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I’m afraid that this piece includes a solicitation. Any amount will help,

https://gofund.me/6be82a3f8

I am exhausted from The Donald. We are called to be better. History, if we bother, is within our reach.

I’m from a small California town, but I took high school history students to Paris twice. On the second trip, I went

Oh!

I showed my AP Euro history students when we studied 19th century Paris, in a unit on urban social history.

Or this one.

This one was more for me.

This one was harder to show, and to understand, when we visited.

As was this one.

But the city kind of comes back to delight you. Like this:

Or this:

Or this.

Or even this:

I’m from a small town in California, so I may never dance in Paris. But it’s not a bad idea.

As many of you know, I’m recovering from both brain surgery and alcoholism. Tomorrow I will be sober two weeks.

But my recovery assignment for the next week, ugly to think about on Father’s Day, will be to deconstruct my dad.

I’ve spent the last twenty years mythologizing him, writing about him frequently in my blog. He has assumed heroic stature. And he was such a big influence on my life. He was a masterful storyteller, and in many ways he taught me how to teach. He was brilliant, capable, very funny and charming. An accountant, he was, as was his father, in supreme command of dense columns of numbers, arranged like parade-ground soldiers. His adding machine emitted machine-gun bursts from the den of our home on Huasna Road.

The part I’ve been concealing for twenty years is the other side. He, like me, was an alcoholic; It finally killed him in 1985, when he was only 67, and now I’m a bewildered 74.

You might say that I‘ve outlived him. No, I haven’t.

You might say “he did his best.”  No, he didn’t.

My father was terrifying. He had an explosive temper and was sometimes violent, attacking our mother. He was inexplicably cruel toward my big brother. There was always an undercurrent of violence in our home. I might go to bed wondering if I would die.

After one of his explosions, he would open the bedroom door and plaintively apologize. It was confusing.

After our mom died, he locked her Basset hound in his kennel, and when the dog bayed, begging our company, he beat it with his belt. Now you know why I have Basset hounds.

He drove drunk with us in the car down the Kern River Canyon. I still have nightmares about going over a cliff into the water. Once on Branch Street, he left Bruce and I in the car for three hours while he got drunk at Bill’s Place. He came out staggering and squinting in the sunlight and some stranger—an angel?—intervened, took his keys and got us home safely.

He did income taxes in addition to his work at Madonna Construction. The Outrigger, a Shell Beach bar, was his favorite place to do taxes. He’d show up late for open houses at school or my Boy Scout meetings. Or he wouldn’t show up at all.

On weekends he would get drunk twice. He’d start with Coors in the morning, start to slide, and take a nap. Then when he started the barbecue he’d transition to Ten High whiskey.

It was my job late at night when he was passed out at the kitchen table to make sure his cigarette would not burn the house down. Just before he passed out he demanded ice cream. I want my ice cream! he would shout.

Later, if I didn’t have to carefully remove the burning cigarette from his fingers, I might find it stubbed out in the ice cream

There are a lot of other things I need to talk about in this recovery business. But on Father’s Day I wanted to put this down because I know that some of you had had a similar experience with your father.

It’s okay for you to love your father. It’s okay for me to love my father. But now I have to make a break with him so that,  unlike him, I can be free.

The MonaLisa Twins really are twins, fraternal sisters born in Austria—I think in Vienna. Their Dad , Rudolf, Wagner, is a Boomer, like me, taught the girls his love for playing music and his love for British Invasion music. The girls inherited both loves and, as young women, are the featured act in The Cavern Club, a Liverpool pub that duplicates the Hamburg Cavern where the four lads first made a big splash.

So they do Beatles. Like this:

And this:

They do Revolver:

They do Rubber Soul:

They let old guys onstage for one of my favorite Beatles songs:

They do Hollies.

And they cover one of my favorite one-hit wonders:

So,, if bug’s ears are cute, these two are. They are also great fun. And, no, I haven’t yet figured out which is Mona and which is Lisa


P.S. There’s “cute” and then there’s “beautiful.” Like this:

There was something terribly morbid and terribly wrong about FBI Director Kash Patel’s VIP snorkeling dive on USS Arizona. It’s yet one more example of this administration’s casual indecency.

I take it personally, and this is why.

Two sailors who died on Arizona were from my hometown, Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 Census. Wayne Morgan and Jack Scruggs had been second-grade classmates in Arroyo Grande in 1932.

Arizona’s destruction had a tragic impact here: 25 of the 58 seniors in the high school’s Class of 1942 were Nisei, or second-generation Japanese. On April 30, 1942, they were taken away to be incarcerated in the Arizona desert. Many never came back.

More than eighty years later, Project 85 is devoted to using refined DNA science to identify the battleship’s casualties. Many of the unidentified sailors and Marines were buried, some in mass graves, in the Punchbowl Cemetery on Oahu.

In December, those remains will be disinterred for DNA testing.

I just sent Project 85 a sample of my DNA. An Arizona sailor, Electrician’s Mate 3c Charles B. Taylor, is my cousin—we share a common grandfather—and, God willing, they might find him so that my family can bring him home.

“Home” would be the Boone Creek Cemetery in Missouri. His mother, my Aunt Aggie, is buried there, along with Charles A. Taylor, the sailor’s father. Despondent over his lost son, in July 1942, Charles A. Taylor walked out to the middle of one of his farm fields, put a .22 rifle to his heart, and pulled the trigger. Aggie Gregory Taylor carried the burden of those losses for the rest of her life, for thirty-eight years.

We got Christmas cards from her, and my dad a birthday card, every one of those years.

So, yes, Kash Patel, in my mind, you had no right to your little “joy dive.”

My knowledge of Japanese cinema pretty much begins with “Seven Samurai” and ends with “Rashomon.”

Director Yasujirō Ozu knew–directing, in the hat, above, knew to compose a frame, as John Ford did. Ozu’s, framed by Japanese interior screens, are particularly intimate. And, unlike Ford, he was much more understanding of women–his women were lovely, and they register emotion, including deep anger–and he worked particularly well with children. With children, he liked to include fart jokes in their scenes. I am okay with that.

That’s a good thing, because much of his work–he died in 1963–was focused on postwar Japanese families, bewildered and drifting apart in a sea of social change.

It reminded me of a song that played a lot on KSLY, our San Luis Obispo County, California, AM station in 1963, with the Americanized title “Sukiyaki.”

But it’s a song about the kind of loss that Ozu addressed. The lyrics follow the excerpt from his performance.

The singer, Kyo Sakomoto, born three days after Pearl Harbor, was killed in the 1985 crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. It was the worst single-airplane accident in history; claiming the lives of 520 passengers and crew.