Damien Galeone

Twas the early afternoon before the night before the day or two before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring except for five frantic Galeones who’d just found out there had been positive COVID exposure.

It seems that the youngest Galeone, a one and a half year old who has a predilection for launching food items across any room she inhabits, had been in contact with another such aged chap who had the plague. Fortunately, that boy was neither bothered by nor understood that he was carrying the plague, but nonetheless, all adults were stressed. It seemed, sadly, that Christmas might actually be ruined.

I don’t have to tell you about traveling in the time of COVID. Even with vaccines and masks and tests, the best laid plans can be thwarted by the terms “exposure” or “positive” or “omicrom,” “delta” or just plain ole “COVID.” My trip to the U.S. involved 20 hours of sweating in an itchy mask and popping out to eat food and guzzle wine like I’d imagine a trapdoor spider would if he visited relatives in Philadelphia and enjoyed a merlot with his airline chicken pot pie. But it was all worth it.

Like many, COVID has thrown off my life in a variety of ways. They’re probably the same for you: less travel, more worry, far less doorknob licking than I am used to enjoying. For many, myself included, there has been a huge slash in face-to-face time with friends and family. For me, this is difficult. I live far from my family, but we have two prescribed visits each year – at Christmas and in July – that refill my familial saddlebags.

In those times I am reminded of why I love those people more than any other people on earth and am equally amazed at how after spending a half hour with them that I am somehow not in jail for third degree murder. This is the duality known as “the family paradox.”

When I stepped into the arrival hall at Philadelphia International Airport on the Friday night a week before Christmas, I could not have been happier. My brother was in the hall, my travel was almost done, my mask was peeled away from my beard the second I stepped out of the airport. We zoomed towards home with the knowledge that cheesesteaks were awaiting us. There was talk of Christmas Eve fare – the ever present meatballs, ziti, sausage, eggplant parmesan, and dueling lasagnas (the result of a bet between my brother and our Uncle Dan). Joy was afoot.

For most of the week I lived in utter joy. I was home for the holidays. I visited the mall Barnes and Noble, where I got a coffee and browsed books. I mourned the ghost town look of the mall in which I had gotten little tastes of freedom throughout my young life. Across from the food court, next to the Bath and Body Works and nearby a calendar shop I got my booster shot with my sister. We ate, we chatted, I watched football with my dad and cooked with my mom.

But then on the 22^nd the text came from my sister’s quarters in the attic: bad news, baby has been exposed. Mayhem. We drew a cross in lamb’s blood (OK, red crayon, but the symbolism was heavy man) on the attic door (where, by the way, she lives willingly watching Blacklist and Cocomelon). Could Christmas be ruined? No. There were meatballs at stake. Something must be done.

If there’s one thing you learned as a child in America, it’s that George Washington had some rough Christmases. Christmas 1777 tested his unshakeable perseverance in the face of suffering. Christmas 1776 he and his men crossed the Delaware in a Durham boat and sneak attacked the Hessian soldiers in Trenton. As we all know, there’s nothing more horrifying than the prospect of losing a revolution or of spending Christmas in New Jersey.

By Christmas 1776 the Americans were low on men, ammunition, and morale. They had just been kicked out of New York and had been chased across New Jersey. Before being annihilated, Washington and his troops had hightailed it across the Delaware and destroyed or brought all of the watercraft with them. Belief in Washington and the cause were at a nadir, desertions were rampant, and reinforcements either couldn’t or wouldn’t come. They were fighting superior enemies. The British was better equipped and better trained. The martially-intuited Hessian were the scary mercenaries enlisted by the Brits to help whip the revolutionaries back into submission. After chasing Washington’s men across the Delaware to Pennsylvania, the Hessian took up winter quarters in Trenton. Alongside the desertions, many American soldiers’ enlistment was up and they were planning on going home to practice eating marmite without vomiting. Washington was up against a wall. What could he do?

