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When I was a kid, back in those “dark” ages, I remember walking to the old Trion movie “show” with a quarter, and being able to not only buy admission but also popcorn and a coke.

The movies were mostly Westerns and an occasional Sci-Fi film, but many a wonderful summer afternoon was enjoyed at that big white monstrosity of a building. The multi color play bills advertising upcoming movies hung up on the walls all over the place. Famous stars like Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne would be staring down “at ya Pilgrim”

I went to see “The Hobbit” with Ted and Paula this afternoon, and continue to wonder if all this high tech is really worthwhile. The ticket lady said: “That will be 10.50 per ticket because it’s in 3-D” “Do you have just regular old Technicolor?” I asked. “No” she replied.

So we got our tickets, went in and waited until two minutes before the film started before they let us in. They were having problems cleaning up they said. I wondered if the previous crowd had rioted over the prices.

Anyway the movie started, and I put the big clumsy 3D glasses over the top of my regular glasses.

Now, the movie was kind of good. It was all pretty much non Tolkien, because most of the stuff they wrote into the screen play ain’t in the book. But great entertainment. The 3D thing just bugs me though. I used to get excited over black and white movies, and well directed and written movies of any kind please me very much. I just think 3D is the latest ploy, and latest toy they use to fleece people. Kind of like if you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bull s**t. Peter Jackson has it in him to do better. I cried after the first “Lord of the Rings” movie, sitting there listening to Enya sing “May it Be” That was a great movie! This one…good entertainment.

I really hope they get over this phase, cause next time I go to the movies and they tell me its 3D I’ll probably just go home and watch “Diners, Drive Ins and Dives”

The best thing by far was being with Paula and Teddy. That pretty much makes up for everything else….and the movie was exciting…I’ll have to give it that. I did not fall asleep…not one single time. “The Duke” woulda been proud of me.

I was just listening to Frank Sinatra the other night. That man could really sing.

I never really listened to Sinatra a lot before September of 1968. Before that time, I was an Elvis fan first. I like some other rockers too. Jerry Lee Lewis was another. I liked a lot of the other crooners besides Sinatra earlier on in my life too. Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Andy Williams. I sang “White Christmas” every year at school from 1964 through 1967. I could do “Everybody Loves Somebody” and sound just like Dean Martin, I’ll guarantee it. Paula and I went on our one and only cruise back in 2011, and I went to nightly Karaoke on the ship and sang that song. The rest of the cruise, I had people coming up to me in the dining room and saying….”There’s ol’ Dino” Yep, I do a pretty good imitation of him.

But Sinatra? I could never imitate him very well. I didn’t do it in High School because I had never listened to one of his albums before. Oh, I had heard him on the radio of course. “Strangers in the Night” was a hit song during 1966. It hit number 1 on the pop charts that year. His daughter also had a hit with “These Boots Were Made for Walking” in 1966. It seems that that was a good year for the Sinatra family. But, Sinatra’s album “Watertown” which came out in 1970, only sold 30,000 copies. He just sort of retired from recording new stuff after that. He got dissatisfied with the way his voice sounded and although he performed in Vegas, things were never the same.

I only discovered how much I loved his earlier music in that early fall of 1968. That’s the month I started to college at West Georgia College in Carrollton. West Georgia still had a real “small college” feel back in 1968, and I’m glad I went there. Another reason I’m glad I went was because that’s where I met my future wife. But…back to Sinatra.

My “assigned” roommate in Strozier hall at West Georgia College, who’s name was also Larry, was a real record collector. He brought his record collection, and his record player to college with him. I didn’t have squat besides the clothes in my closet, so I asked Larry if I could listen to his record player while he was gone to class. He told me it was ok, but “You might not like my taste in music” At first, I had to agree.

There were no rock and roll records in his collection. No Elvis, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones. There was Sinatra, Nancy Wilson and Deon Warwick. There was about 6 Sinatra records, and his record player held five albums at a time, so I took Sinatra. It was a good choice.

The albums were all from the fifties and early sixties…up to that 1966 album from which “Strangers in the Night” came. There was Cole Porter songs like “I’ve Got You Under my Skin” and there were songs from movies like “Three Coins in the Fountain” There were the greats: “Come Fly with Me”, “The Days of Wine and Roses”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, “The Lady is a Tramp”, “That’s Life”, and my favorite of all of his songs “It Was a Very Good Year”. My next to favorite was the oft recorded Paul Anka song “My Way” I think he is best remembered for that song, but I liked “very good year” the best.

