You Got Nothing On Us - Charlie Brown

I'm getting to the "Great Fire of 1968," but since it is close to Christmas I think I'll take a couple post to share what Christmas was like at my house on Harding avenue in Venice California.

I have tried to tell people about Christmas at my house...but find that there are really no words adequate to describe the level of chaos that took place every Christmas right after Christmas Mass.  I will try, but (I can guarantee you), I'm not even convinced that Hollywood with a big budget would be able to portray on the big screen the scene at our house at Christmas.  Whatever I do here... however, I portray this... no matter how much flourish and embellishment I add...use your imagination, multiply everything by 10 and it'll only get you close.



Remember the Wolf Pack began as somewhat normal children. We did things that other normal Catholic families might do for our family Christmas traditions.

We had a manger; a nativity set with Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus!  We went to bed at night dressed in pajamas... we woke up at 11:00 pm and dressed for church. We went to midnight Mass and came home to find that Santa had filled our living room with presents and toys. Oh what joy!

It is quite possible that we even read the Christmas story from Matthew or Luke's gospel...said, "Happy birthday Jesus" and unwrapped our presents like regualr people. It is likely that we did that. I have some great pictures that would support this rather civil and ordinary Christmas proceedings. (I submit the picture on the right as evidence to support these claims).

 I'm the baby on the front of the rocking horse.









(On the left) I'm the baby crawling on blanket.



Look at how adorable and how normal we once were...



We are the model of the perfect Catholic Family...

The Nuns at Saint Marks Convent would be proud and we might even put the Lennons to shame... could it get any better or cuter than this? 

Now it is important to remember that at this amazing time in the evolution of the Wolf Pack (before the boys turned into wild animals and began devouring flesh and turning on one another) I was a mere baby and have no such recollection of this sweet and reverent demeanor.

By the time my memory kicks in (at about 6 or 7) the older boys are teenagers and had been growing more and more out of control.

By 1968 with the addition of the "Mexican Tomato Plants,"  the Veloci-Rooster, the alligator, the hippie-"girlie/man"-cave, the pond, the mosquitoes, the fleas, the snake cages, the stacks and stacks of old decomposing National Geoprpahic magazines... the addition of cars out front, trailers, boats, car parts and also with the additional members (we kept adding to our clan) Christmas was no longer the idealistic picture seen above. 

By this time in our history Dooh-Dooh Pants had gotten involved in the Boy Scouts and dad helped out every year with the Troop 32 Christmas tree lot.  We sold trees that started at a dollar-fifty that went all the way up to $3.50 for the most expense Nobel Firs on the tree lot. The Blasers next door always managed to buy the best looking tree - I think one year they even paid $5.00 for their perfectly shaped tree. 

My dad would never be caught dead paying that kind of money for a Christmas Tree. He made a dollar donation to the Boy Scouts and somehow managed to bring home a tree worst than Charlie Brown's. Mom wasn't too keen about that and dad would usually bring another tree home from the Boy Scout lot that was twice was bad that no one wanted to buy. As a clever and frugal Swede, he would use old twine to tie the two trees together. Sometimes he drilled holes in the trunk of the first tree and stuck branches from the second tree into the holes to increase the foliage on the incredibility sparse stick he brought home in the first place (This hole-drilling thing only took place on the particular Christmas' when he could find the electric drill motor, find the drill motor chuck and find a drill bit - the convergence of all three was indeed a rarity).




But the good new was: TINSEL!   Tinsel had to be Swedish invention or by thought up by someone from a culture that was also defined by frugality and use of imagination.  You could buy a ton of tinsel for like a buck at Pick and Save and gob it so thoroughly on the branches that you could hide any manner of hideous tree underneath. And that's what we did .

The more kids, the less money spent on the tree; the less money spent on a tree - the more tinsel we packed on the thin and meager branches. Sometimes, I wondered if Charles Shutlz visited our house and got his idea for "Charlie Brown's Christmas."

I wouldn't be surprised if we were his inspiration. 

Anyway, the rambunctious boys were growing up and took all the youthful energy they had for climbing and fighting and channeled it together along with smoking the hippie-stuff out back and melded it into the craziest, the loudest and the rancorous frivolity known in the history of mankind! 

But by the time I had a brain, I'm sure that whatever was taking place at our house on Christmas was much different than what was happening over at the Famous Lennon Sisters' house across the street. I happen to know as fact that the events at our house on Christmas was totally different from what was happening next door at the Blasers.

Deductive logic would conclude that a Dahlin Christmas frenzy had to be completely different from just about anything that was taking place at most homes around the world with those who were celebrating Christmas.  

My mom had a dream. Her dream was that we could be more like the Lennons, (which I sure looked more like something in the picture on the right)  My Mom spent considerable energy describing the rules for engagement as if was a military briefing on how we were to open presents  when we arrived home from Midnight Mass.

She had a perfectly good image of organization...of cooperation... and of  this quiet and peaceful present exchange which she hoped would be a bit more subdued than the lurid din of an active battle zone in Vietnam.

At 11:00 pm Mr. D would bang the ceilings and walls with the handle of broom, and like the staff sergeant, he would begin shouting out commands for the troops to get dressed for war...ummm... I mean for church. The regular high-octane hullabaloo would break out in the mad scramble as the hippies were trying to find pants to wear, because my mom band jeans with holes in them. As usual we fought over socks and I had to sniffed around the floor of Flea-Bait's room looking for stinky old socks to wear that no one wanted to touch (they were shiny and stiff and hard and stood up all by themselves).  

This 50 minute scramble usually involved a lot of screaming, name calling, booger flinging (that was my favorite -I hope you noticed the tone of sarcasm - because boogers always activated my heightened gag reflex) along with Dooh-Dooh-Pants passing potent gas that had the power to empty entire rooms .

