William Lobb

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Dear Christmas,

Dear Christmas,

Two weeks into all this noise, and to be truthful, the decorations and stuff are bugging me. Clutter pisses me off and distracts me. It’s all looking ratty. I do like the lights, but that’s about it. If it was up to me, we could put up lights in October and leave them up until the sun comes back, but the rest of this I can do without.

Speaking of lights, what’s with these series style lights that die on the tree when it’s just one damn bulb that burns out? It’s almost 2023 for Christ’s sake. In 1958, with my dad and his sets of ten lights apiece, it was fun and amusing to watch him find the bad bulb; these big cheap sets with one or two hundred lights each is just a pain in the ass.

Gift shopping is just an absurdity. Does anyone actually shop anymore, or do they just click and ship? All year long, I buy shit. I’ve got crap I’ll never use up or wear out. I don’t need anything except car parts. If you want to buy me a gift, I know a great pick and pull junkyard. Otherwise, please click and ship to someone else.

The baby kitten is adorable, but she’s Hell-bent on tearing down any trees and decorations. It’s like her mission. I’m thinking of knocking all this stuff down and letting her have a little party. The older kitten, Tilly, has never seen you either. Tilly is as good as the baby kitten, Ethyl, is bad. Yes, Ethyl and Tilly. I think you need to be over fifty to get the side-splitting humor in that. At the very least you must have spent days home from school sick, on the couch, watching I Love Lucy reruns. Do they still run I Love Lucy? They should. Lucy was hilarious.

The best part of you used to be back at the lake. The big kids would collect all of your trees and drag them over the ice to this tiny island in the middle of the frozen swamp. Then we’d have a blazing bonfire where we’d all get drunk on whisky stolen from our parents and the boys would coerce the girls off into the woods and try to get laid. I’m sure I know some people, who are now in their fifties who were a direct result of the Great Silver Lake Post Christmas Bonfires. So, thinking about it, my favorite part of you was always watching your trees turn to sparks and head for the sky. And the next day when the great conflagration was over and all that remained was torched and blackened branches.

Everyone, literally everyone has Covid, the flu or RSV this year. Going to a party is risking your life. Even the grandboy is sick and I miss him bad, so pretty much bite me, Christmas.

Imagine if we took all the money and time and effort, we spent on tchotchke that will be lost, broken or forgotten by the Wednesday after Christmas and sent that to Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital so they could fight cancer in kids or food pantries so the seventeen million children in this country who go to bed hungry every night went to sleep with full bellies.

Oh, and something about Jesus, but the significance of him and this season is somehow lost on me.
My daughter is right. I am like old man Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life, but truthfully, as this world gets more complex and confusing every day, The Christmas Season totally baffles me.

Love, Bill

I’ve Forgotten How To Simply Be

And the muddy boy’s summer days lasted forever. The only plan ever to cross his mind was to one day, but not any particular day, be a spaceman or jump a train and be a railroad man.

How many of those endless days were spent snoozing by the cement and steel trestle looking at the countless heavy cars roll by, and how many warm nights spent looking up at the planets and stars.

This old man’s summer flashes in less than a wink. Is it because the boy lived entrenched in the moment while I’m greedily counting my remaining days, hoarding my remaining moments, like cards close to my chest, never fully present, always stumbling between the past and the future. Never here, never now.

One day, I don’t remember the day, but it was a just day and for no reason I can recall I lost the fascination with fishworms and trying to fix everything with tape and bicycles with shifters perfectly placed to neuter me. I traded the desire to fly in space with learning to drive a truck and shift a duplex B-Model Mack. Most of this, maybe all of this had something to do with girls and beer money.

When the beer money ran out and wasn’t enough I became a criminal. And there are things to enjoy about being a criminal, but not a lot and not for a long time. As a criminal I learned to fear both the days past and their stories as much as the days to come and what they will hold. I skated too much, too much for the law, too much for my own good. I touched by the law, but never caught. That’s not a good thing. It made me feel invincible and special. Truth me told I’m just lucky and white.