It hit me the first time I heard it, and it still does the same to me after all of these years. He had a great hit song in the seventies with “New York, New York,” too. That was in 1979, and Sinatra is remembered best for that song, even though it came from a Liza Minelli movie.

All of those records that my roommate brought with him to college changed my tastes in music. I went on to listen to just about every album he had brought. I got to like Patti Page and Doris Day. I listened to Rosemary Clooney and Eartha Kitt. I took the measure of Billy Vaughn and Burt Bacharach. If not for those albums, I’d have never have loved music as completely as I do, and would have missed a lot of good moments in the history of music.

Larry and I were roommates for that entire year, and after that year I married my permanent roommate!

I do still love Sinatra though, and I’m glad for YouTube so I can dial up the old hits from time to time. I grew to even like Nancy Wilson too. Larry said I would…..

I try to watch sunrises and sunsets as much as possible. I frequently make photographs of them, as any of you who are my friends well know. I love the days that I live on this big blue marble. I certainly enjoy everyone of them, and will try and continue to do so.

But, I am fortunate. So much more so than the vast majority of other human beings on the face of the earth.

All around us there is hunger, and homelessness. Even in our fortunate country there is plenty of it out there. If I could end it all with a snap of my fingers I would do it. If I had the money to end it all…..would I do it? Or, would I say: “I earned this money, and it’s mine” even if I didn’t need a fraction of it?

If I was living in luxury, would I have the same attitude as I do now, as this person who lives paycheck to paycheck, and always has?

It’s an interesting question to ask yourself. If you could do magic, like the finger snapping thing, and end all poverty, hunger, sickness, homelessness and disease in the world it’d be easy to make that choice, wouldn’t it? But, if we were billionaires with lots of real money, would we try and do the same things?

I think that the answer to that question is pretty much self evident.

Maybe I’ll venture out and buy a lottery ticket for tonight and tomorrow. If I won, I could put myself to the test.

The New Year is creeping every closer. Just a few more days until Sunday and it will be 2017.

When I was a kid in the 1950’s, I often thought about the year 2000 and beyond. I thought it would be a magical time where most problems of health and poverty would be solved and I thought that surely by then the world would find a way to be at peace. I thought people would travel around in “sky cars” sort of like the Jetsons and that there would be devices to take care of human needs. I thought human beings would be living together like the people in the Coke commercials. Singing together in “perfect harmony”.

I think maybe if we, the human race, had spent as much money and effort on the problems of health and poverty, and on finding ways of helping our fellow man instead of on wars, weapons of wars and ways to destroy each other we might have seen that idealistic world I dreamed off as a child. Instead, the rich have become richer and the poor have gotten poorer, and our divisions have deepened.

Where did we go wrong? Surely I thought, after two huge wars that killed so many people in the middle of the century we would LEARN something……I want to go back sometimes to those days in the past and see if it was something I did, or didn’t do, that might have helped. Surely I could have done more. Certainly we could have all done more.

Instead we have become slaves to technology, instead of beneficiaries of it. People use it to spread hatred and discord. People spend hours and days lost in cyber space instead of talking face to face with each other.

Instead of moving forward for the good of all mankind, and in the spirit of love, it appears we have gone backwards. In this past year especially, hatred has become more widespread. The population of our country seems always to be split right down the middle on important social and cultural issues. The holiday season this year has given us a tiny break in which to catch our breath, before we apparently embark on a new national journey….a tact we have never before taken. We are sailing in uncharted waters. Bad or good? Depends on which half of the population you belong to.

I have to have hope that we will learn from what lies ahead. I have to have faith that somehow humanity will turn over a new leaf, and that my children and grandchildren will have a world in which to live.

Yes…the new year is creeping every closer this week. There is still a chance for all of those good things that I have pondered on in the past to happen.

I wonder if there’s a chance they will?

I wonder if we can solve the the number one problem in this world? The problem of people hating other people just because they are different from them. Just because they look different. Just because they think differently.

