Today I’d like to share with a recipe that’s been a feature of Daddino family Christmases for decades:

TROPICAL PUNCH

Combine Hawaiian fruit punch, fruit juice concentrates, and water. Pour ice in melon bowl. Resting bottle in rim of melon, carefully pour ginger ale down side; mix with up-and-down motion. Float orange and lime slices. Twine melon with ivy leaves, holding with toothpicks. Makes 30 to 35 servings.

In mid-sixties cookbook it comes from (it shall remain nameless because it’s by an enormous copyright-hungry American recipe cartel), it’s one of two recipes that have been flagged as being really good…the other being Lemon Mayonnaise. Which sounds ick. And even though I have fond recollections of it, the punch is probably ick, too, as it mixes juice, juice simulacra and soda in a carnaval of high-fructose corn syrupy goodness. But who are we, oh dezinens of 2004, to judge, seeing as people drink Snapple Juice Drinks willingly? And that there are recipes for similar punches all over the net using raspberry sherbert, and I hate sherbert. Further, equally upsetting revelation: on a trip to the e-fecking-normous chain supermarket yesterday, I noticed Minute Maid no longer comes in 6-oz. of juice concentrate, only 12-oz. cans (which is fine as the family’s doubling the recipe this year) and 1-pint 12-oz bottles of ginger ale have also gone the way of all flesh, replaced by larger (and smaller) sizes. The moral: Americans are PIGGIER than EVER.

Incidentally, we never made this punch with the melon (or the ivy). Melons really aren’t in season this time of year, and besides, hollowing one out for punch is a really thankless task, isn’t it?

I’m wearing one ugly fucking t-shirt: batik (again), blue, a non-licensed Snoopy carrying balloons, extra-clingy to show off my complete lack of physique. Plus I have to wear glasses now. It all started the day my grandparents come to school and notice I can’t read things printed on the blackboard without getting up from my chair and squinting. (Was my teacher completely oblivious to this? My parents?) It’s funny, I don’t really remember having sight problems at a young age. I don’t remember the world as blurry. In fact, I can remember being able to read storefronts and road signs glasses-free I probably wouldn’t be able to read now. So I’m assuming my vision must’ve taken a massive nose-dive from the mid to late seventies, then kept getting steadily worse to the point where, by the late eighties, other glasses wearers would look through my own pair and say to me “LIKE OHMYGOD YOU’RE SO BLIND!” (On the other hand, if I had crappy vision even as a young child, my glasslessness would serve a very convenient scapegoat on which to blame my initial and subsequent ineptitude at sports.)

Those blue flares were the family’s earliest tree ornaments, appearing in the photos documenting the first Christmas my parents spent together as a married couple. They were glass bulbs, some shaped like a fat teardrop, the others (perhaps purchased later) bulging in the middle and tapered at the ends. Alone on a tree save for garlands of silver tinsel, they made for an elegantally minimalist tree for an elegantly minimalist apartment, as compared to the embroidered patchwork craziness that comes from putting several decades’ worth of Xmas purchases on the unruly branches of a real pine. In January 1973 they’re put in the attic (as close to Gothic as you can get in my house, only accessible via small holes in my brothers’ closet’s ceilings and opened not much more than twice a year) and don’t come down again until 1979, by which time these thin glass things have had a good thirteen years of minute expansion and contraction with the extremes of Long Island summers and winters, evidenced by the slight crackle patterns in their blue paint. So almost from the minute we put them on the tree, they shattered POP! POP! POP!, one every hour or so, leaving a mess of blue and silver shards on the tree, on the presents, on the carpet for my mom to clean up, again and again and again. Thinking it was the Christmas lights doing them in, we tried re-positioning them on the tree but it didn’t make one damned bit of difference. In a final fit of masochism, we placed the remaining few on next year’s tree.

It never occurred to me that Lobster & Shrimp Fra Diovolo might not constitute a “real” Christmas dinner. It also never occurred to me that it was an especially Italian-American thing, either — if anything, it seemed appropriately “fancy.” But I never really paid much attention to Christmas dinner anyway, it being an unwanted interruption of my toy ecstasy when I just as easily have taken a plate upstairs to my room. I bet I liked it, though (the shrimp, anyway): along with predilections towards thick-framed glasses and melodic yawning, I inherited from my dad an appetite for really spicy foods, something I know I got from consciously imitating him. Of course, I could never keep up. At five or so, I tried one of his breakfast grapefruits, finding it a completely impenetrable eating experience now matter how much liquid sugar I put on the damned thing. Much later, on a mid-eighties trip to Washington D.C., he and his future wife took me to my first Indian restaurant; for me, it was an obstacle course of taste-bud death-by-misadventure and rivers of mucous — him, no problem. Getting back to Christmas, there were a couple times when I stayed with the adults long during the dessert trying to finish an espresso, just like the adults at the table were having. Yeah, I would finish it, but taste-wise, I couldn’t see the point of it. Much too bitter. There was a grand upshot, though. A little later (but still a kid), emboldened by the times I had espresso, I would take every opportunity during my day camp’s “Parents’ Day” to ostentatiously take some free coffee at the industrial urns placed at strategic locations throughout the grounds, thereby freaking out both parents and counselors. That was fun, a little. Probably nobody would blink now if they saw such a thing.

Judging from yesterday’s picture, this year’s Christmas table seated at least thirteen, and some subsequent Christmases probably had even more when even more folks from my mom’s side of the family joined in. Yet to my parents’ (and grandparents’) credit, we never had a separate “children’s table” at special occasions, at least as far as I can remember.

L-R: Grandpa, Aunt Pat, Tommy, Mom, Aunt Millie, Nanny, Me, Grandma, Holly, Bobby, Uncle John.

There’s me in mid-bodytwist, dodging Holly and Tommy, wearing a clingy lavender-colored batik unicorn shirt. (Not only wore it, but loved, bragged about it.) A really busy photo, made more busy than usual by the presence of relatives on my father’s side of the family: Aunt Pat, Uncle Mike (not shown), their son Chris (also not shown) and Grandma. They start coming to our Christmases for the next couple years, after having their own little celebrations at their own house, maybe a ten-minute drive from our own. I really hope they weren’t bored senseless by all this — how exciting could it be to watch other people unwrap presents? (Well, maybe there was some for them, too, I dunno, can’t remember.)

Probably taking after my parents’ lead, I called my maternal grandmother “Nanny” and my paternal grandmother “Grandma,” and while I loved them both, Grandma definitely had the edge for a long time. Initially, though, while she would do neat things like let me and my brothers play with watercolors in her Brooklyn apartment, I remember also being a little intimidated by this scolding edge she had, telling me in no uncertain terms there were parts of her apartment I couldn’t go into. One time when I was very young, she came over, probably spending some time over at our family’s house, and (I suppose undbidden) went through my closet and throwing out a lot of minute things that, because they were mine, I had an attachment to, and that made me unhappy. Dad told me that when he was a kid, she used to throw out his toys — baseball cards, comics, things like that — without the least warning. Mom told me similar stories about her mother, and I think this might supply a facile reason…no, probably a pretty straight-forward and conscious reason for both my parents’ un-ending Christmas generosity and my Dad’s adult love of trains. (I probably should’ve mentioned this earlier, but seriously, I don’t think that’s crossed my mind in maybe twenty years.) I also remember her getting angry at me for not eating a sandwich in the kind of argument that mom and dad would never get into with me, them being largely laissez-faire about my eating habits. And then, after her apartment was broken into, she moved to North Bellmore, a mere fifteen second walk away from my maternal grandparents. And then she seemed very different to me, very generous, very uncomplaining, very up-up-up, and so I gravitated towards her. I started spending a whole lot of nights over with her for a couple of years, and we would amuse ourselves, watching TV on Friday (the first night might’ve been the same night as the premiere of Diff’rent Strokes, November 3, 1978), then going somewhere, maybe to a card store or maybe to the mall, then come back, and then I’d get picked up to go home. At a moment when family tensions were beginning to come to a head, she was somebody who could give me a willing ear and — I’m absolutely not proud of this — deep pockets for whatever random shit that caught my eye. (I’m almost positive that she got reimbursed from my parents.)

