When I was growing up, I had two sets of toys that I was fond of. First were my Fisher Price toys. I had the castle, which had a big pink dragon, a knight, a princess, and a king. There was a trap door in the tower which you could plunge anyone except the dragon. I had the airport and the plane, which had a pilot and a copilot in the cockpit. There was the garage, which I could run cars around down to the gas station in the bottom. There was the school, which was a little red one room schoolhouse; and the farm; when you opened the barn door it made a low mooooo. The animals were great. Fisher Price toys are still good by me!
My second set of toys, or, really one big toy, was my train set. It was a huge, beautiful box set, which we built ourselves, with an oval route of track that ran round and round and round through tunnels and hills and a town that we made to look like Richard Scarry’s Busytown. It was my favorite toy, more so because we made it ourselves, my mother and father and I.

Toys have changed a lot: they are more plastic, less wood and metal, and the plastic is softer, less “dangerous” but more fragile, flimsy. Monster transformers and trampy dolls are now more the rule and less the exception. More fluid looking things like the MagNext toys with their magnets have replaced the more industrial, clanky Erector Sets I used to play with by screwing them together with actual nuts and bolts.

I wonder what Sparrow will prefer. Marketing’s an awful thing, so I can’t imagine what her little friends will be encouraged to want. I simply won’t put up with Bratz: but a Fisher Price castle I could go along with.

She was a fun-loving sort despite her small-town nature, who liked to take us out to Big T, and to Sonic, back in El Dorado. She was known to naughtily help me make chocolate milk by adding my chocolate pudding to the milk. (My mother did not approve.) She was pretty sharp, too, sharper probably than we gave her credit for at the time. At the same time she looked a lot like a conforming grand-mother type, who owned a giant white-and-black cat who mostly lay on his back, an aluminum Christmas tree with a rotating color disk (wish I had that now), and had one of those lovely grandfather clocks.

We would visit her often, and I would lie on her carpet, watching the filigree hands gently move around the broad face. I’d wonder what was below the elegant, almost medieval dial where the moon phases and the sun were, and I’d hear the works rasp and click behind the face, my excitement building as the top of the hour approached. This was when the works buzzed and span with speed, and as the big hand clicked into its highest place, her clock would quietly tone the hour . . . one, two, three. The works murmured again, rustled, and then the clock quietened. Tick, tick, tick. The grownup conversation went on, their half-distant voices rising and falling. I’d settle back again, watching, listening, looking at the dark chains and the big brass weights behind the narrow glass door. It was no antique, but to me it looked like the oldest, most wonderful clock in the world, and I wanted one almost as much as I wanted a cuckoo clock.

I guess it was auctioned away like everything else was afterwards; I would have said something if I had been older and wiser. Right now grandfather clocks would just wake Sparrow, but if the opportunity arises when my child is older, it’s something I’d like to have.

Top three resolutions according to local news at five a.m.–

1. Spend More Time with Family
2. Get Fit
3. Lose Weight

No surprise, I suppose; and smoking is down at number four, too: a vice I thankfully do not have. I may have mentioned that I am not a gigantic resolutions fan. (Indeed, I did mention it.) And I never, ever made a resolution to get fit, or to lose weight. And why New Year’s? I guess packing on the pounds from the week of Halloween candy to the night of New Year’s booze finally catches up with people, and in the cold hard light of day, staring into the mirror at the sallow, pudgy cheeks and the sunken, bloodshot eyes and the hair askew and matted and the faint stink of cigarettes and liquor all over . . . people decide that the time has (again) come. They gear themselves up, but on “Eye of the Tiger,” and get to work.

More power to them. They can work out to the P90X program until the sweat pours, building stamina and increasing muscle mass until they are toned and tan and leap from their beds every morning like a giant refreshed, determined to sell more life, health and casualty insurance than any other guy in the district, changing their diets to be more healthful, and working their way through the entire convenient DVD set . . . and I shall watch from the sidelines. It will work for them if they carry out the plan. I believe everything is efficacious if done properly, but this includes my inaction: I resolve to do nothing. Everything in moderation, from diet to exercise.

