Those holiday meals

 I posted this on Thanksgiving morning on social media: I made the mashed potatoes this morning, with cream cheese, Parmesan, and more butter than you want to know about. Kathleen made my mother’s corn pudding recipe. The turkey is in the oven and I’ve taken down the smoke detectors. There will be crab cakes and Key lime pie and wine and cursing from the kitchen.

Our daughter the pescatarian was with us, which explains the crab cakes, and the turkey was for Kathleen, who unaccountably likes it,* and for the guests from our day drinking group, who also like it and who were bringing stuffing and crudites in the shape of a turkey on a platter--no photo available--and Spanish wines. (Kathleen had also baked a pumpkin pie for the traditionalists.) 

It was always turkey in my childhood in Kentucky. It was turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the only days we ate ceremonially at the cherry drop-leaf dining table in the front room, with scalloped potatoes and scalloped oysters (from cans; I was in my forties before I tasted raw oysters on the half-shell and discovered that they were actually good), and the sweet corn pone that my grandmother baked in a bundt pan. 

Thanksgiving and Christmas were the two days that I did not read at the table, having gotten tacit permission to read at the Sunday dinner table to absent myself from whatever criticism or quarrel was likely to erupt. We understand that holiday gatherings of family involve a pressure to appear to celebrate as if one were part of a classically happy American family and the parallel pressure of the lingering resentments that characteristically erupt on these occasions. I recall one family holiday gathering at which my older sister, Georgia, marveled that no one had left the table in mid-meal angry or crying. 

In recent years, when Kathleen's parents were living in a retirement community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we invariably went there for holiday dinner. When we arrived, there were always snacks arrayed on the table in the sun room, the best room in the cottage where they were living, and we ate and drank with abandon until dinner was ready. Then we adjourned to the dining room table, already fairly full, for the entire meal and desultory conversation, after which Kathleen's father retired to a football game in the back room. The meal itself was always somehow anticlimactic.

A memory of an idealized gathering lingers, when our children were both here or nearby and on Sunday evenings we had fam din: I made spaghetti with vegetarian tomato sauce and a big salad, and the four of us were together at table. But now the children are no longer available for weekly fam din, and Kathleen and I sometimes just forage.

Despite the days of Thanksgiving food prep and the hours of cleanup for a couple of septuagenarians, we have yet to succumb to the temptation of the restaurant holiday dinner, though we have tried some in the past. It would mean giving up the time of chatting over drinks and snacks in the living room beforehand, and the relaxed, contented chatting after dessert, reluctant to call the day at an end. 

Food and drink and family and friends at the holidays are so damn much trouble and so  damned exhausting, even when you actually like the people,** that I am not yet ready to give up on them. 

* When I was a child, the holiday turkey appeared for days dry in my sandwiches for lunch at school (and the lunch ladies hated me for bringing them) until I completely lost my taste for the bird. Even Kathleen's homemade cranberry relish and the Baltimore tradition of sauerkraut with turkey have not brought me back. 

** Kathleen does actually like people. 

 

Evicting Mr. Mencken

 A few days ago the Enoch Pratt Free Library dedicated the DeWayne Wickham Room of Maryland Journalism, housing the papers and honoring the career of the veteran Black Maryland journalist. The Wickham Room was formerly known as the H.L. Mencken room, and the Mencken Collection has been transferred to the Pratt's Special Collections Department. 

I have no beef with Mr. Wickham and do not intend in the least to disparage his work as a journalist or deny him the recognition that is his due. But I would like to speak briefly for Henry Mencken. 

I was eighteen years old when I first read Mencken's work and was intoxicated by the vigor and sweep of his prose and liberated by his scorn for the stodginess and philistinism of American culture. 

As I became more familiar with his work over the years, I was more deeply impressed by what he had accomplished. He made his mark on American journalism as a reporter and columnist at The Evening Sun and on American literary culture as editor successively of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, where he gave many writers, including several young Black writers, a platform for their work. His essays, published in six installments of his Prejudices series, sum up American culture of the 1920s. His late memoirs, published as Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, are affectionate, relaxed, and delightful. Had he written nothing else during his long and astonishingly productive career, The American Language would make his memory worth honoring. 

But. 

But Mencken went into eclipse in the 1930s because of his strenuous opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal put him at odds with many of his former admirers. And the publication of extracts from his diaries in 1989 revealed many ugly attitudes. 

There are a couple of things to be said in mitigation (not excuse). The diaries were written in a dark and bitter time of his life when he was mourning the loss of his wife to tuberculosis and was politically on the outs. The other things to understand is that, perhaps because of the influence of Nietzsche during his youth, he esteemed individuals and despised groups. That is, he wrote antisemitic statements but many of his closest friends, such as Alfred A. Knopf, were Jewish. He condescended to women but was a devoted husband to his wife during their brief marriage. He had a low opinion of Blacks but published Black writers. Don't imagine that he thought highly of many white people, either, including those in Appalachia who are my people. There are not, I think, many writers who could withstand the retroactive application of our current standards of virtue. 

Let the record show that I am an old white guy, and old white guys remain the diminishing group of Mencken fans. Tastes change, and reputations rise and fall. It's surprisingly easy to topple statues from pedestals. 

But despite his faults, H.L. Mencken's accomplishments in journalism, literature, and philology--and for Baltimore--are not trivial. I think he merited a room with his name on the door at the Pratt Library, and I regret to see him evicted from it. 

I knew Bob Erlandson; he was a friend of mine

 We learned this week that Bob Erlandson died Friday at ninety-four, brought down by a massive stroke. Among the Baltimore Sun reporters I esteemed over three decades, he holds a high place. Other veterans, some who worked more closely with Bob than I did, have been saluting him online, and I owe him my modest tribute. 

I saw in the newsroom that Bob always spoke his mind, clearly and forcefully. I admired his love of dogs and bagpipes -- I saw him march in his pipe band in the Fourth of July parade in Towson. He and I exchanged messages in recent years, and he respected and encouraged my work. 

In retirement he took to social media, engaging with a handful of friends on Facebook, where he was, as always, straightforward with his views. Two days before he died, he dismissed Donald Trump and all his works in a Facebook post:

"Trump has only ever wanted two things from his adherents: votes and money. What has he given in return: chaos, anger, division and ever-richer billionaires.

"The world has seen the damage Trump has wreaked in less than one year in office. Unless he is blocked by a loss next year who knows what further damage he can do on his march to becoming the American King."

But the thing that elevates him to that high spot of my estimation was his return to Baltimore after his term as a foreign correspondent ended. The repatriation of the correspondents was always tricky. They had lived well, often banking their salaries and living at The Sun's expense. They had enjoyed enormous latitude in the scope of their reportage, with very little direction from Calvert Street. Not all of them adjusted smoothly to a return to mundane Maryland journalism. 

Bob had been our correspondent in London, in many ways the prestige post (we owned a house there). And he settled down immediately as a reporter in our Baltimore County bureau, turning out prompt and polished copy until the day he retired nearly thirty years ago. He was as thoroughgoing a professional journalist as any I have ever known. He respected the work, he did the work, and he deserves to be remembered for how he did it.

Correction: A reader has pointed out that the Robert Erlandson who wrote conservative letters to the editor at The Sun that I mentioned initially, was not my Erlandson. Grateful for correction, I have revised the text.