This Time of Year

We just had Thanksgiving and Christmas is coming up. This issue's feature piece is a different kind of holiday reminiscence, but one that touches on something that many might be feeling as 2025 rolls in. Before that are a few Open Tabs, and we close with a very sweet tune from a great musician and an image that provides some understanding of our tiny little place in the universe.

Open Tabs

We all know about holiday stress, but kids are more stressed than ever. Burnout used to be all ours (us adults). Not anymore.

Before we get to something 'lighter' (you'll get it in a moment) here's something you can add to your box of nightmares – running bats.

Hey, the next time someone says "you're absolutely glowing," they're right!

A Holiday Whack Upside the Head

A holiday memory of a different sort

It had been a long day

The memory is of daylight, at least when I arrived at their house, so it had to have been late afternoon on Thanksgiving day. I probably caught the bus from San Francisco sometime after three o’clock and would have been across the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito around four. The exact year is hazy but was almost certainly 1985, the second of what became a seven-year stretch volunteering at San Francisco’s Glide church every Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Glide = Cecil

Glide and its leader, Rev. Cecil Williams, were well known in the Bay Area, and it was also well known that the Glide Kitchen served meals throughout the year for anyone who came in, around 4,000 to 5,000 served each Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Salvation Army and many other organizations did the same, in numbers of varying degrees, but Cecil (as almost everyone referred to him), or Reverend Cecil, was a charismatic messenger whose understanding of media reach, story, and compassion generated enormous exposure for Glide.

SF’s Glide church is in the Tenderloin, an infamous neighborhood of struggle for its residents, those in barely livable housing and those in unlivable but without choice streets. There are a few different tales of how it got the name, but to the people who know it the provenance of the name doesn’t matter. What matters is if you’re there, you’re in a very, very tough place and you probably have a very, very tough life.

Just the kind of place that needs a Glide and a Rev. Cecil Williams. 

The first group of volunteers arrived between seven and eight in the morning, but the Glide and kitchen staff, and others directly connected to the church, had come much earlier. When you’re providing hot holiday meals to thousands of people, it’s kinda important to start as early as possible. The line to get a meal also formed early.

Based on the news stories I’ve seen over the years, the kitchen and eating area have changed significantly over the decades, and I’m sure the volunteer process has evolved as well. Many of the day’s volunteers came in large groups from churches and other organizations, ranging from kids with their parents, to teens and adults. Each group worked for an hour, working as servers on the food line, cleaning tables, collecting trays, doing the myriad of tasks that come with operating a large, free-meal dining area in San Francisco on such a food centric holiday.

I always admired the groups. An hour can go pretty fast and may seem like a too brief period for someone volunteering, but that hour is more than just the actual work: there’s transit time to Glide (which probably started with getting to someplace where the group gathers and travels together into the city) and back, prep to get ready to go to Glide; for most of them it was a real commitment on a major holiday).

When my first hour was up I wasn’t ready to go, the same sentiment I glimpsed and overheard many times from the younger volunteers when told their shift was over. During the transitional minutes between groups it wasn’t too hard for me to stay busy at something — not being a part of any group helped that effort — until I could figure out how to stay ‘legitimately.’

The kitchen was the answer. I wasn’t certain, but it seemed the kitchen crew had no or just a few volunteers in a mix of Glide-employed cooks, some volunteer carvers, and kitchen help. Maybe two dozen people moved around and within a large commercial, well used kitchen, and back and forth between the kitchen and a connected room next to it with food stacked on trays and cooked turkeys waiting to be carved. My lack of commercial kitchen work did not deter me from getting into the kitchen and lending a hand, because I was not unaware of that environment. I lived on Chicago’s south side as a kid, in an apartment above a grocery store on one of Chicago’s then-longest commercial streets. Among the kids I played with was the family that owned the bakery two stores down, and I’d not only hung with them in the back of the store, a bunch of us had made peanut butter cookies one night for sale the next day. In the Army I’d done more than a few KP duty shifts, I’d been cooking basic stuff for myself since before I was a teen, and my first paying job (my newspaper route as a kid doesn’t count) was at Arby’s.

