FDR was posing for a portrait at Warm Springs, Georgia, his “Southern White House,” in April 1945. The painter was flattering the American president, now beginning a fourth term that his intimates knew he could not survive. The “flattery” consisted of a proximate version of Roosevelt, with his great leonine head, albeit with more gray hair than the man actually possessed. The artist did not attempt to hide the dark circles under his eyes, sure markers of a presidency marked by economic calamity and war.

“I have a terrific headache,” Roosevelt suddenly exclaimed. He was dead the next moment, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. They were homely and mundane last words, but presidential speechwriters aren’t constant companions. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd was FDR’s constant companion. She was the mistress Franklin had ostensibly put aside in 1918, when Eleanor found a packet of love letters between her husband and Lucy, her social secretary.

That day in 1945, Lucy was hustled away from Warm Springs before Eleanor arrived. It was the last indignity Franklin visited on her.

So even the powerful leaves messes behind them. Some die, though, with a brief moment of grace. William McKinley was visiting Buffalo, wearing his lucky red carnation in his lapel. He saw a charming little girl, stopped to unfasten the carnation to give it to her, and was promptly shot.

Fortunately, the “mess” that McKinley left behind was his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, who inherited McKinley’s imperialism but introduced the “Square Deal,” a program aimed at curbing the immense power of monopolies, protecting public health and establishing our system of national parks.

He was also, by the way, a wonderful father, with the possible exception of his imperious eldest daughter, Alice. I think there’s an explanation for that estrangement. Alice’s mother, also named Alice, died two days after giving birth to her in 1884. Roosevelt’s mother died the same day. TR dealt with the trauma by leaving New York and going West to become a cowboy.

Sometimes the last words that powerful men hear are mundane. At Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, Abraham and Mary Lincoln were holding hands like teenagers. “What will Miss Harris (part of a young couple who were their guests) think of us?”

Lincoln, I choose to believe, smiled. “She won’t think anything of it,” he replied. Booth then fired his derringer.

A century later, John F. Kennedy was on a campaign swing in unfriendly territory in Texas. There threats against his life in a state where the right-wing John Birch Society and segregation were powerful institutions. To the Kennedys’ surprise, they got a warm sendoff in Fort Worth and, after landing at Dallas’s Love Field, Texans lined the streets for blocks waving flags, applauding, sometimes screaming “Jackie!”

The governor’s wife, Nellie, turned to Kennedy. She was beaming. They can’t say now that people in Dallas don’t love you, she said.

“No, they sure can’t,” Kennedy replied. What immediately followed was the first horrific image from Abraham Zapruder’s little Kodak film camera: the president’s arms jerked suddenly and violently upward, his elbows splayed, as the first bullet struck him.

Sometimes the powerful are lucky in that they die the way they would want to. The much-maligned Richard III fell in battle at Bosworth Field, overwhelmed by forces commanded by a usurper, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII. Shakespeare knew which side his scone was buttered on, and he was writing for a Tudor/Stuart audience, so he created, in Richard III, perhaps the most memorable villain in English literature.

Richard, as the saying goes, was lost to history, except for every stage actor who would’ve killed to play him. (Laurence Olivier’s film version is especially delicious). Then, in 2015, a dogged researcher, Philippa Langley, led scholars to his burial site in Leicester, a city a, out thirty miles away from where the Gregorys came from. He was beneath what the British call a “car park” and what we call a parking lot. Gone since 1485, he was reinterred with honors, but not before forensic pathologists created the sculpture on the right: That is Richard III. They’ve even—somehow—reconstructed his voice, or at least his accent. He would’ve sounded remarkably like a farmer from All Creatures Great and Small.

Despite his restoration, in a way, to the 21st Century, there was a final indignity visited on the king in the 15th. His skeleton revealed a massive puncture wound at the base of his spine. It was postmortem. The Tudor forces, in short, had stabbed the king in the ass.

