MAGGI PICAYUNE

This is the Christmas when the whole holiday season lost its luster for me. After receiving the Millenium Falcon a year earlier, most gifts afterwards seemed anti-climatic, short of a personal computer; in 1980 those things cost as much as a used car and did very little. However, I think the crummy attitude came more from my age than the loot. By now I was 12 and in seventh grade. The time I think most kids make the awkward transition from big kid to entry-level teenager.

We spent the whole break at our house in Springfield again. The grandparents came over but I don’t recall them staying very long. I’m sure they bailed before New Year’s Eve. Maybe they had plans for a change.

I do know I went to the movies a couple times. The first one I was stoked about, a modernized take on Flash Gordon with Queen doing the soundtrack. It was no Star Wars or Star Trek but it was colorful, bright and really different. I’ve grown to appreciate it more as an adult despite it being a rather weak attempt on the beloved Thirties serial and newspaper strip. The second was flick I saw was Nine to Five with my dad. No idea why we went. I laughed at the obvious jokes: slapstick and swearing. Otherwise, I had little clue about its larger message, I was 12.

What else? I probably had basketball games but I was a second stringer. I usually played in the final minutes as we were losing. St. Agnes wasn’t very strong in sports and we tended to finish 2-? because St. Patrick and St. Cabrini were worse. Hard to believe my school fared badly against other parishes that lacked a gym to practice in.

It was Winter in Central Illinois, I was 12, we didn’t have much money due to my father’s government job, the Reagan recovery needed more time (a frequent litany from his worshippers yet Obama is measured by another standard)…so it’s likely I watched a copious amount of TV to pass this new sensation I would start to experience more often. I call it teenage ennui. Well, maybe someone else penned it. I couldn’t find a source to credit today.

Don’t get me wrong though. Any time away from school was a victory and I wasn’t sad or depressed for two weeks, I just had no idea that getting older was going to be rough. Those older kids at Griffin and Springfield High made it look easy like it was on sitcoms.

Christmas is over and that means Picayune reminisces (or navel gazes) about past holiday breaks. I thought I started doing this in 2006 but it originated during 2007 when I probably spent more hours hanging out at Blue Marble (sadly it folded in the last year) and had larger gaps between calls with work. I only went back 30 years because my memory is hazy until I reached Kindergarten and even then, I can remember key events. How I wish I kept a better log of the past and/or had the means like I do today. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be yet I can try by rewinding 35 years on the fourth installment.

For me, 1975 was the GI Joe Christmas.

Before Star Wars took over as the standard on male toys from 1977-84, things were up for grabs. Mego had its licensed lines (Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, DC and Marvel) but their stuff wasn’t very durable; Kenner had The Six Million Dollar Man stuff; Mattel had Big Jim (yawn); Marx’s Johnny West line was fading; Fisher-Price was for babies; and Ideal was a fat goose egg.

This left Hasbro with its retooled GI Joe lineup as the coolest thing around.

Let me elaborate though since people’s minds have been colored by the recent arrival of the Hub network, a horrible cartoon series in the Eighties and a shitty Summer Event movie.

Back in the Seventies, the outcome of Vietnam made GI Joe somewhat unpopular and the first oil-price hikes in 1973 made the doll/action figure more expensive. Thus, Hasbro toned down the war angle. By the time I was old enough to play with more sophisticated toys, GI Joe was an adventurer hunting for lost treasures, defeating monsters, etc. He became James Bond without the enemy or spying element. Hasbro also modified the product line to stay contemporary: he had a bionic ally called Atomic Man, an alien friend/superhero type named Bullet Man; and some weird caveman enemy from space. Plus the novelty Kung-Fu grip.

Accessories were what really got my brother and me hooked. GI Joe was a male Barbie! He had bases, a hang-glider, vehicles, helicopters, a mini-sub and actions sets. Outfits came with guns too.

