Gluten-free Caldo de Cocono and Cranberry Sauce You Deserve, Underdog Poets

In Memoriam Bonnie Lambert and José Lozano, QEPD

Michael Sedano

Bonnie Lambert, landscape  painted in workshop

José Lozano

As November 2024 drew to a close, Chicanarte lost two giants of the culture within a few days of one another's transition, José Lozano and Bonnie Lambert.(two links to artist websites)

Jose Lozano's engaging line drawings augmented with color and infused with humor and insight into social events and human foibles caught the attention of architects who selected Lozano's tribute to musician La Marisol to adorn the side of a building at the perimeter of el pueblo de Los Angeles and leading into and out of the city's administrative center. 

Bonnie Lambert's colorist impressionist canvases never fail to gratify viewers and attract collectors. La Bloga-Tuesday happily shared numerous events that included Lambert. A good friend of fellow painter, Margaret Garcia, Lambert helped Garcia lay tiles in a massive craneo now in the garden at Plaza de la Raza (link).  Bonnie sat with others in Garcia's studio the afternoon I sat as the subject (link). 

Here are fotos from an exhibition and workshop Bonnie Lambert conducted in Fontana, California in 2022.

Bonnie Lambert after the workshop, finished work on wall.

Lambert's Palette

Bonnie Lambert portrait of a woman painted in workshop

 

What's in a Name? Cocono, Pavo, Guajolote, Turkey

Michael Sedano

My grandmother was the best poultry dresser in the Inland Empire. People drove great distances to reach De Young's Poultry in Redlands, California, for a turkey dressed by "Emily", gramma's English name. My elementary school teachers loved the bags of feathers I regularly brought.

My grandmother was from Michoacan, purépecha gente, and she brought the word from her tierra. Cocono was gramma's name for the bird, which she raised at home, as well as processed at the poultry purveyor in Redlands. If you've ever heard a live turkey sing you have not heard "gobble" but a throaty cluck that sounds like the name, co-OH-cono, CO-coh-cono. 

Thankstaking creates more dismay than a celiac ordinarily endures at mealtime. Traditional holiday feasts come to table laden with gluten: bread rolls, bread stuffing, canned soup-based sauces, crispy onions atop the casserole, pie crust. 

There’s cross-contamination in the kitchen with utensils stirring and cutting bread and flour concoctions. There’s cross-contamination on the table with serving spoons and scoops.

Ay de mi, what’s a celiac and other gluten-intolerant tipa tipo to do, when she or he sits at an invited table and cannot be fully in control of the meal prep? Not eat.

The Gluten-free Chicano is grateful that turkey cooks don’t dust a turkey with flour when it’s baked. This means there’s going to be a carcass and soup.

El Gluten-free Chicas Patas happily shares a recipe for the tasty after-thankstaking soup of his dreams. Holiday and any meal featuring cocono means a wondrous caldo in the following days, and lots to freeze for non-turkey eating months.

The basic vegetable mix includes leftovers from the meal preparation, i.e., onion, garlic, carrot, celery, bell pepper, tomato, parsley, papa.

Step 1: remove most of the bird meat and store it to make mole, tacos, curry, à la king dishes. If you’re lucky, you’ll have the neck, wings, and drumsticks. Break the breast away from the back to fit into the pot. If you enjoyed a large bird, save half the carcass, wings, etc. in the freezer for a deep winter soup.

Step 2: rough chop the vegetables. The Gluten-free Chicano saves the tops of carrots and root end of celery for soup.

Step 3: half-fill the soup pot with water.

Step 4: place the carcass and veggies into the water and turn the heat to medium. Cook one hour or until the meat falls off the carcass, legs, and wings. Add water to ¾ fill the pot.

Step 5: Remove the root end chunk of celery and other relatively inedible ingredients.

Step 5 ½: Remove the bones from the water, strip off the meat to return to the pot. Add water.

Step 6: chop and slice onion, celery, carrots, bell pepper, tomato. Add to the pot.

Step 7 (options): add gluten-free rice noodles and cook until al dente; add papas and cook to soft; add rice and boil until the grains blossom; add no starch and enjoy a rich (cloudy) consommé.

Step 8: 

dinner bell! Serve with limon and a side of homemade cranberry sauce.

