SOME CHRISTMAS PS'S

This is a great family time, despite all the challenges and usual family problems that most of us face. So I thought I'd share a little beyond my children to my immediate progeny (all of whom have been in my apartment for the past few days, the first time all my kids and grandkids have been with me without their spouses etc.) and beyond.

So first of all, here's a holiday take from my slightly younger cousin Kathi, who has tried to comment on some recent posts and couldn't get it to happen, so I thought I'd quote an e mail she sent me that gives a different version of some of my Christmas stories (she and her sister lived with my Uncle Lydie (full name Michael Lydon Lally) and my Aunt Peggy and my Irish immigrant grandparents down the street from my family's house, where there were six siblings still living including my dear departed sister Joan and next door four cousins that included David, who would become another cop in the extended family):

"Hi My Cool –

If you have forgotten, your Uncle Lydie’s favorite story about your toddler years concerned him dubbing you 'Mike' and you responding to him with your hands on your hips: 'My’s not Mike…My’s My Cool.' I always thought that was so cute because I didn’t know you as a toddler – not yet a sparkle in my dad’s eye - and very appropriate…a harbinger, since I always thought you were the coolest being on the planet. I have been reading your blog and keeping up with your recovery. Amazing how you can now and have been able to analyze your thought processes and intuitive reactions, every day improving. See? Still the coolest guy on the planet. Perhaps someday you will collect all of the blog entries to publish. In addition to the assist such a book might help creative persons figuring out the paths of creativity, it could also help anyone who might be facing their own fear of upcoming surgery. I’m sure the medical industry would be interested in such a book as well.

I have tried [many times] to respond in 'comments' to your blog, but alas…either I am hopelessly technically deficient, or my security system is too damn vigilant. I’ve been crazed with Christmas plans – shopping, wrapping, making fudge and other candies, planning the trip to Connecticut, packing, yadda yadda… and should have responded to your blog sooner via email – but here I am now, so very happy that this brain surgery was successful and not fraught with bad news. I was one of those 'pray every moment' people when Irene told me you were in a bit of trouble.

Reading the last two blog entries about Christmas prompted me to write now – because your memory of standing in the cold waiting for the trees to be bought or donated reminded me of what I like to call the years of insane Christmases on Hixon Place. There was the 'year of the ice skates' when Mickie and I came down to discover brand new white sparkling skates under the tree – only to discover them gone the next day, replaced by hand-me-downs. In Mickie’s case, they were Joan’s gently used ones…and in my case, David’s black hockey skates – hardly used. It seems that your dad had someone in town that 'needed' the new ones more than we did. Hahahha!! Then there was the 'year of the sleds' – where we both saw brand new sleds under the tree – and then they were gone – replaced by our old sleds – painted up to look new. And the year of the 'kitten' which was brought in late Christmas Eve because the only pet grandma would allow was a 'ratter'. The damn thing sprung out of the Christmas tree and attached itself with its little deadly claws to my face. We remember these and other crazy things each year, but not with bitterness or envy, or even a sense of umbrage. We laugh heartily about it all, [a very consistent Lally trait through all the generations] trying to imagine what was going on in our parents’ inner life. They were bizarre, bawdy, and fun and also malfunctioning alcoholics that loved each other passionately yet fought like vipers. Christmas just brought out all of those traits. The piece of my life I am most grateful for is getting to know my father sober for 20 years before he died – and my mother sober for 9 years before she died.

Speaking of this particular Christmas, it was lovely. How can Christmas not be lovely in Brookfield CT, home of Mickie’s youngest, Patrick, his wife Susan, and their two spectacular kids? We went to an afternoon Mass Christmas Eve to watch the youngest grands [John Michael’s kids] in their pageant. Michael Lydon, 4, was one of the three Kings and John Peter, 5, was the innkeeper that had room in his stable. Soooo cute. Everyone was there with the exception of Joseph and his new bride Carrie, who traveled to Kansas to Carrie’s family.

I am still praying for you and I pray that this new year, 2010, brings you even more inner peace. It is wonderful to read how Cait and Miles are helping you in your recovery. How blessed you are to have such caring and loving children. Keep up the good work.