He did what Americans have done now for 140 years – he exploited Christmas. Because if the scary Hessian loved two things it was brutal, violent combat and Christmas. The Germans celebrated Christmas with drinking and putting up a tree. The American colonists celebrated depending on where they were. In Puritan New England, they viewed Christmas as a pagan feast and so they worked all day, went to bed at 6 pm, and wished they were pagan. In the Mid-Atlantic states they partied, drank, and thanked God they didn’t live in New England. Some colonial American Christmas traditions revolved around the verb “wassail,” which means drinking copious amounts of booze and then strongarming rich people via song into handing over “figgy pudding.”

I had a longish layover in Heathrow flying home for Christmas. For once, I wasn’t bothered. Two years of being cooped up by Covid was enough to allow me to see the positive side of being in an airport with 20,000 strangers while wearing a mask. I went to WH Bookshop, Whiskey World, and Duty Free. I paced for 2 hours and just took in the chaos with some joy. Then I sat down and watched people.

I ate my cashews and watched men and women dragging along kids, old couples marching slowly along in matching travel leisure suits, college kids moseyed on autopilot while staring into their phones. There were families, kids walking into tables, and toddlers licking the side of escalators. It was a nice way to spend an hour. And then I saw it.

A boy about the age of 18 came through the crowd dressed in a matching baby blue sweatsuit. His sweatpants were tucked into his striped socks. He wore a red baseball cap into which he had tucked his ears. Though my entire body wanted to roll its eyes, I refrained. While this getup might look ridiculous to me, I understand that every getup has looked ridiculous to me since I was eleven years old. For the last time I was cool or hip to fashion was in, I hope, a previous life. I can only imagine that I did something heinous in that life to garner the inability to understand what clothing a person should wear. I have never understood what is cool. In 2003, one of our bar customers became the punchline of all the waitresses when he arrived in whitewashed jeans pegged tightly in a cuff above his shoes. It was on that day, in 2003, when I learned that from sometime in the early 90s to sometime in the mid-1990s pegging cuffs was what cool people did to their jeans. I also learned that this was cool in the 1950s, but I wasn’t around then so I didn’t feel too bad about it.

I am an unabashed lover of the holiday season. The lights. The music. The movies. The full on allowance to eat as if you are six people. All of it. Who doesn’t love elf costumes on employees at the stores, even if it only offers proof that someone on Earth is more miserable than you? What could possibly give you more joy than being served a sausage and cheddar brick sampler on a toothpick by an employee wearing elf ears and barely containing their tears? The answer: nothing. Also acceptable: go to the chocolate aisle where Rudolf is mixing up a Swiss Miss concoction and silently weeping.

Oh, I know it’s considered cool to be irritated by Christmas. And the reasons for said irritation are surely there. Each year Christmas makes an insurgence into our daily lives. Each year that insurgence seems to come earlier than the year before. Christmas music everywhere, the grocery stores teeming with Christmas chocolates and cookies, sales on liquor in green and red numbers help chase away those Christmas blues. If you don’t like Christmas, by December 26^th you are going to hate it even more. Every time an aggressive elf tries to feed cheddar to an unwilling shopper, a goth gets its winged combat boots. I get it.

Christmas has always been big in our family. No matter what irks us to “we’re going to end up on the news” levels of angry, at Christmas we put those things aside and have a wonderful holiday season. We do this like so many other families, by pretending everything’s great and by talking about food and football for six days. On Christmas, mirth drives the bus. Mirth and pasta. Sometimes mirth and pasta and bourbon. The true meanings of the holiday season.

When Nicholas of Myra showed up at the inn, he knew there was trouble afoot. The proprietor was acting shifty and Saint Nicholas, man of many, many talents, got him to confess to the murder of three children. We assume he was at least a bit surprised when the owner also admitted to butchering and pickling the children in brine. Maybe more surprised that he was planning on selling them as ham. Because that seems like an unusual thing to do.

