Well it’s almost Christmas. Normally, I’d be preparing for a holiday visit home. I’d be buying gifts and stressing about a flight. I’d be stressing about the layover times and reading up on airline disasters each morning.

Ho Ho Ho.

Prague is usually quite charming in this season as well. Markets and music in squares, done-up trees, stands with ginger bread and hotdogs, and pools of carp awaiting a serious bludgeoning.    

But of course, the world is not in an ideal state. There’s a pandemic raging and you know that unless you live under a rock in a cave on the dark side of Neptune. Or you’re a Republican. Who also believe that though Donald Trump recently got his ass kicked in an election, he’s claiming he won it. He has no proof. He has lost 48 court cases. He still won’t stop.

It would be kind of funny to imagine little Donny stamping his foot and crying about the election, threatening to take his veto stamp and go home so nobody else can play government. But thousands are dying from that pesky virus each day and instead of helping any of them, little Donny seems far more intent on saving a face that has long since sailed off to a historical level of pathetic while he literally poisons a democracy that had been around for two hundred and forty years before he waddled into the place. Also it’s not funny because lots of people believe little Donny, not because he has zero evidence, but because they’re in his cult. They have hats. A whopping 27 Republican politicians have relocated their balls to admit that Joe Biden won. That means than about 220 congressional Republicans won’t admit that Joe Biden won the presidential election, which he did by 7 million votes. The election was more than a month ago. It doesn’t bode well.

In order to steel ourselves against the negative influences this year, we got a tree. Or, as Burke suggested, a big tree.

It is a truth long known that when a man’s floor is covered in chick peas and he’s cradling a syringe of urine, he is compelled to take stock of where his life has gone.  

Tuesday, 4:20 pm

My day of teaching done, I was ready to celebrate with an early evening of not speaking at all and not looking at my computer. It’s at this time that I noticed that my cat was visiting her litter box more often than I will in about four decades.  

Though unlikely to pay off, I decided on the direct approach: “Hey, why do you keep going to the bathroom?”

She decided against answering just then and I was forced to look into her box and push around her sand. The presence of no clumps made me go “Huh.” But over the next hour, back she went every few minutes and posed herself in the urine-stance. To no avail. Nothing came out and she just stared at the wall with a blank-confused expression that I will probably mimic when I’m 86 years old and my prostate has its own gravitational pull.

We went to google. Cat’s constipated. Cat can’t pee. What is a blocked urethra? The first option I commiserated with. The second was probably a urinary tract infection. The third would kill her in a day. I called the vet.

The vet. When we moved in to this little neck of the Prague woods, I did the “walk around.” You know, when you mosey around your new neighborhood in search of pubs, but pretending you’re excited by other facilities, shops, and services you find there that don’t offer booze.

That is, of course, unless it’s a medical service, a grocery store, or a brothel. Medical services near your house are always welcome. Sometimes I leave my house holding my breath and try to make it to the vet without passing out, just to see if I choke on a chicken bone what my chances are. I figure a chicken bone’s a chicken bone whether it’s in the windpipe of a Doberman or an over-zealous ESL teacher. A local grocery store is wanted for obvious reasons. And brothels, well, there’s nothing more comforting that sitting on your couch with a good book and knowing hookers are delivering joy and gonorrhea somewhere nearby.

Normally at this time of year, we would be in the full swing of the holiday season. The lode from the Halloween candy would be down to chocolate raisons and jolly ranchers. The stores would be putting up Christmas decorations and people would be complaining heartily about that. And this week, we would all be looking forward to (or dreading) Thanksgiving.

Despite all of the factors surrounding Thanksgiving, what it really boils down to is this: it’s a day many of us spend with our extended family, a tableful of complex carbohydrates, football, and alcohol. And how you feel about Thanksgiving really depends on you and your situation. While one might spend the week before imagining a gravy pond in mashed potatoes, another might shudder about Uncle Jim in his red hat talking about how Venezuela and George Soros stole the election. One might be washing their eating pants, while another might worry that their college freshman daughter’s lecture on the idealization of the American tradition.

Ah, holidays.

I have spent a lot of time recently considering what I’m going to look like in my declining years. These are questions not easily answered and they require an awful lot of thought.