Rough chop veggies for a rustic hearty treat

There's a lot of meat on a turkey carcass. Boiling lets the meat fall right off into the broth.

Break bird to fit, cover with water. This turkey was roasted with citrus.

The kitchen, the whole house, grows redolent with delicious aroma
surpassed only by several bowls.

Here’s The Cranberry Sauce You’ve Waited For

Controversy has attached itself to canned whole-berry or jellied purée; opinions vary on either cranberry sauce, often negative. There’s no reason to strike up a dinnertime whine, just make your own from fresh cranberries.

La nieta has been The Gluten-free Chicano’s cranberry sauce kitchen partner since she was five years old. This sauce is perfect for children to lend a hand during the oft-frantic days before the feast.

Ingredients: fresh cranberries. Sugar. Toronja. Orange. Lemon. Lime.

Step 1: put the cranberries into a cooking vessel. Cover with sugar—not too much, wait to taste and add sweetness as needed. Turn the heat on low.

Step 2: zest the citrus, add to the pot.

Step 3: chop some cascara, one or two inches of zested orange and grapefruit peel.

Step 4: chop a few slices of the citrus fruits add to the pot.

Step 5: you’ll hear the cranberries pop in the heat, and notice liquid begins to build up in the pot. Stir and smash the concoction as it cooks. After ten minutes or so, the mélange is a beautiful amalgam of ingredients. Taste. Add sugar to cut the bite of the berries.

Step 6: transfer the finished cranberry sauce to a spectacular crystal serving bowl, or whatever bowl you have. Clear glass is good to allow the diners a visual treat. 

Step 7: refrigerate until an hour before dinner. Let the sauce sit at room temperature.

 

Cover raw berries with sugar and add more later, to taste.
This is three bags of berries.

There's no substitute for a zester to get just the flavor buds out of a citrus.

Lots of zest and a modicum of citrus pulp make a wondrous treat.

When berries start popping, start smashing.

Citrusy Cranberry Sauce ready for the table

Underdog Bookstore, Hidden Gem in Hidden Gem

One of those hidden gems of a city is Monrovia, California. The city's a short detour off the busy freeway heading to Pasadena to the West, the road to the Inland Empire and Las Vegas on the East, and it's worth more than just a momentary look-see.

The city's beautifully restored Victorian structures house businesses and gente. The shopping district--S. Myrtle Street--is a quaint anti-mall of sidewalk storefronts and unique specialty stores. And in the middle of the district, bookbuyers will find a non-profit community-centric bookseller, Underdog Bookstore (link).

La Bloga-Tuesday is happy supporting this independent business, especially with its active programming of poetry readings and book release events like Carla Rachel Sameth's 2024 reading from her Secondary Inspections (link).

Underdog brought an invigorating reading at the end of November featuring Teresa Mei Chuc and Hazel Clayton, along with an Open Mic. It's a pleasure to share fotos of the readers.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Hazel Clayton

Open Mic Readers

Angela Clayton

Jackie Chou

Mary Torregrossa

Joe Dominguez

Name Unknown

Thelma T. Reyna

Michael Sedano

Poetry Connection: Connecting with Our Deceased Loved Ones

Melinda Palacio

Carpinteria audience

firefighters placing stars on tree

While this week is all about Christmas for me. One of the traditions I will add to my holiday events is Hospice’s Light Up a Life. I have to admit when Poet Laureate Emerita, Perie Longo, Santa Barbara’s second poet laureate, asked me to read poetry at two Hospice events, I was a little reluctant. Hospice is that bittersweet institution you don’t know you need until you are faced with the final days of a loved one. I usually keep my grief to myself and don’t wish to be consoled by strangers. However, the hospice celebrations consisted of a series of uplifting celebrations of life. 