The days of being a criminal came to a quieter end than I deserved and I never did make it into space. I’m washed in a sadness today that I never did hop that train, never even tried. But the long drawn whistle that once called me to great adventure and spectacular things today issues a mournful fading wail and I realize the cars that are passing me now are gone forever and they ain’t ever coming back.

Sometime between the endless days of that muddy boy and fleeting days of the old man I realize I’ve that in all that noise and rage and turmoil and anxiety and planning and failure I’ve forgotten how to simply be.

Days In The Swamp Grass

The days I’ve spent bareback and barefoot in the swamp grass, muddy toes, hands behind my head as a pillow against the rough bark of an old oak. Days spent bathing mostly naked in the sunshine of a younger, kinder sun. Hiding from the old woman, perplexed that if she wanted me to waste my time cutting her cattails and reeds, why should I not, instead, waste my day doing a better nothing that suits me?

The days of my later youth spent in a fog and drug induced near coma, and the noise and crime that accompanied that life is now the soundtrack to that squandered life that plays an endless loop in a now quiet corner of my mind. The lies of a life spent running from Federales and trusting in confederates.

The harsh reality, looking at a photo album with my cousin that there are no pictures of me from that half-naked boy of seven or eight to forty years gone because I wasn’t quite here for most of that time. I was dull and translucent and finally opaque.

The news, today, just now of a friend’s death, not a good friend, just another Middletown boy, and the reality of the loss of all those days. The reality that there are more days behind me than in front of me, the very real desire to have back just one or two of those swamp grass days, and all the comatose days, and the wish that the road had taken a more honorable twist and path.

Someone will tell me I’m sure you cannot look back in anger or regret, I don’t. On days like this though, I do look back with a very real and deep sense of every moment left on the table.

November 22, 1963

November 22, 1963, best I can recall…

My dad liked Ike and my uncle Ben liked Ike, which meant, through a line I didn’t fully understand, I liked Ike too. Ike made roads and highways, and you needed roads and highways to drive your Ford on, or in Uncle Ben’s case, your Chevy. Uncle Ben had a new ‘58 Chevy, with those wide fins on the rear end and those cool sideways teardrop shaped taillights.

I remember riding in that Bel Air and thinking how much I liked the Chevy and taking a blood oath in my head to never breathe a word of this truth to anyone. The oath in my head was like the ones Dougy and I would take down by the swamp whenever we fucked up something really bad and knew it had to be kept secret into eternity, just without the blood. I’d never reveal to my dad I thought Uncle Ben’s Chevy was cool. Dad, a Ford man, was a little jealous of Uncle Ben’s fins, I think.

Bobby’s dad, Uncle Rick, he liked Fords and Chevys and even Uncle Art’s Dodges, a kind of renaissance man. I guess today they’d call him a liberal.

My dad wasn’t no damn liberal. He liked Ike, but I already said that and it’s not the point of this story, anyway.

November 22, 1963, was a Friday, I think, it’s hard to tell because the world kind of crashed to a stop that afternoon. I think it was Friday because I remember the next day I was home and there weren’t any Saturday morning cartoons on. I was kind of pissed, but then I remembered the President was dead and Ma said I shouldn’t be so upset about some goddamn cartoons.

I remember the principal came on the school PA system, about 2pm that afternoon, and managed to scare the living shit out of all us in Truman J. Moon Elementary School. We’d been in training since first grade for a Soviet Nuclear attack and as far as Dougy and I could remember, being told weekly at least, to hide under our desks when the air-raid alarm rang through the school. We were secure in the knowledge that no Soviet nuke could hurt us safe under our half-inch of plywood. Sitting at our desks and listening to the principal and now our teacher, Mrs. Garrison, crying and some news reporter guy who they’d patched into the system all crying, we figured the nukes were on us and all Hell was about to break loose.

We got out of school early and I remember I was happy about that, even though Dougy said I shouldn’t be happy, what with the President dead from the Soviets and all, but I was and I suppose I felt bad about that. I was worried about my cousin Bobby. He was way down by Goshen about ten miles away and I was hoping the Soviets wasn’t there by him either.

