This is my Baby Dad. The 100th anniversary of his birth is July 31, so we are wondering what we should eat to celebrate his memory. Since he grew up on the Ozark Plateau, some of the potential dishes:

–Chicken-fried steak. I haven’t had chicken-fried steak in thirty-five years. The last time I tried it, it was so good that I only noticed momentarily that my arteries were slamming shut like the WalMart electric doors at closing time Black Friday.

–Ham-hocks and Lima beans. Nope. Lima beans are the only culinary abomination I find more disturbing than kale. Their interiors have the texture of beach sand and taste the same. Lima beans deserve to be extinct, like Dodo birds and Tea Party Republicans. Kale, by the way, reminds me of concertina wire.

–Squirrel stew. Not bad. A little peppery when Dad made it, about as bony as a Lake Trout but darker and more mysterious in flavor. Not for me: The squirrels around here, I assume, are all rabid and homicidal. The ones who aren’t carry the Plague bacillus.

–Missouri fried chicken. Not as batter-y as Southern Fried chicken. Dust it with either corn meal or flour, add Secret Spices, fry, inhale. Grandma Gregory’s Missouri fried drumsticks were divine, so good that we almost forgot she used to absently whack us with her cane. She’d been a country schoolteacher, you see, and whacking then was what refer to now as “Classroom Management.”

–A full-out Ham Dinner, with accompaniments, but it requires a table at least twelve feet long. And an immensity of hams. Fruit salad, potato salad, hot German potato salad, jello salad, macaroni salad, mounds of deviled eggs, cinnamoned yams grown in the Old Confederacy but invaded by melting Yankee marshmallows, biscuits smeared generously with butter melted in honey, string-bean casserole, mashed potatoes that remind you of fluffy clouds–if we could somehow get butter up there–and so many pies that another table is required just for them: Sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, Dutch apple pie, chocolate pie, lemon meringue pie, peach pie and, most of all, pecan pie, with the “can” in “pecan” pronounced the way you’d pronounce it in the term “tin can.”

Also, the emphasis is emphatic on the first syllable in the words “July” and “insurance” and you go to see a movie at the “thee-AY-ter.”

In defense of the Ozark Plateau, a meal like this Meal of Many Hams is intended to reinforce ideals like Family and Community, and it’s eaten in several shifts that are interspersed with funny stories, family stories, local scandals, livestock inspection–Ozarkers love horses, and love commenting on them, as much as County Wicklow Irish do–neighborhood walks to work the food off where the neighbors wave from the front porch. Afterward, for folks my age, there are pleasant naps in rockers on those front porches while the kids screamed at Badminton to the Death on the back back lawn, because yards in the Border States and the tier of states below were and are immense and fenceless. They make you wonder, with all that room and neighborly welcome, why Fort Sumter ever happened.

–Here’s the favorite potential Celebrate Dad meal so far, and it’s intended for breakfast: BISCUITS AND GRAVY, with a creamy gravy studded with nougats du pork and sided by fried (Do you notice a pattern here? Teenaged Dad brought grapefruit to some Hill People in a New Deal relief program and they tried to fry them, too) eggs and bacon. The Ozark Plateau, you may have noticed as well, is no place to be a hog. Biscuits, to be measured with calipers, must be at least four inches thick and also must be able to float effortlessly just before serving. CJ’s and Francisco’s Country Kitchen both serve up biscuits and gravy like that.

I think that’s the meal I’ll go for. Don’t tell Dr. Tackett, my cardiologist. She is, however, from Kentucky, where they eat the EXACT SAME STUFF. Dr. Tackett eats kale and might occasionally and accidentally smell a halibut if it’s served on a table at the opposite end of the restaurant. She is a much stronger person than I could ever hope to be.

 

 

Every once in awhile, breaking through all those Facebook posts from Cabo and Maui and Paris that make us question our own self-worth and our boring, pedestrian lives, a little truth gets posted.

A friend of mine is mentally ill, and his Facebook posts have no Margaritas, no white ribbons of beach, no banks of elms along the Seine with Notre Dame’s towers soaring just beyond.

