Christmas Eve Blues

Christmas Eve Blues

Noel Laflin

11-30-16

The Christmas Eve spirit flew out the chimney the moment the talk turned dark and conspiratorial.

Someone had mentioned the Holocaust.  And looking back on it, it may have been me. I was about to turn sixteen in two days.
  

“They exaggerated the numbers,” said old man Erik, lighting another Chesterfield and downing his beer. “There were no six million killed.  It wasn’t possible,” he concluded confidently.

“Roosevelt and the Jews saw to that,” replied Rudy, snuggled smug in his chair, legs stretched out across our old linoleum family room floor.

I looked at my father sitting to my right.  He was simmering with rage.

Slowly, he rose from his chair and left the room.  He was back in a moment with a tattered, black photo album clutched to his chest.

“I was at Dachau just weeks after liberation,” he said with a trembling voice.  There had been no time to clean up the place. I took pictures.  Would you like to see them?” he asked our two guests.

There was silence for a moment, before Rudy answered.
 

“It doesn’t change a thing,” he said.  The numbers were faked to break the German spirit.

“Ja,” whispered Erik, the tone of confidence wavering a bit.

My father walked over to the two men and set the old album on the coffee table.  He then went to the chair, removed his jacket and left his own home on Christmas Eve rather then ask his guests to leave.

He went for a long walk around the block – several times. 

Wishing for Whales

Wishing for Whales

Noel Laflin

11-16-16

Several magnificent pods of gray whales swimming and spouting close to shore stopped the Laguna Beach Rotary meeting dead in its tracks one fine winter day some forty years ago.  Because of that sudden and unexpected sight, as witnessed by those of us standing and watching through the large bay windows of the elegant, old banquet room, it is, consequently, the only Rotary meeting that I can ever really recall.  It was a most memorable distraction.

Oh, sure, there was the time I attended a different civic club meeting down in San Juan Capistrano when a couple of drunken Kiwanians pushed the button to open the sliding roof at the El Adobe Restaurant during a howling rain storm.  Now, that was memorable too just for the mayhem that quickly ensued; but nothing as so fondly remembered as the spouting of twenty whales a few hundred yards off-shore in a landmark establishment once haunted by the likes of Bogart and Bacall, Madam Modjeska, a prince of Russia, and Myrna Loy.  Catalina Island beckoning just twenty-six miles beyond that provided a pretty stunning backdrop as well.

I got to thinking about this sight, back when I was a much younger man, as a couple of youngsters that I have known for nearly than half their lives are going to be married at the Hotel Laguna a couple of days before Christmas. Those two kids are now about the age I was when I attended that Rotary meeting there so long ago.

And aside from wishing them much happiness of course, I also hope a few whales are spotted during the ceremony.  It leaves one with a lasting impression.