When we got home, Dougy and I went to wait for Kippy to get off the bus. Kippy was older and smarter than us and his dad had killed Germans in the big war, so he was kind of an authority on world affairs. Actually, pretty near everybody’s dad or uncle had been in that war, but Kippy’s dad seemed to be the one still maddest at the Germans and the Germans was as close to the Soviets as we could imagine so we figured he’d know what to do about the Soviets and nukes and the end of the world.

I was kind of pissed off by all this end of the world business, truth be told. It was just a year before the world was ending when those goddamn Soviets had boats full of nukes headed for some place called Cuba, that the President, when he was still alive, called Cuber. Me and my sister watched all that on TV too and I still spent most nights waiting for the missiles to come.

Anyway, Kippy came home, and he said it wasn’t the Soviets at all, but I was the space aliens and it was what we deserved for shooting those rockets up into their turf. We all collectively decided we’d blame Mr. John Glenn hisself for going up there and pissing off the space aliens and killing our President and it was getting dark so me and a Dougy slapped each other around for a minute or two, since it was Friday and we wouldn’t get to fight much over the weekend, what with our moms around and all that; much easier to fight in school.

I finally went home and my dad was there and even though he liked Ike, I could tell he was shook up. Seeing my dad scared was what scared me the most. He said he wasn’t scared of the Soviets or space aliens, but he was scared of the uncertainty and the government.

I called up Bobby even though it was long distance because I had to make sure he was alright. My uncle Rick said there was no Soviets in Goshen either, so I figured we were all pretty safe for the moment.

We got a new president that day and even though my dad liked Ike and didn’t like no democrats; he said we had to listen to him because we was Americans and that want we did, at least back in those days.

I didn’t fully understand what my dad was scared of but from that day in 1963 on I’ve never been one much for uncertainty or the government either and almost sixty years later we still don’t know who killed the president, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the space aliens like Kippy said.

I’m still a junkyard boy…

D.O.’s junk yard was the center of the universe and the more I pondered that thought the more it became a plausible reality to me.

The cars were a fine mix of Fords and Chevys and MoPars, old and all in some state of semi repair, as we lived the second half of the twentieth century American greaser dream.

The shop was a scattered and disheveled mess of old and broken and ‘new,’ recently scrounged and scavenged parts. It was the home we knew and the place we worked out the mastery of shade-tree mechanical engineering and applied physics, with shiny Craftsman wrenches and long, long cheater bars that often broke. When the bars did break it and would send one of us flying, in a direction opposite and perportinate to the applied force and length of said bar. These were times we’d find ourselves crossing from the world of applied physics to Newtons laws of motion, and more than a few times chaos theory.

Life was good at the junk yard, it was simple and grimy and everything, except the pretty girls, was well within our reach. The pretty girls were too smart to fall for offers of rides in loud cars with sketchy and dangerous boys.

It is a good and a very bad thing to have lived the bulk of your life within only a few miles of where you were born. The good is a deep and profound sense of home, the bad is the wither, like corn dying in a field in October, and a very real sense of the passage of the years. Standing next to my cousin the other day pondering the age of an oak tree and somehow adding or subtracting sixty some years to its age and imagining it’s height when we were boys. And seeing it now as a old and dying tree, with a few branches leafless and bare of bark and threatening to come off and bust open someone’s head.

The priorities haven’t changed much since the days of D.O., the junk is still as precious and comforting and grimy. The wrenches not so shiny, but the air is still at times full of anticipation and the joys are just as sweet.

A stunning realization bitch-slaps my face standing on the same exact spot I stood as a much younger man, a boy, on the same patch of grass growing under my boots that grew green and fresh so many years ago. Still, this late in life the boots are burned through in select spots with welding spatter, and I’m holding the same wrench in my hand that turned and broke so many ancient bolts.

All the boys are gone now, save maybe one of two, the smart girls got married to doctors and such and never looked back us the greaser boys. I’m over-washed with a sense of being a stone that has never moved and never changed while the world around me spun hopelessly out of control and into more comfortable and cleaner things. A world without broken bolts and hot slag, and the comfort of grime.

I wonder did the greaser boys, now scattered like twigs to the wind and to various spots above the ground and deep in the dirt across the country, take our traditions with them. Did they find new junkyards and other boys to hot-rod and fix broken things with or did they become old men and bankers and managers and accountants.