 

Light Up a Light is a fundraiser where people buy stars for their loved ones. After a name is placed on a star, you can put the star on their large tree or have a firefighter reach the highest bough. Given my history with Hospice and the many hours I spent taking care of my grandmother during her last month of life, I realized how nice it felt to give back to the organization. Although all events are very similar, each location adds its own flair. My favorite out of Santa Barbara, Montecito, Carpinteria, and Goleta was the one in Carpinteria because the program follows the town’s Christmas Parade and everyone is in a festive mood. The post parade crowd drew a large audience. There was also the opportunity to do some last-minute Christmas shopping at the local art market. The challenge for me was having so many events crammed into the one week, beginning with the local author day the previous Saturday at the Santa Barbara Public Library, followed by the opening Light Up a Life event in front of the Lobero Theater, followed by rehearsals for Las Posadas, the Carpinteria Light Up a Life on Wednesday, a poetry workshop and  the Independent’s holiday party on Thursday, followed by Una Noche de las Posadas on Friday. A busy week but I wouldn’t have it any other way.  

 

 I read my poem, “What the Birds Know,” from my latest book, Bird Forgiveness. The poem is about taking care of my grandmother during her last days. Thanks to hospice, my family was able to bring my grandmother home after the doctor declared there was nothing more that could be done for her. These are such hard words to hear and hospice helps family with at home support and counseling. In my case, these events happened in Del Rio, Texas. 

 

In Santa Barbara, my hospice stories revolve around losing two good friends, most recently our beloved former Poet Laureate Sojourner Kincaid Rolle. I spent several afternoons sitting with Sojourner in her hospice room in hopes that my presence would ease her journey. In the last days of her life, I learned more about Sojourner through the variety of friends and relatives who came to visit her than in the twenty years of our friendship. 

 

I am grateful that Perie Longo asked me read at half of the hospice events. Perie is an important member of Hospice of Santa Barbara, where she has led a group on Writing Poetry for Bereavement for twenty years; she says it feels like only twenty weeks. One of the recent changes is that the group meets on Zoom. She says that each face on zoom is part of quilt of comfort, each poem a frame to contain and hold the moment that helps everyone on the path to healing. 

*a version of this column was published in the Santa Barbara Independent

Waking Up to Middle Age: Xmas 2021

Melinda Palacio

Melinda and Blanca Palacio

As I emerge from my Covid fog, I'm starting to take note of the new normal and how things, especially the holidays, feel different. They feel different because most of us have spent at least a full year in isolation. What's surprising to me is the huge percentage of the population that has taken zero precautions during a raging pandemic. Doing something I used to take for granted, like having dinner with family or good friends, brought up some feelings I hadn’t felt in a long while.  I was a little sad when I realized I had forgotten how old my mother would be this year. Can I blame this on Covid fog? Let's say yes. 

 

My mother died in 1994 at age 44, which means this year, she would have been 72. These statistics are mind-boggling to me because the last time I saw her, she was younger than I am now. I don't have to imagine too hard what she would have been like as an older adult. She was very youthful and she would tell people that I was her sister. 

 

I have to smile at the creative person that she was and how she would throw herself into the holidays. She was a school teacher at Heliotrope Elementary and loved holidays, especially Halloween and Christmas. Everyone that met her loved being around her. Who wouldn't? She radiated positive energy that was irresistible to everyone.. 

 

Somehow with the world opening up again, I feel more vulnerable about holidays, more down than usual. For anyone else suffering from grief, I’m here to say keep finding that one friend or stranger who will remind you to cherish each moment and memory. Recently, I haven’t shared much of my feelings, but celebrations are sometimes bitter sweet because I can’t share them with my mother who took so much pleasure in all festivities and holidays. 

 

A smile spreads over my face as I remember how fiercely my mother loved me and how proud she was of every one of my accomplishments. The beauty of waking up to middle age is to realize that she’s always there to cheer me on. While the holidays can be difficult, every moment doesn’t have to be a Hallmark Christmas movie, but it is possible to enjoy the season while honoring your grief. For myself, the best way to honor my mother is to be kind to others and to share some of the love that she enveloped me in during the more than two decades we shared.

 

 

 

Memory: Thanksgivings In Plague-times

Michael Sedano 

In 1968, my bride and I planned our first Thanksgiving Day feast with dampened spirit. Married on August 31, I got the letter in October. Not the plague, but the draft felt like a terminal disease.

At first, Selective Service told me to report on November 15, 1968. I managed a postponement, and would report on January 15, 1969. Thanksgiving and Christmas, then New Year, then I'd disappear. Disappear maybe forever, Barbara feared, had I gone to Vietnam and been killed. A lot of draftees got killed in those days, so we were feeling rotten.

