“Others:” 1942, 1948, 1951.

“Used Cars,” Bruce Springsteen, from the album Nebraska (1982)

My little sister’s in the front seat, with an ice cream cone
My ma’s in the backseat sittin’ all alone
As my pa steers her slow out of the lot
For a test drive down Michigan Avenue

Now my ma she fingers her wedding band
And watches the salesman stare at my old man’s hands
He’s tellin’ us all ’bout the break he’d give us
If he could but he just can’t
Well if I could I swear I know just what I’d do

Now mister the day the lottery I win
I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again

Now the neighbors come from near and far
As we pull up in our brand new used car
I wish he’d just hit the gas and let out a cry
And tell ’em all they can kiss our asses goodbye

Dad he sweats the same job from mornin’ to morn’
Me I walk home on the same dirty streets where I was born
Up the block I can hear my little sister
In the front seat blowin’ that horn
The sounds echo’in all down Michigan Avenue

Now mister the day my number comes in
I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again

---

That wasn’t my brand-new used car experience, not at all. But Greg driving me down and then me coming home with Hideo Shohei Yamamoto Koufax Mazda turned into a thirteen-hour adventure. Now Hideo (after Hideo Nomo, the great Japanese Dodger pitcher from the 1990s) is parked on our street, all snug and maybe a little pooped. Got him up to 80 on several occasions. about fifteen mph slower than Nomo’s fastball. So here’s Hideo Mazda:

Hideo’s a 2011, so the car still has a CD Player. Luckily, we still have many vintage CD’s, so I can listen to Springsteen and Annie Lennox and Toad the Wet Sprocket all over again. I want Joe Ball or my nephew Ryan to look over the brakes, which seem a little soft. A couple of warning lights go on for no apparent reason. The rear window’s tinted, presumably so the CHP can’t see me smoking crack cocaine as I drive down the freeway with Hip an/or Hop music blasting from the CD player, and that needs to GO. At 73, I have a hard enough time seeing anything.

I discovered something about myself. My friend Greg and my wife Elizabeth grew up in El Lay, and they have no trouble driving—assertively—in traffic down there. I grew up in Arroyo Grande, where you politely stopped while Johnny and Manny Silva parked their Ford F-150 pickups in the middle of Huasna Road. As soon as they realized you were waiting, they pulled aside and just a politely waved you through. Then they waved at you some more. Then they pulled their pickups, cab-to-cab, back into the middle of the road, to resume their conversation.

In El Lay (a term I like), your road hazards are huge scraps of semi-truck tires, boards with sinister emergent tenpenny nails, shards of glass like strands of killer diamonds, all swept neatly into the shoulder alongside the Diamond Lane. Mostly. And there are the occasional wrecks (not any today), stalled cars (several) and roadside arrests (One. CHP had the guy’s hands interlaced behind his neck).

So the sights are nerve-wracking to an Arroyo Grande boy. I left my friend Greg at Arnie’s Restaurant in Lawndale (a 70s throwback, like the Arroyo Grande Sambo’s in my high school days. The food at Arnie’s was marvelous), fumbled my way back to the 405 North, and drove the next twenty-two miles with my shoulders roughly parallel to my ears. My nervousness had contracted my trapezius muscles so much that they were like cannonballs.

Here are a few impressions I gathered from today’s adventure:

1. I suffered an acute overdose of Teslas. A few of them were driven by people so short that you could barely see them. Maybe one of them was Elon’s son, Li’l X SpaceX Musk. Good news: I saw only one Cybertruck, the automobile industry’s version of the high school wedgie and perhaps the most heinous technological design since the Stuka dive bomber, which I think is what Elon was shooting for. Pun intended.

BTW: The new Toyota Camrys are far, far sexier. I saw a lot of them, too. They made me smile despite my envy.

2. So few miles, so much time, and Dante. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to navigate twenty-two miles of the 405 North (hence the hunched shoulders.) Even then, I was not prepared for the 405/101 interchange. I felt like Sicilian immigrants to Ellis Island being poked and prodded by indifferent immigration policemen mispronouncing my name (“Vito Andolini”), and the Italian reference is a good one, because Dante Alighieri accurately captured the 405 and 101 in Inferno, when he described the innermost rings of Hell. Michelangelo did a darn fine job of depicting that interchange, as well. In another panel, The Lord informs the unlucky motorist, who for some reason has his nekkid buttocks exposed, that he’s taken the wrong exit.