So I hung, and worked. Over the next seven years I did everything from  separating several dozen egg yolks at a time from a huge pot (because even on the holidays the kitchen still had to prep food for the next day) to working the kitchen’s massive griddle. Somewhere along the years I knew I had ‘made it’ because after watching me for a bit one of the Glide cooks asked me where I usually cooked.

If you asked someone from that time about me they certainly wouldn’t know my name, but I bet they’d remember the kitchen volunteer who always wore a well-worn, brown leather cap while he worked. 

Seeking 

When I first decided to spend each of those holidays working in Glide’s kitchen, I had also decided to fast for three days: the day before the holiday, the day of, and the day after, a choice I continued during those seven years. The choice was symbolic and with reason: I wanted to feel some molecule-sized pang of hunger while surrounded by people who couldn’t be sure about the when, where, or what of their next meal. It just seemed right.

I missed working Thanksgiving of ’87, which I instead spent in a Sydney hotel while on tour with Michael Jackson. The promoter had arranged an offsite Thanksgiving celebration for the band and crew, but someone at the tour management level had to remain behind in case anything came up. I was fine with it. I was road manager, I was the guy to do it, and it passed as a nice, quiet day. And I didn’t eat.

Again, if memory serves semi-accurately, I did the first volunteer stint as my then wife and I were separated amidst what would be an eventual divorce. By ’84-ish I’m in a new relationship, and although she knew and accepted that I was fasting, ‘Z X’ insisted that I come to her parents’ Sausalito home for the holiday meal. Before I arrived she would explain to them what I’d been doing and that I wouldn’t be eating.

I’m not sure she explained much of the ‘why’ of what I was doing, because I almost certainly didn’t give her an in-depth explanation. When you’re seeking something so deeply personal as trying to understand yourself and this increasingly disturbing world, and you’re a still developing writer and Buddhist, it’s a very internalized thing. By my second or third year (again, it’s fuzzy) I was in a new relationship with Camie, a special woman whose heart and soul helped me understand a little more about myself, and helped me better understand the what and why of my journey.

This wouldn’t be an MWH piece without a minor digression or two: As to the why of my undertaking (the seven-year number was not related to or influenced by the 1954 book Seven Years In Tibet or, obviously, the 1997 movie with Brad Pitt), I was (am) an ever evolving person, an always learning writer, and had no family in the Bay Area. Growing up, I had witnessed acts of compassion and empathy from my parents, but in the later years leading to their divorce, witnessed and directly experienced damaging behaviors, which I carried into and attempted to reconcile during my young adult years (and to an extent still do).

 With the knowledge of more years behind than in front of me, I now know I’ve always been a wandering seeker. During high school I’d been cast in many plays that rehearsed in the evenings, and afterward I walked the just-under six miles home; the lone walk, and the being ‘someone else’ in a play, were a way to inure myself from my parents’ disintegration. Comes eighteen, I join the Army. Comes my early twenties I go on the road with a band and eventually move to the West Coast. The pattern is much clearer now than when I was creating it.

The meal and then the “Mike, how many of them are…?”

Z and her mother met me at the door, I stepped inside and met Z’s father, Mr. X, tall, big voiced, a successful businessman, and older than many fathers of daughters Z’s age.

Pleasantries were exchanged, I think there might have been some talk about how early I had left in the morning, a little this and that, but I don’t remember being asked for any real specifics about the day. Z’s mom was very pleasant, the dad okay, and dinner commenced a few minutes later. As they served themselves food, Mr. X looked at me and asked:

“So, Mike, how many of them were freeloaders?”

Freeloaders. He emphasized the word with rumbly disdain. Freeloaders. This is decades ago, but even then the word was old, right there with hobo and tramp. Mr. X was an I got mine the old fashioned way and you should too conservative. And I’d been warned about his world view by Z, so although I wasn’t stunned by the question itself, the phrasing and the word itself caught me by surprise, as did the timing — ‘let me serve this up as I simultaneously let you know how I feel about the people you wasted your time on.’ In reviewing the memory’s images and sounds of that moment, I feel the pause before I answered, and it was in that pause that a response popped up. That’s how it came to me; I didn’t construct it, it was there, perfect and true. I answered without any counter-emphasis.