Mom made the pitch for the stuff in 1974 but I wouldn’t budge then. I pined for a Mego Robin figure. Why? I’m not sure. Couldn’t have been Burt Ward’s acting and I didn’t have much access to the comics then. I got it though. However, Mego’s poor quality assurance had the toy in the trash by this Christmas so GI Joe was a welcome replacement.

Brian and I each received the equivalent of a starter guy. He had Kung-Fu grip, muscles, a rifle, beard, boots and uniform. Being the oldest, mine was Joe, Brian’s had various names but he wasn’t a twin. Then I got the Atomic Man who resembled an anatomy model more than an action figure since his cybernetic leg and arm were exposed; explains why he wore shorts to the battlefield. The package said his name was Mike Powers, so it was his permanent moniker in our numerous space-action operas. For parity purposes, Brian got another GI Joe of the older-style; in a box, rifle-ready hands, brown uniform, no beard and he was Black (here I agree with The Economist and Wanda Sykes). Having little to no exposure to Black Americans beyond an occasional classmate, popular music and television, he always had the surname of Jackson. Comical and sad. At least he was never a villain in our sagas, just the trustworthy best friend like Battlestar Galactica‘s Col. Tigh.

Our grandparents covered some accessories: SCUBA diving gear and something with a jumpsuit. I’m confident they gave the ‘rents money and said, pick something you know the boys will want.

Santa left the piece de resistance, the mini-sub, aka The Sea Wolf, which allegedly could submerge and surface in a wading pool or bath tub. We never had the opportunity to prove the packaging’s claims. By the time we did try, most of the major pieces to make it work were lost through our childish carelessness.

As for the rest…I’m sure we kids had a great time. Our family was still in transition from the move to Champaign-Urbana which meant we didn’t mind hanging out at Grandma’s for the majority of the time, there were no new friends to share the new loot with. We may have tried to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. We probably drove our grandparents nuts. They were in their late sixties, early seventies by then and dealing with a five and seven-year old was too much.

Looking back, it does appear to be a rather shallow Christmas if all I could go on about was the toys. In my defense though, I was seven. At that age, I didn’t eat much, there weren’t many appropriate movies to see, cable TV didn’t carry kid-friendly stuff beyond PBS and videogames were in their infancy. I wasn’t paying much attention to the world around me yet neither. Having read more about the Seventies lately, it’s a good thing I was ignorant about current events then. Growing up on a routine of anti-depressants would’ve sucked.

Better late than never was the defense I used for needing an extra semester. Maybe my family wouldn’t have been as irked if I were attending a public university taking the standard six-year plan at Illinois State. The biggest stigma I still have to deal with is being lumped into the Class of 1991 every time Marquette mails me something. Why colleges do this is beyond me.

Anyway, while my contemporaries (Paul, Helen, Phil, Deb and Sheila) finished on time and got to enjoy the Reagan-Bush Recession sooner, I stayed in Milwaukee to complete those 12 hours keeping my from joining the “real world.” Having another fun Summer took some of the sting off and I recharged my mental batteries. The highlights:

• Worked in paint crew for the third Summer in a row.
• A new, safer apartment.
• GenCon in August.
• Summerfest in July.
• My girlfriend Carrie.
• Completing three hours at Milwaukee Area Technical College to lower the load to nine hours. It was as easy as taking a high school course.
• Celebrated turning 22 with my cousin Leesa and her husband Joe.

Then the shit hit the fan on August 2 with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. At first, nobody gave it too much thought. Aggression between Mid-Eastern states was nothing new. Iraq fought Iran to a stalemate for years without much scrutiny once the media grew bored with it. Same for the Soviets in Afghanistan, Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds and Libya messing with Chad. Besides, Saddam Hussein was America’s buddy according to Reagan’s foreign policy; he sent Donald Rumsfeld over there to tell the dictator it was alright to use poison gases on the Iranians and internal dissenters. Life would carry on as it had before, just without the Soviet Union butting in.

