Merry Almost Christmas, dear stalker/perp

I know you're like the gift that keeps on giving.
I know that you think and will still think that your little love notes left on the chairs to me must be having an effect, otherwise why would I be composing this brief response?
I know you must believe in your heart, such as it is, that you're accomplishing something by your behaviors and tactics such as the above.
And I wish I could make your dreams come true. But I'm not God. And, as I hope you know, neither are you. But if your prayers, what e'er they be, are truth in spirit, then God may grant you exactly what you want, as only you and He know what exactly they may be.

From my vantage point, I cannot grant you whatever you want to happen. Who knows, if you'd ever,  over the last 21 years or the last five when you got actively involved in your chicanery, let anyone know what it actually you want to occur, redress, undo, whatever...no matter if it's based in righteousness, truth and justice, it might evoke some sympathy if nothing else.

But, as it is, you're only evidencing some very good and clever skills as a prankster and a stalker. This, of course, makes you also a perpetrator. And if you are who I think (know) you are, being a  perpetrator is not foreign territory in the map of your life.

We all have made tens of thousands of mistakes in each of our lives, for which God will provide the opportunity for refinement and purification to those souls whom He knows yet longs for Him. I pray for you to receive a sense of the innocence, vulnerability, poverty and promise this Christmas that we celebrate in the birth of God incarnate, as a baby.

And, if you're the Christian I hope you are, you'll extend that prayer my ways as befits those of us who profess Him Lord.

Now that we're "sharing"....forgive the fast forward.

I thought I might illuminate a few instances of my youthful memories, out of sequence as is my perogative as bloghost, in order to point out that most of us have some fairly unpleasant and extremely formative events that shape who we become, whether from childhood or from our adult experiences.

As I might or not have made clear, my dad, after having a vessel sunk underneath him and surviving, was altered forever. He had some local help, but from anecdotal stories from his youngest brother, when he was sixteen he was a comic of the first order, having frustrated his father from some indiscretion by climbing a tree. But not like Zaccheus, he was up there to avoid a whupping. My uncle's recollection doesn't say whether my grandfather was amused or not. My grandfather was definitely not amused when, after a drunken brawl that my dad and his virtual twin brother (his next oldest sibling), both swabs, helped instigate at an Army bar outside of Fayetteville that first engaged the MP's and local deputies, but then had the outcome of the Sheriff calling upon my grandfather, a locally respected figure, informing him that my dad, the youngest, was to be banished from the whole of Cumberland County. He left on a train to Texas immediately.

Here are the two unpleasant realities of the cumulative fates my father endured:
When we (my sister and I) were approaching bed time one night when we were not even adolescents) Dad came home snockered as usual, got mad at Mom (as usual), escalated the  fulcrum of the dispute (which us kids had no idea was, other than his arriving drunk as usual), compelled us kids to both come to the door of the kitchen only to see our father pull the longest, fattest steak knife out of the cupboard and advance towards Mom. What to do? I grabbed my sister (an act of self-preservation that I've regretted nonetheless the outcome ever since) and bolted out the front door past the convent and down the front lawn of St. Leo's School to the driveway of the rectory.

Like a miracle our Mom pulls up in her car, sweeps us up and assuringly takes us to her and our best friend's house for the night. Survival at the primal level. But as we now know is normal, Mom relented and we were back at home within a day or two.

Two: my sister and I are both teen-aged. Dad's somehow survived his alcoholism and a head on collision on the Nimitz (now I-80) immediately after a stomach-ectomy from acute ulceritis. He recuperates.

But the demon is relentless. So one evening, it was still light in California, he shows up early, drunk. That is now a given. As I recall there are some loud and contentious words exchanged in dispute, but that also was standard operating procedure. But their argument is taken upstairs and becomes more audiobly violent. I choose to go upstairs and burst through their bedroom door. Dad is at once both violent and embarrassed. Mom is, if I recall correctly, clothed and on their bed sideways. My dad is compelled to explain to me that he was violent only because his wife refused his entrities of affection. I'm old enough to do the math.
Unexpectedly, he moves toward my mother as if that declaration to all was sufficient to rectify his behavior. But I, maybe fourteen/fifteen, stand in his way and make it verbally clear that whatever he wanted was not going to eventuate. He sobs.]
I don't recall the rest of the evening.