I used to fantasize as a child about aliens coming to visit Earth, and bringing us the secrets to peace and prosperity. Now I realize that in order for any culture or beings to reach out into the Universe to spread harmony and knowledge, they must first learn how to have it themselves.

If they are anything like us, it doesn’t appear that’s a possibility! We earthlings can barely cooperate long enough to decide what’s for dinner…much less think about reaching out to the stars.

When the ball drops, and it becomes 2017, think about what you can do to make this a better world. Let’s try a little selflessness instead of selfishness. Is it too late, or not??

Winter evenings in the South are gray, bleak events. The sky is the color of the cotton that used to fly out of the sides of the bales that the train would haul into the cotton docks. The cotton that used to lay around for several weeks and get rained on, and run over by cars. That’s the kind of color the sky was today. But it was not silent. Hundreds of thousands of blackbirds kept coming overhead in huge flocks which covered the entire horizon. Hollering and cackling and screaming in their blackbird language heading west to east. Looking for some farmer’s field laying fallow and ripe for ravaging.

We live our lives surrounded by other human beings, but we only know them through our eyes, through the function of our other senses, through the emotional set up, and the hardwiring of our brain which we received through our genetic make up. Our feelings are a series of complex chemical reactions, triggered by exterior stimulus. The organism which we know as “us” is a very complicated piece of nature’s work.

And yet, there are those moments…those rare moments when I am experiencing the love I have for my little ones, and for others in my family, that I feel as though we are something more than simply an advanced species of mammalian life.

There are those thrilling moments of experiencing natural phenomena, such as the beauty of the world and the Universe around us, which have intrinsic value beyond that which ought to be experienced by beings to which they would have no other value to, other than the awe of their beauty.

Our evolutionary process has been long, and the whole of creation that I look out upon at night is so vast, that I cannot with good conscience preclude an interaction at some point with some thing…someone….some presence, which changed the basic nature of our species, and altered the direction we were headed. Was it like the scene from “2001 A Space Odyssey”? Nah…I don’t think it was that overt, but perhaps though, much more powerful. God? The creator of the Universe? Aww man….I just do not know, and neither do any of us, no matter what we say, do, or write. And the frustration is knowing that we may never know, even in death we may have no answers.

However, with all that being said, I hold out the hope…I pray each night, and hope my prayers are being heard, and not falling on deaf ears, or simply echoing out into an empty and cold outer space…I pray that there is something further along past the gateway we must all one day pass through.

The stars are shining brightly outside tonight, and when we look at them it’s hard to realize that we are looking at the past in every single case. Sometimes we are looking at long past.

It’s easy to look into the past, and impossible to see the future. The best thing we can really do is to live in the day, love in the day, be kind in the day, and share good things with those around us. Our family, our friends and as many of those we come in contact with every day. We celebrate love during this time period of the year.

But, I hear the word hate too much every day now. I see it written down every day. Even in this season…that word rises up to bring us down. It rises up to defeat us! If we let it, that one…word…will…destroy us.

Think about it on the eve of this most holy day for Christianity. During this season for different people who celebrate other types of holy days. Think about it in the new year. I don’t want hate to destroy us, and pervert our feelings for each other.

Remember Dr. Martin Luther King’s words: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only the light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that”.

As I have said before, we spent a half of a school year in 1960 at my Grandparent’s house in Blue Ridge because Mom was sick. I was enrolled in school there for almost half the year, which including the Christmas vacation for that year.

My Grandparent’s residence was a desolate place back then. It was the very last occupied house on Snake nation road at that time. A rough, ragged, rocky, muddy when it rained, and creek crossed road which took about 30 minutes to traverse from the turn off at the cemetery, to their modest gray wooded little two story house. Grandpa’s eight to ten bee hives stood like the sentinels of Stonehenge out in front of their house on top of huge flat rocks Grandpa had dragged up there on a wood sledge. I can imagine that their construction probably resembled in miniature that wonder of the English countryside, because the hill leading from the road to Grandpa’s house was extremely steep. A lot of times when it was wet and muddy my Dad had to get a strong running start from Snake nation road before he turned into Grandpa’s driveway and then as soon as he turned left, he had to gun the gas as hard as possible to try and make the curve up the hill to the tiny parking space in front of the house. Sometimes we just didn’t make it. The tires might have been a little too worn, or the mud a little too thick. We would end up having to park down below the beehives out in the high grass and grab our suitcases and trek up the hill, trying our best not to slip and fall flat on our faces.

