Happy Hour and Other Sorrows

February 24, 2025JT Twissel 28 Comments

I haven’t been around lately because I’m planning to re-release two books I wrote over ten years ago. The first one Flipka has a modified ending but otherwise is the same wacky tale described here. The second book has undergone a different POV and will get a new name. Readers had complained they didn’t know what the heroine would do next. That’s not an issue any more!

Rough draft for the cover. Do you think it needs more color?

Many decades ago I spent the week before Christmas hanging out at the Officer’s Club in Worms Germany with military personnel, primarily civilian, who’d opted not to return to the states for the holidays. The club had been decorated for the season with plastic poinsettias and cinnamon scented candles. Canned Christmas carols played. Drinks and bar food were half off but it was still a dreary place. One evening I sat at a table with a be-speckled young man who barely looked up at me as he scribbled on a notepad.

He was a cartoonist for various publications distributed to military personnel.

It was fascinating to watch him work. But eventually Happy Hour was over. I told him how much I loved his work – having spent many a Happy Hour waiting for my uncle to finishing schmoozing with his co-workers so that I could drive him home. And he handed me the drawings.

I wish I’d caught his name but I was so young. At least I had the sense to hold onto his scribbles and the memory of that evening all these years ago.

When I was thinking of a new title, those cartoons came to mind. And a record my uncle used to play …. every damn evening! Stanyan Streets and Other Sorrows by Rod McKuen. And every damn evening it got stuck on the same song:

For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was her sandbox
Two rooms on 55th Street was her domain
Every night she’d sit in the window among the avocado plants
Waiting for me to come home
My arms filled with canned liver and love
We’d talk into the night then contented but missing something
She, the earth she never knew, me, the hills I ran while growing bent
Sloopy should have been a cowboy’s cat
With prairies to run, not linoleum
And real live catnip mice
No one to depend on but herself
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then
Riding my imaginary horse down 42nd street
Going off with strangers to live an hour long cowboy’s life
But always coming home to Sloopy who loved me best
For a dozen summers we lived against the world an island on an island
She’d comfort me with purring
I’d fatten her with smiles
We grew rich on trust needing not the beach or butterflies
I had a friend named Ben who painted buildings like Rouault men
He went away
My laughter tired Lillian after a time
She found a man who only smiled
But Sloopy stayed and stayed
Winter 1959 old men walk their dogs
Some are walked so often that their feet
Leave little pink tracks in the soft gray snow
Woman fur on fur
Elegant and easy only slightly pure
Hailing cabs to take them round the block and back
Who is not a love seeker when December comes?
Even children pray to Santa Claus
I had my own love safe at home
And yet I stayed out all one night and the next day too
They must of thought me crazy screaming Sloopy Sloopy
As the snow came falling down around me
I was a madman to have stayed away
One minute more than the appointed hour
I’d like to think a golden cowboy snatched her from the window sill
And safely saddle bagged she rode to Arizona
She’s stalking lizards in the cactus now perhaps, bitter, but free
I’m bitter too
And not a free man anymore
But once was a time in New York’s jungle in a tree
Before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love
Nobody owned me, but a can named Sloopy
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing
That ever gave love back to me

Sunrise #wordlesswednesday

February 5, 2025JT Twissel 13 Comments

The Purification

February 1, 2025JT Twissel 17 Comments

The Midori Calendar I received for Christmas

Here in California, February is an odd month. The daffodils have started to sprout from the ground and the camellias are blossoming …

But an atmospheric river has just begun to hit the region and with it, rain. For at least the next five days. Rain.

If you’ll notice, the Japanese do not celebrate the same holidays as we do. There’s no Groundhog Day or Valentine’s Day or President’s Day. Instead the Japanese celebrate something called National Foundation Day on the 11th. It’s sort of like their July 4th. There will be parades, etc.

I’m not even going to attempt a “Japanese History for Dummies” lesson here because their history is mind boggling. February 24 they celebrate the Emperor’s birthday. Unlike our President’s Day, this day honors the birthday of their current emperor, Emperor Naruhito, who was born on Feb. 23, 1960. He seems like a nice enough fellow but from what I’ve read he has less power than King Charles of England.

I imagine this is the symbol for February in Japanese. So elegant don’t you think?

February is from the Latin word meaning either purification or cleansing or fertility or all three for all I know. I awoke this morning feeling energetic for the first time since, well I don’t know when. Certainly since November 5th.

I hope you all awoke feeling energetic. Be prepared. February will go really fast and then comes the Ides of March! Et tu, who-know-who?

They swayed like branches in the wind …

January 27, 2025JT Twissel 18 Comments

This one’s for Charlie Dills

There have been many movies made about life in post WWII Germany (The Third Man, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, etc., etc.) that portrayed American GIs who stayed behind as profiteers or spies. The reality is, many were broken men who didn’t want to pretend the world would ever be free from evil. They worked for the Army, mostly in logistics, married European women, adopted European traditions and spent too much time at the Officer’s Club enjoying Happy Hour every night.

As a nineteen year old hippy dippy (love will save the world!) I loved hearing their stories and I think they were amused by my naivete. To a point and then I’m sure I was very annoying. It’s one thing to read about the millions of people – Jews, Catholics, Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviets POWs, gays, priests, members of the resistance – targeted for elimination by the Nazis. It’s quite another to talk to someone who helped liberate one of those camps.

