2023/2024 Merry Christmas/Happy New Year: Santana ABRAXAS, Version 10

Steve Gallanter’s Blog: https://stevegallanter.wordpress.com

is a modest enterprise.  I usually send out about 40 or so Facebook copies and another 20 email copies of  brain candy with the occasional response from a friend being more than welcome as were the pass alongs which on 2 occasions reconnected me with folks from the past.

In April 2014 I began tweeting and my number of views exploded to about 200 altogether.

Oh joy!

...But wait there’s more…

I am both absurdly proud and humbled by the 1217 visitors this brain candy dispensary has tallied so far in 2023.

When the Christmas 2013 blog was passed along quite a bit it broke into the Top 5 of my Google search.

Most gratifying were several comments along the lines of “Thank you for this acknowledgement of a personal Christmas tradition, as I too have one.”

I responded to all of these comments gladly.  I was pleasantly taken aback at the number and intensity of these very private traditions and their importance to their adherents.

One gentleman took the time to send a message about his private tradition of chewing Trident spearmint gum after Christmas dinner as his now gone father had.

The last 10 years have brought thoughts of other Christmases to mind as my memory bank is thankfully still accepting deposits.  Indeed, this blog has precipitated thoughts of Christmases past to the extent that a 2023/2024 addition is appropriate.

 Keeping the faith is part of Christmas and the promise of a New Year is always uplifting even as the holiday transforms.

Christmas cards have largely been supplanted by a virtual blizzard of social media greetings.

Black Friday’s throng of shoppers have seen their number diminished by Cyber Monday’s ever increasing bandwidth and deliveries.

Indeed, grand-parenting, retirement, disability, estrangement and relocation change Christmas more with every passing year.

Still the Christmas spirit is till in my heart and those of many others…

In that spirit I am sending:

Merry Christmas: Santana ABRAXAS

Merry Christmas/New Year 2023/2024

Christmas is a time when we, even those of us who do not share in the religious meaning of the holiday, each have our own meaning for this day.

Santana’s ABRAXAS LP signifies Christmas for me. 

I bought ABRAXAS for my Mom for Christmas 1970.  Mom, Peter and I had seen WOODSTOCK and Mom was mightily impressed with Mike Shrieve’s epic drum solo on “Soul Sacrifice”.  While Mom always tried a little too hard to like what I liked her enthusiasm was more than sincere.

I saved my .75 a week allowance, pestered Dad for money and raked some leaves to conjure up the $3.49 to buy the LP at Port Chemists.

(I gave Dad innumerable promotional packs of aftershave and Borkum Riff pipe tobacco.  My brother Peter got Johnny Lightning 500 while I received several slot cars and Joe Paterno’s FOOTBALL MY WAY from Dad, a Penn. State grad.

It was my first “adult” gift-giving.

In 1970 I was 12.  It was to be my last boyhood Christmas.

Turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, (my Mom never, ever served that jellied, canned..uh.. stuff), and visits from neighborhood kids fulfilled every expectation.

Mom was surprised and delighted with ABRAXAS even with its “dirty” cover.  It played endlessly on the turntable of the Gallanter household’s Harman-Kardon Turntable, AM-FM Stereo with Recording Cassette Compact Stereo.

(Dad was quick to nudge me as a way of reminding me that he had purchased the stereo and had paid me to rake leaves.  On this Christmas I actually found this habit of his endearing).

Christmas 1970 was to be the last Christmas of our family as a unit although neither Mom, Dad, Peter or myself knew so at the time.

1971’s Christmas crystallized the cataclysmic changes, voluntary AND involuntary, familial AND cultural, well-intended AND malicious that would sweep through the lives of Mom, Dad, Peter and myself.

Christmas 1971 couldn’t have all of us in the same room for any length of time. I brought ABRAXAS to our North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation’s Jr. High room where I played ABRAXAS through headphones repeatedly to the puzzlement of the folks I willfully disregarded.