A week later, Bush the First started sending American forces to defend Saudi Arabia and claiming Hussein was an Arabic Hitler. This president desperately needed a re-election issue to distract everybody from the weak economy and war usually does the trick.

All I could think about for the rest of the Summer were the stories my father told me about how the draft worked during the Vietnam War…college students who didn’t come from wealthy or influential families were inducted all the time. What perfect timing too. I would earn my diploma, be shipped off to some hellhole desert the following year and then be killed to get some inept WASP president re-elected while his offspring stayed stateside in safety.

Summer ended and I scored a new part-time job working in the sports department of the Milwaukee Sentinel to pay the non-education bills. I wasn’t a writer (how much I hated writing thanks to the American education system), I was an agate; those are the people who reformat the stats page and answer the phone when people call in scores, perfect games of bowling or holes-in-one at the local golf course. It was also a morning paper so my shifts were in the evening and I was privy to the headlines/events for the next day. Just what I needed to feed my anxiety on how the Kuwait events were going to pan out!

School began and with only nine hours, this demoted me to being a part-time student. Had I known it would revoke my Recreation Center privileges, one more course on the pass-fail track could’ve helped me with my new goal of losing weight. Get down to 170! Those were the days when being 190 was a crisis.

The final three classes were initially dreadful. They were all mandatory in some capacity, namely the journalism ethics course; I skipped it so often the professor punished me with an additional paper or he’d flunk me. Thankfully the local Rush Limbaugh-wannabe called the Sentinel to give me something to write about. Organizational communication (a rather misleading title) sucked plus the instructor couldn’t teach. Religion in America became the unexpected treat taught by PhD candidate Dominic Scibilia (I couldn’t find an e-mail for him, maybe a Google search will get him to write to me). Unlike my previous two theology professors, he had a couple previous careers, the most interesting one being a Lutheran missionary in Liberia. I wish I wasn’t as burned out on school by the time I met him. What little I did retain was insightful on the US from its religious movements: the Irish diaspora bringing a wave of Roman Catholicism, what helped fuel Shay’s Rebellion and how the Mormons are a result of a second religious awakening. Besides, how many people can say they graduated with their teachers? Doctor Scibilia was there and he got to wear a bitchin’ hat.

So went the last semester. A blur of classes, writing papers, working, girlfriend time, riding the bus, hanging out in the business school’s Mac lab (feeding the new addiction I got from the layout class), listening to tunes and panicking over the near future. What was I going to do in January? How the hell was I going to pay back the $14,000 in student loans? Today, I laugh at such a balance because it’s less than a new car. At least those things were taking my mind off the military build-up in the Persian Gulf. The conventional wisdom was then saying the forces were going to remain for years to intimidate Iraq into cooperating.

Marquette’s poor excuse for a job fair didn’t ease my post-graduation concerns. Most potential employers were government-based law enforcement agencies: ATF, FBI, Treasury, etc. I didn’t go to university to be a cop and they only needed a high-school diploma. The only glimmer of hope was Quad Graphics and those clods had no interest in me despite my willingness to take anything to land one of their coveted internships.

There were two bright spots as Fall morphed into another bone-chilling Milwaukee Winter. The first was Leesa inviting me to her place for Thanksgiving. A nice day of eating, getting re-acquainted with my Aunt Letty and Uncle Cliff, playing darts with Joe and petting the shy cats. It was worth the long commute and generous of them to drive me both ways (downtown to Waukesha). The second was the thrill of seeing the Manhattan Transfer at the Riverside Theater. I had gotten hooked on them that year and I practically wore out my CD of Brasil preparing for the concert.

There’s one more event I just recalled. During the week before finals, I dropped by Jose’s radio show to play a couple requests and try one last funny bit before hanging up my headphones for good (I never wanted to work in radio again after my internships). I thought my gag was great. It entailed playing Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” going on the air for a station break and then asking Jose if he’d be my personal Jesus because I had a sudden craving for fish and loaves. It fell flat since he didn’t get it. So much for Catholic education.