WHAT SWEETER MUSIC, what bitter irony

Our Schola performed Mark Hayes' WHAT SWEETER MUSIC for our annual Nativity Concert this afternoon. We also added some single pieces prior. This has been a quite taxing year and fall/winter. Happily, this cantata, as all of Mark Haye's work is demanding but not esoterically demanding.
The audience that came was beyond expectation, even after 21 years of concertizing for both paschal and nativity seasons. We printed 200 programs and they were virtually all taken up. Thank you, people of TCCoV. The concert came in at about an hour ten.
For my part, I was so proud of my basses, the two of them, who so kept in sync and never missed some very exposed entrances on David Basden's amazing AVE MARIA. And so enamoured of my wife (and daughter), but when my wife of soon forty years sailed up to high G's, I couldn't have been more humbled to be her husband. The remainder of the concert, not recorded by any of us, will be told by those in attendance. It's spirit was so ALIVE.
The irony. As soon as the concert was over I had to leave to do music ministry for our mission church out in Goshen. Why is that ironic? The two people who, by deliberate action of their own volition precipitated the dismissal of two incredible Christians and musicians from our team, and who ultimately desire the implosion and destruction of 21 years of music ministry of which one of them was invited to rejoin after a self-imposed resignation, had the hubris to attend the concert. What did they expect to encounter? Disarray? Open wounds from their assault upon the parish integrity? Well, look, listen and behold. Weave your false web of deceptions and falsehoods and self-righteous condemnation, we are NOT GOING AWAY. We are of Christ. I cannot say to whom you've sworn allegiance. We sing for Christ, the Living Son of God, the founder of our Church and the path to the Father Almighty. That's it. Either you get that or you don't. But, in ironic parody of the civil rights anthem, "You sha'n't overcome."
Do well. Seek forgiveness and repentence as all of us have. The injury you so lament was self-inflicted and whatever salve you seek in civil society cannot, therefore, be expected from the Lord of Life. I have turned cheek after cheek and will proceed to continue thus. But you will not prevail. Because the power of Christ will compel you to cease your infestation. Repent now, while you can. Because I will still go to Goshen because of you, I will not renounce nor relent from what I know, in my heart, is right and of God.
I hope you enjoyed what part of the concert you stayed to hear. It truly was sweeter music than the discord you have played for years, if not decades. For my part, I truly wish peace upon your souls. I can do no further.

Oh yeah, where was I? 1951-

I sequentially resume my exploration of "me" with my earliest memories. It is difficult to ascertain whether they are actual or anecdotal, but who cares?

Mom told me I was born at around 4:30am at Kaweah Delta (what it must've been like then!) on the Fifth of July in year of our Lord 1951 Christian calendar. I have no idea whether Dad was in the USA or "in country" undersea off the Korean peninsula in the Flying Fish.

In any case, I do surmise that in the interim between Mom and Dad's marriage around '48 (I'm too lazy to document) that some sort of rubrics must've evolved because Mom and I were consigned to live in the Quonset Hut Village where COS main campus now sits at 198 and Mooney. It was standard military housing for dependents, so there had to be a reason Mom/Dad chose that living option over any public or family option with my grandparents. Hope Amah explains it to me one cosmic day in the hereafter. If you don't know what a Quonset hut is, it's basically half of a very large unpapered Campbell's soup can that can be plopped down on any relatively flat geography, uh, like the whole San Joaquin Valley. I assume the Navy contractors did the minimal foundational work: plumbing, some insulation, windows. Google 'em.

But what they didn't do was air-conditioning. My only true infantile memories are of windows on the side of the can, from which one could see another can. Other than that, the running gag was my first words parodied or parroted my mother's most ubiquitous utterance for the interminable summers in Visalia (May to November)-"DAMN FLIES!" Since one of the great weaknesses of my moral fiber is the tendency to cuss, I have no reason to doubt my mother's telling.

I do remember the heat. It seems natural. When Dad was on leave we must've taken a road trip to his parent's swamp house in Eastover NC, and that meant a trip along 66 in a sedan with one of those cylinder water coolers hung upon the front passenger window, and one or two desert bags full of water. That water, if needed between Barstow and New Mexico wasn't meant for human consumption, but for the car's radiator. But as an infant and by our second trip cross-country with a little sister (Marva) we seemed to accept the misery with stoicism that came naturally from parents and their parents who survived the Depression. But back to Visalia....

I vaguely remember, but am absolutely remember that when the conflict was over and Dad was back at home, we rented a little cottage house somewhere between Giddings and  Locust, likely on one of those parallel streets south of Noble of 198 like Kaweah St. I do have visual memories of that house, conceptually. I must have acquired by contrast to the  tin can life we had '51-'53.

