Barry's Life in Napa Blog

(My mother at age 18. ) I feel obliged to write about my mother today. "Obliged" is not the way you are supposed to feel on Mother's Day. I always wanted to be the loving son who doted on his mother but for some reason, some psychologically complicated reason, I could not achieve the level of devotion to her that I always thought she deserved. She was a kind, patient, giving, thoughtful woman who never did anything but love me. I loved her, too, and on an objective scale I don't think I was a bad son but I've never felt I was as good to her as I should have been. Maybe someday I will understand my feelings but today's not that day. Today I am thinking of moments... ...out in the yard with her when she made pickles in huge stoneware crocks, or watching her pluck a chicken, or do loads of laundry by hand in standing galvanized tubs, running the clothes through the wringer and hanging them on the line. ...her excitement on Election Day when our living room was th...

I have been recently accused - fairly - of writing something "dark" during the holidays. So today, I hope to redeem myself with a true story that always comes to me this time of year. It's a "true meaning of Christmas" story. Like so many of my Christmas memories, it features my dad. Avid readers of this blog with fastidious memory banks will recall last year's item that detailed Daddy's lack of enthusiasm for the whole Christmas issue. I think the biggest part of his disdain for Christmas was the excess of it - and this was in a household that did not have anything like a fancy Christmas. We were a working-class family with a working-class Christmas. Although I never wanted for anything necessary, I was just like other kids in lusting after the unnecessary, expensive toys in the Sears "Wishbook" catalog - elaborate slot car tracks and electric hockey games and full-blown cowboy outfits. Things that were out of reach for people of our means. N...

Sometimes on Sundays I am transported to a place that was called Gene and Darlene's. (OK, that sounded kind of Shirley MacLaine. I am not talking about out of body experiences here. It's a memory, ok?) Gene and Darlene's was a bar down on Shoal Creek south of Joplin. The building still stands (photo proof here, taken August 2008.) No telling how many other names the place has had since it was Gene and Darlene's, but that's the name it has in my mind. On Sundays sometimes, when I was a kid, daddy would come up with the notion that burgers from Gene and Darlene's would really hit the spot. Being always in favor of food in general, and carry-out food being really exotic to me, the idea was always a winner in my opinion. I would be eager to climb into the car with daddy and ride along. It was a short trip down to Redings Mill, around the infamous curve that topped a bluff over the creek, where all kinds of carloads of people had suffered hideous deaths in spectacula...

My dad had a saying- one of a thousand or so - that he would use when he felt like he was engaged in something indulgent: "I wonder what the poor people are doing?" This was irony, don't you know, because I think he always considered himself part of the "poor people," and for the most of his life he had good reason to think so. When I grew my hair long in the 70s he didn't like it, but not because it was rebellious. To him, having shaggy hair meant you didn't have enough money to get a haircut. Daddy would say "I wonder what the poor people are doing?" when we were doing something extravagant, like ordering the fried shrimp at Burl's Drive-In. Fried shrimp was the most expensive thing on Burl's menu, maybe $2.99 back then. "I wonder what the poor people are doing?" would be asked when we had dinner at a place like Wilder's, where people drank cocktails and ate 3-course meals. Dinner at Wilder's was, at best, a once-a-y...

Christmas is like Asian food - you can get sweet and sour in the same bite. And you stuff yourself with festivity, but find you are hungry for more just an hour later. And you get a choice of steamed or fried rice. I guess that doesn't apply to Christmas so much. Let's move on from the analogy. Christmas of 1967 I was in the second grade at Stapleton School. I got a sweet and sour taste that year, all because of the Christmas production that was cooked up. It was a little play with Santa and elves and kids getting toys. There were some songs to be sung, and it was all your basic elementary school effort, to be performed for the parents. I was eager to be part of the chorus that would be featured in this masterwork - but one day the teacher called me aside and asked if I would play Santa Claus. I didn't feel like I could say no, and was devastated that I wouldn't be in the chorus. I cried and said to the teacher "You only want me to be Santa because I'm fat....

Christmas 1981 we were young and wild and crazy in love. We lived on the third floor of the Olivia Apartments on 4th and Moffet - classic old building with a tile lobby that made me feel like we were cosmopolitan. The meekest kid from my grade school lived down on the first floor. By now he had a long beard and a long coat and a drug habit. On the floor above us was a girl who had a bad reputation from high school. I don't know if she deserved it or not. I felt like I was becoming an adult, working a job and paying rent - a rent than ran $110 a month, because this was one of the nicer apartments in town. No problem, because I believe I was grossing more than $10k per annum - major moolah, in my mind, not too shabby. But that big money flowed through me like shit through a goose, always living with champagne taste on a beer budget, as Daddy would have said. No problem, because when we ran out of cash we'd just have popcorn for dinner a couple of nights. You don't need muc...

Ahhh, Christmas memories. Gingerbread houses, sugar-covered cookies, and an orange in the bottom of your stocking. Ornaments made from macaroni, tinsel wrapped around the roller on the vacuum, and always some fricking walnuts in the bottom of my stocking. Getting the toy you really wanted, getting a cheaper version of the toy you really wanted, not getting anything you really wanted. Getting clothes, getting clothes that are butt ugly, getting clothes that don't fit. Ah Christmas, sweet Christmas! Hope springs eternal! Of all the thoughts that visit me like Marley's ghosts this time of year, one memory of Christmas stands out above them all - how my dad hated the whole thing. Maybe there was a time when he was younger, before I was born, when he got some joy from the rituals. But by the time I was old enough to know what was going on he was in his late 40s and pretty fed up with all of it. It wasn't any of that cutesy Darrin McGavin in "Christmas Story" annoyance...

WARNING: Mildly offensive terms used with the best intentions. I worry that our language is suffering. Yes, there's the degradation that comes with the race and gender slurs that have become part of everyday conversation, the kind of thing that got Don Imus in trouble. And there's the overuse of the f bomb ad nauseum. (A friend long ago would offer a one-word comment when someone reeled off a particularly good swear - "crisp," he would say. But you could only keep it crisp if you didn't pull it out of your pocket every five seconds. Overused, it became stale.) But my greater concern is the loss of color in everyday language as all our great colloquialisms and figures of speech fade away. For example, I'll bet it's been awhile since you heard someone say "He doesn't have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot." Or " it's colder than a witches' tit." Or since we're on the subject, someone with their "tit caught in t...

I've spent a lot of time lately pawing through all the old family photos, and a box at a time, running the best through the scanner. The picture at the left from 1920 shows the five sons of Brice Martin. That's my grandfather in the hat. I'm digitizing history for future generations, I tell myself, but sometime I wonder if I'm really doing it for myself. Every time I hit "save" I wonder if that's what I'm really trying to do - save all those faces and those memories so they can't fade, get torn, or just crumble. Most of the people in these photos are strangers to me. I know their names and see family features in their faces, but that's it. I don't know much about their lives, what they dreamed of, whether they thought they were having a good life or going through hell. On my father's side, I don't even know where they came from. You can follow their tracks from southwest Missouri back through the Cumberland Gap to the Carolinas, but...