They include questions such as: Am I going to employ a hat, do suspenders look good on a guy like me, what level of comfort in public can be maintained while still not wearing sweatpants to a bar?

Important.

There is, of course, the comfort level. Were there no rules in pubic, I would spend my late years visiting pubs and restaurants and even governmental offices in lounge wear, or clothing that I had on when I got out of bed that morning. And while I do employ a ‘who cares’ attitude in most things fashion, I want that to stop short of me being asked by police for contact numbers.

There is also a public trust level. Older people are often looked to for help by those on the street. A man in sweatpants is almost never chosen for help, unless that man is Evander Holyfield. Conversely, a man in a suit might also be overlooked for the trust of public help, because depending on the state of his hair and face, others in public might believe that he thinks it’s 1981. They might not be wrong.

When I was a kid, Halloween was one of the events of the year. The others were my birthday, Christmas, the last day of school, and the first day of Little League. Easter was OK, but I think even then I viewed it as Christmas-lite. Also, rabbits sort of freak me out.

But who could beat Halloween? You dress up, you carry around a bag, strangers put candy in it – whether they want to or not – and you go home and eat it. No catch. Well, in my house the catch was that my dad took something of a house candy tax. It was due upon his inspection of our arrival and the official dumping out ceremony which took place on the kitchen table.

There was nothing like that moment – seeing all of your candy quantified on the kitchen table. Like something out of an adventure movie when the good guys see the treasure the baddies have been going for all along. It glitters in some production lights as they look on in awe.

In 1983, my sisters and I did just that. We dumped out our candy into separate piles with rigidly-guarded borders and we looked on in awe. And then my mother told us that we couldn’t have any.

I am watching Foyle’s War. If you haven’t seen this brilliant (US: real good) detective show, then your life is not as good as it could be. It combines all of the things I love the most – World War II, historical backdrop, and the murder of a British person.

Burke, to say the least, does not share this interest. To her, a costume should be on a Disney character and a British accent should be on a mournful rich kid who’s recently gone skint. And if there’s one lesson I’ve learned about cohabitating with someone who isn’t a cat, it’s that you take little opportunities to watch shows you want to watch. Since the pandemic forces us to be home all the time, this is when she’s teaching in our office/storage room. This is when, amid songs about following rules and not stepping out of line thinly-veiled as pronunciation tunes, I cozy up to a British detective.  

It all started many years ago with Inspector Morse. I liked that there were no guns and that the detective, like Columbo, figured things out with sense rather than DNA and a world class laboratory. I liked the old wobbly BBC production value that looked as though it was done in my neighbor’s basement in 1987. And I loved that in Britain, people aren’t just murdered, they are absolutely torn to pieces. (Sometimes literally. One woman broke a mirror over a girl’s head and thrashed it back and forth, thus tearing her to shreds. She was upset because the girl was stealing her son, with whom she was having an incestual relationship. Tell me British TV isn’t awesome.) It’s as if the whole country’s TV bad guys are deep-whiskey-drunk pissed off about a bad cricket loss.  

I was perhaps six episodes into Morse when I realized that I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I could barely understand. Listen though I would, I still couldn’t pick up what was being said. British speakers of English have a completely different vocabulary, with a whole different set of idiomatic expressions, and put it all together in one of a variety of accents whose only uniting factor is that they all sound like someone mumbling the torah while eating peanut butter. On top of that, British plotting and dialogue are far more sparse than that of an American show. American characters are like Americans – direct, obvious, and profuse with their language. The Brits are indirect and they don’t say things that need to be said as much as they omit things that should have been said. And it’s tough to follow, because if you don’t know what’s been said, how the hell are you going to figure out what’s not been said?

Morse led to its sequel Lewis and then their prequel Endeavour (US: Endeavor). My UK English was careening towards proficient around then and I got cocky. I got most of Lewis and eschewed the subtitles.

I’m walking through the supermarket today. I have a list. And I’ve been asked (read: required) by Burke to adhere to it reasonably. Reasonably because she knows there’s no chance I’ll be able to avoid a tiny impulse buy or two. Usually those impulse buys are a bag of grapes or a box of taco shells, a few jars of fruit-on-bottom or oats-on-top yogurt. I have to justify my impulse buy upon return home and I use my walk home to practice that justification. I thought we could use these on…, It’s Friday, isn’t it?, Hey my birthday is in four short months.