Saint Nicholas brought the children back to life and probably unpickled and reassembled them. For this feat, he was (later) awarded the unlikely duo of patronages for children and brewers. Brewers. There’s not a clear reason for this, but one plausible explanation holds that since later paintings depicted Saint Nick standing above a barrel and some naked children, people leapt to brewer and children more naturally than rebuilder and reanimator of pickled ham children.

For an organization whose relationship with alcohol is requiring those who use it to kneel and repent, the Catholic Church sure has a lot of saints dedicated to beer. Saint Augustine is a patron saint of brewing, awarded due to hours of dedicated taste testing. Saint Wenceslas is the patron saint of Czech brewers and bad Christmas songs. Saint Brigid brought beer to the lepers, which is nice because if a group of people in 450 AD Ireland needed a beer it was the lepers. Saints Florian, Benedict, and Boniface are all linked to brewing. But Arnold is the name to have if you want to be a saint associated with beer. Saint Arnold of Metz was the 5th century originator of the motto [paraphrase] “save water, drink beer.” Or more accurately [paraphrase] “if you don’t want to shit yourself to death from typhoid, drink beer and not that green water that smells like a cow’s rectum.” Saint Arnou of Oudenaarde and Saint Arnold of Soissons are both said to have pulled off a “fish and loaves” miracle, but with beer. Saint Nicholas is not only one of many patrons of brewers, he’s fully outclassed by the other canonized booze mascots.

Still, Saint Nicholas’s life has nuggets of 40 proof potential. He was a bit of a brawler, knocking out a heretic called Arius. Facial reconstruction and 3D technology show evidence that his nose had been broken and reset a number of times. So Old Saint Nick evidently saw some havoc. According to patristics professor Michael Foley, Saint Nicholas is the most patronaged saint behind Mary. Considering she had a baby with God that’s not bad company. Although he doesn’t really justify the brewer patronage, his other patronages are sort of alcohol adjacent. He is the patron saint of unmarried people, pawnbrokers, coopers, sailors, and prostitutes. Add the broken nose and fist fighting heretics and you’ve got a Hammered History Saint.

I walk the dog in the afternoon. She is excited. She understands habits and sequences and knows that when I put on pants and grab a few blueberries from the fridge that she is going outside. She has been at the front door wagging her tail since the sweats came off.

Though I grew up with a dog and I love dogs, I am and have for many years identified myself as a Cat Guy. It’s true. And I don’t really know how it happened, but I woke up one day and I was just a Cat Guy. I talked to the cat. I knew things about cats that other people don’t know, so I became a Cat Guy Aficionado. People called me for advice on cats. It’s then I decided to put my shoulder into it. You know, really be the Cat Guy. Go all in. Some people will find it pathetic, sure. You’ll have some twinges while seeing yourself parodied in movies, but oh well. And so I have cat mugs, a cat shirt, cat implements to remove hair. My students know all about my cat. I understand that they find this sadly charming, like it’s kind of charming, but at the same time I’m not on any “if the zombies come, who do you want in your crew” lists. I get it. It’s fine. I am a Cat Guy.

But now we have a dog. “Dogs are fine,” I always said. “I love dogs,” I always said. But I’m a Cat Guy. But now, of course, I am also a Dog Guy. Oh, I’m not that Dog Guy. I’m not going camping or hunting with my dog. I see other Dog Guys out there running or hiking with their dogs and I am not one of them. I will not be one of them. I understand what kind of a Dog Guy I am. My shih tzu’s legs are three inches long. When my shih tzu is sleeping among her toys and dolls, it is genuinely hard to tell she is a dog. During play my shih tzu has perfected the tactic of hiding behind the coffee table until things cool down. My shih tzu wears a jacket if it’s too cold. Burke is considering getting our shih tzu booties for walking in the snow and I am frantically googling to find out if this is a thing that people who aren’t Kim Kardashian do. I understand what kind of a Dog Guy I am. I’m a Small Dog Guy.

Saturday was a lazy day. The weather was the stone wall gray of November, the COVID numbers were in the 20,000s, and it was Cheat Day. I had planned to meet my friend for a night of revelry, but COVID got in the way there, too. His daughter was quarantined and waiting on a test results. Plus, sitting in a bar didn’t exactly fill me with calm.

