I cut down a Christmas tree.
The tree farm was massive for Fairfield County. A hundred acres at least, filled with thousands of trees ranging from small and just planted to massive and requiring a chain saw to chop down and a truck to transport. We went around for hours, scrutinizing them for all the things one looks for in a Christmas tree. “No, not that. What about this one?” It went on and on until we settled for a lovely scotch pine, which I sawed down and, now, sitting with my back in some agony from the experience. I had to get on my chest to cut it at the base, you see, and it’s not a great position to use and the saw they lent was dull requiring that much more effort.
It brought back memories though which softened the spasm in my back though teasing one in my heart. Ugh.
When my kids were little tykes we did this. Roaming the fields near Sudbury and then Westport for the perfect tree. I am sure I was far more amused than impatient as Geoffrey and Nicho ran around, rejecting one after the another looking for the right one, but then a Christmas tree is very personal and the magic it offers has to register, especially with little kids.
I can’t completely relay this the experience of little David. As I recall, we had an artificial one for a while, though hid it when Grandma came over. There was also one that my dad cut down from our backyard in Wellesley, likely to save money, and then vague memories of these scrawny, scraggly, things that I suppose we got out of guilt. The idea being if they were ugly enough and didn’t cost anything, they were acceptable; Jewish families in the 60s didn’t really have trees and calling them Hanukah bushes was a pretty poor rationalization. But the family was into rationalizing an awful lot of the irrational so it fits in.
I felt bad for those trees, like nobody wanted them, and felt even worse for the ones we didn’t cut today. Seriously. It was a Charlie Brown moment. But that’s how I felt and that reminded me of my childhood. Since it just came back – before we bought a case of very nice wine, thank you, and cheap vodka for Nicho (and better vodka for me, Reyka, from Iceland) – it struck me that I’ve entered a second childhold
When I was little and maybe not so little, a ‘second childhood’ was a bad thing. It referred to old people who slipped into dementia, I presume Alzheimer’s, and needed to be cared for, like children, or did silly things, like children but inappropriately so past a certain age. Like 14.
I rather like the term for what I’m going through; a second childhood in my frame and state of mind is a very good thing. I think, I hope, I pray. Do I have permission?
Why just the other day I was out with my metal detector finding treasure! In this case it was an 1864 Indian head penny, minted when Lincoln was President and the Civil War was still going on. Wow! And I did that with a couple of likeminded friends, too, who kept looking around out of fear we’d get yelled of the property we were digging. This detector, an age-appropriate high end one, discovered the GI’s dog tag in that foxhole in Bastogne along with bullet casings and a lot of rust.
Set the wayback machine to 1968, when my father got me a cheap-o metal detector from an ad at the back of a Boy’s Life magazine. I don’t recall finding anything that wasn’t so rusty as to hide its origin and purpose, but the potential was there. I’d buy – or maybe steal – treasure hunting magazines from Art’s Stationary. Art’s also sold Classic Comics Illustrated, but those I bought (still do). Of course the magazine was filled with stories about treasures found, caches of gold coins and the like that inspired the dreams of readers and not just mine.
For the big BM, Bar Mitzvah to the uninitiated, I upgraded to a better machine and used it when my sister was visiting colleges in Virginia and North Carolina. We found a ton of Civil War relics at Chancellorsville, before it was illegal to hunt National Parks, and I still have them; bullets, buckles, buttons; three B’s of the relic hunter.
Sometime in the late 1960s, maybe the early 70s, Dad introduced me to Tannen’s, THE magic store over on Sixth Avenue. Well, I never got very good at magic, but loved it as a kid and had a silly gaffed deck I’d take to school – we’re talking sixth grade at Crittenden – until it was confiscated by a teacher when I was showing it to a classmate. During her class. I wonder where my magic career would have gone had that not happened? S tand aside Ricky Jay, the Great Svengali is here. If you look in my basement, you’ll find the very case I used still with some of the tricks I had that I have not yet sold on eBay. My mother, by the way, was my biggest fan.
It’s been back to magic now that I have the time and patience to practice. There’s a mirror in my home office and I watch myself. I’m pretty good after all, but that’s beside the point, which I’ll ultimately get to.
Then there’s sailing. I’ve did it when I was a fat kid at sailing camp and loved it but convincing the rest of the Aders to get a boat was like convincing the rest of the Aders to get a boat. That’s not a typo.
Sailed then, sailed a bit during my Boston years, but it lapsed over the years. Until now. A couple of years back I acquired Red Sky, a magnificent wooden thing designed in 1913, and now the belle of Westport. We sailed it about 30 times this summer which, doing the math, comes to a mere $200 per voyage. I wrote belle and it’s true; the boat is uniquely beautiful and the big power things speed to it when we’re out, their wakes nearly tipping us over, to shout, “Hey, nice boat!!” before they take off and can’t hear me yell, “No reasonable price rejected!”
I bought two models recently; one of a fishing dory and the other of a WW 2 jeep neither of I’ve yet to start, but I will. In Armonk, on Maple Ave or Street, across from my dentist, was The Hobby Shop. Yep, I spend a good deal of time there, getting advice and buying nonsense that fascinated me. I liked model rockets, Estes, especially, and fired them not up but over towards houses near where we lived. I also made these war dioramas with cotton painted red, orange and black to serve as smoke from the flaming model tanks. I moved onto balsa wood planes with paper fuselage when I got better and who knows whatever happened to those. That youthful claw reaches forward.
I’m not overly proud of this but I set a field on fire. Not recently: more like 1972. I made the fire with a bow drill, a survival thing. I’m proud of that. We used to go to Greenwich Village when it was really cool, onto MacDougal Street, where we’d get Orange Julius’ after a trip to Chinatown. In a long-gone bookstore I got one by Bradford Angier titled “How to Survive in the Woods.” From that I learned about fire-making, hence the fire in the field. I still have the book. I also have on the mantle over my fireplace is about 7 ft of rope I made from the fibers of milkweed and dogbane plants. I used it to make a bow drill just the other day.
Math. I’m studying math on Khan Academy these days. And I’m struggling with trigonometry. Again. Some things never really change.
The wine has gone to my head but then I did exercise, so far, five of six days this week (where I watch The Twilight Zone and Daniel Boone on my iPad while doing 50 minutes on the treadmill, no joke), and had an intense ‘gentle’ yoga class before I went off to buy hen-of-the-woods and lion’s-mane mushrooms I made into a risotto.
By the by, I liked cooking when I was a kid. We had in 9th grade a choice between shop and Home Ec, with cooking the focus, and you can guess which I took. I would like to hint that it was because there were girls in Home Ec and I suppose there were but that’s not the point. There’s a girl in my kitchen as I write and she has a wine bottle and is asking questions about my Christmas Chronicle for 2018.
Is this my second childhood? I can characterize it a thousand ways to Sunday, but allow that what is so striking, so important, so very satisfying, is that these intrigues of my increasingly distant youth still resonate. Good grief!