Love,
Kathi"



And then this morning I got turned on to another family goodie by my older son who got his 11-year-old boy to show me a little Youtube video he, my grandson, made, so I share that here too, a little grandfatherly chest puffing. (That's his father's, my older son's, classic shoebox Ford in the snow in the early shots.)

JULIE & JULIA

I notice I also get tired a lot more easily since the brain surgery. Which has allowed me to skip things that seem too tedious, like articles I'm reading etc. Quite a liberation since I have always had a reading compulsion that made me need to read every word from the front cover of a book to the back cover, or in a magazine etc. Nice to be able to realize I don't want to read something and just stop.

It's like that with a lot of things right now. And for all I know may stay that way, which has its benefits even beyond the one I mention above. Like I watched another DVD sent to me for the awards season, this one of JULIE & JULIA, and like the one for CRAZY HEART, this one skipped too.

But only in two spots and very briefly. In the old days I'd feel compelled to go out and find another copy to see what I missed, but these post-skull-sawed-open days that seems unnecessary. I enjoyed the flick anyway, a lot. I didn't have any problem with the Amy Adams parts as some of my friends did. Although I did prefer the Meryl Streep parts only because as with IT'S COMPLICATED I again found Streep incredibly attractive as Julia Childs!

I don't know if it's the changes in my brain or what, but I never found Streep attractive before. I mean I recognized what others found physically attractive in her and I dug some of her acting, particularly her comic roles, but she just wasn't my type or anywhere near it. But her acting in IT'S COMPLICATED especially, but also in JULIE & JULIA, just made me want to wrap my arms around her and...

Anyway, it's an incredible acting job, and she gets a lot of support from Stanley Tucci playing her slightly unbelievably always loving and understanding husband. But despite the obvious distortions of reality in almost all the characters in this movie, it's still a unique take on relationships, I found, and worth watching if only for that, let alone the Oscar worthy performance by Streep.

SIX WEEKS ON

It's been more than six weeks since the brain surgery and the recovery has gone so well I feel almost unworthy of so much good fortune.

But it also seems like a good time to take note of what's still difficult for me, just as a measure of how far I've come but also of how the brain—or at least my brain—reacts to surgery like this and the reason for it.

As anyone who is familiar with this blog from before the surgery knows, I'm an obsessive list maker, especially at night when having some trouble falling asleep or trying to fall back to sleep after being woken up. And many of those lists are alphabetical, because they're the easiest to remember in the morning.

I make lists obsessivley even during the day, common for a lot of poets, because the basic form of many poems is a list in at least some ways, even if only of words.

But, since the operation, that's been different. First of all I've found it much easier to fall asleep and back asleep if I'm woken up. That makes me think that the growth in my brain may have been causing some of my sleep problems interestingly. But second of all, the few times since the operation that I've tried to come up with an alphabet list, I haven't been able to do it! Not even close.

For instance, the other night the back door on this old house my apartment is in was creaking loudly and slamming even more loudly in the wind and rain (fortunately we had a white Christmas before the rain washed most of the snow away). It woke my 12-year-old son up and by the time I got him back to sleep I was wide awake.

So I thought I'd try an alphabet list to help me fall back asleep. I came up with an obvious one (which I've probably done before) of favorite Christmas themed movies. I could only think of three. I expanded it to include movies that just had Christmas in them but was at a loss.

I fell back asleep anyway. But the next day I tried again to come up with more than the initial three and still couldn't.

The whole memory thing is interesting. I notice I don't remember e mails and telephone calls I mean to answer. I don't just forget to answer them, I don't remember getting them. And yet a lot of my memory has remained intact including most short term memory since the operation.

I'm also, as I've been reporting here, still making more than the usual amount of typos when I type and even when I write by hand, and my brain is still having me write different words than I intended to, not typos, not accidents, but distinctly different choices as I've pointed out many times in recent posts.

The same happens when I'm speaking, I'll start to say something and forget entirely what I had intended to say, or will know what I mean to say but can't remember how to say it. I know that these kinds of things happen to everyone at times, but what I'm talking about here are specific problems that I either didn't have before the operation or not to the extent that I do now.