And then I stopped. I tried again, for old time’s sake, in 1984. It says something about my obsessions of the time that I fix this moment with musical reference points: I fall asleep on her couch watching Friday Night Videos, and when we go to Sunrise Mall, we get Phillip Norman’s Shout! and the Jacksons’ “State of Shock.”‘And in the record store there was this one moment when, looking up from the stacks, I saw her bopping her head — only briefly — along to the piped-in music in a way that scared me: I was losing her. I avoided her a little after that, only seeing her on family occasions, my dad’s wedding and Christmases, and she was still very much my ally but with little eccentricities creeping around the edge of her behavior. Mom, Bobby and I went to see her much later, maybe when I came home from college my freshman year, I’m not sure. Still chipper, and dishearteningly gaunt-eyed, we made small talk I couldn’t wait to end. Then she died. The first family member I knew to pass away. I was in school, in Santa Fe, and it was just…I couldn’t do it.

L-R: me, mom, Holly

This is me giving my mom “my” present of florally-scented bath cubes. As a six-year-old I’m not someone with pocket change for fancy gurl toiletries but my dad comes to me with a wrapped box and says something to me, something like, “here, Michael, give your mother your present.” Since I didn’t actually give her anything, and at age six, not capable of reading between the lines, I say as much; my dad insists again, then I insist again in confused exchange until finally my mother plays along. I end up being more fascinated by them than she is — they were my gift to me. To mom, bath cubes are in a well-established category of desperation-gift (I know because in later years I give my mom scented toiletries when I couldn’t think of anything else to give her), to me they’re more pretty datum to be collected and savored: What do violets smell like? What do lily-of-the-valleys smell like? What do…? Pretty! My mom and stepdad still give each other presents under their pets’ names. I still don’t really understand that cute misdirection, or what kind of pleasure they get from indulging in such a thin family in-joke.

We’re the Daddino family and we’re into CB! You can sorta make it out right there, in a box, to the right. Later that night Bobby uses it to talk to another kid who got a CB radio for Christmas, how romantic. In retrospect, we were maybe slightly ahead of the CB-craze curve for Long Island, given my mom’s long-term fascination with country & western. I even remember Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” (and various spin-off records) being played a lot on the radio the year before; then, earlier that year, we all see Smoky and the Bandit (which comes as something of a shock, as this is the first time I hear someone outside the family curse — I just sorta assumed my brothers had invented “fuck” and “shit”) (also, this movie is a benchmark for memory-fade, as after we leave the theater, I remark to my mom that this is the first movie [in a theater] I’ve ever seen, and she’s surprised that I have no recollection of films I saw just a few years before).

L-R: me, Holly, mom, Tommy

I think I asked my mom to make the horsie kiss the dog. I love the look on my mother’s face, it’s so maudlin.

The dog was Holly, by the way. She may have been born on or near Christmas day, hence the name. Or she may have been named for the holly bushes that used to be grown on our property before the house was built, which was around late 1966. Somewhat embarrassingly for all involved, her name was the first word I ever spoke, not “mama” or “dada.” I was very attached to her; we all were. She was, as my mom puts it, “a lady.” She had an instinctual sense of manners, displaying an unholy patience when putting up with all the nonsense young kids do. Like when I tried riding her like a horse. (She would just slowly walk away from under me.) Or when I used to eat from her bowl. (This when I was really young — before I had any idea what such a thing was, my parents cheerily announced a “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” to me; uninterested, I turned around and went back to the Gaines Burgers.) More benignly, sometimes when she was laying on the floor, I would rest my head on her tummy and doze off — amazingly, she wouldn’t get up.

She was already a little slow from age when I knew her, and about eight years old of the time of this photo. Soon after, the vet discovered she was now blind in one eye; and soon after that, she developed a large cancerous tumor in her mouth. I always thought it looked like a piece of pink wadded gum. She was put to sleep not long after.

In the lower left-hand corner, there’s a box for a Biotron Micronaut, evidence of a mad passion for Micronauts I developed a few months prior. Very uncharacteristic of me to take any liking (or admit to liking) to toys of force and power, on the other hand, it seems very much like me to prefer them to what eventually became the canonical toygeek collector-scum object of lust. (It wasn’t even a contest. As I never tire of telling people, around this time passed up several chances to see the 1st/4th movie in theater because I thought it would be too scary, and this to day still haven’t seen a single SW movie in its entirety.) The burning hot core of the toy’s fascination was the its interchangeability across sets, or, as this site says: “One of things for which Micronauts are best remembered is their 5mm peg hole system. Nearly every Micronaut toy could be disassembled and joined with other Micronauts for completely new creations.” I don’t think I did anything with them, no play-acting or mini-wars, none of that, just building and rebuilding the sets and exchanging pieces between sets to fabulate less recognizable and perverse quasi-organic machines. I amass quite a large collection that fills a milk crate that a few years later I dump wholesale “for charity.” I even receive the Rocket Tubes set, probably next year, though there are conflicting release dates on the web. It’s easily the most expensive toy I’ve ever received by that time, wearing a $99 price tag from Playworld (a toy store chain so utterly gone almost no reference to them exists on the web), an imaginable sum to me, and that impresses me almost more than the toy itself. The toy is very very cool, but before Christmas, it seemed so unlikely I’d ever get it that it never occurred to me to want it. Furthermore, I don’t know how to operate it, and neither does my dad. The day after Christmas dad sets it up on the floor of the den and tries to get it to work, but there’s some vague unspecified thing wrong with it, and back to Playworld it goes, to be replaced by…nothing, I think. I can’t say I remember feeling cheated.

L-R: Tommy, Me

North Bellmore is less than thirty miles away, but I go into Manhattan exactly twice in the 1970′s: one in a class trip to the United Nations in 1979 and other is for THE. BEST. CHRISTMAS EVE. EVER. Mom, my brothers and I take a train into New York City to see my dad in his natural habitat. (Mom wears open-toed heels that I accidentally step on a lot during the train-ride.) Before this, what did I think dad did all day? Answer unclear, try again later. When he was home he’d often work on these inscrutable feats of number-crunching with a HUGE ten-digit Texas Instruments calculator (mine now) and paper spreadsheets with grids in green and white; if I gave any thought to it, I probably assumed he did much the same at work, only wearing a suit. The visit to his offices didn’t clarify much, though it did reveal to me that he worked with computers, too, as one of his co-workers took us aside to show some print-outs of ASCII art. Looking out of someone’s private office (or maybe it was a computer room, if they were putting such things in windowed building perimeter rooms back then), I could see another tall building, part of a cavern of buildings causing darkness on a sunny afternoon.

Then we all went to the World Trade Center. Up to this day, the tallest building I’ve been in couldn’t have been more than a few stories — the tallest building in Nassau County (both in 1977 and 2004) is the Nassau University Medical Center, a mere 19 and I don’t think ever been in that monster. Going up in the elevators is an alarming experience, as I have to pop my ears much as I did on the airplane ride to Florida earlier this year (in the picture above I’m wearing Disneyworld PJs my parents bought there). When we’re up there I was told I just wasn’t going to fall out of the window, and encouraged to get nearer, but the windows extended from the floor to the ceiling and when I was too close it looked too much like my feet was right at the edge of a mile-high drop. A month or two before 9/11, my boss took the marketing department to an informal breakfast at Windows on the World, and when we left, we all passed by a foot-to-ceiling window to get a better view of Manhattan looking uptown, and when I got too close, when I could see the buildings directly under us, there was that same terrified feeling in the knees again and I just had to get away. In 1977, down where the World Financial Center will be, I can see landfill but assume it’s a beach; some time later, misunderstanding a comment by my one of my grandparents, I assume that this landfill is also the site of one my very earliest memories, me and my brothers on a beach, climbing a wooden structure.

Speaking of falling into voids, this photo is amazing because save for a floating piece of wire, it looks as if reality trails off into nothingness right behind. It’s also slightly blurry, indicating that my mom took this. She’s a long-time sufferer of arthritis — probably had it when she was a kid, even — but it’s after the age of thirty that it starts getting really acute, and in light of this, I’m rather amazed she soldiered on as she did, taking really hammy photos of Christmas photos of us even though her hands would seize up in pain.

