Memories

Bring Back the ABCs

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

About fifteen years ago, give or take, some friends and I started exchanging by email these twenty-six-word-long prose-poems which one of us took to calling “abecedarians,” because that is what they are called.

In Merriam-Webster, an abecedarian (noun) is a novice learning the rudiments, the beginning steps, of something. (How does one learn the alphabet?) My friends and I were turning an adjective into a noun: an “abecedarian sequence” is a set of things arranged alphabetically; we were writing abecedarians, twenty-six word paragraphs that sometimes almost meant something. It was our own invention.

(Actually it was not. Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, wrote an ABC poem, appropriately called “ABC”:

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,
 
Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.
 
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:
X=your zenith.

And he found a terrible solution to the X Challenge, which confronts every pursuer of the perfect abecedarian. “X=your zenith.” Oh, sweet honey and the rock, that’s awful, but most of them are.

As my friend John, who started the thing off, wrote, “They are awfully fun to speed-write stream of consciously while at work or elsewhere.” Yes, at work. At the time, I was creating instruction manuals that had parts labeled A, B, and C on our illustrations (one had so many parts that it went around the alphabet and even used AA, BB, CC), so I could claim my abecedarians as work-related research.

Here are a few, which all date from spring 2001 and my work email account:

Alan’s bountiful charms developed even further God’s handiwork. “It justifies knives, leaving me nearly … oh, perfect. Questions? Rotten stuff, that ugliness.” Vigorously wiggles. “XXX!’ (Youth’s zenith.)

 
I have not included my friends’ offerings because they ought to be under their copyright, should they wish to ever use them. All of these are mine.
 

A bistro coffee (decaf) eventually forces growing humility: “It’s just Kona.” Let me notice our position: “Quality really sucks. Totally.” Underlined violently. Wow. Xed-out of your Zagats.
 
“Alright, boisterous Charles, dedicated event financier, go have imagined justice, Korean laughter. Man no open parapets! Question revolutions solving truth! Until vile wishes X-tend, Yours, Zebediah.”
 
Another behemoth cooed delightedly, elevating Father Gordon H. Ionesco’s jowls kinkily. “Lovely monster.” “Next opinion?” pressed Questa Rodriguez-Sanchez, totally unimpressed Vice-Warden. “X- X- X-” yammered Zionist.
 
Ambient balloons clownishly detour eccentric focaccia; gorgeous Hellespont invokes judicious knowledge; lovely millionaire Newton optimistically predicts qualm-free results, sending trivial ultimatums violently wandering; “‘xtraordinary,” yawns Zeus.
 
August Browning captures Dardanelles easily from Germany. He insists jokingly kangaroos leave momentarily; nodding openly, primly querying “Really? So they …”, urging Victor Watson: “X-coordinate! You Zed!”
 
A broken cut developed easily from goring hunters into juicy Kosciusko-less millions now, or perpetually, quelling righteous salves thick under victory while xaviering your zoo.
 
All boyos consider donuts easy food, guessing heavy-duty, intelligent judges know leisure-time munching no-way offers possible questions re: sluggish, tortoise-like, useless, vitamins, where X-Street’s youths zip by.

The abecedarian pieces filled my email world for a couple of months, with even my mother and sister joining the fray. According to my email account (my Yahoo mail, which is no longer my main email, but I keep it active as it is a historical record of fifteen-plus years of historical records), I attempted to revive the phenomenon five years later, which is now almost nine years ago. There were no takers. The abecedarian moment had been a flash in the pan.

One final piece of history: Some who are students of religion will remember that there was once a sect of Anabaptists in 16th Century Germany who called themselves “Abecedarians.” The Anabaptists did not call themselves this term, which roughly translates from Greek as people who “baptize twice.” They were ridiculed and worse, persecuted, for baptizing adults who had been baptized in infancy, but that was their point: Infants can not confess their faith, so they are not candidates for true baptism. Belief comes from within and baptism is for those who can understand. The Abecedarians took this further and held that all human knowledge is an impediment to being saved, that to even know the letters of the alphabet is to consciously block God’s word from the human heart. Hence their name.

A new one:

About Butch Cassidy Don English found good heightened information: Just knowing lies makes not one person quite really sated. Try under “Violence,” William Xavier. Yours, Zara

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 13, 2014, asks, “Write down the letters of the ABC. For each one, choose a word that begins with that letter. Now, write a post about anything—using all the words you’ve selected.”

