The First Day of Christmas

These days, Christmas comes all through December.  As soon as the last slice of pumpkin pie is licked clean, Christmas descends, full of fudge, and golden bells, carols, the sweetness that crosses each child's face.

When I was younger, Christmas was a day, a morning, a fete for immediate family.  Now it's expansive, gloriously fun,  deeply meaningful.  It's the month when the light comes back, the first full month of winter, and we focus on celebrations that hit the high notes for us.  For me.  That includes church with all the little kid's choirs and candlelight.  It's being together with friends, whose friendships go back 30 years.  It's family, community, wonderful things to eat, to cook.

If the American economy was based on my spending habits, we'd be a ship lost at sea.  Our family doesn't buy the big gifts for each other.  It's a book, a bracelet, a knitted scarf, wrapped in paper, tied with a pretty bow. It's being generous with the Food Bank and the Humane Society.  The simplest, sweetest things.

We went  to the first community celebration yesterday—a Christmas tree festival, sponsored by our local Catholic hospital.  Lots of the trees were done by designers.  The trends this year included putting 18-inch glittery balls deep inside the tree.  Really pretty.  The tree I could live with though, was a simple flocked tree with all kinds of birds peering out here and there.  Wonderful.

It's hosted in a very large convention center, and there were lots of little dancers, singers, and musicians who performed throughout the afternoon.  At one point there were a thousand people in the main ball room, all of them families with at least two children, some of them with four or five.  Young families.

My favorite kid was a little blond bombshell about four, who danced with such imagination and vigor. She was way off to the side and was half a beat behind all the other kids, but she was a dancer.  Music.  Big movements.  Even bigger joy.  Her hair so carefully fixed by her Mom, just bounced. So did she.

All those little kids had faces suffused with wonder.  Which, it turns out, is Christmas enough for me.

The Attitude Is Gratitude

I've been inundated with gratitude lately.  All kinds of folks are doing 30-gratitude journals on Facebook.  Our sermon series has been asking us to move from being grateful for the good things that drop in our laps to having a grand response to the goodness of life in everybody.  A tall order.  While I appreciate the encouragement, I just don't have it in me.

I  need to start lower and slower to get me past my slumpy grumps.

Here are the basics: 1.  Our ScottMan is home for Thanksgiving.  Our brilliant car guy is coming home from Texas.  We only get to see him a couple of times a year now, but I am plenty grateful for that.  2.  Our Miss Mackenzie is at a crux in her life, between school and career.  What a tough time that is.    She is our multi-talented artiste with too many interests to choose just one—in a state that is 49th in economic recovery.  We appreciate her and how tough this battle is.  3.  I appreciate that I have an extended family that still gets together for holidays, and Maggie is a great cook.  Not everybody gets that. 4.  Julie is doing well, going through six-year retests for her cancer.  Nervousing, which is why I'm a grump.  In spite of that, we are overwhelmingly grateful for her life and her generosity of spirit.   5.  I still can write, maybe even better than before.  Keeping up with brilliant young techies who are internet investigators and attorneys.  Now that pleases me.

So, doing a little better here.

Next up, the secondary, tertiary gratitudes:  1. I am so grateful for my church and the foundation it provides for my life.  I am quickly reaching my kitty, naps, and tea years,  and finding that there are few "rules" doesn't impinge my freedoms, but frames them.  2.  I am deeply grateful for my kitty, my champion snuggler.  3.  I am so grateful for my friendships, which feel more like family now, anyways.  4.  Things still interest me: books,  weather patterns, riotous ideas fueled by a sensibility of helping other folks, a really good belly laugh.  5.  What is important is very important, and what isn't. . . isn't.  I am increasingly abysmal at hiding the difference.

Deep sigh here.

And lastly, a couple of things that  hardly matter, except that they do:  1.  I'm so grateful that I can still make a really decent pie.  A succulence.  Fed fathers, uncles, and grand fathers, traveling physicians and their families, brothers, cousins, and three sterling friends, an officer and two professional drivers; nephews and nieces who adored them when they were little, little kids.  Comes in handy this time of the year.  And 2.  I catch onto skullduggery, outright lies, brouhahas, undeterred silliness, pufffery, idiocy, miswhacks. and dipsy-doodles ever so much faster.

Must mean I'm still learning.

So grateful for that.  Makes me smile.

Kids I Grew Up With

A photo taken of my four-room elementary school, complete with a bell.  We had homemade rolls and fried chicken for lunches in the basement.