I’m six-and-a-half in this photo. When Tommy was six-and-change in 1972, he got way much more crap for his stocking-stuffer thing AND a sleeping bag, too. But I get Kermit and Grover, a gift-pack of Life Savers I eat in one sitting, crayons for the third year in a row, and two Richard Scarry books, one of which features cut-and-paste Christmas ornaments you’ll see later. I think that one was Richard Scarry’s Best Make-It Book Ever, and the other one was Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever…and suddenly I get some insight where a certain music anthology series might’ve gotten its name.

Now before Xmas ’76, I’ve only had five Christmases, out of which I can probably remember only two. (Or maybe three, only I don’t remember remembering Christmas ’73 back in ’76.) And yet when my mom told me we were going to have Christmas in the new den rather than the living room, I thought it was an intriguing twist on ancient family tradition. But, you know, we had a new den and by gum, my parents were gonna try real hard — too real hard — to show it off to friends and neighbors and relatives.

First off, we get a real tree, probably our first. The family used a fake tree every year, since the days when the family still lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, and on through the years until…well, I remember my dad agonizing over the color coding that determined a branch’s placement on the main tree stem, so that’s probably 1975, and if not that, 1974. (It’s hard to tell from the photos.) But this tree is all too real. Earlier Christmases have trees with tinsel garlands in elegant interlocking grids; this one has unruly branches jutting out in all directions, too impolite to hold the red and white and clear plastic chains in any regular manner. In fact, you’ll notice one of the red chains is sagging half-way off the tree. The chains are brand- new, part of an extensive ornament-buying-programme my parents enact for the occasion. I take part, going with my parents to the nurseries of Long Island, one time asking them to buy a Flintstones ornament that mysteriously disappears from my person (and my memory) before Christmas. One of them was the occasion for one of my most mysterious and random childhood memories: a woman with a bag full of purchases has her scarf fall to the ground as she leaves a nursery (probably Martin Viette’s – God, I am so glad they still exist), and the Santa on the premises notices and interrupts his conversation with some adults to get her attention…and I don’t think I ever found out what finally happened. I felt sorry for the homeless scarf. Anyway, I don’t remember doing this at all, but from the photo it’s pretty clear I also accompanied my parents with the trimming of the tree — the majority of them are placed around my height!

The other way my parents are overdoing it: just look at all the fucking presents. Holy shit, they extend across the entire width of the room, which might be…what? Ten to fifteen feet? I don’t know. It was such a long time ago and I’m a terrible judge of length. But compared to all the other Xmas photos we have, this is easily the most bountiful season we ever have. And off-hand I only remember the cheap stuff: the Richard Scarry books, Stadium Checkers, a carnival playset, a hunk of plastic with a spiral pyramid that round metal balls rolled around before getting lost on the floor.

The couple of months surrounding this Christmas I remember with a warm fuzzy glow. Kindergarten was held for only half a day, and for the first half of the year I’d come home during lunch-time, put a Swanson’s TV Dinner in the oven all by my lonesome, then eat and do stuff in front of the TV set in the den. The family went to Florida for my first vacation a few months later. Good times.

L-R: Santa Claus, me, Tommy, Bobby

The Young Kurt Cobain Chronicles, Part 27:’wherein our rock-star-to-be thanks Santa for bringing the Beatles into his miserable little life.

Actually, am I shaking Santa’s hand or is he pulling me towards him? Probably the latter, as Santa still has presents in his hands and I don’t, thereby giving me no reason to shake his hand.’Either way, I don’t look especially happy and I certainly wasn’t — the moment he came in through the front door I tried as hard as I could to make myself as invisible as possible, even going so far as to hide behind people, hoping he wouldn’t see me. At least I’m not crying this time.’I didn’t know it then, but the Santa here was in fact the son-in-law of a babysitter, Mrs. Marciano, that I regularly visited that year.’I was pretty confused by his visit, sicne he came in with a couple of non-elf adults I had never seen before, and then left with them in a car.

Do I even believe in Santa Claus at all at this point? I think I was both believing and not-believing, and unable to sense any contradiction in this stance. I was’still suspicious that Santa was a story adults told did to keep children dumb, since they always talked about Santa in the same dumb, condescending voice they used to tell kids other dumb, condescending stories. (Around this time, when a friend of my mom’s tells me about a conversation he had with her horse, I get angry and say “but horses…can’t talk…human-talk.”). Anyway, there’s always plenty of empirical evidence available to a kid to NOT believe. Wrapped gifts appeared under the tree before Christmas as long as I can remember. (I have a very early memory, from maybe three or four, of Bobby showing my that our parents’ bedroom closet was filled with toys stacked in neat towers, unwrapped.) My mom says that she explained the seeming discrepancy of Christmas gifts appearing before Santa’s visit by telling me that “there are presents we give you and there’s the presents that Santa give you when he visits our house,” reinforcing this line by placing new gifts under the night before Christmas when we’re all asleep. But then there’s the reality of Santa clones everywhere and Christmas specials where Santa (as opposed to someone just dressing like him) doesn’t figure at all, and crimony, how does Christ figure into any of this? (You never see them together in the same place…WHICH COULD ONLY MEAN!!!)

On the other hand, when it came to getting lots and lots of presents, one didn’t take chances with disbelief. Plus I was still pretty incredulous about a lot of things — this month my mom tells me that the night before, when she was shopping for Christmas presents, she saw Jack Frost! Just for a wee fleeting moment, but yes, him! Not only do I believe her I think this visitation is a sign that she’s downright blessed or something. A photo from Christmas ’77 show milk and cookies by the fireplace; I bet I placed them but I think (I think) this might’ve been done out of a sense of tradition and when I saw the food gone the next day, I assumed my Dad ate it. (He was kinda overweight at the time and I wasn’t above being malicious at his expense.) Some time later I lamely deduce that since Christmas is about Christ’s birth, Santa Claus doesn’t exist. The 1979 book Encyclopedia Brown’s Record Book of Weird and Wonderful Facts has a factoid proving by science the physical impossibility of Santa Claus, and reading that pretty much settles the matter in my mind; my mom lets out a disappointed groan when I tell her. That Christmas Eve, Bobby and I stay up late enough to surreptitiously (since I’m a kid, this means “not surreptitiously at all”) watch Tommy and my mother wrap more presents. The year after that, my mom gives up and takes me to a Toys ‘R’ Us to help her buy presents for everybody.’

By the way, this is our den, mere weeks after a major remodeling job. The sliding glass doors (which I bet were deemed too burglar-friendly for comfort) were removed in favor of a real brick fireplace to complement our fake fireplace upstairs, and the fake wood paneling from earlier shots was replaced with real wood paneling. Plus some lovely parquetry flooring and “greenhouse” windows that jutted out and leaked warm air like crazy. And we got a television in the wall, just like rich people do! Earlier that day, with the light of a brilliantly sunny winter day streaming through those windows, I watched A Night at the Opera on the incredibly new Superstation and it’s the most powerful and sustained set of laughs I’ve had in all my five-and-a-half years of life.

L-R: Tommy, Dad, Bobby, Me (just barely visible to the right)

The loud, fussy stripes of post-QEFTSG pr’t-’-porter men’s fashion didn’t come out of a vacuum, you know.

In spite of Lucas Samaras, I fucking hate instant cameras. Every ’70′s image our family took with them looks dismal, especially compared to the still-vibrant shots taken by less faddish cameras. Thanks to those big honking flashes the subjects are overlit and everything else is dark and shadowy, so everyone ends up looking like astronauts floating in an infinite void of black space. And the colors are almost universally pallid (doesn’t matter whether that’s from age or the shittiness of the original film, it’s still reason to hate) so once again I had to fiddle with the colors of the original to show that we opening presents in the afternoon of an overcast day rather than the middle of the night. The end-result is probably now a little over-saturated when it comes to the reds and you all sorts of scratches and damage to the photo, plus, I admit, the futz on a dirty scanner glass. The big empty space on the corner is courtesy of a very hungry family parrot, Pablo.

