Wrap Sheet

First, I need your solemn promise that you won’t share this post with any of my relatives. Deal?

This is about gift wrapping, one of the things I most hate in life and which is required this time of year, or seems to be.

Like everything else in America, this is something of an Olympic sport now, at least in my family. While we have gift boxes that already have appropriate decorations printed on them, there’s still an unwritten rule that we have to freshly wrap everything. It is noticed when someone has produced a wrap job with absolutely flat corners. While the degree of difficulty is adjusted for large cubical boxes or odd shapes, there are still unspoken points taken off by the judges for excessive use of Scotch tape.

I especially hate the ribbons, because they are always miserably twisted when I try to wrap. I simply quit the team on this one. I will wrap the boxes, but it’s my wife’s job to do the ribbons. She even does the thing where you make them curl by pulling on the ends of the ribbed ribbons with half a scissors.

As if this weren’t enough, there is the UNwrappping. My position has always been that if I’m opening a gift, I cut and tear vigorously to get into it and ask questions later. But there are family members who are so enamored of the wrapping paper that they sloooooooowly remove it, being careful not to wrinkle or fold it, because it’s so beautiful that it must be used again for something next year. We do keep bows. We have a green garbage bag ready for the wrapping materials to be discarded and a white bag to save the bows – and a few scraps of precious paper -- for re-use. They work on birthday gifts, too, fortunately.

But if you run across me in my next life and you want to give me a gift, it’s OK if you just hand it to me as is, I’m 100 percent down with that. It’s just that in this life, we don’t usually have quite as much time to spare. Ya think?

Where Were You?

That’s the question of this day – actually, the question of this month, as the 50-year anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is observed.

In order to answer the question, of course, you have to be a certain age, which I am, so here’s my story. I attended a fancy New England prep school, one of many in that part of the country. For today’s discussion, though, it’s significant. It was the Choate School, then an all-male institution, which JFK also attended, in his case, in the 1930s. I was there a generation later.

On the day of the President’s killing, I had taken a math exam which I didn’t do especially well on – fortunately, because of the news of the day, it seemed they weren’t graded quite as strictly as usual. We were all glued to the TV sets in the housemasters’ apartments, watching events unfold. It hit especially hard, as we knew President Kennedy had used the same sidewalks, sat in the same classrooms, and crossed the same athletic fields we did on a daily basis.

When JFK was at the school, according to historical records, he was a bit of a troublemaker. His older brother Joe, who would die later in World War II, was a top athlete and scholar at the time, and as the story goes, the younger Kennedy compensated for his second-fiddle status with pranks, one of which was blowing up a toilet seat with a firecrcacker. At a chapel service, which was required for students, the headmaster denounced the “muckers,” as he called them, who pulled it off. Kennedy adopted the name for his group, forming the Muckers Club.

The mood on campus was somber in the days following the news of his death, especially those daily chapel services. As a U.S. Senator, Kennedy had addressed students from the same pulpit from which the headmaster had excoriated the muckers.

This was the most significant shared American moment since Pearl Harbor – the only one since that time for which people could say they remembered where they were at the exact moment they heard the dreadful news. It’s difficult to think of another one quite like it since then. But it was only the emergence of electronic media that had made such moments possible.

Personally, I’m distressed that exploration of the events of November 22, 1963 has been turned into a hobby. I don’t think there is now or ever will be a set of facts that will completely convince some people that there wasn’t a conspiracy to kill the President. And even if that turns out to be true, by the time it’s revealed, the shock value will have greatly diminished.

What is going to happen is that this event will officially fade into history after this. The 51^st anniversary just won’t be the same, nor will the 75^th, though I may not be around to make a judgment about that one. The beat, as Sonny Bono reminded us later in the 1960s, goes on.

'Tis the Season

My brother-in-law got upset the other day when he saw a Christmas-type commercial on TV during one of the breaks in his football game. A radio station in the city I used to live in has already started playing holiday music.

Meanwhile, the days are shorter, which I abhor. It’s depressing to see the sun setting at 5 p.m. This time of year, almost two-thirds of the day is in darkness or semi-darkness here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I get a little depressed.

