My friend Henry is dead. I just heard. Looking back it’s been thirty years since we last spoke. Henry was not Polish, he was a “Fucking, black dirt, Polock.” He made that clear to anyone who was confused.

He had a bad temper, and he liked to fight. He may be the only guy I ever met who liked to fight more than me. We used to dust it up on hot summer afternoons, when it was too hot to breathe in the grimy and dark welding shop. Those were the days we’d cause a mild commotion in the back by the racks of flat iron, and we’d dance our way out the big overhead door and into the gravel and mud covered parking lot.

We’d hit each other a few times, someone would draw first blood, the boss would run out, all pissed off, separate us, hand me a couple of bucks and send me on a beer run. I’d find Henry out back in our spot on my return, sitting under a sprawling oak tree, out by the heavy I-beam ramps we’d built for working under heavy trucks and dozers and backhoes, and stuff like that.

Cracking a cold Genesee Cream Ale and splitting the six pack, not enough to get drunk, just enough to cool off. We agreed the beer tasted better when the boss paid for it. “Remember, you have to give the boss a little shit every now and then or he’ll think he owns you. When we fight, he gets scared. That’s good for us, plus, it was too hot to breathe in there today. This is better, and we are still getting paid!”

I learned a lot of the world view, according to Henry, under that tree. A devout Catholic, he could drink and fight all Saturday night, but on Sunday morning he’d be in church on a knee praying for forgiveness. I was puzzled often by the whole, seemingly endless sin-prayer-forgiveness-sin-prayer-forgiveness cycle. I guessed I’d never make it as a good Catholic. He possessed a deep fear of God, respect for women and right and wrong. I always admired the morality of a man who was as immoral as me, but still possessed a juxtaposing righteousness.

He was faithful to his wife of many years but had an eye for the ladies. On the rare day a pretty woman would find her way into the shop, lost or dropping off a part, Henry would remove his hat and leather gloves, and wipe the grime on his palms and fingers into his shirt, and offer the handshake of a true gentleman. He’d watch them drive off with a boyish gleam in his eye, “Ain’t no crime in looking!”

We found a bag of money once. About $50,000. A fortune in 1980. I instantly had a summer planned that did not involve Henry, the boss or that welding shop. Henry said we had to find the owner and return it. “What if it’s some old lady’s life savings?” The cops found the owner. Some NY City thug named ‘Lucky,’ no lie. I was pissed. Henry was convinced I’d feel better in time for doing the right thing. I never did.

He had a code, and believed a part of salvation came with a “Good Monday morning beer shit…”

We did a lot of work for the Hasidics when they began to move from Brooklyn to Orange County. We were more amused by the strange newcomers, many years before the community, Kirus Joel, Henry called it “Curious Joel,” became such a bitter controversy. One day a rabbi from the village was in the shop, talking to the boss about some work he needed done at the new boy’s school. Henry was welding on a backhoe bucket on a bench in the back of the shop. I heard his sparking arc stop.

Out of nowhere, off came Henry’s helmet, and hat, then gloves and he walked quickly to the front of the shop. I thought he was going to take a swing at the rabbi. Pointing a finger at the rabbi’s chest, Henry interrupted the conversation with the boss, “Is it true you people can only fuck with a sheet between you with a hole in it?” The rabbi laughed hard, the boss, about to piss his pants, laughed harder, and the rabbi replied—loudly, “Don’t you believe it!” Henry stood there, his hands on his hips and said, “Good, that’s good!” He turned and went back to welding on his bucket. Through conversations, over the years, I learned that proper married fucking was important to Henry. He had, like, a dozen kids. Other people’s religion didn’t confront Henry, as long as they didn’t fuck through a hole in a sheet.

The man was a master welder, a savant. I commented one time that if he’d gone to college, he would have been a great engineer. He laughed and said that the engineers often came to him for help, why should he waste his time in school. Possibly the most impressive thing I noticed about my friend Henry was how completely unimpressed he was. He never met a machine or mechanical drawing or mechanical device he couldn’t decipher and understand intimately.

One day we were working at the new sewer plant construction, outside Warwick. We both liked the gig; both of us far more accustomed to doing repairs on old, decayed, operating sewer plants, than new clean ones. You’d have to have worked on an operational sewer plant to appreciate the difference. An engineer called us into his trailer office and presented us with a table full of blueprints and plans. There were serious problems with the design. We were asked to look over the plans and design some repairs and workarounds. The engineer asked Henry how long it would take to fix. Henry took off his dirty, polka dot welding cap, scratched his head, looked deeply at the plans, lifted his head back up and asked the engineer, “How long did it take you to fuck it up?”

We were left alone after that, never another word, some days they brought us coffee in the morning or beer in the afternoon.

I need to go find an oak tree to sit under, and 1980 again, and pour a Genny Cream Ale on the ground and listen to some of The Maxie Schmulevich’s Polka hour.

It was a good time being your friend, Henry.

It wasn’t always like this, the rush and commotion and panic and dread of something so meaningless.

No, it was simpler, because it was a simpler time. A scary a-bomb time, but simpler. The season was shorter and It was less important, because it isn’t important at all. It is a holiday.

A man could make a hundred dollars a week and put his hands in his pockets and jingle his car keys and coins and feel himself a success. A one-hundred dollar a week man would still have a boss, but he could maintain some semblance of dignity. A well-paid man.
At a hundred dollars a week a man could own a car and a house and have a wife and family and a black and white TV set that worked more often than not. On the nights the TV worked, which was most nights, the man could listen to Walter Cronkite and see pictures of John Glenn blasting off into space hear stuff that made him worry about the Russians. The man took a shakey comfort, and a cumbersome pride in being an American. Something I never quite understood, though I sure I was supposed to understand it.