There has been a single thanksgiving day meal we haven't shared together, otherwise for the past fifty-two years, Barbara and I have enjoyed the national eating holiday feasting on cocono.

Guajolote, other gente call them, I learned cocono. My grandmother raised gallinas and a few coconos. My elementary school teachers requested the bags of turkey feathers my gramma saved for them. Emilia Macias was the best poultry dresser in California. Customers drove from Pomona to DeYoung's Poultry on Highway 99 outside Redlands, to buy a thanksgiving turkey dressed by "Emily." 

Emilia's great-granddaughter, Amelia, raises gallinas and a few coconos. This year, Christmas heritage turkeys will be on several holiday tables, fresh from McDonald's Urban Farm, dressed by Emily's great-grand-daughter. Thank you, Time, for coming around and going around.

Tamales For Thanksgiving

Miss McCartney begins her fourth grade class with the annual holiday poll, "What did you have for Thanksgiving?"

The weeks leading to the holiday weekend we chattered about the upcoming holiday. We were taught to know our place--at Thanksgiving it was noble Puritans feeding sluggard indios. We were set up to beg for turkey because it was American.

Kids already knew the score. The northside was the wrong side of the tracks, where the poor people live. But there's poor, and then there's dirt poor. Playground talk sorts it out. A few families went for cocono, for most, it was pollo. The dirt poor Sepulvedas had a really festive meal, the twins reported. Tamales. 

"Felix, what did you have for Thanksgiving?" Felix had turkey, and stuffing, and everything. "Irma, what did you have?" Turkey. Freddie, Foodo, Zeferino, Michael. Turkey, Turkey, Chicken, Turkey.

Inevitably the teacher turns her attention to the Sepulveda twins. Painfully quiet and normally uncommunicative, their faces show the tension of the upcoming inquisition. "Carmen, and what did you have for Thanksgiving?" Carmen bows her head in silence. "Oh, come now, Herlinda, what did you have for Thanksgiving?" Both girls hunch their shoulders and hang their heads lower. 

"Now, speak up, girls, what did you have?" the teacher cajoles and wheedles. 

We sit in  uncomfortable silence until one of the one of the Weeks twins whispers loudly, "they had tamales."

"Oh, no," cries Miss McCartney, "no one has tomallies for Thanksgiving. You're supposed to have turkey, and cranberries, and . . ." The young teacher lists an exquisite menu while the twins do their amazing shrinking Mexicans act. Pulling their shoulders to their ears, the sisters' heads slide lower and lower in their desks until the two girls disappear before our eyes, only four trenzas hang over the ladder back seats.

The First Thanksgiving, 1968

Barbara keeping a stiff upper lip. I have just opened the envelope drafting me.

    

Thanksgiving made us sick. She feared I was going to get killed in Vietnam and this would be her only Thanksgiving of the idyll she envisioned for the happily ever after. I scoffed at getting killed, but teevee pictures infected my self-confidence with flag-draped aluminum tubes of doubt. This might be our only Thanksgiving. Not that I would know it, if I did get killed in the Army. I had to leave in January.

We determined we’d make a great big Thanksgiving Day dinner that couldn’t be beat and share it with Karen and Mike, who’d been in our wedding August 31st. 

The Salvation Army stove cost me twenty-five bucks back in July, and the appliance fried and boiled our food all summer, making me confident the oven would roast the turkey. I struck a match and got the oven going. Barbara studied her Rombauer & Becker and got the bird prepped.

Flames squeezed out from around the oven door. Black smoke poured out the top under the burners. Barbara was not calm.

I pulled down the hinged door to see turkey grease and butter splatter pooled on the oven floor boiling and burning angrily, fed into spatters and growth by the infusion of air I’d introduced. The turkey carcass had acquired a black coating of soot from the grease fire.

I grabbed the orange cardboard box of Arm & Hammer out of the refrigerator and ripped off the top. Turning to the smoking fire box I nodded at Barbara who pulled down the door. 

The turkey was covered in baking soda, coagulating spatter, and black grime. Barbara washed it off in the sink while I called our guests over in Isla Vista. Karen and Mike had a cliffside apartment, a functioning oven, and Alice's Restaurant. 

