A Very Pirate-y Christmas
I’m grateful for a lovely Christmas with my parents. I’m grateful to be home. I’m grateful for a cold, pretty sunrise. I’m grateful for a Friday and what’s ahead. I’m grateful for the amazing opportunities that happen by. I’m grateful for new glasses and my same old coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Just fyi, this is not officially the song of the year (yet). However, since Spotify brought this version to my attention, I’ve had kind of a hard time listening to anything else. I kind of thought that’s where I was going to be headed today. I had this thing worked out in my head where I was going to tell the story of my year by just putting in links to a bunch of songs. Then I lost focus for a bit, mostly on account of Christmas, but also because of a pirate-y discovery.
Q: What do pirates love most? A: Booty.
Oh, come on, not that kind of booty. Eyes up here! The treasure chest kind of booty. I was in Iowa City with my Mom (85) and Dad (86), and my Mom casually asked at some point whether I’d be interested in my grandfather’s “notes?”
Ummmmm. Yes. I am now in possession of said notes, it’s actually about a hundred pages of typed and handwritten manuscript: He was writing the book of his life. It’s divided into sections that are neatly numbered and it’s amazing. I started reading it in the Cedar Rapids airport on the way home and was alarming my fellow passengers by laughing out loud at some of the passages.
My grandfather was born in 1911 and lived on a farm about a 40 minute drive from Madison,Wisconsin. The narrative picks up in about 1916. There are stories about riding a horse-drawn sleigh to church at Christmas and a neighbor named “Fatty” Bernander, who of course played Santa in the Christmas program. There are stories of my grandfather prompting a semi-frantic search as a 3 year old, when he was discovered missing from his room late at night. His mother rousted everyone to help find the missing boy, including the Norwegian-speaking hired hands.1 My grandfather was discovered walking back up the drive to the farm, a freshly-picked watermelon triumphantly under one arm and his trusty bulldog trailing behind.
When you want watermelon, you want watermelon.
There are stories of bicycles purchased from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, of “Pa,” (my great grandfather) reading to the boys (he had two brothers) “after the milking was done,” by the light of a gasoline lamp. There is a long account of a clandestine ski jump that was built on a hill on the farm, which drew crowds of spectators and resulted in a fairly spectacular crash by my grandfather that was unfortunately observed by his father. “Pa” cooly dealt with this risky abomination Viking-style (we are Norwegians, after all), chopping it down with an axe.
And then this story:
We got married on a very hot day in August. We had decided to go to Yellowstone Park on our honeymoon. I had a 1932 four cylinder 2 door sedan. I had hung up some curtains that could be pulled closed so we could sleep in the car if we had to. When we got to Yellowstone, there was not a cabin to rent. We parked the car crosswise to a picnic table. That evening we thought we would get dressed up and go the dance at the dance hall. It was kind of hard getting dressed up in car, but we made it.
Later, we went back to the car and went to bed. We had the curtains pulled and went to sleep. Along in the night, Bernice (my grandmother), woke up and pulled the curtain open and there stood a bear on the picnic table, only a couple of feet from the car window, looking right at us. Bernice would like to have died, so she cuddled up real close to me.
I was hoping the bear would stay longer.
I laughed out loud when I read that, and then a wave of emotion washed over me, I almost felt like I was going to start crying there in the airport.2 It was so real, I could almost hear the story in his raspy voice. To be honest, as I read it, it sounded like the way I would tell the story. Also, it was hard not to note that my grandfather was writing this for an audience. And one thing I very much remember about my grandfather was that he never let the actual details of what happened get in the way of a good story.
Every time I go back to Iowa City, or read my own journals, I feel like I uncover more evidence about what happened to me. I’ve always been drawn to spy and detective fiction and movies, and I feel like I’m trying to solve a bit of a mystery sometimes. Here’s a summary of the open questions in the case I’m trying to solve:
How did I become an alcoholic? Why was it so nearly impossible for me to stop? How on earth did I stop? Why did it finally work? What changed?
I’m not looking to do any finger pointing or justifying, I really just want to understand myself and the journey I took myself on. The Big Book repeatedly warns that “self-knowledge” is not sufficient to cause sobriety, that a “spiritual awakening” is also necessary. Make no mistake, I think self-knowledge and self-awareness are critical elements of recovery, but in my own story, the years of therapy and treatment were not enough for me to stop drinking. To bring it down to Boy Scout terms, self-awareness is like gathering kindling and pine boughs and dry wood and carefully building what will hopefully become a fire.3 Sure, that thing with the sticks rubbing together can produce a spark after about 5 hours of frantic effort. So long as it’s not raining.
Think of the Big Book’s spiritual awakening like pulling a contraband Bic lighter out of one’s backpack and touching it to the carefully stacked self-awareness and self-knowledge (hopefully with lots of really dry pine needles and branches in there).