The point of all this? I love sushi, pasta, chiles rellenos. And dogs. And cats. And, most of all, my family.

Power, I can do without.

It’s struck me that write a lot about Japanese Americans. That’s Callie (Yamaguchi) Elliston and me at the 1970 Arroyo Grande High School Prom.

This is why.

Callie’s mother, Louise, known as “Dragon Lady” for her fierce protection of the Lucia Mar Superintendent—she was the District secretary–was unfailingly kind to me. She introduced me to cheesecake, which I first encountered at nineteen. Hers was magical. She and the Yamaguchi sisters introduced me to sushi, long before it was fashionable. It, too, was magical.

Many years later, due to a gross administrative error, I was named the Lucia Mar Teacher of the Year. That was for Louise.

What I owe the Hirase family is likewise beyond imagining. It was Joe Loomis and Larry Hirase who took me in after my beloved mother took her own life in 1969, when I was seventeen. Cancer takes some lives, heart disease others, and depression takes many more. Joe and Larry did me the favor on not considering me weird because of the manner of my mother’s death.

When I visited the Hirases’ home, there was a big fifty-pound sack of sushi-grade rice just inside the front door and a jeroboam of sake on the kitchen counter, an exotic counterpart to my family’s potatoes and bourbon.

I had entered a new world in which I felt completely at home.

In my home, on Huasna Road, in the late 1960s, my parents—brilliant, passionate, loving, terrifying, hopeless and endlessly inspirational–were beginning to come apart. They were beautiful. They were the finest parents anyone could’ve hope for; they made me who I am. So did staggering flaws in generations of DNA, Anglo-Irish, forged in famine, in Pennsylvania oilfields, in Missouri cornfields and milo fields and tobacco fields plowed by big, beautiful, powerful horses.

All of these were carried down to my folks, and so to me, by generations of men and women marked by integrity and fearlessness. And by failure.

When my mother died, I felt ugly. With the Ellistons or the Hirases, I felt restored. Kaz Ikeda corrected the uppercut in my baseball swing. Keith Sanbonmatsu and I were chosen to greet the U.S. Congressman visiting AGHS. The Fuchiwaki sisters, as another generation had been–at least before 1942 arrived—and all of them, our dearest neighbors, were taken away from us—were instrumental to the feel that made AGHS feel like home, just as AGUHS had been in 1941.

When I became an AGHS teacher, I taught three Kobaras, one Nakano, two Ikedas, four Hayashis.

So this is why I write so much about Arroyo Grande Japanese Americans. They are home. In some way—my friend Dennis Donovan gets this—this wee Anglo-Irish American belongs to these people, too. I am home with them. I am safe.

Of course.

Aimee Mann. Love the song, love the hair, including that braid.

Still have to look up the lyrics. This is a mighty fine performance, from 2018, and it made me happy Nena can still bring it.

This song might seem slight. I would argue that it isn’t. Its popularity resurged after the Election of 2020. It was a nice thought. Patty Smyth? You BOUNCE, girl! You’ve still got it, too.

From 1985, Aretha. Pure joy. And Clarence Clemons on the sax.

Annie Lennox at the concert for Nelson Mandela, 1988. Wow.

The official music video. That bow. That hair. Dear Lord, that RANGE. Sigh!

Here performed twenty years after its 1982 release, the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited” is so electric. It’s pure joy.

Finally, and I actually will quit now, there is this group. The song was written by Prince. I have never recovered from my crush on the singer, Susannah Hoffs, who is 65 going on 66. Shoot, I’ve got TIES older than that.

I am now on Day Five of said rotten cold, so thank goodness it coincided with HBO re-running its Western Deadwood, with its elegant Shakespearean dialogue punctuated by frequent “f___s.” and “c_______ers” It’s the only Western I’ve ever seen that demands a libretto, so you can have the time after to deconstruct the dialogue, rich with philosophy and with honeyed insults that are almost inscrutable.