That’s where we finished roasting that turkey and had us a great big Thanksgiving Day dinner that couldn’t be beat. We laughed every time the theme came round on the guitar again, and we had the record on replay for nine hours and that was our first Thanksgiving, 52 years ago.

Thanksgiving Dinner With All the Trimmings. Class "A" Bummer.

Army chow has a deservedly bad reputation. Holiday chow usually makes an exception, and a year after our burning turkey, I looked forward to the Army's promise of an "old-fashioned turkey dinner" in the mess hall here at Bravo Battery. I would not pull duty up on the mountain, where the dinner would arrive after an hour ride tucked inside aluminum cans, not for this upcoming feast!

The site buzzed with excitement at the posted menu of real food. Up in the crew hootches on the mountain, guys passed the hours reminiscing about family  favorites, trading stories, getting lost in memories of the taste and smell of grandma's stuffing, playing football in the yard, getting stuffed, and then having pie. 

Warm thoughts of home help men ignore the routine hardship of the world's "highest and ruggedest HAWK site." Bravo Battery and Site Seven-five lie six thousand miles from home, and two hours from the nearest PX. Men live in close quarters, with the same five or six men, 24/7, North Korea fifteen miles a constant presence in every breath. 

Forget that crap, in a few days, we'll be eating like Thanksgiving  back home. The Army says so.

Turkey, roasted by our own cook, and all the trimmings: stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, green beans, peas and carrots, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls. And pies. Among all the other food we didn't get at Bravo Battery, we never get dessert. And now, not only can we look forward to a great big thanksgiving day dinner that couldn't be beat, there will be pie. Alice's restaurant didn't have pie.

The cook laments the all-nighter he's going to pull, so I tell him I'll make the pies. Tyner agrees. Tyner could get an Article 15 for letting me into the kitchen, a remote risk.  I wait for the mess sergeant to disappear into the ville. I watch Tyner work with impressive efficiency. I am proud of my friend's skill at his work. The chow sucks but it's not the cook's fault.

I had never seen a refrigerated pie crust. Tyner rips open white waxy boxes and dumps the things on the stainless steel workspace next to a stack of pie tins. I make apple and cherry pies, I don't remember how many pies, enough to feed 75 soldiers. 

I was a bit disappointed there was no magic, anticipating mixing dough, rolling crusts, trimming and pinching edges. I simply filled the crusts with canned pie fillings and Tyner did the rest. That disappointment was nothing compared to the next morning's news and the outrage it produces.

Top ruins everyone's day at morning formation. The uniform of the day for chow will be the Class "A" uniform. Incongruity slathered with absurdity tempered with last-minute notice is a slap in the face. Wear coat and tie, all your brass, formal wear out here where locals don't have electricity and running water.

Had we been ordered to wear pink tutus, the outrage wouldn't have been matched. Thoughts of home smolder behind spit-shined dress shoes in the middle of nowhere. The Lifers, of course, love it. They keep their brass polished and dress greens pressed. We enlisted men dig Class A traje out of the bottom of our duffel bags and wear them wrinkled and looking like shit. 

The BC knows it, Top knows it, we know it. Out here, GIs wear a dress uniform when they land, then roll it up and stuff it in the bottom of their duffel. A week before we leave, the houseboy presses it and the soldier wears the Class A home.

We make the best of it, looking like shit. We eat seconds, laugh a lot and darned if we don't look good all dressed up military. And, of course, we eat the best pie in the United States Army. I have cherry.

The Second Thanksgiving

The two happy people in the foto are eating a perfectly-baked turkey. This is the second turkey the woman roasted, and the first that did not catch fire. They remember how grim their first thanksgiving day had been, this is their next. Today, they talk about that time in their lives, they listen to "Alice's Restaurant" on repeat, like they played during that awful day, and they begin again. 

That terror never completely extinguished itself, until recently, for Barbara. That flaming bird never happened again. Barbara became a skilled cook, happily ever after. Every Thanksgiving Day, the couple puts "Alice's Restaurant" on the turntable, play the song on repeat all day, recalling how scared they were at what might have been, and how that absurd scenario gave them nightmares. 

And the people in that foto, they laugh, because things turn out good, and the couple sits there and they know it.

