THE PAREENINGTON POST

December 28, 2011

Christmas

We live next door to nice condos, constructed recently, tastefully designed to blend into the neighborhood but in their tastefulness quite out of place next to our ugly concrete building and the taxi depot across the street. There were, when I returned home from the fancy cheese shop earlier tonight, six NYPD squad cars, two FDNY emergency medical vans and one ambulance parked directly outside the nice condos, because next door to them, on the other side, is an SRO residence for mentally ill or formerly homeless adults, run by Lutheran Social Services. Ambulances are a common sight, police a bit less so. I assume someone died, or was dying.

I think we all know that the “suicide rates skyrocket during the holidays” chestnut is a myth, anecdotal evidence aside — someone close to someone not particularly close to me ended it this Christmas, in the garage, with his fucking kids in the house — but, based again on solely anecdotal data, I wonder if death by natural causes doesn’t spike at the end of the year.

Major Arthur Pareene, a war veteran and a good grandfather and a bad father, died, mostly expectedly, on Saturday. The Press of Atlantic City spelled his (our) name wrong in the obituary. Those interested in such things will learn from his obituary that his parents’ names were Aniello and Amalia Perrino.

Last Thursday I wrote something dumb about talking to your right-wing relatives over the holidays. On Sunday night my father and I, outside his sister’s house having a smoke, talked about his father, who I remember fondly and he less so. My dad, who does not see his family often since he left for the middle of the country as a young man, quoted Tolstoy’s “happy families” aphorism, and I joked that Tolstoy only wrote it to justify only writing about unhappy people. Then my dad told me about when he first saw some Rush Limbaugh book on his father’s nightstand (I remember seeing it myself, as a slightly sheltered child of liberal parents — it was the paperback of “The Way Things Ought to Be,” ghostwritten by John Fund), and he said, to himself more than to me, “what if he’d had Tolstoy on his nightstand?”

I didn’t say that I know plenty of assholes raised by the sort of people who read Tolstoy.

12:48am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z56IbyDuOHAr

(Notes: 39)