3. There were happy moments. Off-ramps that have names like “Mulholland Drive” and “Sunset Boulevard” bring back many happy Sixties memories—I loved L.A. music (the Doors, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, and—sorry, Dude—the Eagles). Until the music died, as it did in 1969 with the murders on Camino Cielo. Oops. Maybe I need to put Charles Manson in another paragraph.

By the way, speaking of “L.A. Music:”

Another happy moment: when people change lanes, shifting sideways into a space not much wider than a north-south coathanger, they wave their thanks to you, the car behind.

Okay. One lady did.

4. Other places were far less happy. The Coast Highway, along Malibu, is still closed except for residents. On the way down, Greg pointed a series of steep hillsides that rise above Camarillo. On one of them, we lost Kobe. We talked for a long time about the Lakers. Greg won a contest and got to ride on the team plane in the Magic years; one of the best birthday gifts I ever gave was to buy Thomas and a friend tickets to a Lakers game in the Lebron era. Chick Hearn, the play-by-play announcer, came up, too (“Couldn’t throw a pea in the ocean,” for cold streaks; “Yo-yoying up and down” for a player dribbling at the top of the key and looking for a pass). Remembering Chick softened losing Kobe. But not enough.

5. Still there—thank you, Lord: The Skirball Center, the Getty Museum, the poignant vastness of the tombstones at the L.A. Veterans’ Cemetery, the Sheraton Universal, and the stunningly tasteless billboards, like the sones for Sweet James’s law firm. So El Lay. And the churchtops: steepled Anglican or Catholic, Byzantine domes, Coptic or Orthodox, loud-speakered mosques, Baptist churches whose presence is advertised in Hangul, in Korean.

The fires are still there, too, alight in our memories. The Coast Highway, along Malibu, is still closed except for residents, because mud and rock flowed down the coast hillsides as ashen as Pompeii. I could not shake images like these from my mind as we entered L.A. from the 101.

But then, the historian in me remembered, hours later, that we Americans are made of strong stuff. The fires reminded me of Randy Newman’s sublime song “Louisiana 1927,” when another disaster met with the threat of presidential indifference.

But my adventure today reminded me of another Randy Newman song. This is a good way to end this little essay. (And I love the Buick.)

I love you, L.A.

---

Because one of my secret alternative careers was to become an advertising copywriter (like my friend Dave), I’ve been paying close attention to the Super Bowl ads now available for preview.

I dig the flying Pringles mustaches and the Affleck brothers’ ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, and the ad where David Beckham discovers that Matt Damon is his long-lost twin brother. I am a big Matt Damon guy.

But this ad, for Michelob Ultra, just might be my favorite so far.

There are several reasons for this. O’Hara has been in many of the Christopher Guest “mockumentaries” (“Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind,” for example) AND she co-starred with Guest’s collaborator, Eugene Levy, in “Schitt’s Creek.”

Her costar in this commercial is Willem Dafoe, who had perhaps the most epic movie death in history (“Platoon”) and was brilliant in a very small film, “At Eternity’s Gate,” about Vincent van Gogh.

My favorite role of his, however, is as the angelfish in “Finding Nemo.”

Also, as annoying as we are, the Boomers win one in this ad.

Oh, and the game? Kansas City is beautiful–it has hills!–and I visited the city several times when I was a student a Mizzou.

The connections go farther back: Kansas City operatives from the famed Pendergast Machine left a bank bag full of $5 bills on my grandmother’s kitchen table just before every election in Texas County, Missouri, in the 1920s and 1930s.

(The farmhouse is still there, but with a satellite dish.)

Grandma Gregory was the party’s County Chair. My teenaged Dad handed out the fives as voters, Hill People, proud and hungry and barefoot, waited to vote.

So I have a lot of very personal connections to KC.

But I think I’m rooting for the Eagles. Saquon Barkley, dumped by the Giants, just might be one of the most amazing comeback stories in NFL history.

And, to be sure, the Chiefs will be back another year. How can I compare, as a history teacher, their QB, Patrick Mahomes, to Figures from History?

