December, 1968

The end of the year brings three things into the house – a Christmas tree, a menorah and my grandparents. My grandfather was a carpenter one generation removed from his Welsh homeland. His father had moved here from Wales at the height of the schooner building industry that helped forge the town. My grandfather followed suit becoming a woodworker. He was a short but solid man with a rosy face and easy smile and during the holidays he was not often seen without a shot of rum in a glass. My grandfather loved to tell stories and he never looked happier than when he had both a drink and an audience. Now later in life, he had exhausted all his tales to his own kids and contemporaries and so, my grandfather packed up his repertoire of stories and moved onto his grandkids.

Every story started with a question. “Did you know there was a ghost living under the cliffs at Arnes Cove?” or “Did you know that the gulls never fly over the Dead Man’s Patch?” or the sometimes, something less ethereal like “Did I ever tell you about old Mrs. Hicks?” And whether or not the question went answered he proceeded with his yarn about ghosts, cursed pieces of land or the woman who ironed her fish before eating it. The only thing these stories had in common was that they always took place in another town either across the bay or across the ocean - always somewhere just out of the reach of verification. On this December evening my older siblings helped decorate the tree and my grandmother was doing her best to conceal her concern for her what she considered her Jewish grandchildren. I was being held in my grandfather's lap and from this corner of the room I laughed for the first time.

My mother was very excited to hear her newest child laugh for the first time as my grandfather bounced me on his knee. Not soon after I started laughing I threw up over my grandfather’s wool ‘holiday dress pants’ and my mother took me away to wash me up and to put me to bed. My grandfather took some pride in the fact that he was the one to make me laugh for the first time. This story continued in the family for a while, usually brought up during the holidays. Many years later my grandfather, his mind raped by the cruel rot of Alzheimer's, confessed that my laugh was most likely the result of the tiny sip of rum he had given me and also the cause of my throwing up afterward. So many decades later and it was this tiny piece of info that tugged at what was left of his mind.

It is the month in which Douglas Engelbart first publicly demonstrated his system known as hypertext. The Apollo spacecraft put men in orbit around the moon, allowing humans to see the whole of the planet Earth for the very first time. And by the end of December, 1968 was quickly becoming history.

Hit from December, 1968
Lady Willpower, Gary Puckett and The Union Gap