The more I see myself, particularly the more I see my younger self, the more I come to understand and accept what happened: The more I can accept myself. When I read my grandfather’s “notes,” I get a strong sense for how some aspects of my personality developed, how I think about things. I’m not sure how this happens or works, but I think as we bounce and vibrate our way through life, we encounter other people who bounce and vibrate in a complementary way. The combination with these people can be kind of musical and definitely magical, as we unconsciously create new notes, maybe even change keys.
These people tend not to stay, unfortunately. I think these special people are meant to help us from Point A to Point B, whatever that is. I think they help us become who we are meant to be, companions sent by the Universe to walk with us on parts of the trail we might not have found on our own.
I’m lucky to have had people like that in my life. It took me a while to understand the loss and emptiness I felt when they inevitably left. Maybe I was even angry sometimes. But my eyes have been opened and I see the world differently. I see those magical people, and my grandfather is the leader of that particular pack, as the people who helped me find the person I was meant to be. The way they did this?
They were themselves and they accepted and loved me for who I was.
I know now, I wasn’t ever meant to spend my life with these people, we were meant to accompany each other for only a part of the journey. We were meant to learn from each other and what happened. But that doesn’t mean it was temporary or that those connections ever really end. As I was reading my grandfather’s notes in the airport, I knew he was still with me, that I still carry what I learned from him, what I gained by being around him, everything that rubbed off on me in that garage or that magical basement.4 I realized that I carry those other people with me, too.
The feelings of loss and sadness when those people leave are just reminders of how deeply I felt them; How far they helped me go and what they helped me see.
I have a pretty good sense where all of my pirate-y ideas come from. I was recounting some of the hi-jinks of my youth over the last few days. I felt like the statute of limitations has probably run on most of it. My mom commented that it seemed like I had been more of trouble-maker than they had suspected and could have probably used more effective supervision. I think I was doing just what I was supposed to (not from a rules perspective), taking in the lessons I was being taught by an actual pirate. It turns out these pirate-y lessons were what I would need to take me through life.
My grandfather taught me that it was ok to imagine and dream. Maybe we were never going on an actual safari in Africa, but we could shoot a shit-ton of imaginary wildlife in that basement from the tall metal stools at his workbench—using actual guns (always unloaded). He taught me that it was ok to think about things differently, that it was ok to take charge of amusing myself, not to take myself too seriously, definitely don’t take other people too seriously, how to maybe get away with minor indiscretions with funny stories and a little charm and really important things like:
Never draw to an inside straight.
When I did my first Fourth and Fifth Step, with a janky-toothed monk at a monastery in Dubuque, Iowa, he listened quietly and patiently to my litany of misdeeds and wrongs. The things I was most ashamed of and regretted the most. The terrible ways I had hurt the people who loved me. As I finished, and sat sobbing in the big chair across from him, he looked at me with incredibly kind eyes and asked me only one question:
Do you think there is anyone in the world who could hear all that, know all that about you and still love you?
I knew that answer immediately.
We went to the 10pm service on Christmas Eve in the church that I grew up in. Things are remarkably the same and having spent a lot of time in that church, there were a lot of memories dancing in my head as we plowed through all of the Christmas carols. Our Lutheran church, like many in the midwest, was divided between Germans and Norwegians, and this was recognized by first singing “We are So Glad Each Christmas Eve,” in Norwegian. Then, the lights are turned off, the congregation lights the little candles that were passed out and we sing Silent Night, the first stanza auf Deutsch.
As a kid, I always tried to maneuver so that I was sitting next to my grandfather on Christmas Eve at church. There were discreet thumb wars to be fought, butterscotch candies in his pocket, the twinkling eyes as we played our necessarily secret games, the knowing glares from my grandmother and my grandfather’s shoulder shrugs. But the absolute best part was when we sang Silent Night: Hearing his raspy voice and feeling his carpenter rough hands on my little boy head as we sang about the miracle of Christmas in the dark. I knew it was special to him, too, because you could see the tears in the corner of his eyes glinting in the candlelight—just like I had on Christmas Eve this year in that very same church and I think probably the very same pew.
I’m pretty confident that my grandfather didn’t listen to a lot of Stevie Wonder, and this version probably wouldn’t be his chosen musical style. But I think this is kind of a pirate anthem and he would have completely agreed with me on this part:
I’ve done a lot of foolish things, that I didn’t really mean, I could be a broken man, but here I am, with the future in my hands
Complete with the “Hell, yeah” at the end.
Happy Friday.
They hired very recent Norwegian immigrants to work on the farm while they learned English.
This can be an alarming look, I believe. Ask me about the time I started crying on a post 9/11 flight because I was reading a book about a really lovely dog dying. That’s why I don’t read books about dogs, or go to movies about dogs: the dogs always die. Why is that fair?
This is the part where I cryptically remind you of the importance of always having a potato on hand or on your person. Here’s the punchline of a potato joke: “OMG, dude, the potato goes in front.”
I’m not exaggerating. My grandfather had built an 10-yard archery range in the cramped basement of his house to practice for deer season.
Brought back a lot of memories and reminded me of the fact that, yes, I’m still standing here-hell yeah! Thanks for a great read, as always. Merry Christmas. 🎄