So no bar and no drinking that night and this was fine with me. It was 5:30 pm. I had just worked out and showered and was dozing in my armchair in front of my TV like a good 82 year old when my phone rang. It was my friend.

“Got the test, it’s negative.”

Though I had settled my mind on a quiet evening of movies and milk and cookies, I agreed to a called audible and a night of revelry. He would come to our flat. The plan: drink many beers, a bottle of Becherovka, whatever whiskey I had in the house, and eat wings.

All those things happened.

Which is why Sunday I lie prone on the couch staring at the ceiling and wishing for some heavily-armed people to come in and kill me. I have things to do, but these tasks are going to be difficult when the dual acts of breathing and not dying are taking up all of my mental acuity. My hangover exists on several levels. I have anxiety, I have heartburn, I have an upset stomach, I have a headache, I can’t focus, I can’t read, I can’t speak without punctuating every three words with “What was I talking about?” It’s rough.

As my tolerance to alcohol has diminished drastically in my forties, I am also now just getting glimpses of myself singing along to Postmodern Jukebox, to what I assume is the massive chagrin of my upstairs neighbor. It’s one of those “Oh shit” moments that tend to come after a  night of drinking your weight in liquor.

And it’s perhaps in this time of strife that I consider my history, for there have been far worse consequences and far worse “oh whit” moments to a night of drinking. Simply having a banger of a hangover isn’t that bad, the singing is worse, but I still possess my limbs and, upon last glance, there are no notes taped to my front door. And it’s in search of that succor that my mind drifts to William of Adelin.

In 1120, William had a binge drink-up that ended about as bad as a day of drinking could when he died in a boat wreck. Not only did he die, but so did about 300 of his drinking buddies, many of whom were his half-siblings. Evidently William’s dad, Henry I, was very fond of impregnating people he wasn’t married to and they could put together three sides of a rugby team. The ship’s captain, Thomas FitzStephen, was also shitfaced. Rowdy and drunk before disembarking, they all not only refused to let priests on board to bless the ship, which just seems like bad luck, but they made fun of the priests, which seems like fun, but just not that bright. The only person to bow out of the trip was Henry’s nephew Stephen of Blois, who had (apparently) a bad case of diarrhea and this also explains his bowing.

Last night we watched one of my favorite shows – Seinfeld and I was engaging in one of my favorite activities. That is, looking in the background to find someone who would become famous. Or infamous. In the last episodes we watched, there were two faces that stood out – Bob Odenkirk and Bryan Cranston. They would both be involved in not only one of the best TV shows in history, but one that was in part responsible for TV’s drastic replacement of movies. It’s funny to see them in small roles knowing what they went on to.

Every time we put on an old movie or show, I look in the background to see who’s there. It’s simple Hollywood reality that before people get famous, they’re extras and in bit roles and it’s fun to see them toiling in their early years. In the last three weeks I have seen Rainn Wilson as an extra in Galaxy Quest and who knew he’d go on to be in a paradigm shifting show. Sometimes they’ve developed beyond simple actor. I recently saw Patrick Stewart and Alan Rickman in the 70s miniseries Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and both would go on to become not only massive actors, but also cultural icons.

Watching News Radio a few weeks ago I couldn’t help considering the trajectory of Joe Rogan, who was at the time simply a comic actor and a comedian (with hair) and who is now a major player in society and culture and who has honest sway with those who have bumper stickers of Calvin peeing. Who’d have known twenty years ago that he’d be discussed by national politicians and a cited resource for how people deal with a pandemic? Probably nobody. More surprising is a character from the movie Two Weeks’ Notice. We watched this romcom of basic pedigree a few weeks ago. It stars Sandra Bullock and, naturally, Hugh Grant. What stood out to me while watching was that the film takes a lighthearted look at protesting capitalist culture, which was a sign of things to come…minus the lightheartedness. It also cameos a guy named Donald Trump, who until then was a punchline with a bad combover and good hotels.

