Great Garloo, The Meeting Birds, and a Visit to the Coalbin- Tales of Christmas

If I asked any of my young grandsons to describe what coal is, they would probably point me toward a bag of Kingsford briquettes near the outdoor grill. Or maybe Google it or ask Siri and produce more information than I would ever like to digest on the subject.  But they wouldn’t know what a chunk of anthracite coal looks like or feels like, all shiny black and leaving dark dusty traces on everything it touched; they would not know what a room full of coal looked like, or coal-2appreciate how much of a part of our everyday lives it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Heating a home with coal is something you won’t find much in use today, at least not in Chicago, but in the 1950’s and 60’s it was pretty common on the west side. Coal fired boilers heated water in pipes that led to radiators in every room and hallway. Those radiators were the warm spots in otherwise drafty houses; school kids quickly learned that they were the best places to get dressed on cold winter mornings.

We had a coal bin in the basement of our two flat. It was a big room, more than half the basement, and in the early fall the coal company would drop a small mountain of coal in the alley behind our house. They also dropped off a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a lone black man. He would move the mountain, coalmanone barrow load at a time, into that room, through a basement window. When he had packed the room floor to ceiling, wall to wall, he would roll up the canvas tarp that ran from the alley to the window and wait for the coal truck to pick him up at day’s end.  He never spoke and no one spoke to him and I think it was the only time I saw a black man in my neighborhood. I was about ten years old.

How the coal got from that bin to the boiler was up to me and my brothers. On winter nights we would fill buckets with a small shovel and drop them into the open hatch of this creature next to the boiler called a “stoker”.  It resembled a VW bug without wheels and it held about twenty buckets of coal. The stoker fed coal slowly all night to keep the boiler burning and the water hot.  And at the other end of this process was the burnt out coal, fused with other lumps into something we called “clinkers” because, well, they clinked when you hit them together. Clinkers needed to be raked from the bottom of the furnace regularly and then be dumped outside. They also served, once ground up, as a poor man’s rock salt, making it easier for cars to get through snow.

And that leads to my first Christmas story…the night my father, being in a playful mood no doubt inspired by a few holiday Budweisers, decided on a late night visit to the coal bin. He placed a lump of very dusty coal in each kids stocking before my mother got around to filling them. When she awoke on Christmas morning, she was greeted by children whose faces, hands, pajamas and robes were covered in black coal dust. I recall she was not very happy.

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Christmas in our two flat was celebrated on two levels. On the first floor, my Grandmother’s floor, we held the entire living room captive with our Lionel train set. On the second floor, where most of my family dwelled, was the rest of Christmas.  The tree in the front window, mounted in a metal cylinder stand with three colored lights, fabricated by some long ago fireman buddy of my dad. The Christmas manager lived in one of the bookcases, the night sky backdrop coming from a roll of blue Red Cross cotton packaging with saliva activated silver stars pasted on. Italian lights had not been invented yet, so our lights were all on the tree, plugged into one impossibly overloaded outlet, ala Christmas Story. Stockings were hung across the living room mantle, in order of age.

My mother was a Christmas mastermind on almost every level you could conceive. With a family of eight children, she somehow managed the entire process from buying the gifts to hiding the gifts, to getting them all correctly placed in the living room, each set of gifts placed for each child in a clearly marked area corresponding to the placement of their stocking,. She knew what the Christmas season, with all of its hype, did to us. It turned normally well behaved little Catholic boys and girls into shrill, self-centered and above all greedy little SOBs, driven half-mad to locate their gifts prior to the Big Day.

Jesus and Mary and Joseph were the reasons for the season, or so the nuns told us at school, but as the day approached, we continued to regress.  Ironically, the Church was said to have invented the placement of Christmas Day on the 25th of December to offset the pagan rituals of that time of year. But by Christmas Eve we were mostly proper little pagans, eager for our loot.

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Tom, Gil, and Bill with the family train set.

The train set was another story, another little world really. Those Lionel train sets were iconic in the 1950’s and 60’s. I’m guessing every kid-occupied house in our neighborhood had one. But while most of them chugged in a circle around the tree, ours was an oval layout some ten feet long by five feet wide, and in the middle of that space was a rapidly growing little town known as Plasticville. The Bachmann Company, seeing opportunity from those millions of train sets, made these snap together buildings that needed no glue and could be easily disassembled and stored.