Long ago a friend of mine and I had quite an argument at the high school lunchroom table, where not-so-healthful Reagan-era food was mounded high under a faint cloud of steam. He asserted that you could achieve a state where no choices were made. I said that the choice to make no choice was a choice. The argument grew boisterous and we didn’t come to a conclusion. So I accept my guilt: my New Year’s resolution is to make no resolutions. That resolution is a meta resolution . . . but I will make no more resolutions that that . . . oh, wait . . .

Somewhere over the Pacific, it already is closing. What a mixed bag.

Ups–

My daughter. Hands down, the best thing that happened to the planet this year.

The Presidential Election. The cobwebs can be shaken away from our ears and eyes, and we can move forward. Or something.

My job. I haven’t lost it yet.

Downs–

Housing collapse.

Market collapse.

Economic free fall.

The mayor and his co-mayor, poor souls.

2008 bit. One of our vendors and I were chatting it up yesterday morning, and she optimistically said that maybe by the end of 2009 or the start of 2010 things would start–start–to get better. Oh, Ruth, you crazy wild-eyed loon! Nothing is all sunshine and roses! So here’s hoping.

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Things that are dead: zines (RIP Zines,) and punk (RIP Punk.) Zines were the internet of the 80s and 90s. The “real” web killed them both, as dead as door nails. That last gasp, the high trembling edge of it, the summer of 1998, and then the zine movement was dead and imploded and punk was left a shell of itself. A galaxy of beautiful zines and the networks that shared them back and forth slowly eroded and vanished, and the burgeoning independent comix movement of Kansas City crashed and died as well, leaving hardly a wrack behind. All the punks and rude boys of Westport vanished away as if they had never been, and bubblegum pop erupted again from the depths of hell.
Oh, what did Le Tigre say?

(Get off the Internet!)
I’ll meet you in the street
(Get off the Internet!)
Destroy the right wing

So is punk dead? I think a lot of people would agree that it was. Punk Chat City would beg to disagree. Punks the world round can sign up for free accounts in minutes, turn on their web cams, and, ah, punk away on the internet. A brief respite, doubtless, in the process of destroying the right wing. But is punk truly dead? Signing on might give you an answer. Meeting you in the street might be an answer too.

There’s that corner of the 1950s and ’60s world, that island of somewhat clean cut rebellion celebrated by Link Wray and his Wraymen: surfing. I can open the old newspaers in my mind, crinkling with yellow, and see distant headlines–Summer camps flourish by the sea: teen summer camps represent new wave.

No pun intended, of course.

But it’s the . . . well, 2000s now, whatever we call them, and that tradition, forty years and more later, goes on. Down in North Carolina, with its storied Outer Banks and he waves come with them, where teen summer camps are not unknown, the surf camps still flourish. These waters are no the warm electric blue ones of tropic Hawaii or the blue-gray surf of sunny Southern California, but the sterner breakers of the North Atlantic, where surfing lessons are sorely needed. It’s challenging but rewarding environment in the waters off the Cape, with unexpected rewards and new-minted friendships ready to be made. The Sport of Kings, as it is sometimes called, isn’t to be picked up lightly, and teen camps are perhaps the best way to hone your skills and improve yourself as well. I’m not one for the sea, but in another lifetime, in another year, I could have been that person, riding the crest down towards a distant beach, Link Wray in my mind’s ear . . . someone else’s chance now!

Deep in dim and distant 1986, “Crocodile” Dundee came out in theatres, which is where we saw it. (That does not date me at all.) It was a movie as charmingly naive as its come-to-America protagonist, which could throw away lines like, “You think that’s a knife? Now this is a knife!” and walk away whistling, without us once having to wonder how on earth he got a knife like that through security. (Today Mr Dundee would be in handcuffs over a toenail clipper.)

My favorite part is where he takes reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) to his own little spot of Australian real estate in the Outback, which turns out to be a domain almost as large as all outdoors itself. “Belongamick,” he says, gesturing from horizon to horizon. “It means Mick’s Place.” Like it was a hole in the wall not worth mentioning instead of a veritable kingdom!