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A Christmas Tree Story

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am sitting in my girlfriend’s office looking at her office Christmas tree. It is white, snow white, like a snowman in a a Rankin/Bass stop-motion cartoon. (Paul Frees would provide the voice.) We will be trimming it in a few moments.

office xmas

A white Christmas.

I think that tree trimming was my least favorite trimming when I was young. I still lack the eye necessary for decorating a tree correctly; in fact, I believe that almost every tree I have attempted to decorate has been quietly fixed upon my leaving.

(Two things transpired within moments of me writing the above: 1. My girlfriend credited me with expanding her notions of tree decoration—she said, “You’re the first person I’ve seen who does not put all the decorations on the ends of the branches,” which is true, I sometimes place them on the middle or even closer to the trunk; and 2. We found that I had overloaded one section with the same color ornament and we needed to correct it.)

One winter, a friend enlisted me in a project to cut down a real live Christmas tree from a Christmas tree farm so her son could experience a Christmas like the one she and I had never ever had. (The sum total of my experience with freshly cut Christmas trees was buying one in a parking lot from a seller who was asked by the police to pick up his trees and move it along seconds after we made an offer. We did not receive an “Everything Must Go Because I Am Being Busted” discount.)

Neither my friend, her seven-year-old son, nor I knew what cutting a live, six-foot-tall or smaller tree would take, so we brought the only saw that she knew she had. (I believe it was one that her uncle had rejected forty-five years earlier for one that was actually sharp; now, forty-five years later, it also had some rust.) We then drove to a tree farm in Dutchess County, New York. I have chopped wood plenty of times, and I have helped take dead trees down; neither of these experiences served me on this day.

The first task in cutting down a fresh Christmas tree for oneself is finding something to occupy the seven-year-old son of your friend—allowing the child to select the winning tree to preserve your friendship with his mom is advisable. Next up is failure in the negotiations with the seven-year-old to pick a tree that is not on a steep, snowy slope. (Happy people with skis were walking almost as far up as our tree was located. Almost. I was wearing sneakers.)

Many will ask the question, “Should I cut two notches to make a V or cut straight across?” I know I did, just not out loud or in the presence of someone who could tell me the answer. With my tiny, rusty saw and no one holding the other side of the saw, I started notching one side of a V. The blade sliced some bark off and did not penetrate the green wood underneath. The snow had already penetrated my shoes, though. The trunk was no thicker than two inches wide, if that—hey, I’m no tree-ologist!—but it was quickly apparent that I was going to need help.

With that in mind, I drove away my companion and her son with my grumpy “attitude.”

After an hour alone, my inner debate over cutting straight through versus cutting a V had produced several partial starts—some up, some down—all the way around the trunk of the tree. Instead of a V, I had notched something like a lowercase w but less useful, partway to the center of the tree. My friend returned and we commenced cutting straight across, because it was “taking me too long,” when we discovered together that there is nothing quite as unsatisfying as the sound of a tree not coming down no matter how far one has cut through it until it is ready to come down. Nothing unites like mutual frustration.

It eventually came down. I accompanied it down the slope … okay, I rode it down the hill like Slim Pickens at the end of “Dr. Strangelove.” I had not reminded my friend or her seven-year-old son to bring rope to tie it to the roof of her car, so we drove home with it sticking out one of the backseat windows. In my lap.

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My family had one plastic tree for twenty or more Christmases. It was a well-constructed one, actually, a bare metal trunk with a two or three hoops to hook in each individual branch around the tree. It actually had an instruction manual. Our Christmas tree and boxes of ornaments occupied several boxes in the basement; the annual production of “putting up the tree” was my introduction to grown-ups not being able to remember from one year to the next the locations of things they put away in the same box in the same place every year. And now I am that grown-up.

I am sure that my mother and father found it necessary to re-position my ornaments; I swear that something happens to me when I approach a tree, ornament in hand. I have hooked ornaments into shirt buttonholes when I swear I was aiming for the tree. Just as I wanted to cut my one live tree down in one graceful and strong sawing motion, I always want this ornament here and now to be the first, last, and only one needed to make this year’s tree the complete and perfect Christmas statement. I want someone to exclaim, “This is the most Christmas ever!” Christmas brings out the perfectionist in all his mistake-prone grumpiness in me.