Speaking of cameras, that’s what Tommy has in his hand as he gurns in mock-aggression for my mom. (He always looks natural and unflustered in ’70′s photos, whereas I tend to cower in front of cameras as I think they make me unrecognizably unMichael-like.) A Ready Ranger Tele-photo Camera Gun it was called, and since he’s aiming straight for my mom, you can’t tell from the photo that it was rather long and looked something like a bazooka. This info comes from eBay ’cause I don’t actually remember it. What I do remember is Bobby’s gift, the box for which you can just barely see between him and my Dad — something called Electric Skittle Bingo. I was confused by what you were supposed to do with it then, and remain confused by it now, but as with Tommy’s gift I was mightily impressed by it the hugeness of the thing (plus Maxwell Smart was on the box) and yet another, even bigger Bobby gift that came in a box seemingly as big as me without any color photography on it. It’s hazy to me just what it was, other than it was sports-related and “not the right one” and thus destined to returned to the store. I almost never did that as a kid. If a gift was wrong I felt obliged to keep so as not to hurt the toy’s feelings. There was one Christmas toy, maybe a Micronauts thing, that once I unwrapped it I started bawling uncontrollably because it was so utterly wrong for me, something too weird or boyish or violent, can’t remember. To my surprise I end up loving it the hell out of it. The one time I insisted on getting a gift returned was when I got a plastic typewriter for Christmas. I don’t know what the nature of my rejection was (maybe it wasn’t frivolous enough) but soon after I felt such HORRIBLE CRUSHING guilt over rejecting the poor defenseless gift that six months later I insisted on getting same thing again, maybe for my birthday. I never used the damned thing anyway as I end up preferring my mom’s bigger (and beautiful) manual typewriter.

I like my toys (particularly the Playskool Village) but as Tommy and Bobby are getting the big gifts I am acutely feeling my smallness this day. It’s like when Tommy and Bobby have their birthdays back in October, and since I’m four-and-a-half I can’t go on any of the cool rides at Adventureland plus I sense I’m being something of a drag, somebody you monitor and humor rather than engage. On the other hand, there is the bizarre moment that day in the den, where in reaction to a gift, I affect adulthood by saying something in a funny-gruff way — in imitation of those commercials where for comic effect kids lip-synch to deep, obviously adult voices — and feel really weird and shameful afterwards.

A moment of remembrance for our den. Until I got my own color TV as a present for my sixth grade graduation, the den was where the action was. If you could call it that. I spent much of my childhood in the den, with the TV on, not actually watching it so much as doing things in front of it and soaking whatever was on with varying degrees of attentiveness. My grandmother disturbing dust motes in the midday light as The Lucy Show played; crayons, blocks, Lego, construction paper and the late afternoon cartoon shift; drinking a whole six-pack of 7-UPs with Space Giants on WTCG; a passerby kissing David Bowie in “DJ”; Foul Play and then Animal House in a male-bonding moment with my oldest brother and his friends; Canadian shows about the metric system and modern media while being sick for weeks on end; playing the Atari a couple years after its peak; MTV and bad movies, alone, deep into many Friday nights. OK, yes, I was watching the TV a lot.

A little scaled-down from previous Christmases, not like I cared then. Stockings and associated piles go from L-R Tommy, Bobby and me. Took a look at a few of the things I dawdled over in the last responsibility-free months of my life, just prior to kindergarten:’

The Sesame Street Monsters! LP – A confusing cover: monsters, some nice, others with arched eyebrows and scary fangs, hovering over a terrified Muppet-waif. I remember wondering (not in so many words): this is scary-looking — why is this supposed to be “good”? Probably the source of this anecdote about me and my brother. Bobby and I listen to a lot of records at this time, basically cheapo kidsploitation from the Peter Pan and Disneyland record labels, things he raided from my parents’ collection, and sometimes things he hears from the radio (like Dickie Goodman’s “Mr. Jaws”). Bobby had a mechanical aptitude, liked poking into the inner workings of things, rejiggering them to make them do things they weren’t supposed to do (The floor of his room was uncrossable with bare feet as it would be covered in broken things.) and records would be progressively destroyed inna Christian Marclay-stylee. One record you can almost see on his pile, The Little Drummer Boy, had a passage that when sped up sounded exactly like this but very fast: Apple Cider! PPHT! Apple Cider! PPHT! Apple Cider! PPHT! In my mind I imagined a long line of people moved by conveyor belt to a pipe that squirted out the drink into each person’s mug. I don’t even remember the ultimate fate of my records. The next record I definitely remember playing is Anne Murray’s Let’s Keep It That Way, right when “You Needed Me” came out in 1978. I play that exactly once. When I finally get records of my own again in early 1984, I have to completely relearn how to operate a turntable.

The Mouse Factory LP — A soundtrack to a Disney-related television series that ended several years before, described by one site as a “series showing clips of Walt Disney movies linked by visitors to the Disney Studio” and “live action comedy segments with guest comedians surrounding clips and full cartoons” on another. I don’t remember that show but I was totally flipping mad for the Disney thing at the time, as that year twenty-year-old b&w The Mickey Mouse Club shows get re-syndicated, running on the local independent TV channel WNEW (now part of the Fox juggernaut, argh). I harbor a not-so-secret desire to be a star on the show, to sing and dance and be one of the gang yet be my own self, only I know it’d never happen because I still had problems “holding it in.” Strange, foreign even to think that back then color and black & white mingled so effortlessly on television, but then 100% color programming on network television is less than a decade old by ’75. Anyway, much as I loved the show I got insulted being equated with a not-quite-human mouse. This is why I don’t care whether you call me Mike or Michael as long you don’t call me Mickey.

Casper the Friendly Ghost: Haunted House Tales LP — An odd thing to get for Christmas but I liked the Casper cartoons a lot, as it was another positively ancient bit of cultural offal that the independent networks were showing at the time to fill time. I’m having difficulties detailing what was so appealing to my mind about Haunted Houses: maybe “the transformation of the familiar” or as I might put it at the time “everything…everything is. different. there.” If I could be sure I knew then what “everything” could mean. I had a goggle-eyed fascination for ruin and destruction, which was part of an even more primal fascination with before and after, or the slow fade or one state to another — you’d get a lot of that on TV, what with the transformed-realities of stop-motion and time-lapse photography figuring large in educational programming. I would play “earthquake” with my Fisher-Price playsets after watching the 1974 movie on cable TV, this year or the next.

The Berenstain Bears in the Bears’ Nature Guide — You can’t even see this at all, it’s propped on the couch. Only three things I can still recall about it: the yellow cover, which I once tried reproducing with tracing paper; a page spread I couldn’t bear to look at, as it showed what an ocean pier looked like once the water receded, filled with squirmy, shelled, foot-repelling life; and a page spread with a composite drawing showing all the varieties of landscape (marsh, isthmus, mountain, bay, plain — I admit some of these are guesses) that I could trace possible paths through — Caspar David Friedrich’s Rainy Day Fun-time Book. I like the faint crispy-crunchy concern this gift shows, and it makes me think of other things I had at the time with a faint ecological flavor to them, like the at-once awesome and thoroughly sick Kenner Family Tree House, a toy modeling a family “living with nature” made of a plastic that won’t biodegrade for hundreds of years, oh joy. Also, Charlie Brown’s Super Book Of Things To Do And Collect, on Bobby’s pile of stuff and hence not my own, which highlighted the joys of cataloging of natural things like shells and leaves. I’m sensing that even back then I had a definite preference towards books with galaxies of facts over those with narratives, a preference that reverberates through other book choices of mine throughout my life: Richard Scarry, The Book of Lists, record guide books, Joyce and Pynchon. You can blame TV, if you like. TV don’t care.