About a week before Christmas, each year, I’d accompany the man and we’d walk deep into the woods. Everything that was alive the previous summer was dried and dead, and our feet would crunch the hoarfrost on the leaves and twigs, and we’d break footsteps in the white rine of the frozen dirt. A week before the festive day, not a month or two months; a week.

He’s take out his oiled and sharp knife and carefully cut a big armful of scotch-pine boughs, while reminding me of the importance of caring for my tools. Tools were precious, much more than an implement to break free a bolt and nut or cut a branch.
Few greater sins confronted me as a boy than a socket or ratchet or a knife left out in the rain to rust. Tools were generational and inherited, and they came with an obligation to care for them. A lineage was completed when a hand grasped the grimy carbon steel. I touched the same steel as my father’s father, and in a way I felt the callouses of that hand in my hand. When he did buy a wrench, or a knife, it came with an expectation it would last at least three lifetimes.

He owned two sets of outdoor lights, with maybe ten bulbs in each. A similar set was in the charge of his wife, and she dutifully attended to the tree inside. We’d weave his lights into the carefully nailed-up pine that framed the front door. Sometimes his wife would decorate the pine with bows and shiny balls. The front door, a kind of no man’s land where the responsibilities of indoor and outdoor decoration commingled.

The lights were the big and ancient and primitive kind. Fire-code breaking lights of red and blue and green, with bulbs hot enough to burn skin and peel paint. He would point out the Underwriters Laboratory tag, with a strange pride, implying and assuring me they were safe. But he’d turn them on at 5 p.m. and off an hour or two later, fearing to burn them any longer would set the fresh pine on fire.

I spent most of my Christmases as a boy waiting for the house to burn down from those sketchy lights inside and out. I came to realize it must be a important holiday to put so much at risk, but the meaning was then and is now lost to me.

There seemed to be a little more baby Jesus and mangers and wise men and a lot less retail involved in his day than mine. None of it, then or now, made a damn bit of sense to me, aside from the agency created between me being good for a few weeks, and some fat man in a red suit.

And the whole thing start to finish lasted maybe two weeks, and that was a lot, then we’d take down the deadly two strands of lights and burn the pine boughs in a barrel and that was the end of it.

I knew him as a young man, less than forty when he died and today, he’d be nearly one hundred. I feel myself a time traveler of sorts stranded between two worlds, his and mine. The path between them so muddied and blurred I wonder at times if either existed or exists. But each year about this time I go to the woods alone to cut pine boughs.

That’s pretty much all I know about Christmas.

One of the toughest and bravest guys I ever met spent the Battle of the Bulge, WWII, shitting his pants, literally.

He was a 19 year old gunnery sergeant from Chester, NY. The most anti-war person I’ve ever met. He didn’t want to go to war, he wanted to milk cows and play basketball and go on dates with girls in cars.

I always found his story remarkable; here was a guy who really was a hero, who volunteered to go to fight the Nazi’s, then came home to work as a plumber and try to never talk about any of it again.

Someone told me he was awarded some medals. I never saw them. I think he threw them away. He didn’t have to go to war, he had a farm deferment, but he told me it felt wrong to stay home while other kids went to die.

This guy had every right to wave flags and brag and talk down to an obnoxious young hippie in the ’70’s, but he never did.

When we did talk about war, a handful of times in the forty or so years I knew him, Frank spent his time instilling in me the need to examine the motives of our government and others, to truly understand that war was not some bullshit you saw on TV or the movies. War is a crime on an unfathomable scale.

Frank didn’t watch war movies. He tried once to watch Saving Private Ryan, he had to leave the theater. When we talked about that movie he turned pale and shook…I’ll never forget seeing him like that.

People, American kids and German kids were there for reasons they did not understand and many were dying brutal painful deaths. I saw these deaths through his eyes and words.

Frank B. Currier. The bravest, most humble and thoughtful son-of-a-bitch I ever met.

That’s my salute to veterans.

I know this kid named Oz. He’s from Honduras. One of the finest young men I’ve ever known. A good, solid, honest and decent and trustworthy man.

At one point in his life he was “illegal,” he’s now a proud American citizen .

My friend Carlos, he was illegal too, he’s been a citizen since the 90’s. A man with a deep understanding of what it means to be an American. Another good man, a man I’ve been proud to call my friend for many years.

I remember the day Carlos passed his citizenship test; how proud he was, how relieved he was. I remember how hard he studied, how proud I was of him.

My point is simple. I know there are some scumbags trying to cross the border in Mexico. There are also some very good guys who will come here and work hard and raise families and work to earn that title American Citizen.

I was always a little ashamed that this title was bestowed on me simply by slipping out of a birth canal and landing in Goshen, NY, while these guys risked their lives to get here – literally put their lives on the line.

I was told the stories of being smuggled by Coyotes, the inhuman conditions, families piled in box-trucks like cattle – some didn’t make it.

Carlos said he knew the dream was worth it. Oz said the same.

They busted their asses off and worked at some seriously shitty jobs and studied and worked even harder to become Americans.

It would be real good if some of the Patriots could take five minutes to talk to some guys like Oz and Carlos. Talk to guys who know what it’s like to still see the United States as the mansion on the hill.

Maybe then they would appreciate the beauty of what they have. Maybe then the Patriots could replace their cowardice with respect. Maybe then they could actually act like Americans.