My friend is in a hospital.

I emailed the hospital and asked if there’s anything I-—or we-—could do to help him. I don’t know that there is. I had to ask.

When I knew him almost fifty years ago, he was one of the finest young men I’d ever met. He impressed me so much with his integrity, his intellect and, underneath his shyness, his personal warmth. We grew up together in both high school and in the Episcopal Church, so that means a lot to me, too. The kind of young man he was-—the kind of person each of us once was, or the person that we hoped to be-—is something profound and deep and enduring. But it’s not unassailable.

We spend great parts of our lives, I think, under siege, rather than sipping Margaritas, fighting so hard just to survive that we never quite become the person we were going to be in our dreams. We get worn down. Sometimes, in our exhaustion, we lose faith in ourselves and we have to fight to get it, and ourselves, back again. Life is a war, constant and merciless, for so many of us.

My friend’s war may be the most frightening any of us has ever fought.

I know a little, and it’s a very little, about what he’s going through. So do many of the young people I’ve taught who fought their struggles so quietly but with so much courage.

I’ve been hospitalized several times in my life for depression—it killed my mother and twice almost killed me—and while the spectrum of our illnesses might be vastly different, the constant in both is the voice inside my head and inside my friend’s, insistent and seductive, that tells you lies about yourself, your self-worth, and about reality itself (it may be as menacing as the green fog in Eliot’s “Prufrock,” or, conversely, reality might be a kind of English garden, lavender-scented, where you are a barren stinking weed). That voice is a damnable liar.

It’s also cunningly persuasive—-the most persuasive when it makes the least sense—and it is powerful. It’s a voice that lies almost as much as Facebook.

So I’ve been crazy, too, and I wanted to say that in my friend’s defense. I also wanted to say that because it gives me an extra measure of responsibility toward him.

I am also a devout coward. I like mental hospitals and long-term care institutions only a little less than I liked bulls when I was a little boy, when, laden with fresh jolts of testosterone and adrenaline, they would look up at me from their grazing with suddenly murderous eyes. I get the same catch in my throat today when I see large men driving pickup trucks garnished with Confederate battle flags.

Fear’s the only thing that stops me trying to do something for my friend. I don’t know that seeing him would do any good, or even if his doctors would think it a good idea. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for me.

But maybe it is.

Maybe anything we can do, even if it’s tollhouse cookies, is a good idea. Compassion is never a small gesture and, in the research and the writing I’ve done, it’s never rare, either, not even when the war is even more murderous than the one we fight inside ourselves, when it’s the kind of war young men fight to murder each other.

You’re right, by the way, if you think that this is none of my damn business and that I’m in way over my head. I agree with you completely. Maybe, and I’ve done this before, I am confusing myself with Jesus.

Maybe that’s exactly what He wants of me.

The photos above are of Churchill’s famous portrait (Cecil Beaton got the expression by reaching out and snatching the cigar out of Winston’s mouth) and of Trump visiting Blenheim Palace today.

Blenheim Palace was Churchill’s birthplace, named for the victory his ancestor, Marlborough, won in Bavaria, fighting for Queen Anne and for Britain in the War of the Spanish Succession, when the Bourbons aimed at disrupting the balance of power in a manner only slightly blunter than Putin’s. The intent, the malevolence, was otherwise the same.

The palace is magnificent—-my wife, Elizabeth, and I have visited—but it’s the estate that’s even grounder, with the grounds so beautifully and carefully designed, yet with a seeming artlessness that gives hillsides and lakes and copses of trees the appearance of happy accidents, and all of it was executed by my favorite landscape architect, Capability Brown, a man I used to explain the Enlightenment, in visual language, during nineteen years of teaching history to the high-school sophomores I loved so much. Churchill proposed to Clementine in a neoclassic Greek temple recessed in Capability Brown’s shade, cast by trees that he hadn’t planted yet. He had faith that the shade would be there when it was required. That kind of faith leads to the imperfection we call “democracy.”