But, this year my Mom, my brother and I were already there, and it was for Daddy alone we waited on the day before Christmas Eve. I heard his car first and went and stood out front, next to the porch. He came around the curve which was just in eyesight across the road from “Uncle Lark’s driveway. Lark Davenport’s was my Grandpa’s Uncle…his Mother’s brother and his farm sat across Long Branch creek from Grandpa’s house. The only way to get over there in a hurry was to walk the narrow little half log bridges that the two men had laid down across the fast running little creek in order to access each other’s house if the need arose. It rarely ever arose, but the logs were there just in case.

Daddy drove up the driveway and into Grandpa’s little parking space without any problems that day since it was dry…cold, but dry. It seemed like it was always cold in Blue Ridge that time of the year not matter what was happening elsewhere. We were in the “mountains” of Georgia…..the foothills of the Smokey Mountains which lay not too many miles away across the border into North Carolina.

I hugged my Dad, and my brother ran up to him and Daddy picked him up. Mom didn’t have much to say…things still very unsettled between them.

Grandma and I had been the ones to get the little Christmas tree a few days earlier. We had gone out into the woods and hiked around for quite a while, and found just a little old pine tree that looked nice. Grandma cut it down with the hatchet she had brought with her, and we took it back and Mike and I helped her decorate it. It was about the size of Charlie Brown’s little tree and Grandma had put it up on a table so that the lights could be seen…that one string of lights that she owned. There were maybe a dozen ornaments on it. It looked wonderful to me…as beautiful as any Christmas tree before or since. Grandma also hung our stocking from their mantle, on the far ends away from where the vent from the stove was. There were candy canes hanging around also, giving the old house a festive and fabulous look.

We always slept upstairs in the old house. Since the only source of heat in the house was a potbellied wood stove in the “living room” downstairs. During the cold Christmas weather we slept under 5 or six quilts upstairs. It was one of those situations where when you got warm, you didn’t move out of your “spot” If you moved over a foot, you would have to warm up that spot all over again. Most of the time you could see the fog from your breath, if you had your head out from under the covers. This was how we bedded down on Christmas Eve that year.

I never slept well on Christmas Eve. I always listened for Santa, but never quite heard him. Grandpa would always go “ho, ho ho” a couple of times, but I always knew it was him. He wasn’t fooling me. I heard the trunk of a car slam shut after we had been in bed an hour or so….then drifted off into a light sleep.

I heard Grandpa stoking up the potbelly stove about 5 am, and I waited the required 30 minutes or so until I knew the downstairs would be warm before I woke my brother up and we went running downstairs. All the grownups were already up and having coffee. Grandma already had biscuits in the oven, and we know that a delicious breakfast would soon be coming. Under the tree there were presents! In our stockings there was a plethora of oranges, apples, nuts, peppermint and other great hard candies. We could have our stockings but had to wait until after breakfast to tear into our presents.

We had three presents a piece from Santa, and one from Grandma and Grandpa. Four presents. In this day and age that would seem skimpy, but back then it seemed like more than enough. We place so much emphasis now on the number of gifts given, instead of the number of gifts given in love. There’s a big difference. I despise the TV commercial they have on nowadays with a woman called the “Gifter” whose only goal is to out give everyone else. That tells you where our society has gone.

This was the year I got a telescope, and Mike and I both got a “friction” stagecoach which shot sparks out the back when you revved it up. I also got a plastic “pinball machine” where you shot the balls up into the machine and see whether you get them to land in the highest number “slots”. I think I played that thing pretty much all day long that day. Grandma and Grandpa gave us some clothes of some kind, and I got a couple of new comic books. It was good…no, it was great.

Later on that day, the Uncles and Aunts, and numerous cousins came for dinner. Grandma’s little house was crowded to the gills. A lot of us ate dinner sitting out in the living room or even on the front porch. My cousins and I would find something to play or do after dinner. The food was nothing grand. I don’t remember if we had Turkey or roast beef. It really didn’t matter because Grandma could make anything taste good. I think later on that winter, we got iced and snowed in for over a week or so out there at the end of that old road. Grandpa had to shoot Robins for us to eat. They were delicious. When you’re hungry, I guess anything tastes good!