I'm not complaining, just deeply interested in how the brain functions under different circumstances.

There's other stuff too, but my daughter is here with her little girl and my grown son and his wife and little boy are about to arrive at any moment so I'm going to go celebrate a late Christmas with all of them and my little guy now.

CHRISTMAS POST PS

I got carried away with my own rhetoric in that last post. I didn't mean to give the impression I don't dig Christmas. The exact opposite is true. I was just referring to the mixed feelings holidays arouse.

But I love Christmas—or the idea of it and the chance to celebrate that idea again each year—so much that I can listen to some Christmas music anytime. My 12-year-old got in the habit of falling asleep to that Vince Giraldi trio recording of A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS every night, so I fall asleep to its strains as well, or work at my desk to it, or just have it in my head most nights, and I've yet to grow tired of it. The melodies and artistry still give me pleasure after so many repetitive hearings.

I feel the same way about a lot of other classic Christmas recordings, like Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" etc. And I love the lights that people and stores and municipalities put up. And getting a tree (we got ours late this year because of my operation etc. and chose a smaller tree, but my little guy can now carry it and put it up without any help from me!) and decorating it (seeing all the old familiar family heirlooms of family history no matter how broken the families might be or have been, remembering ones now gone, incorporating new ones given as gifts etc.)...

As a matter of fact, it still makes me smile just to think of Christmas and any of its traditions—personal, family, or historical. I know there's other traditions for this time of year that represent the histories of other religions than the Christianity Christmas is based on, and maybe if I wasn't raised an Irish Catholic they would resonate with me similarly.

But maybe not. The giant Channuka candlelabra in the town square where I live just doesn't have the same panache as the fir tree, even this year when the old colored lights have been replaced with a limited set of one-color LED ones to save money and energy. The tree still resonates in ways none of the major religious symbols can because it goes back to an even more ancient tradition or sense of tradition, to a more primitive and basic sense of "holiday" when just the idea of nature represented by these trees was religion enough.

At least that's the way it strikes me. And the other trappings, the music and idea of "peace on earth" and good fellowship and gift giving and taking time off to be with family and friends isn't tied into any specific religious ritual or rite or even belief ultimately, but with a broader concept of what it means to be human in certain seasons and parts of the world, or just in our hearts.

Hopefully that doesn't offend anyone, but even if it does, lighten up. I like the Japanese practical perspective on all this, which basically is—go to the Shinto shrine when a child is born to get the good luck that comes with those rituals and beliefs, get married in a "Christian" ceremony that actually has nothing to do with any Christian beliefs or even traditions but instead with the style and fun of traditional Western weddings with the gowns and feasting and etc., and then when someone dies bring that loss to the Bhuddist temples on the chance that maybe the idea of reincarnation is real...

Our "secular" society, or the supposed secular aspects of it, already has a similarly practical approach to some holidays, including Christmas. Holloween is a strong second, a holiday few realize is related not only to the Catholic tradition of All Souls Day and All Saints Day, but to the even older Celtic New Year. And why should they, since these holidays have become secularized in ways the right deplores but which may just work to "assimilate" all the varying traditions and beliefs into something easy for all the accept.

A QUIET CHRISTMAS

Yes, and tranquil and easy and nice.

It hasn't always been that way. Nor is it still objectively. But as with most things, it's a matter of attitude.

This hasn't always been the case for a holiday fraught with excess—excess emotion usually from family dysfunction or nostalgic longing or deep disappointment or anticlimactic expectations or social obligations getting in the way of true desires or missed opportunities, but also,thankfully, excess joy and hope and satisfaction from the faces of little ones overwhelmed by the generous bounty of family and friends and even excess love for not just those same family and friends, dysfunctional or not, but for the good cheer and genuine longing for peace that cuts through the commercialism and exploitation, et-you know what-cetera.

I had to work Xmas eve as a kid because my father sold Xmas trees in front of his little home repair shop and someone—me—had to stay for the last stragglers and then wait until midnight when the truck from St. Joe's Orphanage would come for whatever we had left.