It started with a small replica of a malt shop with the name Frosty Bar, but each Christmas my brothers and I asked for more and more buildings and Santa delivered. My mother, perhaps not wanting to see the town go to hell, also located a church that played Silent Night, and soon became the center of town. The little town hit boom times when my Uncle Jimmy, then a bachelor living in the basement apartment, began to date a widow named Marsha. Marsha, later Aunt Marsha, owned a hobby shop on Chicago Avenue. Jackpot.  Our little town soon featured an oil well that bubbled, switch tracks, and anything else Jimmy could buy to further his cause with his new love.

We were geeks, to be sure, and played almost the entire Christmas vacation with the train set, complete with figures we painted, named, and assigned various positions in town. Being boys, of course, meant the town required destruction two or three times each day.  The Attack of the Giant Dog, featuring the current puppy, was a favorite, as was frequent invasions from our collection of green army soldiers. But the absolute best was the Christmas our sister Maureen, now working for the phone company, bought us Great Garloo, a battery operated plastic robot monster just made for the job of destroying small towns.  Old Garloo could be depended upon to pick up houses and drop them on other houses, push speeding trains off tracks, topple light towers, and generally strike terror into the small plastic hearts of the town’s occupants.  Heck, it was usually too cold to go outside anyway. garloo

We were typical kids of our time, getting limited outside information from the scarce programming on our black and white television sets and radios. Telephones were still pretty much the property of adults and off limits to us, and our world centered on our home and church and school and extended no further than the range of our bicycles. But there were lots of kids on our block and in our schools, and I think we were sort of “rough around the edges” city kids. I think we thought of ourselves as tough kids, whether or not we really were.

My mother wanted nice kids, not tough kids, and she tried, like most mothers, to keep alive our belief in Santa Claus as long she could. Not easy when there are so many different ages in one household and some know the truth. She told us from the beginning of Advent that “Santa was watching”, but we knew he couldn’t be everywhere.  My brother Billy was convinced that it was a tale concocted to drive our good behavior, nothing more than a scam.  He asked her one day how Santa could see everything, be everywhere, like God, for crying out loud. And that was when my mother pulled out the Meeting Birds.

She pointed to the electric wire outside the kitchen window, where sat a flock of sparrows. She asked us if we ever noticed how they seem to be discussing things with each other, turning their heads, chirping? These were the Meeting Birds.

The sparrows on the wire, she told us, were looking in our windows, observing our behavior all day long, comparing notes with each other, and then flying back to Santa to record their observations. Did we notice how they weren’t there at night? They weren’t just mentally challenged birds, unable to figure out how migration worked. They worked for the Big Guy! We were stopped cold in our tracks. Santa was an abstract, maybe a legend, but you could see the damn birds right outside your window. What if she was right?  You would not want to take that chance.

It was and still is an artful and inspired bit of parenting.   10342660-pigeons-on-the-wire

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Christmastime always pulls us back to our homes, to our beginnings, our families and their stories. As the world gets crazier, colder, louder, more dangerous, and as information washes over us in ever increasing waves, memories of those Christmases become a very dear safe harbor. To be sure, time softens the edges of those memories, drops disappointments to the rear, and air brushes out any pain and discomfort that certainly had to accompany the joys of those days. Time acts like a salve, dulling the aches and enhancing the good memories.

Leo Tolstoy, the author of Anna Karenina once wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I am grateful looking back through those years that my family was like so many other happy families we knew. I remember we seemed a simple people, closer to poor than wealthy, but not really wanting for much.  We had our common faith, we had our jobs or our schoolwork, and we had good friends and good neighbors. We felt safe, even if it was the safety that comes from being insulated and protected from most of the world.

As families grow up, the children go down many different paths, achieve different levels of education, accrue different amounts of material wealth, live in different zip codes, and sometimes have different values. But when I think of those long ago Christmas days, I always see my brothers and sisters as sort of the same child and the child looks and sounds a lot like me.  As if somehow we were just one child and we were happy.  If there is magic in Christmas, it lives somewhere around there.

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Orbit

 

 

 

Walking alone in the crystal Arizona dawn his senses came calling.

He felt a moment: summer slipping, autumn gaining.

And he wished he had the gift to write it, but he didn’t.

So I did.

It works like this:

We stand on the earth as it spins and orbits

We don’t ever feel it.

New seasons dawn unseen and we turn to look back.

But sometimes we see,

Our senses wake and we feel the tiny shift of a few degrees.  Smile at the fog which is our breath.

