Sputterpub's Blog

Americans are childish. Vigorous, energetic, imaginative. And impulsive, petulant, whiny. We invented standup comedy and most of the entertainment business. We created superheroes and archvillains and comic books. We spread the Internet.

We changed audience brains, but not for the better. The laws of neuroplasticity dictated the new mental pathways, and all of them lead away from wisdom. In time, we came to believe our own stories. To our doom.

Who’d have thought a mediocre player who became active in the Screen Actors Guild would run for governor, and win? And then move up to President, and win again? And again? It happened. He’s even lionized as one of the greats.

Now half the population is surprised that a bankruptcy-using businessman/reality show celebrity has won the same top-office election. What’s that about? The only real surprise is how wrong the pollsters, spin doctors, and news anchors were. And that’s refreshing.

I found those four paragraphs on my Uncle Burt’s desk. It isn’t really his desk, but he’s staying with us while his broken ankle mends, and he’s using the battered old unit in what was my son’s teenage room. Sam is 34 now and hasn’t used the room for 15 years. Uncle Burt is 87.

Those were calm words from Uncle Burt. I call him Uncle Upset more often than by his name, because of his tendency to rant. He’s not my biological uncle, but he was my father’s best friend’s brother and he’s been in my life as long as I can remember. I’m used to his curmudgeonly diatribes, but my kids are not. In fact, my Gen-X daughter finds him weird. My Millennial son thinks Burt is mean. I’m always startled to rediscover that my beloved offspring don’t see the gold in him.

I found the paragraphs when I was tidying the house, all in preparation for the kids’ visit. We’d arranged the dinner party weeks before the election; we thought we’d be celebrating the bust-up of the old glass ceiling, and instead we were gathering at what felt at best like a wake. I stood the vacuum to one side while I perused Unc’s words. I smiled. I wondered if they were a draft letter to some editor. Or a blog bomb (he once managed to hijack my little blog and post his comments). That was the moment I started thinking it might be a good idea to let the youngsters listen to this man. I began looking forward to dinner, and I hadn’t been looking forward to anything since Terrible Tuesday.

I stashed the vacuum in its closet niche and went to the kitchen. It was a comfort food occasion, so I was preparing dishes I knew the family loved. The Millennials are vegetarian. The Gen-Xers were meat eschewers when they married, but my daughter developed perpetual hunger when she got pregnant, returned to burger-love, and hasn’t left it. She was the one who started me and her brother on the vegetarian path – her family would be fine with this dinner.

While the bulgur steeped, I decobbed the corn and sauteed it with onion. Then I mixed the corn with the grain, added citrus juices, jalapeño, and cayenne, hit the salad with salt, chopped a clump of cilantro for the top.

I kneaded pizza dough and set it aside so the yeast could do its thing. I sliced and garlicked the potatoes before roasting them, assembled the onion and sun-dried tomatoes, grated the smoked mozzarella and Parmesan. Smoked cheese gives the pizza feet without meat. It’s similar to adding coffee to a vegetable soup, that way.

I’d already made the dessert cookies. I felt okay about them as an after-dinner carb. They were darkly chocolate and the recipe used four eggs. I’d added chopped walnuts, too.

I pulled open the veggie bin and sliced raw things for a platter. Plenty of carrots for my orange-tinted son. He’s loved them all his life, but only big uncooked ones, so he made up for the glycemic load with compensating fiber.

Finally, I assembled a few bowls of nuts. The meal was higher in carbohydrate than I would have done for myself, but it’s what the vegetarian youth wanted and it would be well-received by the other guests. They were all tired of hearing me talk about nutrition anyway; this meal was like a peace offering.