The air seemed to be filled with good will, good feelings and love that year. Later on, early in the spring we moved back home to Trion.

Mom had gotten better, and our lives went back to normal…as normal as it could be in our family anyway. We continued to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house pretty much every Christmas after that. Even after my wife and I married in 1969, we continued to make an annual Christmas trek to “the mountains” Certainly, even now when Christmas rolls around, I think of those days. The camaraderie, the food, the love that we all had for one another. Those were great Christmases, as are the ones we have now with all of our children and grandchildren. The common factor is family…and love, and remembering what Christmas is all about, not the presents, not the food or the games. It’s all about the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas everyone.

Chapter one

With Christmas drawing near it naturally evokes many feelings and emotions in those of us who have seen a few of them come and go. In my case, more than a few.

Christmas, I think, is lived in stages in the hearts of we humans.

We begin as children, with the mystery of Santa Claus. No matter what religious persuasion to which you belong, Santa fits. He’s the epitome of unselfish giving. The uncanny being who can somehow make it around the world in only one night in order to pass out gifts to “good little girls and boys”. His existence alone during the first few years of my life, kept me from committing many awful offenses.

I solidly believed in him. I revered Christmas. Of course, being raised Southern Baptist, I also knew the story of Jesus’s birth in every different gospel version. By the time I was eight, I knew every Christmas gym in the hymnal by heart. I memorized the entire Baptist hymnal by the time I was 12, and still don’t need a book for 99% of the songs if they do the first, second and last stanzas)

But Santa was my hero, and Christmas was my big day. I kept a handmade calendar, which I drew on notebook paper, using a ruler in order to keep the lines straight, just so I could X out the days one by one starting the day after Christmas every year. I kept a calendar even after I knew there wasn’t a Santa, just because I found it reassuring to be able to visually see the days, and be able to make notes on special occasions. For many years after I got out of school, I still had those calendars, along with my genealogy charts that I had compiled with information gleaned from my Grandparents and my Great Grandma Locklear. There was some invaluable information that was lost forever when I misplaced the big, huge notebook that contained all that hard work. I still hold out hope that I’ll be going through some long packed up box someday and find that book. They might possibly still be in the attic of the old house on ninth street if somebody hasn’t thrown them away. Wonder if they’d let me in to look?

I remember quite a few Christmas Eve nights spent at my Moms’s parents house in Blue Ridge. Cold, cold nights sleeping upstairs under piles of quilts so tall, that turning over was almost impossible. You see, Grandpa Stewart only had an old pot bellied stove back then, which was a wood burning hog. He shut the air flow down at night and there was no heat at all upstairs. By midnight you could see your breath on those frigid December mornings. By six a.m., the cold had penetrated those six quilts, and as soon as I heard grandpa’s feet hit the floor, and hear the old heater start to go swoosh with heat, I was gone! Besides, it was Christmas morning! I had heard Santa downstairs during the pitch black night going “ho, ho, ho” and I wanted to see what he’d left me.

Those were the younger years, the magical years before I knew the “secret” of Santa, and became a part of Santa myself. Those were the years of the Lionel train set when I was 8….one of the few years we didn’t go to Blue Ridge, and the only year I can remember as a child when my Mom woke me up to say “look out the window, there’s snow”. There was. Those were the years before Mom got sick, before the mental illness which would haunt her the rest of her life, embedded it’s claws into her.

The years before that one had been wonderful Christmases too. I remember the set of Hoppalong Cassidy cap guns, and his replica outfits. I remember the red Radio flyer wagon, which I hauled rocks, dirt, dogs and toys in until it literally rusted through. I remember marbles in drawstring bags, matchbox cars, and tootsie toy trucks. I remember a bow and arrow set with rubber stoppers on the ends of the arrows. Then there were the comic books….usually Superman and Uncle Scrooge. I was a lucky little boy those first eight magical years.

After the first nervous breakdown Mom had when I was a fourth grader, Christmases were fraught for a few years. By the time “normality” returned, I was twelve years old. I looked at a photo of myself the other day from the sixth grade. I was on the end of one row, and had a sad, hollow look in my eyes. As I moved on through the next couple of years, and across the street to the High School, Christmas took on new meaning and understanding.