Headphones were clamped over my head as the congas of “Oye Como Va” reverberated.

“When Steven doesn’t talk, he really doesn’t talk,” I overheard one girl mention as I re-cued ABRAXAS.

Hostility was assumed to be my motivation, and not one completely inaccurate, but astral projection back to 1970 was the guiding star.  It was still my Mom’s LP but she was caught up in her own affairs and didn’t notice it missing.  Dad lived in Forest Hills, Queens as the divorce was now final.

(I remember looking at a snapshot of Christmas 1962 in our home at 86 Henry St, Merrick, Long Island.  There is a tower of blocks in front of me wearing a devilish grin with my Mom kneeling beside me with a bemused expression.  I remember kicking the blocks over.  1962 is my earliest Christmas memory).

For several years I continued to play ABRAXAS at Christmas.  Most memorably in 1975 when my Mom returned home from a hospitalization and I wanted to comfort her.  ABRAXAS proved to be more curative than the turkey I attempted to cook with tomato soup flavored stuffing).

By 1973 I was not speaking to my Dad, an estrangement that lasted more than 3 years.  ABRAXAS’ “Oye Como Va” reminded me of the photo of Mom and Dad celebrating their 1st. anniversary with a grinning Tito Puente, the author of the original “Oye Como Va,” at the Palladium in Manhattan, where my paternal grandfather worked.

ABRAXAS signified Dad as well as Mom and the paternal grandparents who posed with me on their laps but who I have no memories of.

The summers of 1974,1975 and 1976 found me at  Rowe Unitarian Universalist Camp and Conference Center.  ABRAXAS was in the ‘Radio Rowe’ LP pile for the public address system that broadcast on a loud, sporadic basis throughout the camp. Santana was very popular with my brother and sister campers although they would have been taken aback, to say the least, at the talisman it was to me.

Boston gained me as a resident in 1978.  I left ABRAXAS with Mom.  I played it upon my early Christmas sojourns to the ancestral home.

In 1981 a group of we Port Washingtonians had a Christmas celebration at the New York, New York discotheque in Manhattan.  Mom remarked that the percussion of much disco reminded her of ABRAXAS.  The next day I played the now battered LP.  Upon hitching back to Boston I purchased a used copy at Looney Tunes Used Records.

1982 brought the realization that college graduation was beyond my capability.  At home in Port Washington I put on ABRAXAS to please Mom before disappointing her.

By 1984 my Dad had passed.  Yes, “Oye Como Va” reminded me that once upon a time Dad and Mom were deeply in love and Peter and I were fortunate to be the offspring of their union.  I have no recollection of my grandparents on either side but ABRAXAS is a talisman of their lives causing mine.

10 years pass. ABRAXAS PLAYS annually on my Panasonic Plus Cassette-to-Cassette AM/FM with Auto Reverse boom box.

1995 found my brother Peter and I at odds to the extent that I spent Christmas in Boston brooding ambivalently although I did send presents to Peter, his wife Aida and Mom.

I consoled myself with ABRAXAS “Hope You’re Feeling Better”s theme of ambivalence powered by congas and Carlos Santana’s wah-wah guitar pyrotechnics.

2022’s first week has made “Hope You’re Feeling Better” a talisman of COVID even more than “Oye Como Va.”

“Is that you

Your eyes slowly fading?

Is that you

Your mind full of tears?

Is that you

Searching for a good time?

Is that you

Waiting for all these years?

Is that you?

Look across the ocean

And I hope you’re feeling better.”

https://youtu.be/P_vJBz2_LtE

The clever wordplay of shifting from the declarative voice to the interrogative voice is the kind of lyrical daring do that seems to have vanished, along with the presence of rock music in general.

But make no mistake; “Hope You’re Feeling better” is perhaps Greg Rolie’s finest vocals on ABRAXAS. The questing baritone being cut off by the fiery pyrotechnics of Carole Santana’s wah-wah wailing is a metaphor that is far more descriptive than any printed lyric can give voice to.