Okay. Here we go:

–Mozart
–Leonardo
–Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein.” Okay, and as Willy Wonka, too.
–Louis Armstrong
–Emily Dickinson
–Aretha Franklin
–Walt Whitman
–The opening paragraph to Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.”
–The closing paragraph to Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
–Linda Ronstadt

Yeah, Mahomes is THAT good.

By now all the world knows that I am off-the-charts ADHD, which is small freight for this story. This story is about dogs.

But the way I’ll tell it—God Bless thirty years’ worth of history students who had to suffer this—reflects that ADHD thing. I don’t think or write or speak in a linear fashion. I move laterally. One thing reminds me of another and I’ll go there, then to the next topic (they’re like stepping-stones across a garden pond), and then another until, almost invariably, I’ll come home again. The sigh of relief in my students was visible and audible.

If I had a storytelling mentor, other than Dad and Dan Krieger, to point to, it would be the scientific historian James Burke, who thinks laterally, too, which is one of the great blessings of his 1980s show, The Day the Universe Changed, a staple in my AP European History classes at AGHS.

But this isn’t about James Burke. It’s about Irish Wolfhonds. I saw a lady (not this one) walking her Wolfhound across Elm Street, near the park, and I rolled down my car window:

WHAT A GORGEOUS DOG! I opined. Vigorously. Loudly. I had to struggle not to fall out of the car. She blushed and smiled, so I made her happy. I was maybe happier. You don’t see many Irish Wolfhounds (we’ve been Mom and Dad to Mollie and Brigid, two Irish Setters, and to thirty-eight years’ worth, in our marriage, of a parade of much-loved Pound Puppies.)

Now then, you might ask, why get so exercised about Irish Wolfhounds?

Those of you keeping score at home might remember that I’m about half Irish, and that half comes from County Wicklow, where Mom’s ancestors, Famine refugees, came from. That’s Sugarloaf Mountain in Wicklow, and the requisite horse, Wicklow’s known for them, racers and jumpers and hunters and draught horses and homeless horses who go a-begging, dolphins that leap high above the Irish Sea and rainbow trout the size of Daschshunds.

(Elizabeth and I love Dachshunds, especially the long-haired variety. They look like miniature Irish Setters.)

Mom’s ancestors did not come to America. They were Canadians first. This is my second-great-grandfather’s citizenship oath, sworn just before he took up farming in Minnesota.

Great-great-grandfather Thomas Keefe, before he came to Minnesota, farmed in Cobourg, Ontario. Well, son of a gun.

Father Francis Duffy came from Cobourg, Canada, too, where he’d taught in colleges and seminaries. My ancestors became Minnesotans; Father Duffy became a New Yorker, which is why his statue overlooks Times Square today. (We saw it when our niece, Emmy, graduated from NYU. Duffy and Emmy: Two great honors.) Pat O’Brien played Duffy in The Fighting 69th, the World War I regiment in which Duffy had served as regimental chaplain. You can’t go wrong with casting Pat O’Brien as an Irish priest, or his costar, James Cagney, as an Irish-American soldier.

The First World War wasn’t the 69th’s first war. They suffered terribly in the Civil War, especially at the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, where 2/3 of the parent Unit, the Irish Brigade, were killed, wounded or missing. They’d been ordered to assault a stone wall atop a place called Marye’s Heights. Here are two images from different sides of that stone wall, which remains today.

And here is the 69th’s Civil War battle flag. Next to it are the colors of the 24th Georgia. There were so many Irish immigrnts to that part of Georgia that the 24th’s flag includes the Irish harp, as does the 69th New York’s.

The 69th New York’s war wasn’t close to being over. Eight months later, they and the Irish Brigade were at Gettysburg, where Father William Corby, from the Congregation of the Holy Cross—the order that staffs the University of Notre Dame—granted absolution to the unit before they went into battle. (I suspect that a few Methodists and Episcopalias were kneeling the last rows.)

And here the 69th New York’s memorial at the military park today. Look at its base.

It’s an Irish wolfhound, and so are these, leading the 69th in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. It’s a tradition.

Now, to square the circle of my lateral thinking, I need to come back to my starting point. This story began in Arroyo Grande. This is where it ends, at the end of this little video.

Better to let them die, and decrease the surplus population. Ebenezer Scrooge, “A Christmas Carol,” 1843

USAID is a criminal organization. Elon Musk, 2025.