It wouldn’t do any good if I cooked low-carb and continued trying to “inform” them. I understood. Even though I was astounded and excited by what I’d been learning in the last year, I got it. I’d spent most of my life looking at others the way my kids currently looked at me. Now I was jazzed about how wrong I’d been, setting myself up to actually learn something. But till recently I’d completely bought the post-war American nutritional approach. I’d been so confident about what I saw as scientific logic. Over half a century I’d been singing the “calorie is a calorie” nonsense, avoiding fats, seeking healthy carbs, grading my days as good or bad based on calorie consumption, castigating myself for sloth and low will power when I failed to fit into the bathing suit in my drawer. I’d been as loud as others in demonizing Robert Atkins and mocking acquaintances who advocated cleansing fasts. I deserved the disregard I now experienced. Whenever I started in on the evils of high insulin levels or the subject of rampant metabolic derangement, I noted the semi-patient disbelief in the faces of my loved ones, and I shut up. My plan for the evening was to serve tasty food, close enough to my ideals but palatable to my guests, and to listen.

I enjoyed the prep. I still indulge in the occasional pizza and I looked forward to the Provençal variety that was taking form on my baking sheet. As much as I love tomatoes, I prefer a white pizza.

The Millennials arrived first. My daughter-in-law is halfway through her first pregnancy and looks adorable. Uncle Burt limped out of the room he’s using on the ground floor, and then the tumultuous Gen-Xers pulled into the driveway. My daughter was first inside, kissing me while her boys ran around our legs to the yard. My son-in-law parked their van and then joined the other adults in the kitchen area.

I poured drinks. Hard cider for the Gen-Xers, prosecco for the other non-pregnant adults, soda water for kids and the kid incubator. Sure my grandkids would have loved lemonade or root beer, but I drew the line against sugary liquids.

We were sweet and careful with one another. That seems to be one of the responses to the election debacle; it felt like earthquake or terrorism aftermath that way, with some assholes acting like looters but most people looking more closely and kindly at our fellows. My offspring asked Burt how his ankle was healing and sympathized with his relative immobility. My in-law kids seemed interested. Burt modulated his powerful voice.

The food was well-received. The grandkids asked if they could eat at the round glass-topped coffee table in the TV room. We’d used that table time and again for popcorn with movies and they arranged it for themselves. That left us grownups at the proper table, hunger sated and thirst quenched, meeting one another’s glance over the small vase of flowers I’d placed in the middle, ready to talk.

I was trying to come up with an effective way to say things when my son surprised me. “So,” he said as he pushed his chronically-sore spine into the chair back, “please give us some perspective. You guys have lived through bad regimes before…” He looked at me but then shifted his glance to Burt. There was a moment of silence. It seemed appropriate for the oldest to go first.

Uncle Burt spoke gently. His voice was so low we all leaned toward him to hear. He described the Reagan surprise. He gave a nod to Schwartzeneger and Jesse Ventura. He waxed historical about Tricky Dick.

“But did those guys have a majority in Congress, too?” my daughter asked. “And what about the Supreme Court?” came from my son’s wife.

“Remember,” Uncle Burt said, “the court appointment is to replace Scalia. How much worse can the new justice be?”

We hadn’t thought of that. And the kids hadn’t begun to consider Unc’s next topic.

“If you want to worry,” he said as he reached for the prosecco, “consider the environment. I mean, sure it’s too late as far as the melting poles go, but it’s the planet that’s going to get trashed now. Can you imagine Trump taking his kids backpacking? Or even visiting national parks?”

Then there were groans around the table. I had to say something.

“People. Beloveds. How about looking at it this way: Wasn’t it refreshing that all the pollsters and spin doctors got it wrong? I was born after the Dewey miscall in 1948, so this is my first chance to scoff at the so-called experts. Let’s face it,” I continued. “You never learn when you’re right about something. All of us were wrong. Now we have an opportunity to learn.”

From the next room we could hear the boys warming into an argument that would soon turn physical.

“Frankly,” I said and I started to grin because I was about to quote my late father Frank. “I think this country’s issues are so big and complicated, that no President will be able to solve them OR make them substantially worse. Here’s what my dad always said: If you meet someone who claims to have a simple answer to a complex problem, you just found someone who doesn’t understand the problem.”

Then there were nodding heads and choruses of “Right on.”

“You know my father,” I moderated. “He was probably paraphrasing another’s words. Someone like Mark Twain or H.L. Mencken.”

“Doesn’t matter who said it first,” said my son, reaching for a carrot. “He was right.”