And on Xmas Day I worked for the Parks Department when I was a teenager, making sure kids didn't fall through the ice in the always frozen for Xmas in those days (now, rarely, hmmmmm...) duck pond and always snow covered (now also rarely, double hmmmm....) Flood's Hill where kids would try out their new sleds and my job was to make sure no one got hurt including from fights when the tougher kids from Newark and other environs invaded this turf...

By 18 and in love with a beautiful black girl when that wasn't just almost nonexistent but illegal most places in the good old USA, Xmas meant not being able to be with her and her family nor her with mine and getting drunk to drown the sorrow that caused my heart. Later, in the service, more reasons to feel blue on this day, and after that the early poverty of first years of first marriage Xmases with not enough to make it what it might have been (though those Xmases were some of the best I remember, including the gift of W. C. Williams' PATERSON in paperback but nonetheless a treasure for me, so much so I remember the thrill of opening the wrapping paper, which for me and my first wife Lee in those days was the cartoon section of the Sunday paper (a tradition I continued after we split and I raised first our son than son and daughter alone, mostly, and at times in even greater poverty, though there was always something to eat and a place to stay and music to make and dance to and books to write and read and friends to make it all feel joyous (though for the kids there must have been mixed feelings)))...

Right down to the present, it's always meant the sad with the happy, like all reality including the everyday kind. But because this particular day resonates with so much more in the way of expectations for the happy, the sad feels even more deeply difficult to accept. But. But if we—I should say I—can adjust my attitude to accept reality exactly as it is, as I am mostly able to do these days and have for quite a few years, I can surrender my expectations and allow whatever happens to be okay, and then I get to have a Christmas that's easy and tranquil and nice like this one, and to express my gratitude for it (all, especially considering what I've been through these past six weeks since the brain surgery).

Hope the New Year is even easier, more tranquil, and nicer for all.

CRAZY HEART

The movie I was trying to watch the other night that kept skipping toward the end was CRAZY HEART with Jeff Bridges in the lead.

I was able to get it to skip to the last few minutes of the flick so I know how it turns out, but the climactic scenes before that coda at the end are missing. Nonetheless, I saw enough to know that this is another film for which Bridges should be recognized as one of our greatest and most underrated movie actors.

I've been writing and saying this for decades. I still think he was robbed of many Oscar nominations and wins.

He should have won, for instance, for STAR MAN, one of the greatest film performances ever, especially when you consider that the incremental progress his character makes—as the alien assumes the personality of the human body it has taken over—is shot out of sequence like all, or almost all, movies are. To make such tiny adjustments to the physicality and speech and awareness etc. of that character out of sequence is like Michelangelo painting the Sistine chapel.

Anyway, not to get carried away, but I hate that so many actors who have much less range and consistency, let alone craft, have gotten a lot of attention over the years since Bridges first proved what a great actor he is in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and ever since.

CRAZY HEART seems created to help him win an overdue Oscar. The story of an over-the-hill (read alcoholic) country singer, it might have critics remembering TENDER MERCIES and PAY DAY, but Bridges makes the sometimes cliched story points in the plot resonate with realism because he embodies this character so completely and fearlessly.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the female lead, and even though you can argue with the usual Hollywood age difference (she's thirty as I understand it and Bridges must be close to sixty) she and Bridges are so good they make it work. She's a great match for him, despite the age difference, because she's as great an actor as he is, for my taste, and equally fearless in allowing her characters a physicality that few actors let alone "movie stars" ever do.

Robert Duvall, who also co-produced CRAZY HEART has a small role playing the kind of old codger he was already playing sometimes before he was one. And there are other great performances in this flick as well (though I thought Colin Farrell as a Country Music star was miscast)—but it's Jeff Bridges' movie all the way and he makes it worth every moment of screen time.

No matter how you feel about country music, or stories about alcoholism, or failure-and-redemption, or the life of an "artist" etc.—give this movie a chance and I think you will be not only satisfied by the way it unfolds, but deeply impressed by Jeff Bridges' performance. I hope the awards season voters are equally impressed, because Bridges is so good at being a chameleon and disappearing into his characters he doesn't do that movie star thing where you never forget who you're watching. As a matter of fact, throughout this flick I kept seeing other actors and performers in Bridges, as if I was actually watching Willie Nelson or Chris Christopherson or Chris Cooper etc.