Chicanonautica: Getting Ready for Holidaze in Trumptopia

by Ernest Hogan

 

By the luck of the draw, for the first time in years, I’m not doing Thanksgiving duty here at La Bloga. I thank the gods, and wonder what else I should do?

For me, this time of year tends to be a confusing blur. I call it the Holidaze. I’ve got this traffic jam of Guajalote Day, anniversary, birthday, Guadalupe Day, Christmas, News Years that usually ends up hijacking me.

Not to mention the Aztec and other indigenous festivals.

And that editors and publishers have a habit of getting back to during this time of year. 

And I really wanted to finish the novel I’m working on before 2020 gets here . . .

So Happy Holidaze! Because we got more than Jesus going on here.

There’s Donald Trump.

Yeah, I haven’t done an update on Trumptopia in a while . . .

So, congratulations, we’ve got impeachment hearings! Things that have been denied as fake news for weeks are being confirmed as true. The supporters spinning it all to seem positive are beyond absurd. It’s also tedious as all hell, but we’re getting things like school shooting to break up the saturation coverage.

So, what's this about a mysterious hospital visit?

And how’s that wall coming? USA Today did an interactive map of its progress, and it doesn’t look very good. Lots of gaps. Not the unbreachable barrier we heard so much about. 

Just look at the Rio Grande. Nothing. Nobody ever mentions how they’re going to build the wall on the river . . .

If I voted for a guy who promised something like that and did such a miserable job of delivering, I’d be mad. At least they have those concentration camps to make them happy in the interim. 

But nobody seems to be happy in Trumptopia. The overall mood is . . . well, weird. Like everybody’s waiting for something big and ugly to go down.

Not long ago, a stranger walked up to me and blurted, “I’m so mad, because the democrats want to impeach Bush and there’s no reason!” That’s not a typo. He said Bush. Must be living in a sociopolitical time warp.

And we will still have an election. After the Holidaze, we get the primaries. They should be fun.

Looks like the Twenty-Twenties will roar. Keep 

your hands and feet inside the vehicle. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Ernest Hogan is the author of High Aztech, Smoking Mirror Blues, and Cortez on Jupiter. They are all great gift ideas.

Xmas Memories 1969, Christmas Wishes 2016

Michael Sedano

It was the worst of winters, it was the best of times. I arrived at Bravo Battery in mid-July 1969. Debilitating humidity and paralyzing monsoon rains gave way to Fall’s cool weather. Winter appeared as a gentle snowfall that soon became wind-driven sleet followed by a cycle of storms, each bigger than the one before.

Penetrating cold kept men indoors where oil-burning space heaters glowed cherry red in the struggle to warm the uninsulated crew hootches.

Security guard perches close to the space heater.

Bravo was a hundred guys rotating up and down the mountain, two up, one down. Rain or shine, the manning truck left the admin area at oh seven hundred hours. A deuce and a half or a flatbed truck ferried the soldiers on the hour drive to the tac site at the top. The mile-high peak commanded strategic views for hundreds of miles. Army engineers had carved flattened spaces for launch pads and the firing crew’s cinder block shelters. At the mile-high summit, a concave radar antenna spun above the command van and the commo hootch, where I worked.

Commo worked at both ends of the site. The Admin Area’s sole connection to the outside world came via the telephone wire that stretched along the ground from the top of the mountain to the switchboard in the base camp. On the wire’s route, farmers harvested sections for copper. They worked in the early morning, cutting a quarter mile of twisted pair wire and hauling it to a safe place near the road, where they’d burn off the vinyl before hauling away their loot.

Three Homing All the Way Killers are a full load on a launcher.

One failed commo check sent the guys in the Admin Area into the field to find and replace the stolen wire. Fortunately, thieves found a favorite section near the second ford, the last crossing before the ascent.

The telephone line ran close to the road, on the far side of the alpine stream and along easy terrain. Ample vegetation streamside provided fuel for the bonfire. We used to curse the thought of the hungry farmer, squatting upwind of the smoldering plastic, reaching out his aching palms to the fire’s warmth. All we’d ever find were spirals of white and black ash lying on the cooling embers of a small fire.

There was the day the wind whipped a brittle commo line until it snapped. It was our luck, me and Concha from Santa Ana, the wire lay along a fully exposed section at the edge of the bulldozed earth. The punishing cold and buffeting gusts convinced us to remove our bulky gloves and wool glove liners and work with bare hands.