Dickens lives among us. So do Hunger and Want. Scrooge meets them here, thanks to the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Here, Musk carries Li’l X, his son, in the Capitol. Bob Cratchit carried Tim, too, for the simple reason that his son could not walk.

So this song is for you, Elon Musk. I hope that ghosts of children come with it. They will begin to visit come Monday, because they will begin to die this weekend.

Had these children lived, they would’ve remembered the gunnysacks filled with American wheat brought up by great harvesters, belching blue diesel smoke, in South Dakota and and rice harvested, winnowed from drained fields by big combines, from the Sacramento Delta. Their parents would’ve explained to them what the flag on each gunnysack meant.

But by Monday, they’ll be as dead as Marley. Mankind was my business! he wailed to Scrooge, bound by his chains punctuated by strongboxes. Marley, too, was wealthy. The wealth of his agony, in death, was too much to bear.

As to Elon Musk? I don’t know what he’ll experience once he dies, but the children who survive Monday will never forget him. He’s the man who will have taken their brothers and sisters away from them.

This is for my parents. They both experienced want in the Great Depression. Mom’s ancestors were Famine survivors from County Wicklow, Ireland. Dad did see, quite literally, bloody footprints in the snow left by the proud mountain people of the Ozark Plateau.

Both of them knew that there was a better way to treat hungry children. This is what I mean. This is what they taught me, in the link below.

On the Anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s Death

Kathe Tanner covers the North Coast for the Tribune, my old (if brief) paper from many years ago, and she is excellent. This story made me a little sad. I’m hoping Leffingwell’s closing is a mere demographic blip, soon to be restored by a few more students who deserve a school like this.

I did. My career at AGHS was never particularly distinguished, but my GPA nosedived in 1969. There was chaos at home, including Mom’s death, and I had some excellent teachers, but I could’ve used a place like Leffingwell where there was a better chance for teachers to grow into mentors, when they weren’t surrounded by 35 teenagers in an American Government class. “Continuation School,” in the late 1960s, was pejorative, a place for knuckleheads and girls who got pregnant. (Like my friend Bonnie, who Elizabeth and I found waiting tables at Bob’s Seafood in Morro Bay many years later. I adored Bonnie in 1969; I admired her—it was the weekend just before her daughter graduated from Cal Poly—even more when Elizabeth and I met her over fish and chips.)

I later found out that Bonnie, years later, took her own life, just as my mother had in 1969.

Despite my dismal high school career, I went on to teach Advanced Placement U.S. History and Advanced Placement American Government at Mission Prep in San Luis Obispo. Someone in administration must’ve lost their mind, a suspicion confirmed eleven years later when I was suspended from my teaching position for insubordination. The same kind of catastrophic lapse in judgment came fifteen years later, when they decided I should be Lucia Mar’s Teacher of the Year.

Bosh.

In Lucia Mar, at AGHS, I taught Advanced Placement European teacher, and there was at least one colleague who couldn’t resist needling me for teaching “easy” kids. (I only got the job because the previous AP teacher, a little soft on Hitler for my taste, resigned to take a higher-paying job in another high school.)

I understood my colleague, even though the little barbs she threw drew blood. I was not particularly good at teaching the “regular” kids—there isn’t a good word to describe the vast, and important, in-betweens—10th Grade World History. It took my passion for the subject and a year’s maturity (mine and theirs) to make me love teaching 11th Grade U.S. History.

But I found out something else in the interregnum. Between leaving Mission and beginning at my Alma Mater, AGHS, I taught for a year in Atascadero Unified. It was Night School. I was assigned every student who’d failed World History or U.S. History—or both—and they had to get through me to graduate high school. They were the “retreads.”

Napoleon could not begin to imagine the immensity of my power.

I also taught GED for adults (thank God for the student who helped me to teach math) and, in one of the richest experiences of my teaching life, I taught an adult how to read.

I didn’t have that much fun until, at AGHS, Mr. Goossen tapped me to teach a study hall for at-risk kids. When my class filed in the first day, I felt a quiver of fear: one of them, Jack Raymond, had a lacquered Mohawk. In technicolor. I was doomed. There was no way I could teach to a Mohawk.

The one thing I had going for me was that they were expected to begin each class by journaling. I collected them periodically, read them and commented on them. In the process, I found out f that many of my study hall charges were very bright—-some of them brighter than I–and some of them lived in directionless homes, slept on dirty sheets at night, had lost someone whom they loved, frequently a role model, and they loved the constancy of their closest friends, always music and almost as often a cat or dog.