The Scribbler’s First Word Book — Practically invisible’even in the higher-res scan I’ve supplied, but I know it’s there, the orange triangle above and to the left of my pile of record albums, with a little corner of the cartoon owl on the cover. Almost singlehandedly taught me how to print upper- and lowercase letters months before kindergarten, though by the time my everyday print handwriting started looking a little like the impossibly perfect letters in the book it was time to fuck up script, ain’t that a bitch, eh? The big wonderful point of pride here was that I was doing this on my own, propping myself in front of the television with a magic marker copying letters. Likewise, thanks to a nameless book on Tommy’s pile (he seems to have received it two Christmases in a row), I knew all the fifty states before I hit kindergarten (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California…), and started watching the evening news religiously because there would always be maps; then there was a cookbook that I used to read the chapter titles (Artichokes, Asp-ah-RAH-gus, Beans, Broccoli, Brussell Sprouts…), then came learning the days of the week, the months of the year, the twelve signs of the Zodiac…Is this my intellectual axial age? An arrival into The World? I got along pretty well, me in hyperactive state of hunt-and-peck discovering and manic listing, nursing my obsessions of my own and, later, in Kindergarten. In contrast, I can’t even remember who taught my 1st Grade class, neither name nor face. (Actually, I might remember more had my grandfather not thrown out the box that held nearly every single assignment me and my brothers completed in elementary school, among other mementos, at some point in the eighties. As he grew older, he started doing things, destructive and odd things: ripping my paper models of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in half to make them fit in moving boxes, fatally cutting down plants in the garden after they flowered, handling his money in foolhardy ways. He was still in reasonable possession of his faculties, could drive a car and pay his bills, yet his behavior sometimes seemed ruled by a netherworld of intentions — it was hard to tell whether he did these things to hurt, or because he was at the stage in his life where he didn’t know what he was doing anymore, or something both, or neither. Of the box, the only things left are the few things I unthinkingly set aside for my own purposes: two accounts of anti-social [i.e., anti-sports] behavior at day camp, an essay about a nauseating amusement park ride from 1978, and a second-grade handwriting assignment I d’tourned with a picture of S’ren Kierkegaard that I fear I haven’t seen in a while — it may have gone down with the World Trade Center.)

That’s a fake fireplace, by the way. (My apologies to all you fireplace rockists.) You can see one exactly like it on page 24 of Bill Owens’ Suburbia. A rotating piece of wood, covered in tinsel and illuminated with light bulbs, then covered with a large black and white piece of plastic whose overall shape and texture suggested a rotting carcass just as much as it did burning logs. It gave off little light, a faint grinding sound and no heat. Those are fake plants, too. My brothers and I had a tendency to “water” them by peeing in the pots.

One Christmas (not sure which) I received the General Electric Show ‘N Tell, a filmstrip-viewer/turntable that looked like a bright red television set. One time when I was bored, I remembered my parents had other filmstrips in their closet, and when I finally found ones that could fit into the Show ‘N Tell, I could see pictures of my brothers in formal clothing — but the colors were all wrong and it made everybody look like monsters, so I never did that again.

I scanned this image from a color negative as a place-holder for me to write about before I got the negative developed. Then I lost the negative. Then I found the negative again and decided I liked it better than what it would probably look like developed, with the years of damage (sadly, all our color negatives are that dirty) and the odd color balance, almost like super-vivid afterimages from closing your eyes too hard. The above .jpg still doesn’t really look much like the negative does when I hold it up to a light source — even with the dust and fading, the lines and colors on the negative actually look very well-defined — but a massive amount of fiddling with the saturation and contrast turned this mass of browns and greens into something vaguely recognizable as me, in the den, playing with Tinkertoys. You can even recognize the lump in the hallway as our family dog in sleep mode: the diagonal white strip is her crown, the black triangle to the right her head, the rest is the rest.

I can’t think of much else to say about the above, so this is as good time as any to review the schedule for the typical Daddino family Christmas. To wit:

Stage I. Christmas Stockings. Early morning. The opening of ephemeral Christmas gifts.
Stage II. Intercalary Christmas Moment I: Morning. The adults prepare meals while the kids play with toys.
Stage III. Entertaining: Midday. Small talk, finger food, spiked punch.
Stage IV. Christmas Presents: Afternoon until dusk. The obscene selfishness of bourgeois children.
Stage V. Intercalary Christmas Moment II: Dusk. The kids play with toys while the adults prepare meals.
Stage VI. Dinner and Dessert: Early evening. Lobster or Roast. Cake and espresso.’
Stage VII. The Rosy Afterglow: Evening. People leave, the parents clean up while the kids play with toys.

The “canonical” Daddino Christmases — meaning the ones we all mentally refer to as the Christmases all other Christmases will have to stand or fall (invariably fall) by — follow the above template very very strictly. These stages are all present in their recognizable forms some time before I’m born, when my family stop celebrating Christmas at our relatives’ homes, and die a protracted death throughout the eighties. In 1982, faced with the reality that we’re all too big for coloring books and candy, my mom fills our stockings with office supplies (I got stamp hinges, a hole-punch and a mini-stapler with extra staples, among other things), and faced with that kind of unromantic factualness we all silently concluded that this tradition had become largely redundant and never bothered with Stage I again. Furthermore, as us kids evolved beyond treating Christmas as a toy-based experience and started actually helping out with the festivities rather than squirreling ourselves away with our stuff, Stages II, V and VII begin to lose their distinctiveness.’Finally, by Christmas 1987, my mom, too exhausted from the demands of work to prepare meals, takes us all to the Garden City Hotel for dinner, forcing the system to reach complete collapse even though Stage IV is still present. There is rallying, even peaky highs in subsequent years (XMASY2K comes to mind), but 1987 marks the end of the classic Daddino Christmas era. Yet there is hope the magic can begin again with the grandchildren.

This may be terrible to admit but I really could’ve done without Stage III; as an obstacle to Stage IV, it was INTERMINABLE. I couldn’t understand why my parents couldn’t see the logic of combining Stages III and IV, but Mom insisted on it being something of a formal occasion. Odd, really, since it meant dressing up and making nice small talk with people I already saw every single day.’Oh, and yes, clearly Stage III was put on Earth to heighten the feelings of expectation for Stage IV, as if months and months of waiting had only succeeded in making us completely apathetic about getting more presents than any child will ever deserve. So Stage III largely saw a lot of my pacing, whining and clock-watching. When I got a little older I tried salving the boredom a little by helping my mother with the food, such as preparing a spectacularly failed fondue one year, but eventually I get so fed up with the hours of stilted conversation and aimless wandering around the den that during Christmas 1986 (or maybe ’85) I don’t even bother coming downstairs, choosing instead to listen to R.E.M.’s Murmur on my stereo verrry closely.

Today’s photo shows me during Stage VII, finally allowed to play with my toys in a moment of peace before I was sent to bed. In contrast to Stage III, Stage VII was sometimes actually and truly full of family feeling. When we were older, we’d just go straight to our rooms, but in Christmas ’76, we all found ourselves in the den with our parents, staying up very late at night (for us) playing with our toys, playing with each other’s toys, and completely transfixed by the Magnavox Odyssey we got that year…which can’t at all be right since they stopped production on the Odyssey in ’74. Hmm.

By the way, I forgot to link to this photo in the last post, so enjoy.

1974 appears to be the dividing line between the recognizable and the void in my life. The earliest memory I can attach a date to is Bobby’s birthday in October, and there are memories which must be earlier, like the tail-end of toilet-training, which, going by the averages, would mean spring or summer of that year. There are even ones which seem to predate my ability to talk because they seem oddly silent and closed-in, devoid of any sense of verbal action or thought, but I just don’t know. This Christmas is the first one I can remember. The photos I’ve posted so far are, at best, a bloom of frayed connections between then and now: they show toys I know I played with but probably played with for years, recognizable traditions that were also undertaken at other Christmases, etc. They offer tantalizing maybes. This one has tantalizing yeses. I’m pleased my dad took this photo, because he just as easily could’ve not captured this event; if you asked him that day what, if anything, I might take from this day thirty years down the line, it’d be the opening of the most expensive toy, or…I dunno. It just wouldn’t be this.’But it is this.
‘
The internet tells me that what I’m holding in my hand is the circa-’74 edition of the Ohio Art “Busy Boy” Tool Box. It may or may not be the first toy I played with that day: here it looks like I’m just about to open the box for the first time while I’ve already taken the train off its track, yet in another photo, the train is neatly on its track and the tools are already all over the ground. (If I had the negative strips for those two it’d settle the matter as to which came first, but I’ve got all the negatives for this year’s Xmas photos except for those.) I could deduce from that I found immense pleasure just emptying and refilling the box again and again. This sounds about right because while I remember almost nothing else from this day, I remember playing with it, fixating on it, getting lost in the vinyl smell, which was like the smell of toys and toy stores; the taste of the tools (of course I was going to put them in my mouth) and their tactile profile on my tongue and lips, the saw and its ridges, and the zizzing sound they made going back and forth on my teeth; the blue exterior and and the lime green interior of the tin, the thin tubular hinges, and the intricate little Ohio Art logo on the back of the lid, which obviously had meaning but I wasn’t sure what…and then…and then…in a push-pull moment of consciousness, as if my mind had just received a gentle reboot, everything shifted from dreamy play to real life, and I became newly aware of what was going on around me.