I do have photographic evidence of the confluence of the nascent Culbreth and Smith families with the Hamiltons (my maternal grandparents) in the form of snapshots of family gatherings, I suspect Easter days, at the Johnson House where my great-grandparents, whom I only knew as Ma and Pa Whipple, my Amah's parents (I think my great-grandmother was a "Hannah") lived. She was already declining and wheel-chair bound and my memories whisper to me that she lived and saw the real coming of age of America. Perhaps like my grandfather's people from Freedom PA they migrated west during the 19th century, but that both of them were aged by WWI and lived into the fifties (Hannah) and the sixties (Pa) has to prove they knew America in the wild, the best and worst of times. Anyway, snapshots were taken of the whole mixed clan at Johnson House, along with my new cousins, Jen and Skip Smith (scions of Chief Bosun Bill Smith and my Zampa's apparent golden daughter, Andru Hamilton. We were a handsome extended, white Middle Class clan, all smiles that likely were a respite from deeply rooted familial conflicts.

Outside of these recollections, not much of pre 1955 Visalia has ever surfaced to me.

But then comes the move to Kingsburg, and eventually to Oakland. From one web to another. But Oakland became the prime mover (besides God) of my entire life.

These are a few of my least favorite things.....

Florid, pedantic, ephemeral essays that are really kissing cousins, metaphorically, to snake oil pitches extoling the virtues of the traditional Mass as Pius X as he intended it to be reformed after 500 years.
In other words, "elephant talk."

People that are totally unaware of the truth in the cliche that "Half of life means just showing up!"

Clerical princesses.

Carey Landry songs in hymnals. Children's collections, okay.

OCP's penchant and nack for saving the chaff and throwing out the wheat in their hymn product repertoires.

The Big Three's inability, or more likely, disinclination (disincentive?) to find a truly inspiring Mass setting that meets both the criteria of SttL and Tra le sollecitudine.

When I revert to behaving poorly, acting instead of merely being; as if the whole of the world is mine, and it must conform to me as its headliner and star.

Critics who display not an ounce of creativity, not even in their strategic deployment of words, in their own personal lives.

The word "hermeneutic."

Oh, and "tradition" when it's obviously meant to function as a truncheon.

Folks who're sure that they've never said or done anything that is self-contradictory.

When redemption is stolen from this world and consigned to one more "pie in the sky."

Suicide.

For that matter, all words ending in "...cide."

Any furtherance of unwarranted negativity. I bid this post "adieu."

I'm skipping to THE Christmas Tree

Sorry for the "time warp" jump, but it's after the BIG MASS for Our Lady of Guadalupe, I'm exhausted and my mind wanders. Being a card-carrying child of the SIXTIES, I have very specific memories of my teenage years. Somewhere around '62 aluminum Christmas trees became a rage. One easily supposes that some forward thinking genuis pushed the environmental envelope way passed the ability of silk and plastic artistry to put the SPUTNIK version of Christmas Trees into American homes not only because of novelty but of its "perpetual" usefulness. In any case, both my maternal grandparents and my parents bought into it wholesale, with the four color rotating color wheel which really made it cool. And trust me, it was COOL. For some reason, both those existential trees were lost to the ravages of old age, tragedy and death's black hole where essentials of memory are swarmed into the vacuum and become memories. But I've never forgotten the virtual beauty, the 20th century elegance, of the aluminum tree. And between the genuine replicas costing 20 times what they're actually worth from cost to markup from jerk-faces like Sharper Image and Hammercher Schlemmer to the pitiful offerings of little faux tinsel versions of Walgreens, children with memories like mine are left adrift. No tree, fresh cut by yerself or acquired by a sweet deal from Grocery Outliet, can replace the Kennedy year's Aluminum Tree with the rotating color wheel for the zeitgeist of the era. Gotta be real. So, we have Christmas trees (those thin handmade ones) adorning our not so public den and grandson's room year round. They each have a specific mode of adornment, like clowns for the one in the man cave; a vesigial nod to my maternal grandfather and his second daughter, mom. But I want, I WANT to recreate the sheer coolness of having the aluminum tree and color wheel. I know where a dear friend and husband (hoarders, no doubt) have one stashed. I've repeatedly asked her and then him (he had know idea of its existence) to just sally forth into the maelstrom of the garage, but despite each promise (influenced by the offer of serious, real money) I don't think they'll find the original and transfer its ownership to me. Here's the deal: it's the last, finest vestige of the innocence of Christmas that I remember during my adolescense. I associate that tree with my first pair of wingtips, my father (surprisingly sober) helping his sophomore kid shave for the first time, my feeling worthy of being both Dad's kid and Zampa's good grandson... in other words that tree as my last recollection and signet of my transition to adulthood. So imagine the irony that, at 15, I was so proud to usher in my adulthood, which would only be zoomed in magnifcation in less than two months by my Dad's suicide. Posing for pictures by the silver tree I could wear slacks, a turtle nect green formal sweater, slacks and wingtip oxford that signified my coming of age, and feeling secure at Amah/Zampa's residence on South Grant. Maybe there was hope for my nuclear family. C'est la vie, C'est la morte. But I am hoping that karma through writing this will compel my friend to follow up on the promise made to locate that sum*itch antique aluminum tree and let a now very old man bask in the four colors dissected and radiated by the best of Alcoa. It's not life or death; I'm confident Jesus will cut me some slack on this irrational desire. And on this night of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mass was great with bishop) I say 'g'nite. I'm going sleepy.) Hope I dream of that tree at the end of South Grant that dead ends into Paradise. (Oops, pun alert)
Love to Mom, Dad, Amah and Zampa....