The two men, Churchill and Trump, have much in common. Both had emotional lives that were stunted by neglectful mothers. Winston’s Jennie, a Philadelphian, resented his very birth, in a cloakroom, because his arrival made her miss a ball, and in revenge, she practiced premeditated and cruel neglect on her son until she discovered her love for him, finally, in the moment that he began winning elections.

Trump’s mother grew ill when he was a toddler and she was so consumed with staying alive that he was, for several years, a virtual orphan.

As a result, both men grew up terribly insecure, petulant, self-centered, childish and given to bouts of anger that were frequently cruel. Both men were impatient with arcane bureaucracies and took cudgels to them, beating shortcuts through the red tape that often proved disastrous. The disasters resulted from their certainty that they were smarter than every expert summoned to counsel them.

Both men were racists: Churchill witnessed with satisfaction the salutary effect the Maxim Gun had on North Africans and he loathed Gandhi; Trump delights in making orphans by the hundreds, as long as they’re brown.

Both held forth interminably at social gatherings, impatient with the contributions of their guests because they interrupted the flow of their own brilliant monologues.

But only one of them was brilliant, and brilliant, most of all, in our language.

Only one of them was a statesman.

Only one of them instructed, elevated and inspired his people.

Only one of them studied history, understood it, after his fashion, and appreciated the depth of history’s lessons and used them to shape his decisions.

Only one of them was a patriot.

Only one of them was a man so profoundly gifted, and so determined to use his gifts, that he was able to transcend his deepest and most grievous flaws. For Churchill, the most crippling flaw was the depression, the trait he shared with the one man he admired more than the Duke of Marlborough, and that was Lincoln–the Black Dog, he called it–that he fought, admittedly and in part with generous doses of brandy and champagne, but he found his steel in fighting it, in pushing it aside in every waking hour of his life.

Trump finds his steel–his is no stronger than tin– in insults and in cruelty. There is none of Churchill’s spine in the man. There is no man there at all.

Yet Trump was at Churchill’s ancestral home today. In keeping him away from London, in evoking Churchill’s birthplace, Her Majesty’s Government may have reminded us, deliberately or not, of Trump’s tragic smallness.

Trump is Shakespearean, but only in a minor key: He is Rosencrantz, or Guildenstern, or perhaps, in his best moments, Polonius. He is a character best dismissed offstage, behind an arras, where he can’t harm the plot.

But the same was said, and I’ve read the journalists who said it, about Mussolini and Hitler. They were, seemingly,  petit-bourgeois clowns, nearly as crude as Trump, yet they dragged the world down with them, and they made orphans from the Atlantic to the Urals. And then, having dispatched the parents, Hitler burned the orphans.

Where is our Churchill?  Where is the statesman with the talent to remind us all of our own greatness? That’s the faith, naive as it might seem, that Churchill kept and that Americans as diverse as Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Willa Cather, Dorothea Lange, Frank Capra, and Martin Luther King Jr. kept. It’s a faith I try so hard to summon in the little books I write. one that’s been validated in places as far away as Antietam and Cold Harbor, Papua New Guinea and Iwo Jima, Normandy and Berchtesgaden.

It’s a faith that was lived by Army nurses who whispered gently and urgently into soldiers’ ears to keep them alive. It was a faith lived by the big Missouri farm boy, a B-17 waist gunner, who got his comrades out in their parachutes but went down with his bomber. It’s a faith that was  lived by the Japanese-American teenager, sent from Arroyo Grande to a desert concentration camp, who answered this insult by becoming an Army intelligence officer serving his country in the mountains of China: he won a Bronze Star, he won a Congressonal Medal of Freedom and he never came back to Arroyo Grande again. Until he died. He told his son, a Texan, to bring  his ashes home to Arroyo Grande, seventy years after the buses had taken him and his family and his friends away.

So where is our Churchill? Today reminded me that we don’t need him. We need ourselves. We need to remember who were are. There was Churchill’s genius: it was all in the reminding.