How much of this memory is actually bullshit? I don’t really know. After I wrote the above, I thought it sounded almost like a purple fabulation based on the suggestions of photos I’d seem of the event years after the fact. I always remembered this memory, but I didn’t think about it much until I was able to connect it to this photograph, back when I first organized the family photo collection in 1995. Before then, for some reason I thought I was doing this everything — the teething, the smelling, the zizzing — behind or even to the right of the blue couch, which by the photos seems to be physically impossible. (Unless I was hiding under the side table…) I remember music was playing, but can’t think specifically what, and anyway I’m wondering if I think that only because my parents always played music on Xmas day, and maybe I only believe I chewed on the tools only because I always did that, too. On the one hand, I clearly remembered I was playing with an Ohio Art toy (maybe it stuck out in my mind thanks to a commercial, or exposure to an Etch-a-Sketch?) without any evidence of this fact being visible in the photos — as I said, there are yeses in the photo, but tantalizing yeses.

Likewise with the coming-down-the-stairs memories I mentioned in the last posts. I have two different memories, from two different times, of coming down the stairs and being shocked into exclaiming that it was Christmas. At two-and-a-half, I was a late talker, so these Christmases would have to be Xmas 1973 at the earliest, and — since Christmas 1976 was largely held in the den rather than the living room — 1975 at the latest, so it’s safe to assume these two instances happen in ’74 and ’75. But any examination of these memories renders them insubstantial. I cannot actually remember the difference I found between what was there the day before and what was there on Christmas; I cannot even remember if I realized it was Christmas by sensing there were differences, I may just be assuming that. Even the picture-image of coming-down-the-stairs has been corrupted, melting into countless other memories of being in that room. I do remember…or rather, I attached to this memory the notion that it was bright, even sunny outside. I don’t even remember that so much so much as the way light from the outside reflected back into the living room. Photos from these Christmases don’t really show a sunny day at all. I sort of see myself in the memory, in pajamas and throwing my hands up but of course I couldn’t see myself. Is that all these memories consist of, a few facts and a cast of supporting suppositions? It’s as if the little QuickTime videos in my head that once constituted The Memory of That Thing dried up, what were left were sentences and a few blocky jpgs. (A LOT LIKE THIS BLOG.) What I remember is a story that I told myself — when I talk about “this memory” certain images and phrases that have attached themselves to it, perhaps meaningfully, perhaps not.

The only other thing I remember is that this may have also been the Christmas Uncle John explained to me what Gouda cheese was.

L-R: Me(?); Nanny, Grandpa, Mom

This time you can click on the pic to get a higher-res image, not that it’ll do much good here. Save for the Santa pic, all of the earlier pictures were scanned from new prints made from fairly pristine 35mm slides, but our family stopped getting pictures developed into slides early in ’74, and the negatives I have of everything else (when I have them) are pretty iffy. So, from now on, everything I post will be scanned from prints developed a week to a few months after the photos were taken. These photos are all victims, more or less, of aging and the stupid technological fads of the day. This photo, for example, lost a noticeable amount of blue since early 1974 (my parents were terrible slackers when it came to getting things developed) so I had to do a lot of Paint Shop Pro color-correction to restore some of the original vividness. The photo is also the first of many Christmas shots developed on this awful textured paper that, while preventing smudgy fingerprints totally retards image resolution. And when they get scanned, they throw off little pinpricks of reflected light, often making fields of dark color look positively starry. Later you’ll also see the Polaroids, which looked like shit right out of the camera, and the less said about Kodak Disc film the better. So my apologies in advance.

I can’t blame Fotomat for this photo, though — yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to look. Why this photo is so crazily off-center, I don’t know. My grandmother is clutching a red something-or-other that should’ve been the center of the photo: it could actually be me standing on the table, as there’s a little hand by her neck and I’m wearing crimson overalls in other shots from that day.’There’s no accident in it, no blurring from movement, and it’s vertically centered, too, so I’m tempted to say it’s deliberate. Unless Tommy took this photo and was being a brat (not likely), I’m guessing my father was probably caught in a moment of irrational contrariness, brought about by being as exhausted as my mom looks, as she gives off the kind of smile indistinguishable from amphetamined teeth-grinding. (She looks moderately insane here.) For a number of years, this one included, my parents would stay up all night quietly frosting the Christmas cake by adding to an already Christmassed-out house, arranging the stocking displays and assembling toys, and wrapping more presents for the tree (the idea being that the new presents that magically appeared on Christmas day — as opposed to the ones that had been slowly been massing under the tree all month — were Santa’s additions) That kind of fussing around was of course in the service of major Christmas-memory-creation for me and my brothers, and believe me, the payoff was enormous. I have two clarion-call memories (probably from 1974 and 1975) of waking early, going down the stairs, just as I did nearly every single day, then surveying a radically changed scene and being so overwhelmed with surprise that it was Christmas, Christmas was TODAY, I screamed in delight and surprise thereby waking up my brothers and my parents, who maybe had two hours of sleep.

To the right, you can see fragments of the family’s photographic legacy, including several Christmas shots. (A Christmas meta-picture.) The topmost one is of the infant Bobby in a Christmas photo with well-nigh iconic status at the Daddino household: him peeking through the metal guard railings and fake plastic Holly garlands on the second-floor hallway (and I forgot to scan that, sorry). Underneath are pendant-shaped frames, one of which has four mall-Santa shots, including the two I’ve already shown. Imagine having to look at those photos every single day when you’re a small child: your parents choose to highlight pictures of what they think are you at your cutest, and that’s you getting all neurotic on Santa’s lap. The big blue thing: that’s a plaque with the’”snips and snails and puppy dog tails” quote which still hangs in my mom’s house in a light-filled room largely dedicated to my brother’s children when they visit. Also, out of view, a picture of a tiny Tommy outside of my parents’ first house, and a Hallmark (or American Greetings) plaque with Snoopy on the doghouse saying some appropriately cute thing.

L-R: Tommy, Bobby

It’s a pretty safe bet that everything you see in this photo is probably in a landfill somewhere.’

OK, now that I’ve gotten the sweeping statement out of the way, it’s fun to quantify (and qualify) the fates of our possessions as they sailed off towards eternity like the souls at the end of Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil. Almost all of the toys were destroyed or given away within a few years — while I can’t speak for my brother’s toys, by my estimates, the inch-worm (upper left-hand corner) wins the 1973 toy longevity game. I’ve got a clear recollection of trying to play with it during the Bicentennial party two-and-a-half years later, then watching snow fall on it in the yard one night, probably during the next winter, where I imagine it stayed until it was thrown out, water- damaged and insecty. The all-time oldest toy of mine I have any trace of: the Fisher-Price Play Family Castle (it seems appropriate to italicize it, like it was a work of art). I sold it off for mere dimes in a garage sale in 1977, 1978 or so; sometime before the family quit the North Bellmore house for good in 1992, I ran my fingers underneath the radiators in my room and found this little survivor. I also own the family’s Atari cartridges from ’78-’83 and a Woodstock doll with a gnawed arm that I should take to the New York Doll Hospital one day, to say nothing of the LEGO sets I still have. There was a very odd Christmas special back in ’78 or so where a magician or a scientist (what’s the diff in these things?) misguidedly tried to encase all the world’s toys in Lucite cubes so that kids can have them around forever and ever. Raggedy Ann & Andy would have none of that, leading us to the Heartwarming Lesson: the whole point of a toy is to love it — in other, more Marxian words, to use it up and then buy another one. (Bet it was sponsored by Toys “R” Us.) The Lucite option actually sounded pretty attractive to me, as I never liked how my attentions would make toys increasingly crippled, yes crippled, as I was an animist at heart and treated almost everything around me as having some kind of soul that I had some responsibility for. Surfaces scratched, pieces lost, the dog ate the New York puzzle piece again, BAD GIRL: these were little injuries and deaths. The not-so-faint traces of that attitude later inform my understanding of economics and ecology, teaching me you don’t waste stuff. Toys that lost their usefulness would not get completely discarded, instead they’d “go to charity” — that is, get thrown into these large dumpster-like metal boxes you’d see in suburban parking lots, set up by a local Catholic church usually, thereby postponing the landfill-fate for at least a few more years. Unless my grandfather simply ditched them in a dumpster somewhere, which I wouldn’t hold past him.’Right after I got rid of most of my early toys this way it occurred to me that there was still something perverse and wasteful about sloughing off the old only to make room for new in endless cycles, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the spell of toys had over my imagination started breaking.’