I thought Jack was smiling at me insolently sometimes. It turned out later that he liked my sense of humor.

The honor in teaching AP students was in their drive, their curiosity, their willingness to learn the craft of writing. In teaching “retreads,” I discovered in my students the immensity of their compassion and the incredible courage it took for them just to come to school, to come to my class, every day. I certainly didn’t have that kind of courage in high school. I missed a lot of classes.

We were assigned Melville’s Moby-Dick as 11th-graders and I conveniently came down with strep. That meant that I could cover myself with blankets, stretch out on the sofa with our West Highland White Terrier, Winnie, asleep on my feet, and begin to learn more about whales than I ever wanted to know.

But I was safe. I didn’t have to go to school.

That’s when and where I learned to be a Retread.

I was all a-melt over a Newfoundland Mom and her puppies (eleven!) I saw on Animal Planet yesterday. When she got stressed out, she went swimming.

Then I found out my friend Erica Mueller had a Newfoundland named Fergus. What an outstanding name! When Fergus needed decompressing, they’d take him to river to swim, upcurrent, until he was finally tired out.

I bet it took Fergus a long time to tire out.

That led me to pondering Irish Setters. They love the water, too—note the difference between Mollie, our first Setter, and Wilson, our first Basset, at Laguna Lake, in the photo below.

Setters are also field dogs. I feel sorry for the grouse in that first photo, but when Elizabeth comes home, Brigid heads for the toy basket and emerges triumphant with a doggie toy in her mouth, just for Mom.

Fergus and Brigid behave the way they do because of their breeding, whatever that means, I guess it’s in their DNA.

But I wonder if part of them is beyond DNA.

Maybe it’s even Jungian, as in Carl Jung, the pioneering psychotherapist and theorist who believed in the “collective unconscious,” a kind of memory pool that all humans share. It goes back, Jung argued, to our ancestral human mother, the woman some physical anthropologists refer to as “Mitochondrial Eve.”

She was African. So, of course, were the women warriors in Black Panther. Damn. I hope I got some of that DNA.

I don’t know that this is true. But one of my heroes (because he looked and sounded like my Grandpa Kelly) is the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who pointed out that there is a version of the Cinderella story in virtually every culture.

I once watched the actor Wes Studi–Magua in Last of the Mohicans–and this man, who had played such a cruel character in this film, had little children at his feet rapt on the PBS show Reading Rainbow while he read them, so gently, a Native American version of “Cinderella.”

I was rapt, too. So here, Campbell and Studi, are two great storytellers:

One of my favorite poets, despite his verbosity, a sin I share, is the American Walt Whitman, who believed that all of us, living and dead, are bound together by a kind connection, a kind of spiritual film that presaged Jung, that makes us all brothers and sisters. Midway through his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” you suddenly get the intense feeling that the old fart, Whitman, is watching you, just over your shoulder, as you read the poem he wrote in 1856.

He’s got a little smile on his face, Whitman does.

Maybe it was Whitman’s poem that made me love this 1988 film opening, even with the Big Hair, so very much.

When the Twin Towers come into view, they hurt. I cannot see them now, but Nichols’ introduction reminds me that even the vanished Towers are are part of me, too.

Maybe even the sixteenth century is part of me.

I was watching parts of the two “Elizabeth” films with Cate Blanchett this morning–that’s her coronation portrait below.

My ninth great-grandmother, Lady Elizabeth Gelsthorpe Gregory, died in the great queen’s reign, three years before the Armada, and is buried beneath the concrete of this little London church.

My Elizabeth says that we Gregorys have very distinctive mannerisms, like the way we tilt our heads just before we have something meaningful to say.

And here comes Brigid with a toy chicken in her mouth.

You have to wonder: Did Lady Elizabeth tilt her head in the same way that my big sister does today?

Did my cousin Roy, killed by Waffen-SS troops on the doorstep of a French church in January 1945, do the same thing?

And if Roberta and Roy had that little tic, doesn’t that mean that, even with the intervention of so many years, that all of us are much, much closer to each other than we think we are? Don’t we, all of us, belong to each other? The poet John Donne certainly thought so.

But maybe now that’s the kind of thinking, in my case thanks to dogs, that will get you into trouble.