Notice surprised the first tree blazing.

The gentle breeze after too many frigid ones. First buds.

We note where the sun finally sat tonight.

We orbit through life, only now and then noting time or sign and one day, one instant,

we get off the earth and look over and say,

“Thanks for the ride” and the earth smiles back, continues on its unending route.

And we begin to trace our own timeless orbit where there is no need of season

and no markers matter.

Famine Walls

 

 

 

 

I was standing at the base of a rocky green mountain in the austere, blustery region of Ireland known as Connemara, my eyes tracing the low rock walls that started from the base of the mountains and wound their way to the top. They were straight walls, about the height of a man and maybe two feet thick, made of countless stones and with no earthly reason for being there. There was a wall every hundred yards or so, each tracing a route to the top of the mountain.

I was listening to the tour guide explain how these walls came into being and I found myself getting angry. These were Famine Walls and they were built during the Famine of the 1840s as a means to keep the hungry masses out of the estates of the landowners. We learned it was the usually homeless Catholics who built the walls, for a few scraps to eat. According to our guide, massive, largely pointless work projects like the Famine Walls and the Famine Roads kept the masses barely alive during the four years that the potato crop failed. The British rule had proclaimed that the poor had to work for sustenance and not be given charity. And that stoked my growing anger.

I have a long fuse. It takes a lot to provoke me and I think the last time I threw a punch was in eighth grade, but the anger was welling up and I could not tell you from what source. I am a second generation American of Irish descent and a Catholic, but that wasn’t it. I grew up in a mostly Catholic, largely Irish Chicago neighborhood, but it seemed in the 1950’s and 60’s that it was more important to be an American, just as it had for the generation before. The things we took pride in were American things: landing on the moon, winning the world war, JFK, our position as world leader, our great democracy.

On top of that, immigrants to the United States have always known the importance of assimilation, of becoming part of the American Dream. With assimilation comes access to better jobs, more education, bigger homes, and opportunities denied to those just “off the boat.”   The Irish knew this better than most, and cemented themselves into power in Chicago and elsewhere. It seemed to me that only in the last twenty or thirty years and with a new generation on board that we amped up our celebration of heritage, with bagpipes, Irish dancing, and an ever escalating emphasis on St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish.

So I was much more American than Irish. But the anger was there, anger against the British. Those were the same British I had been taught were America’s Best Friends. Our Cousins. Our staunch allies in two wars, the country that produced Winston Churchill, that stood alone against the Nazi menace. The same country whose language we spoke.  Now I was both angry and confused.

Those British who managed to turn the Great Famine into a near genocide were long gone… gone even before my grandparents were born in Ireland, but there was a connection to them I did not recognize until that day. And it was not an intellectual connection, but an emotional one.  But from where? Was it some faint echo of the emotions of my ancestors who perhaps had to help build those walls? Was it a lost fragment of the passion that caused someone in my family tree to pick up an IRA rifle in 1918?  Was it the dim memory of the shame and hatred one feels when you are part of a class that others look upon as lesser beings because you are poor, or Catholic, or both?

We are who we are, as defined by our behavior, our values, our duties and station in life, and those we love; but we are also the accumulation of so many other lives already lived and ended.  Our DNA is the blueprint that dictates our physical appearance, our health, lifespan and more. That accounts for tall people and short people, red hair and no hair, ears like car doors, and all things physical.  It is passed along, parts of it refined, parts of it suppressed from generation to generation, strands from mothers and fathers comingling with their pasts and forming new variations that become us.

But do memories, thoughts, and feelings somehow come along for this genetic ride? Can the anger, shame and fear felt by the hungry workman on the Famine Walls be passed along not just in stories and songs, but in our souls?  Can powerful memories somehow imbed themselves in that complex genetic coding, invisible and undetectable to even the most intuitive of scientists? Or are these feelings only lurking like ghosts at the foot of that Connemara mountain, waiting to inspire emotions only when you actually get to that place on the map?

I’ll never know. My anger cooled and I shifted my attention to the more pleasant things to see and do in Ireland; especially the precious time we could spend with my sisters’ families. My sisters returned to Ireland as young women and have spent their adult lives there, raising their families. They retain their American pride, but they are much more Irish than I, and that’s as it should be. But I still recall the unexpected visit from an anger I did not even know existed, and I wonder if, in fact, I am more Irish than even I know.

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