others actually care what I say? Maybe not. I think they realize that some effort has been put forth. I hope the recognize that I give a damn.

Peace on earth.

Screen Time

December 10th, 2025

There is a meeting this afternoon for caregivers of kindergarteners at our grandson’s school. The topic is “Media and the Effect on Child Development”. My wife and I have thought a lot about the subject. We try to limit Asher’s screen time. It is a struggle to do so. He loves to watch YouTube videos, and he would watch them all day if we let him. We don’t. He gets no time online during the school week, and only a couple hours of it on the weekend. Sometimes, it is very tempting for us to allow the screen to act as a babysitter for Asher, especially if we are busy with other things. If Asher is not watching videos, then he is demanding our immediate attention. That can be exhausting.

The subject makes me remember our vain efforts to keep our own children away from the TV a generation ago. In some ways it was the same fight. Back then, Karin and I simply refused to even own a television. We were absolute Luddites about it. People offered to give us a set, and we wouldn’t take it. Needless to say, out three kids nagged us incessantly about not having a television in the house. We held fast, but they slowly wore us down.

I can recall one evening when I was lying in bed reading a book. Our eldest son, Hans, had his bedroom next to mine. That night, as I was reading, I heard strange voices emanating from Hans’ room. I chose to investigate. His door was closed. I went inside anyway.

Hans was staring at his Gameboy (does anybody remember what a Gameboy was?). He had somehow converted it into a miniature TV. It had a makeshift antenna and a microscopic screen. I admired his initiative and ingenuity. However, I felt bad that he needed to watch his shows in such a furtive way. It was like I was a member of the Stasi who had suddenly discovered that his teenage son was secretly watching programs on the BBC during the Cold War days. I let him watch his show.

Eventually, we bought a television. I think it was as bribe to get our daughter to clean her room (she did it once). We tried to fight the good fight, but I am not sure our efforts had much effect.

I don’t watch anything on online anymore. I find it nearly impossible to function in a room where there is a television playing. My attention is irresistibly attracted to the glowing screen. Movies are the worst. After watching a video, especially with intense scenes, I suffer an emotional hangover. I used to like watching films, but now they always feel overwhelming to me. I avoid all types of motion pictures.

So, I read.

Not Home for the Holidays

November 30th, 2025

“All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?” – from “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles

Three of us sat at the dining room table for Thanksgiving dinner: Karin, Asher, and me. Our holiday meal was simple. We had chicken, a green bean casserole, zucchini fries, and a yogurt dessert that Karin had dreamed up. I think Asher, our nearly five-year-old grandson, actually ate mac and cheese, but at least he ate with us. Karin and I have three children. None of them were able to be with us on Thanksgiving. Our tiny gathering in no way resembled the Normal Rockwell painting from The Saturday Evening Post in 1943. I suspect that almost no Thanksgiving dinners look like what Rockwell idealized.

Thanksgiving is a strange beast. It is officially a secular event with all the trappings of a religious holiday. It commemorates the first Thanksgiving in 1621 when Pilgrim colonists in Massachusetts shared a feast with members of the Wampanoag tribe. The original gathering has a symbolic and mythical status. The current holiday is supposed to be an occasion for people to share food with others and express gratitude for what they have. It is also an opportunity to overeat, binge-watch TV, and then buy unnecessary consumer goods the following day. Thanksgiving is a day full of contradictions. As such, it is profoundly American.

Karin and I said a Christian prayer before we ate our meal with Asher. Then we recited a Japanese Buddhist verse that we learned from our friends, Senji and Gilberto, long ago. We chanted “Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo” three times, and then we joined hands with Asher and said, “Froelich heisst beim Abendessen: Guten Appatit!” (a German phrase that Karin learned as a child that roughly translates to: “Happy means at dinner ‘have a good appetite'”.

Years ago, before Asher entered our lives, I used to go with a small group of people from the American Legion to visit patients in the psych ward at the local VA hospital. We went there every Tuesday evening for a couple hours to spend time with the vets. Around the holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, the ward was packed full of patients. Holidays that emphasized being with family and friends were particularly painful for veterans who had no loved ones. The loneliness that these vets could somehow keep in check during most of the year overwhelmed them, and they wound up in a hospital ward loaded up with strangers who felt equally forgotten. I’m glad that I had the chance to spend a few hours with these men and women. We shared our common humanity for a little while, and I learned things from them.

Our culture and our technology encourage us to remain isolated. We need to be physically together at least once in a while. I give thanks for Asher and Karin for being in my life every day. I look forward to being with others too.