Anyway…the carpet and wallpaper disappear by the late eighties; the furniture gets thrown out once we leave North Bellmore. The glass credenzas (upper-right corner), after spending some time in my apartment, are now in an unloved corner of my mom’s basement; the green glass globe (also upper-right corner) is also in the basement; the glass ash-tray (on the side table) is…somewhere, while the porcelain bowl with a lid is in privileged space in keepsake cabinet. The boys are still around, if irretrievably grown-up. The house itself still stands, now occupied by another family.

L-R: Bobby, Dad

Dad is thirty-two here, a year younger than I am now, yet eternally a leap ahead of me. However old I get, I will always look at this photo and see someone my senior. Other photos, from his teen years or early twenties, don’t have this problem. He seems young there. But then he seems like someone else entirely. The first time I saw a picture of him from his early twenties I burst out with “he looks like Ricky Ricardo!” Now this was when I was maybe six or seven and still pretty naive about the markers of ethnicity; still, not entirely ridiculous, as the Daddinos trace their bloodlines not just through Italy but Morocco and Brazil (though not Cuba, far as I know). But in slightly later photos, when he starts losing the callowness in his face — when he starts looking like the man who raised me — he may be twenty-five or thirty, the same age as any random Williamsburgher dork on Friendster, yet completely incommensurable with them in terms of…a lot.

In light of this time dilation, it’s ironic that he’s sharing with my brother one of the childhood passions that lingered all the way through his adulthood: model trains. We bonded, in our way, over them. As a very young child he’d tote me along, spending many longueurs (meaning maybe only an efficient ten minutes a time, still very boring for a child) in the number of the hobby stores on the Island; while I have only one clear memory of going with him to Trainland, a specialty store in Lynbrook, every time I passed by it while commuting on the Long Island Rail Road, I’d think of that moment, very brief but full of light (was a sunny day). One time the family went to a train show somewhere on Long Island: the only thing I remember was the charging sound of trains that seemed to come from everywhere yet nowhere yet behind a very large curtain yet um maybe not. He’d often spend his weekend in the den or butcher-block kitchen table, quietly assembling wooden train cars via x-acto knife and mitre box, balsa wood and a Diet Pepsi to the side. I never thought it odd that an adult took toys seriously, which is possibly a root reason why I still have dozens of old LEGO sets from the eighties…and it never occurred to me until just now that Dad and I shared a passion for lording over miniature worlds, systems you could enclose in a wide hug, smaller versions of larger things. Mine: LEGO sets, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, Fisher-Price play-sets, dolls and dollhouses, maps, models esp. Visible Mans and Womens, Build Your Own Books, my own electric set, at five and a half…

Also, photography (the “smaller versions of larger things” thing, again). Dad gave me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, around 1981, a completely spur of the moment gift (which at the time was completely unlike him). He was the family photographer, more likely to be behind the camera than in front of it. Some fragmentary evidence: out of the over nine hundred 35mm slides our family had developed from 1970 to 1974, my dad appears in less than five of them; of our Christmas photos from 1982 and 1983, the last two Christmases prior to the divorce, he isn’t even in a single shot.’So photos of him are hen’s teeth rare. But the lion’s share of the pictures you’ll see this month are his.’

L-R: Nanny, Mom, Uncle John

Nanny wasn’t anyone’s nanny but my maternal grandmother; likewise, Uncle John was my maternal great-uncle. Grandpa (maternal grandfather) and Aunt Millie (maternal great-aunt) you’ll see later. Collectively, my stepdad called them (not unfondly) “the old folks.”

They had a powerful sense of attachment. Both couples lived in the same Brooklyn house for years; later, not long after my parents moved out to Long Island, they moved, too — only a mile away from us in a nice little two-story apartment complex, and again, right next door to each other. (Later my paternal grandmother would move to the same apartment complex only a few doors down.) Subsequently, they were always around us. Always. Nanny and Millie took care of the family wash, Grandpa and Uncle John would do manly odd jobs around the house, and and all of them picking up some of the loose ends of household management and child-rearing: feeding, shopping, transport, amusement, protection, dotage. Or they would just, you know, “hang out” and read the paper, have a cup of tea, watch the stock market returns on our cable TV, and so on. Friends sometimes cluck in envy that, unlike their own family members who’ve passed away early, leaving only a sad vague trace of remembrance and some old photos (if that), I knew my grandparents. (In comparison, my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, is as much of a cipher as most of my other relatives.) The other side of the coin…well, the kind way of putting it is that they often drove the family crazy in a kind of Everybody Loves Raymond sort of way.

Anyway…what is my mom laughing at? It’s not clear from the photo, and the ones before and after don’t reveal anything. (Such an odd-looking laugh, too, with the arms and hands so delicately out-stretched, suggesting an over-rationalized response.) I’ve asked her and she doesn’t remember. She thinks she might be reacting to me or my brothers opening a gift, and if that’s the case, it sure would’ve been nice to see exactly what (there are not nearly enough pictures of toys in our collection, which shows you where my priorities are). The switch in photography from flash-powder formality to point-and-click immediacy has encouraged a much more casual relationship between the frontal lobe and the trigger finger; consequently, in any Western family’s photo library there is always a healthy percentage of photos like this which are completely inexplicable to anyone involved. Why this reaction? Why this gift and not that one? Why then and not a little later? Why the food and the immaculate set table and not that expensive toy? Why? Why? Why? Nobody can remember. We get to experience the echo but not the actual gunshot. (And yet a photo is itself an echo.) But we do get my mom’s crazy-ass patchwork maxiskirt (Which she still has! Which by all rights oughta be on someone’s waist in My Comrade‘s next issue!) and a really blank wall which seems to hover over the three like existential doom.

L-R: Bobby, me.

Weeks of preparation. Several hundred dollars spent on presents. Two hours of sleep. And after all that fussing towards perfection, you get what every parent wants to see on Christmas day: a son more interested in playing with his younger brother’s toys rather than opening more of his own. (See those blue boxes on Bobby’s sleeping bag? Un-unwrapped.)

Thankfully the younger kid prefers playing with the Christmas ornaments to fighting with his brother.

Bobby looks very solemn with his Snoopy pajamas and Bicentennial kitsch drum, but sooner rather than later that drum’s gonna a receive a whack too hard and off to the trash it goes. Not that I blame him any — I mean, what good is a drum to a child if he can’t thrash it, right? I salute my parents for selflessly feeding us rock-ish instruments again and again, with the final upshot, after many formative years of clangs and bangs and disembowelingly huge bass sounds, being 1) a son who spent some years drumming on a professional basis 2) another son who spent some years DJing weddings and parties on a professional basis 3) yet another son who reviews records on a semi-professional basis. (Go me.)