ABRAXAS is definitely the gift that keeps on giving.

The repeated playing of “Hope You’re Feeling Better” is an uplift in much the same way as “Oye Como Va.”

…Indeed, the ambivalent holiday of 1995 seeped to mind…

Being well into my 30’s in 1995 I had made my own Christmas tradition of surprising someone that I liked with a gift that spoke to an affection that had not been fully expressed.  Being single, childless and employed in an industry that throws folks together and throws them away with equal speed I had learned that small blessings are sometimes the only blessings one can receive but that can be a good thing.

…I was sitting on the living room floor of 24 Haviland St, Apt. 28 at about 9 P.M. 2 days before Christmas wrapping up 2 gifts while ABRAXAS played through the open door of my bedroom.  My roommate was out of the country for the holidays so I felt little compunction about playing my music a tad louder than I might have otherwise.

I was wrapping 2 gifts for a former co-worker.  Patricia was a beautiful woman who had tended bar at the same venue as I.   Although it had been a brief and occasional job for her the chit-chat of the time when I was an afternoon employee at that venue had crossed over to more chit-chat when we briefly worked the same bar.

Patricia was in the midst of several transitions in her life and I was taken aback, although pleased, when she asked me to call her.

Over the course of more than a year these calls became more frequent and more intimate and I found myself listening more than I spoke.  Certainly, I was flattered to be trusted but more than that I trusted her with the pure aspects of my heart that had become very distant.

Pure and impure thoughts mingled, as Patricia was a beauty.

I was thinking about how to finesse a meeting with Patricia so as to give her both of her gifts.  One was a sardonic look at the recent past while the other was a light unto what was to come.

The phone rang, landlines had only begun too cede their domain to pagers, and it was Patricia.

“…Steve, I am at the bar. I have a present for you.  Where do you live?”

“I have 2 presents for you. I live 25 yards away I’ll be there in 5 minutes,” I replied.  My heart did a full-gainer. Steeling myself I managed to wind some Scotch tape around my gifts and jetted out the door to the bar.

Patricia was by the pay phone smiling.

I ordered drinks, we took a booth and we spoke briefly of the joy and relief of having finished Christmas shopping.

“What did you get me,” she asked with the slightly turned head that moved my eyes and heart.

I gave her the 1st. package and she ripped off the wrapping with an urgency that was enthralling.  Laughing out loud she proclaimed, “I don’t know what I would ever use this for!”

“I know, that’s why I got it for you!”

I slid the other gift over the booth’s table when the owner of the bar came by to shake my hand and wish me a Merry Christmas.

I thanked him and introduced Patricia who also wished him a Merry Christmas.

“You know him?”

“I’ve been coming here since 1979,” I offered while wondering what Patricia might think of my recreational habits.

Patricia unwrapped the second gift and plugged it into a socket. She smiled a closed mouthed gesture of gratitude while nodding slowly in a way that signaled that all was right in the world if for only this moment.

“C’mon open your present.”

I opened Patricia’s package to find a mustard colored turtleneck that would undoubtedly be a good fit underneath a leather jacket for Boston’s winters.

I blinked involuntarily and held her hands briefly.

“Hey, do you think that the Prudential Mall is still open?”

“If there is any night of the year when it would be open late tonight would be that night.”

“Let’s go, we can leave the stuff in my car.”

My mind was pondering whether this meeting was a gesture of sympathy for being estranged from my family, gratitude for being a shoulder to cry on or just because Patricia was a good kid…or something more.

We walked the 200 or so yards to the Prudential Mall and after determining that indeed the stores had closed at 9, walked back to the car and I removed my gift.

We hugged.

Patricia got into her car.

I returned to my apartment…

1997 found Mom in a nursing home for the final phase of her life.  I bought her a new Walkman with ABRAXAS poised to play.  She was delighted.

1999 found Mom receiving a Discman.  The first CD…?  Yes, she remembered.