“Actually Mr. X, most of the people I saw were families.”

He glanced down at his plate, not to ensure it had food on it, but because whatever gale force, blowhard winds had been swirling inside him suddenly abated. What the hell could he say about that? With a little time he could probably construct something along the lines of families can be freeloaders too. But the neutrality of how I answered, without eye-for-an-eye attitude, and the inherent, unexpected poignancy of it, easily recognized even by an educated troglodyte such as Mr. X, showed in a sudden deflation in his posture and lack of any response better than, “Oh?”

Mom X interjected with the kind of pithy thing meant to ease any holiday dinner confrontations and evoke let’s all just enjoy our meal, and we went on. I don’t remember much else, because… eh, I’m just guessing but I’m thinkin’ without much common ground whatever else was said was simply uttered to pass the time until we left.

In the review of what led to my response, I am standing behind a server, glancing at the food pans to see if any are low, then looking beyond to the dining area, and that’s what I see: families, obvious families, amidst the wide range of humanity sitting besides each other at long tables around the room; a parent or parents and kids, eating; a parent helping a kid eat, or bringing trays of food to them. Take away the surroundings of the Glide kitchen world and they’re simply families having a holiday dinner.

If you’re family is having dinner at Glide, you ain’t no damn freeloader. Were there people who came to eat a free meal who might have had a way to get a meal otherwise. Sure. Was that the majority of diners? Not even close.

No family, no person with an option, chooses to eat at Glide because they really want to.

Years later, I would be counseled by Elizabeth, my closest confidant and person who makes me whole, that while my heart and dedication were above reproach, I could give myself back to family on those holidays and my soul could still be fed, and be somewhat better served, finding volunteer efforts that made a difference on an ongoing basis. She was right and I have done that over the decades since, as an adult literacy tutor; as a hawkwatcher with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory during migration season; with the American Red Cross (its reputation as an org takes some hits online and it has had its issues, but its boots on the ground volunteers are above reproach); and in different ways with nonprofit community and wildlife organizations.

But the Zen metaphorical ‘whack up side the head’ from that freeloaders moment guides my life often, especially during the holidays. Many of us are in a funk about the country’s recent events and the philosophies of those about to be in charge of societal-shifting initiatives. That freeloaders incident happened 40-ish years ago. The attitudes of the self-made, pulled up by your own bootstraps strata that’s about to sit in the halls of power are not new views, they’ve been around for a long time. We’ll ride it out, do what we can to work for ‘better’ and give of ourselves to help people where and when we can.

It’s the giving season, giving time, money, energy, or solace. Find your way to being happy and, if you have the means, do something — no matter how tiny — for those who need that something, because not everyone who has the means to do something will.

Seems to me that the freeloaders are those who can do something for someone in need of a giving season but don’t.

You Are So Beautiful

Eric Levy has been Nightranger's keyboardist since 2011, and also a member of Garaj Mahal, an awesome group. Lately he's worked with my longtime friend and Journey bassist Ross Valory, and he regularly posts his own vids, including this lovely, evocative version of You Are So Beautiful. It's nice to let this play as you look at and ponder over the image below.

Carl Sagan called our place the pale blue dot. I would suggest adding 'tiny' to that description, and this winning image from the People and Space category winner, 2024 Astronomy photographer of the year awards, the International Space Station as it transits the sun (BTW, the ISS is nowhere near the sun in this shot) shows why: every brown spot on the sun's surface in this image is the size of earth. This planet, this tiny thing we're on, is the only place we got. My Christmas wishes include that we come to our senses before, well, you know.

Be well, be loved, be loving, be grateful, be giving, and no matter what you call this time of year, enjoy it.

MWH, 2024

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