By the time I understood who Ronald Reagan was, in the mid-1980s, I only knew him as the president. My parents of course knew him to be a B actor in goofy comedies and as the Gipper. My parents also did not like him and I never really got why. He was just the handsome guy with the voice everyone at my grade school tried to impersonate. I guess I understand that now, since I really wish Trump had kept his role as bad combover hotel guy. It seems that purveyor of the end of American democracy and the most hated person on the planet is a bit of a stretch. 

It’s about noon on Saturday and I’m eating an arancini (rice ball that you’d sell your liver for) in a back alley in Rome’s center. The Trevi Fountain is causing liquid havoc behind us as are the roughly 23,000 people there. Up ahead are the Piazza Navona and the Pantheon. I have been, as are many people, vastly overwhelmed by the history in Rome. It’s not that every shop is historical, for example I’m pretty sure Cicero didn’t have a fridge magnet in the shape of rigatoni. But history is everywhere and that can be hard to wrap your head around.

We got in at about 9 am yesterday and dropped our bags at the hotel. We then instantly went out for a walk, making the Colosseum and the Forum our aim for the day. We set this because we know that once these aims are met, we can begin our more primary (corporate lingo for “actual”) aim of eating food and drinking wine.

But first, the history. Despite all attempts, the Colosseum has grandeur. It’s hidden behind 19,293 people taking selfies (us included) and the Spanish tongue lashing I get for walking down the steps to the Colosseum in between a man and the woman he’s trying to video in slow motion seven feet away on the other side of the steps. I point to the fact (twenty feet away now) that perhaps his placement for his project and the fact that there are roughly 10,000 people trying to walk down that artery is the culprit rather than rude tourists, but he’s already yelling at a group of Russians for the same infraction.

Amid it all – the heaps of tourists, the men dressed as gladiators, the African gents hocking wares and then saying “Africa” to us (we couldn’t really suss out the strategy there) – we can poke through to the history. If you think about it, the Colosseum was not only famously the site of famous gladiator competitions, brutal fights, and slaves and citizens being forced into the most monstrous and awful situations. It’s also where Cicero and Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius went to watch these things happen.

When John Adams became the White House’s first resident on November 1 1800, he was alone. Staff had rushed to get it ready for him and it was replete with his furniture and a hanging portrait of George Washington. The yard, on the other hand, was filled with cannons and mud. There’s no way to know exactly what John Adams was thinking as he took in the house. He may have been damning his move-in luck, as the last time he moved was into the president’s house after George Washington’s servants had boozed hard the night before and left the place a wreck. He may have been planning the Abigail Adams Cannon Mud Garden (tours twice daily). Or he may have been grumbling at the portrait of Washington.    

John Adams’ life of dedicated public service is matched by few other Americans. He was a framer, member of the Continental Congress, and minister to France and the Dutch Republic. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and negotiate the Treaty of Paris. He was significant enough to the American revolutionary cause that he’d have been hanged by the British had he been captured. He was by almost all accounts a brilliant and dedicated politician, thinker, and statesman. But for all of his intellect, Adams may have had a bit of a George Washington problem.

The American Revolution and its heroes were fresh in the memory of the country. The wartime exploits of men like Ethan Allen and Henry Knox had become legend. America had fallen in love with the battlefield action and heroics of the glorious cause. John Adams and Ben Franklin had undoubtedly helped sway the cause in the meeting rooms of Europe, but tales of a negotiated loan didn’t hold a pub audience in rapt attention in young America. America admired action. America loved heroes. America adored George Washington.

From his looks to his demeanor, George Washington was every bit a military hero. He was tall, broad, and built like a brick outhouse. He was courageous and carried himself like a man whose underwear saluted him before climbing up his legs in the morning. He was the subject of legends and depicted in famous portraits. He was larger than life, an American hero. And then he was elected president. Unanimously. Twice. In the eyes of America, there was simply no alternative.