The Year the Christmas Lights Went Out

THE YEAR THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS WENT OUT by Wayne Dixon That year began with promise. Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in peace-making. Détente was in the air. But 1973 ended in darkness as a result of the energy crisis. President Nixon ordered curtailment of electricity usage as well as fuel due to the Arab embargo. How did we get in such a situation? The conflicts between Arabs and Israeli continued in what became known as the October War and the Yom Kippur War. Yom Kippur is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a time of solemnity and atonement. Israel was also celebrating its 25th year of independence. Arab nations surrounding Israel took advantage of the occasion to attack from all sides. Lebanon and Syria stood on the north, Jordan and Iraq on the east, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia on the south. Israeli forces were severely outnumbered as Egypt crossed the Suez Canal while Syria simultaneously invaded the Golan Heights that October 6th in an attempt to reclaim land lost to Israel in the 1967 war. That war had lasted only 6 days, while this war would last 16 days, with both conflicts resulting in victory by the Israelis. The Arab oil-producing nations decided to punish the West by withholding 60 percent of its production. I remember the results well. Not only did the lights go out, but we would severely limit driving . Even downtown Fresno suddenly seemed too far to go under the circumstances. Every destination was measured in mental miles. Another result, continuing to this day, was the banning of heating home swimming pools except for medical need. Even then, the cost became prohibitive. Many people permanently pulled out their pool heaters, but I kept mine in hope the ban would pass. It never did.

Jokes on Me

The Joke's on Me by Wayne Dixon It was a five hour drive from Fresno to Banning California that winter’s day. We were headed to their Grandmother’s house for Christmas in our Volkswagen Bug, and I was not too happy with the large package our daughters insisted on bringing along. “It’s your Christmas present,” they said, a sure-fire way to obligate me to bring it along. “OK,” I consented, but it has to ride in the back seat with you two. I could barely see around it as I complained all the way to Grandma’s house. I was hooked, however by my curiosity as to what could be in this large oblong box. Could it be a telescope, I wondered. What else could it be? I mused. I could hardly wait for Christmas morn to find out. My turn finally came as we went round robin opening our gifts one at a time. I tore off the paper and finally opened the box with anticipation only to find another box inside, and then another, and another. As the boxes got smaller and smaller I shifted my guesswork to a wristwatch as the final outcome. Boy, was I disappointed to open that last package to find what? Can you guess? A rock. A plain old rock, not even a special gem of a rock. I can’t remember my real present that year, but I do remember my daughters’ peals of laughter as the joke was on me! Other times followed, as my junior high students played a tricks on me. One time they all dropped their books on the floor at a prearranged signal and waited for my reaction. I joined in and dropped my book as well. “I saw that TV show last night, “ I said, “Wasn’t that fun?” Now the joke was on them, ha, ha. One morning at school I heard a student say outside the door to her friend, “Mr. Dixon will faint when he finds out I finished my science project.” So I obliged as she brought in her project. I fell to the floor pretending to faint. Turn-about is fair play I told her, reassuring her I was alright. I’m mellower now, so when our gym instructor said I was doing a good job, I took it as a compliment. She had offered me a mini-candy bar from her Easter basket, and said, “Take an extra one for your wife.” “She won’t eat it,” I said as I helped myself to a second, adding, “I have to eat for two these days.” She looked me over in my wet bathing suit and said, “You’re doing a good job!” Another ha ha on me, I thought. That’s not as bad as at the hardware store when the clerk at checkout challenged my credit card. I had bought some plants for our front yard where Jean had cleared some room, and when I handed over my card I was asked, “Is this your card?” Indignantly, I pointed to my picture on the face of the card. “That’s me, right there,” I insisted. “Are you sure, “ she said, adding “I thought it was your son!” Ha ha? At the gym again, a former student from long ago recognized me. “What is your name,” I asked. “Sylvia,” she replied. I thought back to the student who hit me on the head with a pink eraser. She didn’t remember that, she said, and now she was working at my old school as a teacher’s aide. She complained about the behavior of her students, and I said, “It’s payback time, Sylvia.” I gave her an invitation to our presentation at Woodward Park Library. She enthusiastically offered to invite everyone who remembered me to come. That should be interesting, don’t you think?

Beyond Christmas

BEYOND CHRISTMAS by Wayne Dixon My grandfather used to say, “They always want to keep Jesus in the manger. Why won’t they let Him grow up?” Beyond Christmas is Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and the Ascension, and the Second Coming. My grandfather believed he would live to see the Second Coming, and it threw me for a loop, when grandpa died when I was still an adolescent. Was grandpa wrong or did Jesus come for him in his time? I have since come to realize that Christ comes to us again and again. He comes to us in history. He comes to us in experience. And He comes to us in the future. That first Christmas is rooted in history in the fullness of time. “I bring you tidings of great joy,” the angel announced out of the blue to startled shepherds. That message continues to reverberate throughout history, dividing time into before and after. We are the inheritors of that legacy. Civilization since is embedded with that event, an inescapable part of our culture. Christ comes to us personally in experience. The apostle John wrote that Christ is the light that lighteth every man born into the world. That light comes to us as “a lamp to our feet and a light to our pathway,” as my grandfather wrote in my birthday Bible at age eleven. The light still shines 2,012 years later, an unbroken beam passing through history to our present experience. And what of the future? “No man knoweth the day nor the hour,” the Bible records. The future is often obscured by clouds of current events swirling about in threatening storms. But the last words of the Bible voice the enduring hope, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” That legacy of Christmas remains with us. Even in the most profane circumstances the echoing carols remind us of a resilient heritage beneath the surface. Should we keep Christ in Christmas amidst all commercialism and controversy? Of course, by all means. But more importantly let us keep Christ beyond Christmas. As they sang at my grandfather’s funeral, “We praise thee O God, for the Son of thy love, for Jesus who died and is now gone above. Hallelujah, thine the glory. Hallelujah, amen. Revive us again.”