I missed my 50th reunion, but the people who attended had so much fun and rousted up such good memories that they decided to keep in touch.  I was invited to join in.  Said yes.  Pronto.

I'd lost touch with so many of those kids, even though we started first grade together and graduated, pretty much intact.  I think only Carmelo, our resident Basque kid, moved away.  It's tough to place the photos of people now with the children and teens I knew then.  Names changed too, particularly with the girls, through marriage.

Melba in the 1950s and 1960s was a mystical farming community, with fields in varying shades of green, well kept homes, neighbors and their children on farms that were a quarter mile away.  I was a dorky sort of kid, more interested in books than lipstick, although the boys were pretty darn cute.  All that bucking hay bales gave them wonderful shoulders and strong backs.  They were all nice, and a little shy.  There were 28 kids in my graduating class.

So it was with some surprise that a lot of us geezers and geezerettes wound up on Facebook.

We share a checked past, post-high school.  One of my best high school friends, Bob T, turned out to be a gay man and he died of AIDS.  His obituary focused on the truth, which I imagine, he held close and kept dear.  It wouldn't have made a whit of difference now, but then it did.

Two boys, Donnie and Bobby G, died in Vietnam, a thing our Harley guy, Perry, still grieves.

Eddy died in a car wreck not a week post-graduation.

Donna died of a brain tumor,  Another Barb, a year older, died of cancer.  Eileen and probably Billy K were suicides.  Janel,  Paula, and Joyce have the most children.  Larry, I think, made the most money, but his sister Nancy might be dead.  There are a few serial marriages, a few with their original marriages still intact,  a few divorces.  One of which was my old boyfriend, Bill, who is now living with a woman sans marriage in a far-away city.  I wonder if it isn't my fault.  I was such a mess, due to a death in the family, the last year we dated that it might have marked him for life.  Certainly, it marked me.  Carole is a splendid artist,  I'm a writer, Judy is a wonderful photographer, and Janel was the musician.  Still might be.  I still see posts where our Harley guy writes poetry about his post-Vietnam experiences.  We're all pretty arty for such ragamuffins.

David is a pastor, married to his high school sweetheart, and we just saw each other a couple of Sundays ago.  David reminded me, not too long ago, what was said at my mother's funeral.  She was the high school secretary and the unofficial school counselor, and people have told me, "Your mom saved me, more than once."  So.  Sweet, that.

Most of us are parents and grandparents, aunties and uncles, loving the children that trail behind us.  A few of us are still renegades and not just the boys.  Most of us are ardent conservatives and my brother and I might be the only liberals, but we'll keep that our little secret.  

It's quite wonderful, 50 years later, seeing those family names reappearing again.  It feels like a grounding and a returning.  

A Sideways Kind of Light

November.  Thanksgiving.

We're getting close to  winter as the sunlight gets weaker and and wobblier, it also gets slanty.

And that accounts for the changes in our perceptions.  For example, a merely yellow tree turns into solid gold, and the leaves into golden coins.  It's only at certain times of the day or just after a storm.  Perhaps it is merely in our imaginations.  But the autumn sun does something to our colors and what we expect of them.

We expect them to dazzle.  These roses I captured today on a walk.   They are rosier than they were a month ago, the reds sweeter and more seductive.   The maples now  orange and red transmogrify into a rich and succulent merlot.  The frosts shed all the leaves on an Aspen in one night.  And the dark browns move through the caramels and the bronzes into a deepening mahogany molasses. 

Then it's time for a long, sweet nap, before the first tulips find the February sun and hold it accountable. 

So, Church

The October sun, which is filtering through the golden leaves outside, streams in through the stained glass rose window, which means the morning started off, base line, as staggeringly beautiful.

Next, the high school kids sang "He Never Failed Me Now," a gospel, spiritual, jazz piece that had the whole congregation, on it's feet, clapping and shouting, which would not be the only time that happened this morning.

Tim.  Of Tim and Julie.  I'll never have a son, but if I could choose. . .  He has a profound heart, acts as a God-Father to two little girls who really, really need him.  Is the best husband to Julie.  Is a big goof, who has no idea that people just follow him around.  Like Louetta.  Like Larry.  Like Stephanie.

Stephanie's dad, and three other men,  sang the 23rd Psalm.  Grandly.