I had left behind the mysterys of Santa Claus by the time I was an eighth grader. I knew years before that about the secret. Santa Claus only existed as the spirit of Christmas. He was the joy of children, provided by the largess of the familie’s grown ups. I don’t remember exactly what day, or the exact hour I stopped believing that Santa Claus was a real person. I just remember it being a sad day. A day of disappointment. A day of numbness. How could such a thing actually be true?

I think during my High School years I actually became more affectionate of the holidays, and of Christmas. After I got over my initial disappointment at there being no “real” Santa, I began to realize that those of us who knew Santa’s secret actually became Santa ourselves, for those who still did believe. I remember thinking how I would never want to disappointment a child who still believed.

When I grew up and married, and had kids of my own, I wanted to always make sure that Christmas was a most special time of the year for them. I tried every year to make them happy, and to make my wife happy. Perhaps I went overboard on the gift giving at some points, but I didn’t care. My philosophy has always been to make the ones you love happy while you can, because you’ll never know when the day comes that you won’t have that chance.

As the Kathy Mattea song says:

… “Time passes by, people pass on

At the drop of a tear, they’re gone

Let’s do what we dare, do what we like

And love while we’re here before time passes by…”

Its never more important than it is right now, today, this year….to let people know how you feel. Let the child in you who once believed in Santa Claus take over. Approach life one more time with that innocence and awe, which made you believe in Magic

The magic is still there in most of us….I can’t say all, because I believe the joy of life and love are absent for some people, and that’s beyond sad. Some vessels are empty, and some are corrupted . I feel sadness for those people, I hope they are not beyond redemption.

For this year, this year 2018…I wish all of you my friends and family, a very Merry and Magical Christmas.

Chapter 2

…”but Jacob,” said Scrooge “you were always a good businessman.”

“Mankind was my business!” Said Marley.

And so it remains. Mankind is the business we should all be worrying about. Who doesn’t have enough to eat, or four walls to surround them? Who is down and out, and needs help? Who is hurting, either physically or mentally….financially or spiritually?

As my son reminded me once a few years ago, I only gave a single dollar to a well dressed man in downtown Chattanooga who said he was homeless. But, he did turn down my offer to buy him a meal at the Maple Street biscuit company….said he’d already eaten. And those biscuits are ‘spensive. I did, however, wish him “Merry Christmas” as I handed him that dollar. He put it in his suit pocket and said “thank you” Then I went out the next day and gave 20 dollar tips to the three young ladies who have taken turns waiting on us at Jim’s over the past year.

I consider mankind my business, oh so much more than most. And not just at Christmas either. I take Charles Dicken’s lesson to heart. Oh, I’m far, far from perfect, and I will never be mistaken for a philanthropist. I’ll muddle through by doing what little I can for my family, my friends, and those whose lives intersect with mine. I want to thank all of my family and friends, and the people around me for all the kind things they do for me. It’s mutual, and it’s a balance.

Merry Christmas if I fail to see you, or if I forget to say it again in the next few days. Merry Christmas and a Happy New year.

Chapter three – the longest night

I had a walk yesterday and timed it to end at 6:03 p.m., which is/was sunset for the day. I wanted to do this because I had read where scientists said that yesterday was going to be one of the longest nights in the entire history of the planet. Yep, that’s right. At first they were saying it was going to be THE longest night ever, but then they decided that it was sometime back in 1912 in which that happened. But last night was a very long, dark span. I slept deeply and much longer than usual. I had unusual and vivid dreams. Perhaps it was because my legs were like lead weights as I walked yesterday, or maybe it was just my imagination. That aspect of my personality doe run wild every now and then.

In some respects it was really kind of eerie. It was as silent as I can remember with the exception of a few dogs barking off in the distance. I closed my eyes as I walked down the long straight away next to the railroad track, almost an entire quarter of a mile, and tried to imagine how our distant ancestors must have felt in this season of the year. Sitting in a cave or at a rock overhang, with a tiny fire as the only heat and light. Straw as a bed, and perhaps a fur or two as cover. Hungry from not having enough to eat that day. Howls and growls of animals drifting in through the opening of their abode. A lot of them who would have considered us as prey. It’s amazing to me that our species is so tough. It’s remarkable to me that humans made it through that primitive phase.