My favorite character, of course, is Ian McShane’s deceptively admirable barkeep, Al Swearengen. Al, a pimp, hustler, thief, murderer and moderate drinker—he’ll limit himself to three shots at a time before he takes a pause–is magnificent. He is, as the mythologist/philosopher Joseph Campbell said of Han Solo, “a hero who doesn’t know he’s a hero.” Yes, he disguises it well, “Irascible” is Swearengen’s best mood. The rest of him would make Machiavelli blush.

I was sick enough this time to notice that another actor, Garret Dillahunt, appears twice. Dillahunt was the hapless but adorable grandfather figure in a charming sitcom, Raising Hope, centered around the little girl that a working-class family is trying to raise up right. Dillahunt had all kinds of problems, including a certain intellectual density, but his failures (fruitless schemes, minor dishonesty, brain farts) were mitigated by his devotion to his family. He was wonderful.

In both the Deadwood roles I’ve seen so far, Dillahunt was a miserable human being. Early in the miniseries, he was the drunk Jack McCall (at left) badly in need of dental work, who shot Keith Carradine’s Wild Bill. Midway through the series, he reappears as a smooth and silky agent (at right) for the ruthless silver baron George Hearst, and his job is swindling miners out of their claims. His avocation—he is a psychopath–is murder; his victims are the prostitutes he kills with a straight razor. He is as much a bastard in this show as he was a sweetheart in Raising Hope. That’s fine acting.

As to the primary cast, there really was a parallel to Timothy Olyphant’s sheriff, Seth Bullock. His name was Seth Bullock, and in his time (1849-1919) he really was a sheriff, a U.S. Marshal and he really did operate a hardware store in Deadwood. There was, of course, a real Calamity Jane, a real Swearengen (crueler, had to believe, than McShane’s character), a real Sol Star (born in Bavaria), and so on.

McShane is my favorite, but alongside him I admire the prostitute Trixie and Brad Dourif’s town doctor.

Another detail that struck me today was the peculiarity of Olyphant/Seth Bullock’s walk. As soon as he leaves the hardware store or his home, he claps his felt hat atop his head and he elevates to his full height. His walk, then, is fluid but stiffly upright. He walks narrowly, too, down the street, as if to avoid passing bullets.

I’ve seen this walk before. I think Olyphant is paying tribute to Henry Fonda. Fonda had abnormally long legs, championed by John Ford in My Darling Clementine, Ford’s wildly extravagant version of the Wyatt Earp story. I’ve written about those legs before, but let me show you, rather than tell you.

You can see, albeit briefly, the same kind of walk as Bullock and Wild Bill confront a man who’s murdered a family—the only survivor is the little girl he missed— outside Deadwood.

I even decided to take the “Which Deadwood character are you? I came up as Whitney Ellsworth, a prospector and gentleman who comes to the aid of Alma, Seth Bullock’s onetime lover. He proposes marriage to her to legitimize her pregnancy, but she demurs, goes back to the dope and Ellsworth, one of the few townies with the courage to stand up to George Hearst, is shot dead by Hearst’s gunmen, probably Pinkertons. Yup. It fits.

I can get through one episode at a time of the Spielberg/Tom Hanks series Band of Brothers, which speaks more to me because my Dad was an Army officer in Europe. Sometimes I can’t get that far in The Pacific. It’s so harrowing that I don’t know how any Marine came home undamaged. I don’t imagine that any did.

I read, many years ago, With the Old Breed, by Eugene “Sledgehammer” Sledge, a character in the miniseries, and the historian/biographer William Manchester’s account of his war service, Goodbye Darkness, and both left me deeply troubled. That’s exactly the impact they should’ve had.

Somehow, thanks to the work of computer artists and the incredible composition, “Honor,” by Hans Zimmer, the opening credits to the miniseries are strangely and surpassingly beautiful.

But it remains a disconnect in my spirit, to imagine what young men from my hometown went through. There were other Marines, but here are five who resonate for me.