We were roiling in the old Methodist hymn, Come Thou Font of Every Blessing.  I told Tim I didn't know what an Ebenezer was, as in "Here I raise my Ebenezer."  "Scrooge,"  Tim replied.  "Sometimes you just have to play along."

Julie was on Tim's other side and we all stood to sing.  I was hoping that Tim didn't forget which side Julie was on and pat my bum by mistake.  So, I did it.  Tim is enough taller than me that when I put my arm around his back, his bum got a little pat.  Yow.

Sometimes, I swear, God gets a good laugh in church.

Sometimes you just have to play along.

Then Yve Evans sang to us.  She was in Sun Valley last week for the Jazz Festival.  She has a Doctorate in music.  And she had us on our feet too.  Our little too-quiet Methodist selves were having the time of our lives.  In the next service, she'll tell us that she was diagnosed with a terrible lymphoma, from the base of her throat to the top of her pelvis.  Full of as much cancer as you can imagine.  From one "tit to the other."  Her words.  She went from walking into the doctor's office to Intensive Care in the space of a couple of hours.

Now, she's cancer free.   Six years out. She had me crying like a month-old baby with that one.

Yve promised that she would be unfiltered tonight.  Pastor  Duane said he didn't realize that she wasn't already.

So, if you want to understand joy, you'll have to come and see a cancer-free jazz angel sing her heart out and tell a hundred jokes.  Then you'll sorta understand.

As far as I could see, only two old guys slept through it.

When A Great Kid Bites the Dust

Well, you sorta need to live in a football-crazed town to understand this.

It happens that I do.

We're not as rabid as Texas, but we're close.  I live within a half a mile of Boise State.  Between Boise State and my friend, Larry, I admit I've come to like college football games.  And those are more fun when you win.  Larry is an avid fan, one of those rare guys that understands the whole shebang.  He has a whole lotta 'splainin to do where I'm concerned.

I'm not a fan of those big blow-outs, and we've lived through some of those.  I'm a simple-minded fan, like high scoring games, games where everybody gets home with their dignity and their digits intact.  My idea of a contact sport is doubles ice dancing.  So I'm a prissy sort of whimpy sort of auntie, who'd rather make chocolate chip cookies, most of the time, and spoil the local kids rotten.

Our quarterback broke his ankle, fell on it, rolled over it, had it stomped on.  Don't know for sure.
What I did see was a student who was frantic and out-of-your mind frustrated with that event.  You know how horses get this wild-eyed, head-twisting, need to escape when those babies are terrified.  That was the look Joe had as he hopped, on canes, toward the locker room.

I felt so bad for him.  His senior year.  Any hopes of NFL play, dashed.  The big plans he had for this year.  Gone.   Stunning to lose all of that in a minute, and to have a completely uncharted future in the time it takes to snap your fingers.  Can you imagine the adrenaline coursing through that kid's veins at that moment?

Here's what I hope for Joe:  that he relishes the time he had as quarterback and realizes that he had a great gift that few kids get; the he buckles down with his studies and charts out a newer future, one that requires the grit and fire football required of him, maybe art, maybe quantum physics, maybe history; that he listens to his mom and dad, his friends, and maybe a girl friend who will reassure him that he is still loved and respected, grandly.

The new kid, Grant, stepped up and did a magnificent job.  He'll get the spotlight for awhile now.
Football has some really tough lessons attached to it.  Hope those kids remember that, at base, it's still a game.

So this Story Is True

"Hey  Sophie!   What are you doing here?"

My friend Diane had stopped by to deliver some poetry stuff and was staying for tea.  I was fussing in the kitchen.  She was in the living room.

I don't  have a Sophie that lives with me.  I don't know a Sophie.

I walked around the corner, and Diane was talking to a curly-haired, black pooch, who seated, was still about chest-high.

"Well hi!"  I said and reached out and scratched Sophie's ears.  She was mightily glad to see some humans that liked her and wanted to pet her.

Sophie lived with Diane's next door neighbors and that was about a mile away, as the road goes, about half a mile as the crow flies.

Apparently,  Sophie had escaped, run down the hill, couldn't find her way back home.  She'd spotted Diane, whom she knew, followed her into my apartment building, then knew enough to search the open doors on a summer day, found my patio door open, walked in, and plopped her sweet self down until Diane spotted her.

I still shake my head.  How do dogs know what to do?

Diane called Sophie's human mom and she popped down the hill and picked up Soph.  Now there's a dog you want to know.