The fingers went instantly numb. We took turns on each phase of repairing the four broken wires. Strip the insulation on one strand. Re-glove and take cover. The other fellow strips the insulation of another strand, re-gloves, takes cover. With the four strands stripped, one man twists the ends together, re-gloves. The electrical tape doesn’t stick in the freezing cold so we take turns heavily wrapping the twisted pairs before wrapping them both and securing the line to anchors that hold the wire taut against the whipping wind shear.

We were out there over an hour. When we took shelter in the crew hootch, our fingers started to hurt. When we pulled off our gloves frozen blood came dripping off our fingers. We had torn layers of skin off our hands but had not noticed it in the intense cold. Another time, the wind carried me aloft off the top of the commo hootch, when I’d climbed to clear a radio antenna of ice. Unexpected adventure was the order of the day, but for the most part, Winter passed with monotonous similarity, endless days of cold and misery and being tough, and taking it.

Admin Area after first snow.

The rules for R&R were clear, in 1969. At the midpoint of a tour, a soldier could spend a week anyplace on that side of the world, and the military would provide the ride for free. My wife planned to fly out from California and we would rendezvous on Christmas Eve in Tokyo.

I’d had my fill of the romance of the world’s highest anti-aircraft missile site but more so of the relentlessness of raging elements like none I could ever have conceived, and it came day after day, then stopped. And we’d have days of incredible beauty; windless skies, sun so bright no one felt the cold and nights so black and silent snowfall made a sound when it landed, and a match held overhead reflected off millions of crystals making the air glow with the flame.

Japan was paradise.

Korea was a land of privation. Military carried ration cards limiting access and availability of anything imported, from U.S. soap to Japanese cameras, to fight the black market. The Army paid military payment certificates instead of greenbacks, to fight inflation. The first English words many GIs heard from Koreans was “you buy me soap, GI?” Or toothcream. Or booze.

Fresh fruit was entirely absent from the mess hall. One day, the cooks served up boiled potatoes and nothing else. Not all the rotted black spots had been cut away and no one walked away without a sour word for the server, who gave as good as he got. For the next two weeks Bravo ate C-rations. The battery had run out of food.

The first breakfast in the ryokan style hotel rekindled my faith in eating as something beyond mere sustenance. I went into paroxysms of joy tasting the incredibly flavorful coffee. Shiny outside delectable inside rolls. Jam, butter. Steamed fish. A silken chawanmushi. Pickles.

The tatami floors and elegant furnishings were as far from a military barrack as one could be and still be earthbound. Paradise it was.

We bought a large Go board that my wife had to schlep across the Pacific. Barbara bought a Satsuma chrysanthemum pattern porcelain espresso set. I bought things wrapped in ten. Ten tangerines in a woven fabric tube. Ten tangerines again. Ten walnuts. Ten tangerines again. Five bananas. I bought fresh fruit everyday.

We ate Kobe beef. We attended a play at the Kabuki theatre. We saw the Broadway musical, Hair, in Japanese. We saw a James Bond movie in English with Japanese subtitles. We ate street vendor yakitori under a rail bridge near Shibuya station.

We rode the subway. Taxicabs. Walked and walked.

During the Yoko and John peace event we watched the shiny helmets of youth groups snaking their way through the shadowy streets near the blazing Ginza. In a moment we were pinned against the curb and the inching traffic when a snake of black-clad youths danced into a semi-circle around us and stopped. They braced their kendo poles on the cement and at a signal lifted them and clapped them loudly onto the sidewalk. The leather clad leader stepped forward in a challenging pose. We made eye contact.  I had been a pugil stick champion in basic training but I would stand small chance against one, much less all these vatos.

I tensed for a fight and a beating. “Get out of Vietnam,” the leader demanded.

I held out my right hand, three curled fingers down, the index and middle fingers pointed up, forming a “V.” I told him “Peace," and repeated his words with conviction.

The leader looked at me, his face relaxed. He turned to address the waiting dancers, shouting a command. At that, the dancers pivoted, lifted their flags and staffs at port arms we called it in the Army, and they danced out of sight into the crowd.