Mom has clear memories of Jerry Lee Lewis playing the Brooklyn Paramount; the really shocking thing to her was not the sex & religion thing but seeing him DISRESPECT the piano. Growing up, pianos were not to be toyed with, they were expensive and your key to mobility up and out of Brooklyn. But (I’m supposing) the family was already out of Brooklyn anyway. The family ended up largely avoiding “proper” instruments, maybe thanks to my parents obnoxious recollections of endless piano lessons: some family photos show an upright piano in this room that disappears prior to my existence and I even wanted to learn the violin at elementary school but I vaguely recall my parents discouraging it.

Also, you can’t really see it but right next to Bert is a card or a box (hard to tell) with a flag on the moon and an astronaut waving hello; the final American lunar landing was only days before, and God, what a waste of time that all seems now. I also salute my parents for feeding us with mild patriotism, though the good that did us has been largely fuck-all.

Here my parents first employ a trick of placing “stocking stuffers” (gifts not really significant enough to be wrapped) on large patterned sleeping bags, giving the illusion that the floor is covered with more stuff there’s more than there really is, which is still quite a lot of stuff. And this isn’t even Christmas proper yet — the unwrapping of the REAL presents, following tradition, would be much later in the afternoon.

L-R: Tommy, me, Santa Claus, Bobby.’

You may have already laughed at the family’s next (and, unsurprisingly, last) mall Santa photo.

Man, what happened to my beautiful blonde hair? Who the hell do I have to fuck to get hair that Beach Boy-esque, that glinty gold again? More urgently, just what is THE DEAL with me and Santa? Rooting around my memories makes me think my SANTACLAUSTROPHOBIA touched on many of my all-time favorite neuroses (guilt, sexuality, parents), making the subject a rich mine for navel-gazing, but given that we’re dealing with the psychological dead-zone of infantile amnesia, anything explanation would have a serious lack of provability. Though to indulge in the armchair therapy just a smidge, it’s telling that very similar reactions towards overbearing or condescending adults (parents included), or “famous people” (meaning people dressed as cartoon characters rather than Elton John or Richard Nixon) are vivid memories from a slightly later time.

On the hand, it may be a simpler matter of the fucked-up-ed-ness of being plopped onto the lap of a strange old man in front of very bright lights (probably the reason why I’m shielding my eyes in the second photo). Meanwhile, both my brothers are totally unflappable about the big dude in red, damn their fearlessness.

My first Christmas. Perhaps someone thought it would be cute to let the six-month-old me wade in a sea of wrapped presents. At that age, I’m not sure what it would’ve accomplished apart from overwhelming me, though that may have been the point. Yes, my son. This is what Christmas means: stimulus as far as one could crawl. And my god, it gets even more dazzling. From the photographic evidence, Christmases in the Daddino household up this point have been small-scale, with presents safely umbrella’ed under a not-too-big not-too-little fake metal tree. But now there are three children, and as we grow older and the family gets richer, our expectations rise and all of our eyes grow saucer-sized. Dad has already made amazing career gains the accountancy world, making us firmly middle-class-rising-to-upper-middle-class, split-level ranch and two cars in the heart of darkest suburbia. So in the Christmas photos I’ll be posting in the next couple of days, you’ll see this room get busier and busier, absolutely bursting with STUFF.

The other two kids tolerating my wriggling are my brothers. Tommy is the oldest, born 1966, and Bobby (here partially obscured by the green chair) is the middle one, born 1968. I myself was born on June 20th and adopted only a month or two later, thus I’m the newest presence in the house.

It’s difficult to suss out from the resized pic above, but those white, red and yellow blotches to the side of me constitute a doll I figure I must’ve carried around for a couple of years because I think I ruined it in a misguided attempt to give it a bath, then hid it in a toybox when it didn’t dry as fast as I had hoped. It had large buttons with which a toddler could practice motor skills. That excepted, I remember none of the toys at all. We apparently all got drums, probably in the spirit of kid equality. At that age, I had problems sitting up — what was I going to do with a drum?

I quite honestly don’t want to listen to this fucking thing again.

I played it while watching a TV show a few days ago and felt a chill, then felt…irritation. I turned it down and just let it play to the end. Today, sitting down for a serious listen, the dings and twees, bursts of moment and then long echo, seeped through my pores. But then my body followed the slow rhythms of the music and my heart jumped and my breathing staggered, like the arrival of anxiety attack. Then disengagement once again.

Other music I associate with that day, even other Feldman I can take but this is now just a shade too careful, a carefulness shading off into inadverant mockery, the mockery of a careful music helplessly referencing what is not careful.

It was rich with the kind of decorative footballing froth (entirely devastating when deployed by the Red Devils, of course) that catches Tim H’s ire below. One hilarious sequence had Cristiano Ronaldo displaying his outrageous ball control for the assembled awestruck kiddies, all manic jabbing legs, like Twyla Tharp plugging a bag of locusts into the mains in an effort to incarnate speed metal. Never has so much F been D’d.

Roy and Rio were terribly good with the youngsters, while Ruud Boy emerged as the transcendentalist of the squad ‘ slipping into heavy-lidded reverie as he described last season’s rampaging solo goal vs Fulham; to score at Old Trafford was an “explosion inside you, and outside you too.”

Ole Gunnar played up to his cutie-pie image, as prepubescent as the children he was coaching, with an anecdote ‘ “I used to have, before, crisps. Now they measure all your body fats. And I’ve stopped that.” Aw, bless.

Oh, and Mr Beckham wasn’t mentioned once ‘ erased from history.

Outside, construction to the new room was still unfinished. The floor was dirty with Long Island sand; the apartment, eclipse-dark. Frigid, it was always frigid, what with it being on the ground and what with my parents, upstairs, being so fond of air-conditioning. Things were in boxes.

When I came back that day, after the train-ride, after the car-ride, after an insensate stumble down to the light fixture store, the hardware store, the church…this is what I came back to. Before, when people asked me, I would say: I live…. Then I’d recognize that the weird mis-wiring of my brain was acting up again and I would say: I mean, I work in the World Trade Center. But this place, my apartment, was where I lived, both in a legalistic and a felt sense. I left it two months later to be closer to the city; two years later, almost, my parents left it, moving forty miles further east. What once was home is very gone now.

When I came back, I put this on, just before a nap. If you listen to it awake, this is music that can suck the air out of a room. Like being in a snowstorm, it can slip you into a bubble of sound where anything outside is just a shout across the river. It can infect your surroundings with its stillness, as these sounds, silences, gaps and near misses between discreet sounds become what feel like the only lasting things in the world.

But it could also unmake my concentration, if I let it. Its slowness and repetition could catalyze a surrender to the unconscious. A day or two after Kurt Cobain died, I had this crazy wish to see him in my dreams. I got Beck instead. This time, my dreams conspired with me, allowing a wish untainted by Freudian repression: a view from the north side of Liberty street, facing west, near Greenwich, an echo of a world racing away from me at the speed of time.

Indeed, why patterns?

Well, repetition can lead to knowledge, and knowledge can lead to predictability, and predictability can lead to comfort, the comfort of knowing you live in a predictable universe. If the sun goes away, it will come back. In music, we can gain pleasure in the knowledge that the dominant chord will reach its tonic as it always does, and the chorus will kick in again, just like you half-hoped it would. Repetition can lull the listener into daydreams, sleep, love.

Out of all the music I kept reaching for in the anxiousness of 9/11 and its aftermath, “Why Patterns?” was shrugged off the quickest. Some tracks I needed had a good beat and a good line I could rip from context. Others were destruction-in-sound. D.I. Goes Pop, a music made of crashes, is bleak, so bleak that at one point Ian Crause doesn’t even seem sure there’ll be a next year. Yet even that album ends with our star-hopping children’s children flushed of God, free from the blood-red jackboot of history. Almost maybe the 1964 World’s Fair run by Situationists — what could be happier?

Morton Feldman can only offer the black hit of the void. These are sequences of sound with no beginnings and no ends, no resolutions, just the dark ironies of variations either too subtle for these ears or just not there at all. Some repetitions comfort, others cause anxiety. Anxiety has its own uncomfortable repetitions — compulsion and addiction, the mind turned robotic from fear. When I was a small child, I was afraid of counting past twenty: what if I can’t stop adding another number to the last? And I also thought: what if it snows and it never stops?