The pilgrimage of my soul and self, and music's influence.

Who am I, really, some of you may be curious to know? I’ll tell you what I remember and know as far as I can keep this autobiography moving towards the moment I can type no more. I was born to two misfit souls. Both of them beleaguered by pressures and expectations neither seemed to know how to cope with or fulfill. My dad was part of a huge clan of nuclear and expansive relatives in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Mom was one of only two children from sturdy and rock solid parents from Pennsylvania. But both were black-sheep to their parents via their status compared to their siblings. Dad was a sharp-minded son of a railroad official who, like me apparently, learned to diffuse daily crises with a keen humor and clownish camouflage. Mom was a truly beautiful woman who’d be celebrated as an Elle, or “real woman” size paragons of beauty nowadays. But back in her teen and crucial years, her exuberance for life was always mitigated by the societal norm that woman’s figures had to be somewhat smaller than Bacall’s and not as drastic as Vivian Leigh’s. They were both rebels in a country that still had tangible memories of the Civil War and its outcome and effect. I didn’t know until a few years ago that both of them literally rebelled against their parental and society’s dictums and strictures to extreme and profound levels. My dad, having enlisted in the Navy near the beginning of WWII, was a survivor of an USS Indianapolis-like torpedo sinking in the Pacific. He couldn’t swim, but abandoned ship and somehow “ran upon the water” to a lifeboat, or inflatable raft’s safety. As has been depicted so many times in film, he dealt with the loss of comrades and likely friends to sharks, dehydration or despair for a number of days before rescue vessels arrived. It changed him in ways I could never have known. But his older brother, a commander of a diesel sub not two miles away from the whole episode of the sinking ship, finally managed to confirm my father’s survival, sought him out when they both were ashore (probably in Australia) and nurtured him through the trauma and convinced him to relent and stay with the Navy but in submarine duty. His brother, scion of the family siblings, persuaded another southerner from Arkansas, later to become my uncle by marriage, to be my dad’s mentor on his vessel sub, the USS Flying Fish. They finished the war’s campaigns without any huge catastrophic instances by comparison to the sinking of my dad’s first vessel. To wrap up this first installment, as fate had it my uncle met my mother’s older, favored sister in dry-dock in Oakland/SF. My mom, who I was reliably told would sneak out of her bedroom window here in Visalia in the dead of night, catch the train in Hanford and go up to the Bay Area to fraternize with those swabbies on shore leave. Perhaps, as I’d like to think, she coordinated these clandestine adventures with my aunt, though my loving grandparents never relayed such stories to us kids. My aunt met, fell in love and married the Chief Petty Officer William R. Smith from Arkansas, and his protégé, my dad, met and married my aunt’s “black sheep” sister, Mom, shortly thereafter here in Visalia. They celebrated their marriage at the corner brick home at Oak and Johnson Street, then the home of my maternal great-grandparents. That house still stands to this day, though now a commercial building. Film and snapshots recorded the party afterwards. How my grandfather, a school board and college board member and relative “somebody” in the then small town of 10,000 souls in Visalia in the late forties internally reacted to both daughters marrying obvious hard-living but charmingly clever young southern rapscallions, I’ll never know. But my maternal grandfather, my namesake, was a submariner in WWI in the Atlantic. I’m sure that experience softened whatever reservations he might have had as his daughters became Naval, submariner wives. Next installment: early memories of Visalia and the Korean War effect.