Two days later, Barbara flew back to California to teach high school, and I to Korea to be a soldier. We would see each other again in eight months when I got out of the Army. It was the best imaginable Merry Christmas and Happy New year. Yet, every one since then has been better.

Including this one.

Happy Holidays. Season’s greetings. Merry Christmas, raza, Merry Christmas one and all.

A Festive Sharing - old holiday tradition revived

Yesterday my wife and I hosted our annual Festive Sharing, usually held a couple of weeks before Christmas. Here's how the invitation read:

"In the spirit of less stuff, bring a gift to share, not to give away, something you or someone else created--non-manufactured.

"Come experience all the shares, like: A story, poem, song, play, dance or artwork, written, spoken, sung, performed or simply exhibited. Drawn, painted, sewn, photoed, carved or crafted. Baked, steamed, brewed, homemade, self-portraited, recently read, or--your choice. 10-15 min to present your Share.

"Food, hot mexicano cocoa, primo margaritas, beer, sangria and other liquids. Bring a favorite dish or drink to richen the communal meal. Dress code, tribal-informal. Wear your fave, faded, baggy, flabby whatevers. Drinks & eats followed by the Sharing. First-come, first to share."

Our event is a mix of family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and others, although our home barely accommodates the couple of dozen guests. It looks like a holiday party. Until the Sharing starts

And a teenaged boy performs his dance. Or a young lady sings.

A guitarist does an original composition.

A writer, her prose.

A man reading his favorite poet.

A self-produced documentary on remote-control airplanes.

A pot of jambalaya, and the story behind it.

A handmade fishing rod.

A fire-dancer out on the lawn.

You can't imagine the variety because there's no limit to what interests people or what they're capable of creating.

For our few hours, there's no worry about buying gifts or getting to the sale or wrapping presents. No one expects you to give any thing, No exchange of purchased presents. You give of yourself, and everyone receives that.

I enjoy the Sharing for its non-consumerist, non-materialistic, non-commercial qualities. It reminds me that once upon a time, our much happier ancestors gathered in forests, around campfires, on grassy plains or in caves, and had fun sharing what they'd made with natural materials and their own hands. Or shared a rock crystal or a bird's colorful egg they'd discovered. Maybe we were more like children then. Open to discovering, exploring, enjoying and definitely sharing that, with little or no stress.

Today we are social animals who've lost our tribe, our largest, safe grouping. We may still have our other circles--our close support group of 5, 15 sympathetic friends, 50 close friends. But the approximate 150 who once constituted our tribe hardly exist anymore. Social media friends in the thousands doesn't fill the void. And we suffer the loneliness, the vulnerability, sense of helplessness and lack of power, things we didn't so much have when we were part of a tribe.

That why there's cholo gangs, community and cultural groups where people regularly meet and engage with large groups. That why there's Ferguson marches. They're attempts not only to protest, but also to reacquire the power of our tribe. When we gather together in one place, we approximate a tribe; attending a rally makes us feel more powerful, less helpless.

Our neighborhood barrios, ghettoes and communities were once our modern-day tribes. Real estate development, eminent domain, gentrification and segregationist dispersal of working class people have eaten away at our communities. Now, in many cases, we don't know our neighbors and wouldn't want to. We can't imagine their being a part of our circle, our tribe.

I believe all the dystopias facing us and our descendants will again provide an enclosed environment where tribes will naturally arise out of dire necessity. As society--the economy, joblessness, debt, climate, deteriorating public services, and institutional violence--gets worse, our social genetics will induce us to gather with those who live nearby, like tribal villages of old, to protect ourselves and survive. And to prosper, for that matter.

I don't expect to report next year that I'm now a member of a thriving tribe. I'm simply doing what I can. What my genetic make-up and mind tell me is true and required. Our Sharing event is a piece of that. Try one for yourself. You don't need published authors, gifted artists, politicians or rich patrons to make yours worthwhile. You simply need to invite whoever comes to mind. And realize that in times past, they were integral to how we survived blizzards and saber-toothed tigers and enemy attacks.

It use to take a village to raise a child. You were one of those children and may need to be again.

Having a great sharing season,

RudyG, a.k.a. Rudy Ch. Garcia, Sharing host and author of fabulist mextasy tales