It opened up my little senior year in high school mind to the existence of a national character as broad-minded and chest-pounding as my own, to a land as vast and empty as the Wild Wild West of my imagination. I had to shake myself coming out of the theatre, and not think about moving to Australia, to experience those empty spaces for myself. With a rush and a crash I could give up my plans and be there in a couple score hours . . .

Well, no matter. Not today. But I can’t talk to an Aussie, even today, without hearing in my mind those empty winds above Belongamick, and that cheerful, Steve Irwinish voice of Paul Hogan cheerfully declaiming his quiet views, and imagining those vast properties reaching out into the desert dark, as far as time itself . . .

I do not know what is a more boyish activity in Missouri than paintball. Imagine a crisp late autumn day, gold leaves turning to brown still clinging to the branch tips, trunks straight gray-and-black pillars lifted to the sky. A maze of bunkers, barrels, and nets drapes the landscape. A clear, bell-like silence trembles in the air. Your breath rises through your mask as you strain for a rustle, a snap, a heavy breath. Then–

Pfaff!

A pellet of paint smacks the trunk next to you, oozing its cargo down the bark. You clutch your paintball gun to your belly and and roll behind a log, leaves bursting around your already muffled ears. Pfaff! Pfaff! Your unseen assailant targets your shelter, hoping you’d be fool enough to raise your head to glimpse him, and instead catch a ball in the mask

Pfaff-pfaff-pfaff! You show him. You crawl to the end of the log, loose a few rounds through the bare, groping roots, your barrel scraping on the wood. Pfaff!

You don’t have time to wait. Men are crashing through the woods. Who are they? Which side? You sprint to the next shelter.

Pfaff!

Crisp autumn days in Missouri. The distant pop of balls. Little war games quietly fought in the woodlots.

I had Gerald Ford’s flu. Most people do not remember this, but the late 1960s and early 1970s were good for waves of killer flu that passed quickly but created great alarm in the media and in government circles. People did die, but not the hundreds of thousands that were feared. No, we shelved that fear for another day, which we trotted out a couple of years ago–avian flu, anyone? Line it up next to Peak Oil and the next Depression and run Terrorism out again before we forget it’s back there and it gets black spots all over.–Well, people did die, and I did get very, very sick from it myself. The flu flu isn’t a lot of fun. People get bad colds and moan and groan that they have the flu, poor babies. When you get the flu, you know, and it’s awful. I had the flu, and it literally just about killed me.

The up side is, I’ve sometimes gotten sick since then with bad colds, but I have never gotten a bad case of the flu. My body got ravaged by ye olde Forde Flue, and it remembers, oh, yes it does. I’ve seen you before! You’re that flu! Get out, you aren’t wanted! People always tout vaccination, but I never go in for the shot. These days I’d be just as likely to gulp orange juice and shovel beta glucan down my throat, to boost my immunity. When I am old and gray I likely will, as the immune system gets as forgetful as the person it’s attached to, but for now, I put my full faith in Gerald Ford and dietary supplements.

Several years ago, in 2002, a huge ice storm shut off power throughout Kansas City for days. Some areas had no power of over two weeks. The ice downed power lines, or toppled trees, by thousands, dragging down long swathes of lines. Or, most spectacularly, the ice penetrated the transformers so that they exploded in huge arcs of fire and lightning.

My apartment building was in something of an unusual position. The building across the way, the Longfellow, was totally plunged in cold darkness. I saw the lights flicker there, once, twice, and then out, like civilization falling. Ours, the Carlyle, seemed to stand bright against the darkness, but then a cold seeping cold came. The furnace ran on a separate transformer, it it blew. So we had lights, but no heat. It was arguable which was best.

There was a run, you may imagine, on gas and natural gas generators, so that there was hardly a power generator to be found from Maryville to Clinton, or from Topeka to Columbia. In darkened cold neighborhoods, pipes dubiously creaking in basements, houses like lit islands, the generator transfer switches drinking in electricity from those humming generators behind the garages.

It was that, or turn off the water and head for a hotel. There weren’t hotel rooms, any more than there were generators.

Lights out.

Lesson: no electricity, no house. A strange world it has come to.