“I saw thousands of people whom the Red Army has saved – people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people whose ages one could not possibly guess.”

Boris Polevoy, correspondent for Pravda

So, on this eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I’m remembering you Charlie Dills.

From my WIP which at this point is resting:

The train had passed through Switzerland on a cloudy night, thus, there had been little to see out the window, only the blur of lights as they’d passed through town after town without slowing down. Charlie’d watched her curiously for a while and then his eyes closed and his head slipped against the window. For the rest of the night he lay like a broken doll in that position. At one time, he’d probably been a handsome young man, she thought, like Gregory Peck, tall and dark with prominent features and soft eyes before the alcohol and cigarettes had taken their toll. Now he looked beyond repair.

Outside their cabin, the Italians partied all night long, laughing and sometimes arguing. Loudly and without a care for first class passengers who might want some shut eye. They were going home for the winter where presumably they’d have plenty of time to sleep. Riley didn’t know what awaited her except a long drive home through Switzerland with the saddest man on the planet.

Rock Gardens

January 25, 2025JT Twissel 29 Comments

The weather has been mild here in the San Francisco Bay Area and so I’ve been spending a lot of time rolling big rocks around what had been a hillside covered with a particularly hideous ground cover. These rocks weigh between fifty and sixty pounds so … I’m kind of an idiot, aren’t I?

One of my first sculptures and not a natural stone!

When my back gives out, I work on the re-writes of my second book now titled The Sloppy American. I think it’s done. Or more to the point, if I keep working on it I will done. Spent and completely mad. Over fifty years have passed since I went on the adventure that spawned the book. Europe was such a different place back then. WWII was still so fresh in so many people’s minds which I, of course, didn’t understand. Love was going to save the world and the Nazis had been driven underground and would never rise again. Ha!

I’m going to try to digitize the story which requires figuring out how to use a new software program. Ha! I’d be better off rolling rocks around the garden.

The Executioners

January 21, 2025JT Twissel 33 Comments

Rejoice America – the Executioners have arrived. You can tell from their smug expressions that their fun has only just begun. You can tell from their colorful attire what to expect for the next four years – if you live through those long and painful years (after all, Daddy is home which means the switch for all you disobedient children.) And on this happy day, to show their compassion, one thousand federal workers were fired. Seniors lost the ability to negotiate lower drug prices.

And this the only the beginning! Rejoice … there’s plenty more to come!

I’m okay. Really I am. My heart breaks for those who tried to warn us.

Divided we stand

January 16, 2025JT Twissel 36 Comments

My father, who would have turned one hundred and one years old today, always had “a twinkle in his eye.”

One of the last pictures I have of my dad. He’s the one with the mustache.

His brother-in-law, my Uncle Ralph, wrote at least three books on Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln, What He Stood For, Abraham Lincoln and the Western Territories and Lincoln Quotat (a collection of Lincoln sayings). Uncle Ralph was tall and thin – a lively man who taught speech and debate and, of course, quoted Lincoln at every turn.

And so, this morning as I fuddled about with some bills that needed paying I watched the HBO Max series: Lincoln, Divided We Fall. This series covers Lincoln’s entire life but primarily challenges the myth of Lincoln as a willing and eager abolitionist. While he always felt slavery was an abomination,

He began politics believing that the black race was inferior and that the two races could never peacefully coexist. The expansion of slavery to new territories was the issue that forced him to listen to his heart over his head. If they couldn’t erase slavery without severe consequences, they must not allow the abomination to spread. It was Frederick Douglass who convinced him the black man was not inferior and so he changed his mind. Changed his mind. Imagine. Such an impossible thing for a politician to do in this era of nonstop armchair quarterbacking.

Anyway Happy Birthday Dad. If there is an afterlife, I imagine you’re listening to Uncle Ralph tell another Lincoln anecdote, or perhaps debating the man himself! Wish I was there.

And so it begins

January 2, 2025JT Twissel 15 Comments

My favorite Christmas gift this year was a Washi calendar from Japan. The graphic is actually an embedded postcard and so at the end of each month I going to try to send a postcard to someone somewhere in the world. That sounds like a task I can accomplish without too much stress!

Maybe I’ll even learn a little Japanese in so doing.

Unless I’m wrong, this is going to be a year filled with quite enough stress, thank you very much GOP. The agents of chaos have won powerful positions by inciting hatred and feelings of superiority over “the other.” The Blue Meanies walk amongst us. Therefore, the only answer is – LOVE.

I remember when this song was released, the Beatles were at the end of one of the most productive artistic runs ever. And there was John saying it didn’t matter if there wasn’t enough love in the world. Such a simple lesson and yet true.

2025 – the year the Blue Meanies meet their match. One can only dream.

My movie to end the year with

December 31, 2024December 31, 2024JT Twissel 21 Comments

Let’s see if you can guess the name of the movie I’ve decided to end the year with.

It was based on a three act play by Noel Coward
The title is from a poem called “To a Skylark” by Percy Bliss Shelley
It was the screen debut of Margaret Rutherford

The plot in a nutshell: The ghost of a writer’s first wife is conjured forth by a bumbling spiritualist causing great distress to his second wife.

By far the best thing about this film is the performance of Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972) as the spiritualist. She was a “big boned” actress with so-called “spaniel jaws” who nonetheless, stole every scene she was ever in … although she never meant to. She once wrote of being called a comedian: “I never intended to play for laughs. I am always surprised that the audience thinks me funny at all.”