Cuba Flashbacks

Back Flashes to Cuba by Wayne Dixon We’ve been back from Cuba now for three whole days, but we’re still on Cuban time and temperatures. We fall asleep in front of the TV by 8 pm (but that has happened before more than occasionally) and we’re up by 4 am (usually 5 or later). Jet lag has taken its toll in other ways as well in various forms of disorientation and confusion. We had arrived back at San Francisco April 12 Friday morning after midnight. After getting our luggage and going through customs we called the hotel and waited in a shelter for the van to arrive. It was cold and raining and we were joined by a few other unhappy customers for what seemed like an hour. We were not in our rooms until 1:30 in the morning, and went straight to bed. You’d think we’d sleep in, but Cuban time kicked in and we were awake before our time. The breakfast room did not open, we thought, until seven, so we waited. Later, inside, I saw a clock in a mirror and it seemed time was going backwards. “Is it five till eight, or five after eight?” I asked Jean at my side, who was more awake than I. “Five after,” she informed me. We were on the road to Fresno by 8:45 am, missing most of the early work traffic. Although it was raining we had a good drive home. It was actually pretty through Gilroy and beyond, reminding me of the beautiful Cuban countryside we had seen the week before. I was surprised then how much of Cuba was rural in nature, and I am now surprised how much open space there remains here in California on the way to and from Los Banos, although commuters are finding new tract homes along the way. I was tempted to stop at a thrift store I spied in Los Banos, wondering what treasures might be found from this community. In Cuba, I remembered, nothing goes to waste, but is recycled over and over. I had left a shirt behind I could no longer fit into after all those rich Cuban meals and a ten pound weight gain, which led us to Home Buffet in Clovis for lunch upon our return home. We were hungry right on Cuban schedule. Jean frowned at the suggestion, but I assuaged her with the idea that we must go through gradual withdrawal. However, there was nothing gradual about our appetites for the foods of home. I noticed a preference for our Cuban diet of cucumbers and tomatoes, pineapples, chicken and beef, skipping the rice. It was the desserts that I had missed as I rediscovered peanut butter pie with white chocolate cappuccino. I don’t know what has happened to my English spelling as I type these words at 5:30 am on Sunday. My brain is still on Spanish, and there are other bewilderments as I want to put dates in Cuban form with the day before the month. I won’t even tell you the confusions of my early morning nature calls when I head for the wrong directions and cannot find the mandatory waste container to save on Cuban plumbing. When Jean and I cross paths in the dark startling each other, I mutter something about the ghosts of Cuban pasts.

Grandma's Watering Can

Grandmother’s Watering Can by Wayne Dixon My Grandmother lived for her garden and plants of all kinds. I remember how upset she was when I accidently hoed up her iris rhizomes thinking I was doing her a favor by removing weeds. “It will take two years for them to bloom again,” she said. “Don’t hoe any more weeds,” she insisted. It was one of the very few times I saw her angry. She nurtured her plants from slips, as she called them, and was somewhat of an expert at starting new plants in pots which she kept under her grape arbor behind her white-frame house. One had to be careful walking around not to knock over one of her precious potted succulents and cacti. She would water them by hand with her omnipresent watering can. I do not remember her ever using a hose. She always filled her watering can from the faucet and laboriously carried it from plant to plant, front yard or back. They would reward her from time to time with extravagant blooms. I still have some of my Grandmother’s plants, transplanted over the miles and times from her house to mine. There were the hen and chicken succulents, expanding like their name, over the pots. I, too, have jade plants all over the yard, some of them started from a single leaf, bringing me prosperity and good luck. Her baby-tear moss has died, unable to tolerate Fresno’s heat. Some plants, such as her purple flowering Mexican sage, I’ve obtained from nurseries in her memory and that of my growing up years. And now I even have a watering can! What would my Grandmother think of that?

