Sense and Nonsense

What Christmas Means to Me

I saw this clip from "A Christmas Story" on fdl today, and it called to mind a reminiscence from my boyhood, written about some time ago.  Part of it is excerpted here, in honor of Christmas:

The Tierney household in Denver in the 1950s and very early 1960s reflected many of the characteristics of the Wild West, of which it was a vestigial part.  What made it so?  Partly it was the spirit of independence and self-reliance -- those hearty values of the rugged frontier -- that prevailed among the four Tierney boys.  Much to our regret, of course, we weren’t out slaughtering buffalo or Injuns, nor were we herding cattle or taming the wilds.  But we were independent young cusses, loved by our folks, but left to find our own way, with a bare minimum of parental steering or intervention.  It was parenting by benign neglect.  Like millions of American kids of that generation, we were out of the house early on a summer’s morning, the screen door slamming behind us, often with no thought of return, or maternal expectation of it, until supper.  It was a measure of independence, wrought by the relative absence of those things that limit youthful independence these days -- fears about kidnappings or abuse by strangers, heavily programmed schedules, and the like.

Sunday Reminiscence

Sister Dennis Anne, Bride of Jesus

The Catholic Church had a great influence on me in various ways in my early years.  All four of my grandparents were devout Catholics, prominent both in the church community and in the community at large.  The waters of the faith then washed over my own parents, dowsing them with centuries of tradition and ritual.  Into this religiously moistened environment came my three brothers and I—four little boys marinating in the strange ways and beliefs of the Church.  The sway the Church had on us was partly cultural, partly liturgical, and partly educational.

Like most kids, I focused on the world around me when I was a boy.  And growing up in Denver—in the Park Hill section of town—it was easy for me to imagine that almost everybody in the city was a Catholic. We’d go to church on Sundays and would see virtually everybody I knew, other Catholic families from the parish, some of them gargantuan in their proportions: the Clarke family had 13 kids, for example, and the Cellas had 10.  But most of the other families we knew had 4 or 5 kids—of moderate size then, but certainly on the largish side by today’s standards.

The parish we happened to live in was Blessed Sacrament.  The church itself stood as a squat, solid sentinel of God, right there on Montview Blvd., between Elm and Eudora streets. 

Sunday Reminiscence

The Demise of Margaret T. Frizzles

"Margaret T. Frizzles" is what they called me for a while when I was a kid.  My three older brothers were the ones who called me this, along with some of the other kids in the neighborhood who picked up the name from my brothers. They all thought it was funny.  But to my 7- or 8-year-old ears, there was nothing funny about it. 

The origins of this nickname, this epithet, are relatively easily parsed. The “Margaret” portion stemmed from my brothers’ contention that when our mother would ask me to go outside at dinner time and call for my brother Dennis to come home to eat, I would call “Deeeennnnnn-nis,” very much in the way that Margaret, the little girl on the television series “Dennis the Menace,” would go around that fictional neighborhood calling for her male nemesis.   Nonsense, I say; but that’s how “Margaret” came about.

And the “T” portion of the moniker?  One summer during my youth (again, probably when I was about seven years old) my footwear for those several months was primarily a pair of plastic or foam rubber flip-flops, which kids in Denver in those days called “thongs.”  The T was for thongs.  (What’s so wrong with thongs?  I ask you.)

The Wild West at 5533 Montview Blvd.

The Tierney household in Denver in the 1950s and very early 1960s reflected many of the characteristics of the Wild West, of which it was a vestigial part.  What made it so?  Partly it was the spirit of independence and self-reliance -- those hearty values of the rugged frontier -- that prevailed among the four Tierney boys.  Much to our regret, of course, we weren’t out slaughtering buffalo or Injuns, nor were we herding cattle or taming the wilds.  But we were independent young cusses, loved by our folks, but left to find our own way, with a bare minimum of parental steering or intervention.  It was parenting by benign neglect.  Like millions of American kids of that generation, we were out of the house early on a summer’s morning, the screen door slamming behind us, often with no thought of return, or maternal expectation of it, until supper.  It was a measure of independence, wrought by the relative absence of those things that limit youthful independence these days -- fears about kidnappings or abuse by strangers, heavily programmed schedules, and the like.

But if an observer from the year 2008 could visit the Tierney household of those years, the vestige of the Wild West that would most stand out was the role that the rifle played in the life of the boys who grew up there, at least the older ones. Our father was not a gun enthusiast -- not a collector, not a man worried about his family’s safety, not a man who even cared a wit about guns. But like many families in the West in those days, we had a rifle in the house.  In fact, there were two -- a shotgun and a 22-caliber rifle.  Actually, there were three if you counted the later arrival of a BB-gun (but none of us, save perhaps our Mom, the sole female in the house, would have counted that in the gun category in a household inventory).

So it wasn’t the presence of the rifles in the Denver household that was so remarkable.  But what might have invited comment or alarm, even then, was the various ways in which the Tierney males employed these arms.