Finals week was tense. No major snowstorm to help me that year. Marquette’s graduating senior policy did save me a little grief. At my alma mater, if you’re graduating and passing the course, you can take the grade you have and skip the final exam. I definitely exercised this option for Org Comm, took the CD over the teacher’s suggestion to try raising my grade. Scibilia and the journalism professor got around the rule by assigning a project and take-home test respectively. I wasn’t worried in the end. I figured I was going to pass everything so my family wouldn’t waste their time coming to Milwaukee for a long, cold weekend.

The ‘rents flew in from San Diego and chauffeured my grandparents up from Central Illinois. I felt bad for Brian. He got dragged into this when he could’ve been enjoying his break from the U of I with friends. Mom made it clear that Carrie wasn’t invited to anything. My girlfriend took it pretty well even if she missed out on a great meal at Mader’s (see the link, it has nothing to do with unfunny redneck culture). It was a relatively peaceful Maggi dinner. No major unpleasantries were brought up. Probably the usual crap about how I was wasting my life, blah blah blah.

Then came this day 20 years ago.

The ceremonies were held in downtown Milwaukee at a minor MECCA building with all the colleges together due to the smaller graduating population in December versus May. I liked it this way more. Spring-Summer events are always too crowded. The biggest surprise was Dean Murphy pronouncing my surname correctly when I was called up. I knew being an (minor) annoyance to her would help! The school president telling us to shut up when we got uppity over a couple students being skipped was par for the course; the Catholic Church still acts like it’s the Middle Ages. After the pomp and circumstance, Carrie and I guzzled a mini-bottle of champagne in the corridor before Mom arrived to be a killjoy. Again, Carrie wasn’t allowed to tag along for the post-celebratory dinner. This time she didn’t miss anything…Shoney’s. The meal was mediocre but I only remember it thanks to a private conversation with Grandpa in the lobby. While Mom, Dad and Grandma only talked shit about Carrie, he expressed his approval while warning me about the pitfalls of divorce and how those witches get all your money.

Before returning to my apartment, Mom and Dad took me to the grocery store as a Christmas gift (along with a check). I got around $50 of staples I wanted. They were puzzled and kept asking me why I didn’t want some other luxuries like steak. I replied how I wanted to get food that would last due to the uncertain future: a looming war and a rotten economy always being present. Besides, employers wouldn’t be hiring until March, I needed to hunker down for several months. Never mind the new stereo I scored on my Citibank card a couple weeks earlier.

Once I saw my family’s car driving away on Wells Avenue toward I-94, I called Carrie to tell her it was safe to come over and we celebrated with more cheap champagne. We joked, talked and drank the evening away. It was a welcome respite from the impending Gulf War (aka Gulf Distraction), six months of underemployment and standard bitter Milwaukee Winter.  I couldn’t hit the snooze button on the “now what?” thoughts for a couple days.

Looking back, I used to feel rather swindled over my diploma. Even today, my career doesn’t really require a college education but it helps immensely. Trust me, I’m horrified by the number of people I meet who can barely write a clear, coherent sentence. There are other things I encounter too yet I let those slide because I learned how learning is a never-ending experience. Not right away. It took probably another decade for it to sink in. My diploma did become one of the top five accomplishments plus I am at least a third-generation college graduate; hopefully Nick and Anna will extend it to four.

An undergraduate degree can be a hard sell to younger people finishing high school nowadays with the costs. However, I tell them it’s an important milestone for employers. It says you are capable of finishing what you started, meet a deadline and are somewhat self-motivated. Trust me, college was years filled with distractions a hundred times more interesting than coursework. If you can manage it with moderation and graduate in a reasonably amount of time, life will be pretty good especially when you see the US Census report on how well the educated fare in the long run.