2004 brought the end of Mom’s life.  On that Christmas I played ABRAXAS at 2 AM in the living room of 42 North Bayles Ave, Port Washington on my Discman in a private memorial to Mom.

2013 found my now gone friend Steve Boisson offering that he had “never thought of Santana as Christmas music” while offering blues artist Charles Brown as his own eccentric Yuletide troubadour.

2019 found me in brother Peter’s place in Port Washington, N.Y. the night after Christmas patting my protruding tummy and nursing a straight up Jameson.

Peter’s television was displaying a vivacious Latina declaiming the weather.

“That’s Audrey Puentes.  Her father is Tito Puentes,” Peter offered.

“Hmmm..,” I said to myself.

My grandmother Marie Jack, biologically my Mom’s stepmom, gifted me a Christmas ornament featuring 2 cardinals in a gilded cage in, I believe 1973.  It never occurred to me at the time that I would never see Marie again although the passage of time and circumstances eventually made this reality evident.  From 1997 to 2017 I brought the ornament to the ancestral home for the talismanic Christmas tree.  In 2017 I neglected to bring it home but Aida was good enough to rescue the birds as they nestled in my rolling case for the Greyhound to Boston.

Much to my sadness the fragile frame of the cage was twisted in transit and my efforts to restore it fell short.  However, it is intact, if a little twisted, and resides next to Aunt Goldie’s sock monkey as ABRAXAS plays.

Our decade has brought the passage from this world and from my life of more than several folks; Martha Shaw among them, and places. Looney Tunes records, where I purchased my Santana ABRAXAS CD has been gone since 2012; likewise T.C’s Lounge, with local watering holes and record stores right up there, or down there, with trilobites as fossils.

ABRAXAS keeps record stores and Christmas alive at one and the same time as this mind contemplates Christmas 2022 and the New Year of 2023.

To all those folks both present and absent I humbly offer,

“Oye Como Va.”

ABRAXAS signifies Christmas; calling out to heart the folks who have passed, friends who are missed, places that are gone and the phases of the Christmases past, present and future.

ABRAXAS is a talisman as real as a rock, in LP, cassette,  CD and YouTube formats that holds in its notes the presents, love, tears and hopes of Christmas every time I so much as touch it.

I am listening to it right now.

“Oye Como Va”

“Hope You’re Feeling Better”

!Merry Christmas!

!Happy New Year!

2023: 10 SIGNS OF AGING.

1) Your age is 455 in dog years.

2) 44 years a vegetarian.

3) Your nose and ear hair grow at an alarming rate. The hair on your head…not so much.

4) Procrastination regarding daily events lasts about as long as it takes to enter this sentence.

5) Your injuries are visible.

6) “Thank you” is good.

7) AARP!

8) You are kept awake for hours by computer work; even while wearing blue light blocker shades.

9) Spying deer, skunks and porcupines at UU Rowe MA Camp and Conference Center is chapel.

10) Writing for folks feels right now.

RULES OF THE GAME: #3 ?..Forgive..?

?…Why..?

Forgive and forget

when

You

can

Blame and remember

CHANGE 2022: 10 Signs of Aging

1) Your age is 448 in dog years.

2) The toenail of the big toe on your left foot that broke a year ago will not grow back…ever.

3) You understand the Federal budget deficit and the national debt and the difference between the two.

4) You are about to become a ‘great uncle’, at least in the chronological sense.

5) Ibuprofen before a shift is a sound strategy.

6) Cash is your preferred medium of exchange.

7) You remember when the Hynes stop on the Green Line was Auditorium.

8) You are proud of your earnings in the biz.

9) You don’t curse.

10) Let’s Go Mets!

RULES OF THE GAME #2: Impressionism.

You

never get a first chance

to make a last impression.

TIPS FOR BARTENDERS: #3 Job security

“Bartenders have the job security of ice cubes.

You’re going to get swallowed,

crushed,

melted,

liquefied,

or just go down the drain.”