But it was just Bridges being no afraid to evoke the spirit and even the look of someone else, someone possibly even more familiar to most viewers, because Bridges is not worrying about his star status or image.

CRAZY HEART—I wouldn't miss it.

PS: Just to keep current with my progress recovering from brain surgery—it took me a little longer than normal to write the above, because of the more-than-usual amount of typos, but the typos are more obvious and easier to correct and close to what I was doing before the surgery. I also noticed yesterday when writing a note by hand that I made similar mistakes there as well (writing "to" for "so" and "unance" for "nuance" etc.). This experience has left me convinced that most of our troubles come from misunderstandings caused by different "wiring" in our individual brains. Now, what to do about that is the question.

TUNNEL VISION VS. SCATTERSHOT

As my recovery from brain surgery proceeds, and the limitations to my motor and cognitive skills decrease, the clarity and simplicity of my perspective and understanding also, unfortunately, recedes.

I remember that happening after other operations and life threatening situations I've survived. There's always that initial high of enormous gratitude and relief to just be alive. Followed by the kind of focus I've rarely had in my life, which helped me to truly keep things simple, being incapable for that brief period of seeing life in any other way.

The way you see life under those circumstances becomes so clear that most things don't matter much, if at all, except for love and the family and friends you share that love with. I had the feeling, even when I still couldn't read or write after the brain surgery, that the "writing" projects I was working on (always several at a time) should be replaced by a project that came to me and could be done through voice recognition programs or on a CD or DVD recorder. It was crystal clear exactly what that project would be and how I would do it, simplicity itself.

Already I've lost that simplicity of focus. The idea is still in my head, but the clarity is fading and in its place is the usual array of questions, embellishments, other ideas for other projects, more mundane distractions and interruptions and etc.

The simple dailiness of life has taken over. A few weeks ago all I could do pretty much was eat and have a conversation. Yet I felt so happy and grateful, as well as focused and clear, that things that used to mystify me seemed boldly obvious. Now, not so much as I become more aware of more and more.

For instance in the first weeks after the operation I didn't really notice or take into consideration the bookcases full of books scattered throughout my apartment. I couldn't read or not very well and didn't know if I'd ever be able to again so I just didn't think about books, I barely noticed their presence in my apartment let alone life.

The interesting thing was it didn't make me sad or depressed, it actually gave me a certain level of relief and even comfort. Like I said, I had an idea for a book I could dictate into a recorder that seemed like the most important book I could write and also like one that would be "commercial" in ways I've obviously never cared about, or cared to do.

I've always been more into the art than the commerce in anything I've done, even film and TV acting which I thought I was doing almost strictly for the money to take care of my kids and wives and friends etc. but in the end couldn't even do that in a very commercial way but instead would get tripped up by my desire to create something new rather than what the powers-that-be were demanding.

But now I'm reading almost normally again, and just yesterday I noticed my books again in that old way, as art objects and signs of my personal history with deep meaning and resonance just in the printing on their spines, and I felt a deep desire to pick them up, randomly, and look at their covers or open arbitrarily to any page and read a few lines and savor the language and the feel of the book and the design and the memories of what the book is about and what it has meant to me over the years and the connections to other books and friends who gave them to me or wrote them or loved them etc. etc. etc.

A very rich experience indeed, and one I wouldn't want to trade for where I was a few weeks ago for sure, but still, I miss the kind of focus people call "tunnel vision" that I've seen over the years in friends who have achieved their goals often on a higher level (in terms of worldly success and recognition) partly if not mostly because they were able to have that kind of "tunnel vision" focus where I wasn't.

Not complaining just observing, because I was happy and grateful for that simplicity and clarity and focus of a few weeks ago, but I am also happy and grateful for the return of my myriad interests and loves and ideas for future projects. As the popular cliche goes—and one which I normally dismiss in my head as just that, a cliche, but today I see as nonetheless mostly true—it's all good.