Blue Danube Reflections

BLUE DANUBE REFLECTIONS by Wayne Dixon They say the Danube River isn’t really blue but looks like chocolate from all the mud and silt it carries. It is only blue when the sun is at the right angle and the blue sky is reflected on the water. I can verify that by experience. In all my photos the water is muddy in appearance, and I only remember seeing the river blue once, punctuated by mirrored fluffy white clouds on the water. Our trip itself through the Balkans remains a bit of a muddle in my mind, having passed through seven countries in a dozen or so days, getting off the riverboat here and there for an inland tour. Places and faces race by mostly from tour-bus windows. The barrage of tour guide facts are like pieces of a puzzle heaped together waiting for the larger picture, like truth, to emerge. That takes time and patience for bits to converge, and upon reflection, to convey more than passes by the eye. On the riverboat, ours is a frog’s eye view of the river and its banks as we cruise by. Our cabin is in the bottom of the boat at water level. Much of what we see is reflected reality of “castles and kings, and hundreds of things.” Things are things, philosophers say, and like histories, have the importance that we attach to them. We float by much of that history, much of it eclipsed by more recent events. You would think World War II never happened as we have heard the guides narrate the modern struggle to free themselves from Russian Communism, once hailed as liberators form Nazism. We are shown bombed buildings but they are from Kosovo’s war. I first learned of the war of Kosovo from President Clinton’s speech at our Abraham Lincoln School in Selma, California. He was running for office again, landing in his helicopter, kicking off his campaign with issues far away in the Balkans. I had taken his picture, shaken his hand, and now here I am in the land of Kosovo, staring out the bus window at bombed out buildings, taking pictures again. What we bring on board beside our baggage, what we take from our journey, and what we add to it after the trip, refocuses on the significance of what we’ve seen more than forgotten facts. It is not the details I recall, but I feel it is the river I have come to know, moving on, day by day, as our version of “The African Queen.” Now and then, reflections, like memories, come and go, shimmering momentarily on the water, and then vanishing. History parades before us like art, impressionistic in nature, giving us glimpses of what was, what is, and what might be. We are like Alice in Wonderland, looking through the looking glass, or as St. Paul put it, looking through that glass darkly, waiting for face to face.

ISLAND MAGIC

THE ISLANDS OF OUR LIVES by Wayne Dixon “No man is an island,” John Donne wrote, yet islands have played an important part in our lives since our 1960 honeymoon-days in Catalina. What an adventure that was as we flew on a seaplane landing in Avalon bay. We enjoyed our stay so much we went back a second time the following year, to see the flying fish, explore the isthmus, and walk all over what was then the small community atmosphere 53 years ago. We would walk out past the domed ballroom to the now gone St. Catherine’s Hotel for lunch, and to the bird park behind the town of Avalon. Years later we spent our seventeenth anniversary in the Hawaiian Islands. While we were in Oahu, we arranged to fly to the adjacent island of Kauai. We drove all over the island in a rental car with a destination of a historic mission station on the north side. It rained cats and dogs flooding even the bridges. When we arrived the docent wiped the rain from Jean’s face with a Kleenex and asked where we were from. I replied that is was such a small place, she probably never heard of Clovis, near Fresno, California. We were startled when she said it was named for her uncle Clovis Cole! Small world, isn’t it? There are other islands in our lives: Mediterranean islands such as Rhodes, Patmos, Mikonos, each one deserving of a story, at least a visited memory. Rhodes was a medieval memory enshrined in stonework from the days of the Crusades. Walking through the archways on cobbled streets we were transported to days of yore. Taking us back even further in time was Revelation’s cave on the isle of Patmos where the apostle John envisioned the future. And Mikonos the Greek isle was memorable for its white stucco houses and windmills by day and its moon reflected by night. We have Atlantic islands such as Ireland, Iceland and Newfoundland. And what about Great Britain, that sceptered isle? In spite of what they say, Britain is very European regardless of its present detachment. Its gothic architecture rules over all from Westminster Abbey to the stately ruins of Coventry Cathedral. Ireland was as green as Iceland was glacial white in places. Both took your breath away with their unbroken vistas. Newfoundland was just that with some things old, some things new, and blue sky and water over all. No wonder Marconi’s signal could be carried across the Atlantic from Europe. Our Caribbean islands, later in time, included the Bahamas, Jamaica, Roiatan, and Cuba on separate trips. The Caribbean is a world of its own, no matter where you land, the rhythm is the same, and not just the music, but the life-style. Even the Castro brothers could not change that with their Soviet-style regimen. The people set their own relaxed pace in each place. Pacific islands we visited included Orcas Island where we stayed for a week in our RV. Does Japan count as an island, as it’s not a continent? Actually it’s a series of islands. People are always asking me about my favorite island trip, and I will have to say the Galapagos Islands. At first landing it was such a barren, God-forsaken looking place. But I soon learned otherwise as the small ship took us from one Eden to another. No wonder Darwin was impressed. Australia is a continent, but down under is Phillips Island where we braved the rain to watch the penguins come out of the sea at night to migrate to their on shore nesting sites. Then there were African islands, such as the one Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, Robben island. As did President Obama later visit Mandela’s cell, so did we years before off the coast of South Africa. Nor will we forget Isle de Gore off the coast of Senegal where African slaves were transported to the New World in the 18th century. Our island-hopping now continues, to celebrate our fifty-third anniversary on a cruise to Polynesia, with its array of Pacific isles. Did you know that Hawaii alone encompasses seventeen islands, and that the Pacific Ocean includes some 25,000 islands? That ought to keep us busy for awhile!