Thus, the only part of decorating that I relax and enjoy is either throwing tinsel everywhere or putting the angel on top. (That is an unsung rite of passage, growing tall enough to top the tree with a star or angel.) We had an angel, a cardboard seraph with glued-on glitter and thin, stringy blonde hair. Its halo was glued-on, as well. But it was our angel, and when nicer, more expensive-looking, ones found their way into our house, they were always relegated to lower branches. My family’s underdog mentality extended to angels.

That mentality may have been the best, most lasting, gift from my family.

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(An earlier version of this was first published last December on my previous website. My girlfriend and I will be decorating the tree again this weekend.)

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 11 asks, “As it’s been a while since our last free-write … set a timer for ten minutes. Write without pause (and no edits!) until you’re out of time. Then, publish what you have (it’s your call whether or not to give the post a once-over).”

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Wherever You Go, There You Weren’t

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In recovery circles it is called, “pulling a geographic.” While sharing their stories about the past and living the inebriated life, many addicts and alcoholics learn that they have done similar things. (Although I am the only person I know of who stole a commuter train. For only five feet, but still. Sorry, Metro-North.)

One of the things that many of us did a lot of when we were trying to exert control over life was run from it. Move. Sometimes cross-country. There was nothing so bad it couldn’t be fixed without filling out a change-of-address card.

Some might call this “running away from one’s troubles,” and those “some” people would be correct, somewhat. At the time, I did not see things that way. I was taking advantage of new opportunities. And now, I am grateful for all that I have seen; as I have written somewhere, if I am content-verging-on-happy about life now, how can I resent my past? I hate some things that happened to me, some things that were done to me and some things I did, but I no longer yell at ghosts. (Understand, my life is pretty not-entangled, given that I do not yet have children.)

By the oldest of old-fashioned reckoning, counting on my fingers, I have resided at more than 20 addresses in six counties across three states in two time zones. (This includes three residences in four-and-a-half years in recovery.) And there are about a half-a-dozen “I almost lived there” cities that sit in my memory like books unread on a shelf in a library I no longer have a membership card to. Two suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts; Jersey City, New Jersey; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee.

Each one of those place-names sounds to me like a bullet whistling past my head, an anecdote of a disaster that I did not have to watch unfold in front of my eyes as if I was a bystander in my life instead of a participant. I had enough disasters in the places in which I resided; and, yes, I might have found recovery in any one of those fine cities and be celebrating many more years of recovery than I have, but I did not. Life is perfect where I reside, even in its many imperfections.

Oh! and California. I had a few job interviews with newspapers in the Bay Area. It was the late 1990s and several friends and acquaintances had moved to the Golden State. (Matt Coleman, Some Memories.) By the late 1990s, several had moved back to New York, of course, but not all. I have yet to set foot west of Sedona, Arizona.

Wherever I moved, the fact of successfully landing a new job, which was always the spur for any change in residence for me, carried with it the idea that I was a success in this life and had no problems ticking away in my psyche. “Sometimes sooner, sometimes later,” as the saying goes, this hubris that masqueraded as self-knowledge always resulted in the loss of employment, change of address, loss of friends.

(I never consumed on the job. I always drank off the clock. But at some point, those two facts will be over-ridden by how much one consumes off the clock and how little one produces on the job. An illustration of the progression of addiction: I liked to drink as a celebration of successes. I worked hard and earned it, went the thinking. Publish something? Go out, get congratulations from people, drink. Finish writing something? Okay, great, you’ll submit it tomorrow. Go out, get congratulations from people, drink. Get pretty far into an assignment? It’s late, you’ll get it done tomorrow. Go out, congratulate people, drink. Start something? Cool. Go out, con … people, drink. Button your shirt correctly on the first try? Drink alone. Go out tomor … soon.)

You know, I never fooled myself into believing that I was indispensable, but did I have to prove it so often?

Wherever I went, there I wasn’t, completely. Four-and-a-half years off that hamster wheel, and I feel like I can make it anywhere.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 5 asks, “‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,’ goes the famous song about New York City. Is there a place—a city, a school, a company—about which you think (or thought) the same? Tell us why, and if you ever tried to prove that claim.”

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