My mom's  vision for a serene and sacred evening was usually shot to "H E double hockey sticks" before we even left the house for church (that was one of her words). By the time we rounded the corner in front of the Lennon house, she would be shouting words like this all the way down the street right up to the moment the 14 of us darkened the doors at Saint Marks church, 10 minutes late for midnight mass looking slightly better than drowned rats, but not much better than refugees who had just escaped through dirt tunnels from a prisoner of war camp.  

I will try my very best to paint as accurate a picture as possible - knowing how daunting that task really is.

So until our next time together in my blog titled: The Hand  
               

Merry Christmas

God jul

Wesołych Świąt

¡Feliz Navidad!

Crăciun fericit

С Рождеством

З Різдвом

Весела Коледа

Joyeux Noël!

Καλά Χριστούγεννα

 Buon Natale!

חג שמח

Chúc mừng Giáng sinh

Hippies, Skunk Weed and Baseball!

I apologize to my faithful friends and followers world over...this has been an extremely busy and very trying week at my house, where nothing has gone according to plan.

Now, I want to get back to the story of Markie d.

Laying in bed wondering if I'd ever walk again, I figured that my less-than-illustrious little-league baseball career was over. By this time in seventh grade all my friends had moved up from Minors to the Majors - expect for me. "Gherhing the Great" had grown an inch over the summer and now I was officially the shortest boy in the seventh grade class at Saint Marks School. Heck - as far as I knew, I might have been the shortest seventh grader in the whole world.

              That's Gherhing the Great on the far right.   →

The people in the league let me stay down a division even though was too old, because I was so small; I knew it and I knew everyone else knew it too. The most embarrassing thing is that they nominated me to play in the All-Star game and I had to show up pretending that I was something, when I knew I just a skinny, little fraud in a hand-me-down uniform that was too big.


Oh well, before my accident at McIlliot's pool, I played first base in my first and last "All Star" game and got some kind of trophy. I don't know if I really earned it or not, so I hid the trophy away from my family in the big, o' steamer-trunk buried under junk in the front room on the second story - where the "John the Baptist" fox furs had been decaying for the past billion years (Video blog post...Oct 28 2013).

Since no one in my family came to see me play in the all star game - I guess my secret was safe. 

By this time, my leg was healing and I could crutch myself not only to to the bathroom and back, but had finally gotten enough strength to go back to school. Because of this new gift of mobility I was lucky enough to join the family downstairs for our annual catastrophic upheaval of joking, name-calling and inevitable food fight -  known in other normal households by another name - "Thanksgiving."

After much of the chaos in our house had calmed down to the mere roar of a War-Zone, Dooh-Dooh Pants flung moist turkey dressing on my neck that he had pulled out of his mouth. Not knowing exactly what the brown, icky, stinky stuff was, I couldn't crutch quick enough to the toilet and vomited all the way to the bathroom. That was the creme de la creme... the climatic crescendo that delighted the entire Wolf Pack. Thanksgiving was now complete at our house.

Everyone laughed. Laughing at people was what they liked to do best of all (that's why I didn't dare tell them about my trophy- they would have made sure to totally humiliate me).  

Crutches were kind of cool. Horrible for school, but really good for defending oneself against older brothers who tried to torture me. They were lucky that I was too busy hobbling to the bathroom on those wooden weapons than to use them for my protection. Trust me - No, trust "Flea-Bait!" He could tell you that I was a lot better with those old wooden crutches than I was with a wooden baseball bat any day.
         
Wolf Pack be warned.   Yeah, I know I sound tough, right? But the older boys didn't take my threats very serious when it was always like 10 against one.. and especially now that they had bigger fish to fry!

The bigger fish was the Veloci-Rooster!   

The hippies had to figure out how to get back to the Mexican Tomato Plants and to Wall Drug without being attacked. If the cunning bird of prey allowed them free access to the ivy cave, it was only because the fowl thing was setting a trap on them like he did with the "The Chicken Lady"

Only...only they were usually high on the loco-weed when they discovered their exit (their means of escape) had been completely cut off.

It was funny! At least dad and I thought it was. We sat in the house and rolled with with laughter when they tried to negotiate with "Tomahawk attack helicopter" as if it were one of them.

"Hey, there little fella. Its like, it's all good...happy, happy?" They asked  "Like dude, man it's all groovy...you know...we're all one with the same cosmic universe man!"

"Bro...like, it's all copacetic...man."  

"Yeah dude...bro...peach and love and granola and flower power man"  Kjersten, dad and I couldn't help but laugh, because we knew what was going to happen next.

They thought they had talked the vigilante bird (with the "sidewinder missiles") down with all their mellow hippie nonsense.

"Like man...we're just like you. You want to be understood like us...you know man - Love is where it's at."

The next second, under attack,  we hear 7 of the hippies screeching in pain and laughing at each other at the same time. And then falling, and then stumbling, and then laughing at each other, and then screaming, and then begging their bird-friend-brother child-of-the-cosmos to stop. Oh my goodness, this was better than the Star Trek episode a couple weeks ago when William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared the first interracial kiss on US television.

The skunk smelling boys would desperately rush up the back steps - pulling and pushing each other to get in the back door to safety, then seeing us they would walk in and act calm as if pretending like they weren't just out back in the hippie-hideout of Wall Drug smoking it up.  And the funny thing was, I don't think they knew what just happened.  I think that "what-ever-it-was" they were smoking, made them forget EVERY TIME. And every time it was the same: they would emerge from the hollow - try to talk down the crazy rooster with razor-sharp talons having forgotten the results from the last negotiation failure.

For those of you with androids   TV's first interracial kiss

I'm getting to the story of the "Great Fire" of '68.  I'm just setting the stage for the events leading up to it.