Last year, a friend told me this is known as SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and that I would feel better if I only took Vitamin D pills. Another friend, in Seattle, is acquiring some kind of ultraviolet lamp. Well, OK then, I understand, that’s Seattle, after all. What am I complaining about – it hasn’t even rained here yet. Meanwhile, the East dipped below freezing this week, but we in my part of the West have yet to see the other side of 40 degrees F.

Something in me, however,  resists the notion that this annual depression is just some kind of chemical or physical imbalance which can be righted by pills or artificial means. I actually think moods are useful. Some of our best literature and music has been written by those in certain moods, often brought on by natural environmental changes. I actually write pretty good stuff when I get depressed (not necessarily this, of course!).

I especially resist being told how I am supposed to feel over the holidays. Suppose I’m not feeling thankful at Thanksgiving or filled with cheer and brotherhood at Christmas? Suppose it doesn’t make me happy to learn from your holiday letter that your son has been named a Rhodes Scholar? What if some years I want others to join me in a chorus of “Bah, humbug”? But I digress.

In the town of Inuvik in Arctic Canada, they have a ceremony the first week in January to mark the return of the sun, which disappears for 30 days in the dead of winter at that latitude. The sun just begins to reappear on the horizon on Jan. 6, and that’s a good reason to party.

One of my favorite quirky horror movies is called “30 Days of Night,” in which a pack of Eastern European vampires visits Point Barrow, Alaska during its month of darkness. That’s when vampires can go on a real bender – no sun.

The only cure that would work for me, I guess, is an expensive one: getting a winter home in the Southern Hemisphere. Perth or Cape Town or Buenos Aires, here I come!

But they still do the same holidays in those places, too, where it’s hot. Must be tough on the reindeer.

PC Virus

You thought this was a place to come get your computer fixed. Wrong. The PC and the virus I’m talking about have to do with Political Correctness, and now it’s open season on sports teams. The latest wave started with the Washington Redskins. OK, that name might actually be considered a racial slur. If Bob Costas says it is, it must be.

But a high school in the Southern California desert whose teams are known as the Arabs is coming under criticism from some quarters. Coachella (you know that name) Valley High’s mascot is an angry-looking hook-nosed Arab, which some Arab-Americans feel is a racial slur. While the name and mascot may seem odd, it goes back generations, thanks to the date industry (I mean the fruit, folks). That desert area represents the largest date-growing region in the world outside of the Middle East, from which date palm trees were imported long ago. Every year, there’s the National Date Festival (a.k.a. the Riverside County Fair), which features a parade including young women wearing fetching Arabian Nights harem costumes. It’s all part of the region’s culture. BTW, the Arabs’ big rivals down the street are the Rajahs of Indio High School. Farther up the Coachella Valley, the Palm Springs High School teams are called the Indians. Even the late longtime chairman of the local tribal council didn’t have a problem with that. But there are other institutions with similarly named teams that have chosen to change names and mascots to preserve feelings.

I’d like to scream, STOP IT, but the comeback is going to be that I’m white and of course I don’t have a problem. No, I don’t. But being partly of Irish descent, I certainly would have had one if I’d lived a couple hundred years ago in the United States, when the Irish weren’t treated all that much better than black slaves. BTW, when it comes to sports teams,  a friend tells me that JFK High School in La Palma, California, has a leprechaun for a mascot.

What’s the solution to all this? I don’t have one, except, isn’t there an “unreasonable” or “overboard” light hat goes on in most of our heads? I’m surprised PETA hasn’t objected to the use of animals. Or maybe they have, don’t know.

Some high schools have a sense of humor. At Key West High in Florida, the teams are known as the Fighting Conchs. That’s a shelled sea creature, for you landlubbers out there.

Don’t worry, if your own ethnic group or country of origin hasn’t been slammed yet, the spotlight just hasn’t fallen on you – your turn will come. But when will we embrace each others’ differences instead of trashing them, or conversely, beating others over the head with the misrepresentation of our own marks of distinction? Do we really have this much time on our hands?