We have survived all of that to get to this point. Now we are divided by religion and politics, along with race and class. These are the most divisive issues in our world today. Maybe there are some other “minor” issues, but these are the ones which continue to rear their ugly head. These are the ones which people are warring and dying over by the thousands every day. These are the issues fueled by the two “children” beneath the robe of the “Ghost of Christmas Present” in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” He tells Ebenezer Scrooge:

“They are your children! They are the children of all who walk the earth unseen! Their boy’s name is Ignorance and the girl is Want! Beware of them! For upon their brow is written the word “doom!” They spell the downfall of you and all who deny their existence! But most of all beware this boy“

Ignorance and want combined with all of the divisive issues, but most of all ignorance.

We no longer sit in the dark in the caves and fear that we will become the prey of fierce animals. We ARE the fierce animals and we now prey on each other.

As we head into the Christmas Season after one of the longest nights in the history of the Earth, I wish some type of unknowable magic could be worked in the middle of one of these long Winter sleeps, and we would wake up at dawn as creatures of total love and peace….Peace on Earth, and true Goodwill to all men and women.

For some reason today I thought about the line from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka tells his group of guests in his factory about the Oompa Loompas and their country and how they came to his factory: “Oh, well, then you know all about it and what a terrible country it is. Nothing but desolate wastes and fierce beasts. And the poor little Oompa Loompas were so small and helpless, they would get gobbled up right and left. A Wangdoodle would eat ten of them for breakfast and think nothing of it. And so, I said, “Come and live with me in peace and safety, away from all the Wangdoodles, and Hornswogglers, and Snozzwangers, and rotten, Vermicious Knids.”

I sometimes wish that a place like the Chocolate Factory existed, and that those of us who wanted to, could go there. “Well there’s Heaven” some people will say: “It’s a lot better than a Chocolate Factory” Well I’m not ready to go there quite yet. As the country song says: “Everybody Wants to go to Heaven, but Nobody Wants to Die” That’s how I feel about it. (ok, that’s my limit for clichés and quotes for the day!)

The kind of place I am thinking about doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. As the days grow more and more dangerous during this age and in this time, there is very little a person can do to get away from the world that want’s to harm them, unless you want to move to one of the islands that the “Survivors” have abandoned, and start using their stuff and living like them.

A lot of people have tried to create their own “safe haven” Jim Jones, and his followers. David Koresh tried. A lot of people try to start their own Valhalla, and somehow it always seems to fail. I wonder why? Is humanity and human nature so geared to be combative and hateful to other humans who don’t “fit in” that no matter what we do here on this earth, we are doomed to fail when it comes to loving and protecting those who are different? You would like to think that wasn’t so, but tell me a time and a place where there has ever been a “Chocolate Factory” for the Oompa Loompas?

Sadly, I can’t think of any. I know that all religions promise us a place like that of one kind or another. Heaven, Nirvana, you name it. We have been promised it from them all. But that’s ONLY due to us after we die. I sometimes wonder about the theory some “preachers” espouse that people are living their “hell” while they are here on earth. Some people do I think,… of their own accord.

I know there are many, many joyful things that we have while we are here. Most of the time, we don’t really see them or appreciate them while we are experiencing them, and it’s only through the glasses of “nostalgia” and memory that we look back and think about what we should have done, or might have done to make things better, or to enjoy things more. That’s probably why I reach back into the past so much through my writing. Maybe I didn’t get it right the first time! Damn I wish I had another chance sometimes!

But sometimes when really bad and horrific things happen to good people you HAVE to wonder why. Senseless murders, children molested, wars and killings of innocents. Good people having to suffer with horrible, painful diseases. Where was THEIR safe haven? Life just never ceases to puzzle me when it comes to things like that. Why do these things happen? What can the purpose of this possibly be?

I guess it’s all in what you seek while you are here. I think none of us, from the Pope to the Dali Llama really knows, with absolute certainty what is waiting for us.

I kind of hope I open my eyes and I am walking into this big Chocolate Factory where everything is made of candy and………………

Peace and Joy!