But it’s usually ignored.

Today I walk by the endcaps with confidence. I look at my list and know that I am fine. But then I notice a few little capsules, like thick squat plastic pills the size of a coffee mug.

“What are you?” I ask them. As I’m wearing a mask, nobody can tell that I’m speaking. All is well. I pick one of them up.

Home Lantern.

Uh oh.

I begin to sweat almost immediately.

I suppose we all wonder what we manifest of our parents. This has become something of a theme for my middle life crises, which are various, fruitful, and evidently multiplying. I got my mom’s cheeks and my dad’s hair. I got my dad’s temper and my mom’s tendency to discuss topics and argue out loud in public alone. And I got my dad’s impulse buy tendency. Which is our jedi trait.  

In the last week of August, I was asked by the kid’s magazine to write an article called My Hometown. The premise was relatively simple: write an article on some basic trivia and ins and outs of your hometown. As several of the writers are from other countries, there were a few asked to do this. I did my first draft on the basics, writing from the information in my head. Selected clips:  

Philadelphians love sports. We have a team for each of the four major professional sports. Our Phillies (baseball) won the World Series in 2008. Our Eagles (football) won Superbowl LII.

The Declaration of Independence was signed there in 1776 and Washington’s Crossing is where George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night to surprise attack the British. It worked so well that we won the Battle of Trenton. It’s why you have to learn American and British English in school.

Philadelphia has lots of delicious food that will make you very fat. Soft pretzels are our preferred street food for a snack. Scrapple is a breakfast meat and if you go to Philadelphia you have to get a cheesesteak.

I finished the draft and, as usual, closed the file for a day while I let the ideas permeate. In the meantime, I let the ideas come and jotted them down. I looked through some articles for inspiration: 32 Things that Make Philadelphia Special, 20 Things We Love about Philadelphia, 9 Things that are SO Philadelphia.

As I read through the articles, I said this a lot: “Oh yeah. I need to mention that.”

As it so often does, the second draft reflected the dearth of my research.

Sports

Philadelphians love their sports teams. We have a team for each of the four major professional sports. Our Phillies (baseball) won the World Series in 2008 after an absence of 27 years. Our Eagles (football) won the Superbowl in 2017 for the first time. It was a great moment for the city.   

History

America was born in Philadelphia in 1776 when The Declaration of Independence was signed there. Washington’s Crossing is where George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night to surprise attack the British. It worked so well that we ended up opening a can of whoop ass on them and winning the Battle of Trenton. It’s why you have to learn American and British English in school (ha ha). Elfreth’s Alley is the oldest continuously-used street in America. Philadelphians have been using it since 1704.

Food

Philadelphia has lots of delicious foods that will make your mouth water. Soft pretzels are our preferred street food for a snack. You can buy them on the street from vendors. Scrapple is a breakfast meat that’s very common and if you aren’t from Philadelphia you won’t understand its appeal. It’s sort of like tlačenka*. If you go to Philadelphia you have to get a cheesesteak. The most famous places for that are Pat’s and Jim’s, but each section of Philadelphia has their own special place for a cheesesteak. If you like cold meat sandwiches, you can have a hoagie, Philadelphia’s special name for a submarine sandwich.  

Famous People

There are many famous people from Philadelphia. Kevin Hart and Will Smith are two of them. Founding father, statesman, philosopher, and inventor Ben Franklin ran away to live in Philadelphia when he was 17. He probably needed a cheesesteak.

As usual, I closed the file on the second draft and let the ideas and words seep in and permeate. I worked on other projects, but found that my thoughts were drifting back to Philadelphia. This is perhaps also due to the fact that I couldn’t go home this summer. Summer is the time of year I get my “home fill” of all things Philly. I eat water ice and ice cream with jimmies, go to the Jersey Shore, eat four cheesesteaks, a couple Italian hoagies, go down to Center City and visit Independence Hall. I sit at a sports bar and watch a Phillies game and listen to the sports talk guys gripe about an Eagles season that hasn’t started yet. And yet none of this was possible this year. And I soon found that I was consumed with Philadelphia.