Noel Perez, Europa, General Manager/Partner

COVID-19: the new normal. Quint Stella

1) COVID-19 has replaced ‘coronavirus’ as the ‘nom du pandemic’ in our new normal. A certain brewery is doubtless relieved as part of the new normal.

2) Baseball and bartending are both MIA this summer as part of the new normal.

3) Mall walking at the Prudential Center at 2-steps-a-second is always accompanied by a loungy version of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.” If any reader knows why this is, please advise. Anyway, 2 steps-a-second for 60+ minutes walking as part of the new normal.

3) Mall walking at 2-steps-per-second at the Prudential Center is part of the new normal. Why is it that a loungy version of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” plays every time I walk? If there is anyone with knowledge of the Prudential Center’s music policy who might offer enlightenment it would be appreciated as part of the new normal.

4) Smelling one’s own breath isn’t just for nervous first dates and that additional slice of pepperoni pizza with onions. Smelling one’s breath is the most frequent effect as part of the new normal.

5) Repeating cliches often means turning a blind eye to everyday stuff but the “new normal” cliche as part of the new normal.

WORDS OF OTHERS

“This life’s hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”

CORONAVIRUS 6.0 Quarantine Trey Stella

1) Bad hair days are no longer a threat to income.

2) Love is the only word that can describe the loving relationship with your Black & Decker Toast-R-Oven.

3) RING OF BRIGHT WATER was once called a ‘nature’ film at the Port Washington Public Library. I saw the movie as one of the free films shown to occupy the evenings of bored, alienated teenagers such as your humble correspondent. I loved the movie which of course I did not admit to the few folks I conversed with.

(It is conceded that my fondness for Harry Nilsson’s SON OF SCHMILLSON would have confused the issue.)

Last year I discovered a copy of RING OF BRIGHT WATER lying in the lobby of my building where harried residents donate/dump possessions that are not being brought to presumably greener pastures.

Sadly, I am past the point in life where there is limitless time to indulge in flights of literary fancy. However, on this occasion the under used right side of my brain reminded me that very little warm and fuzzy had entered within the last fiscal year. So…

I couldn’t put RING OF BRIGHT WATER down even with the paperback version’s glaucoma inducing 50 lines a page at 10 words a sentence.

Gavin Maxwell is an English author and naturalist who spends his summers in the rustic Scottish Highlands town of Camusfearna which translates as “ring of bright water.”

Mr. Maxwell brings an otter named ‘Mij’ on a treacherous journey from Iraq to become domesticated in Maxwell’s London flat.

An apartment is no place for an otter so Mr. Maxwell decamps for Scotland.

Mr. Maxwell details the joys and inevitable challenges of living with what is, after all, a wild animal.

Mij is quite the comedian and warms to Mr. Maxwell’s love but also very capable of destroying floorboards and furniture.

As charming as this story is, and “charm” is a word rarely spoken or evoked these days it is the literary grace that captured this mind.

To wit:

“Later, marbles became Mij’s favorite toys for this pastime-for pastime it is, without any anthropomorphizing-and he would lie on his back rolling two or more of them up and down his wide, flat belly without ever dropping one to the floor, or with forepaws upstretched, rolling them between his palms for minutes on end.”

In a time of 280 character Twitter blasts the elegant, albeit florid, literacy of RING OF BRIGHT WATER is almost shocking.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER is profusely illustrated with whimsical pen and ink drawings of otters cavorting adding a visual analog to the tale of otters.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER was a book I couldn’t put down, even as I acknowledge the ethical conflict of making a pet of a wild animal.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER is an ideal quarantine read. Recommended.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER, E.P. Dutton & Co, Inc. 1961

ISBN-978-095625404

stevegallanter@yahoo.com

617-835-2373

15 Edgerly Rd.

Apt. 8

Boston, MA 02115

CORONAVIRUS 5.0 Quarantine Stella Uno

“Social distancing?  I’ve been practicing social distancing since 9th. grade.”