December 25, 2021

 Oy, vey!

Another tree. Another wreath on the door. More red ribbons around the coach lights. Boombox carols in the air. Ham and sweets for dinner. Again. Tradition. Latkes were last month. Biscuits and gravy the morning of the 23rd. Fried chicken that night. Challah last night. And now?

Oy, vey!

Mulled wine not Manischewitz?

How?

Fall in love and find out. I married an Irish Catholic. She married a Russian Jew. 44 years in 2022. Believe it or not (I’m joking), it took some compromise to get us here. I never had a tree inside of anywhere I had a roof, not one tree, and certainly not a Christmas tree. She had never sat through a Yom Kippur service let alone no food or drink for 24 hours. She thought no food or drink was only on Fridays. So, here we are.

I’m in my office. Out the door three steps to my right is our living room. Even though this year’s firewood hasn’t been fully cured, a fire roars in the fireplace. It helps to  have this napalm like concoction to squeeze on the logs. My son has Chet Atkins playing Xmas music on his computer. My daughter helps her nephew navigate his myriad of toys. Sweet smells from the kitchen: ham and corn pudding on their way. My family is happy, and, I’m thinking, maybe I am, too. It’s taken me a lifetime but I think I’m beginning to get it, just as I think, at this age, that I have finally learned how to write and what to write about, and why I need to write about it. No coincidence. The place where I wrote from then is not the place I write from now.

(In some other life I once went out with a woman who said, “coinkidink”. One “coinkidink”. That was it.)

Everyone waited until Dorian, aged three, woke up because we wanted to see his face when he saw a brightly lit tree surrounded and stacked with all shapes of things wrapped with ribbons and a kaleidoscope of party paper. He spent a few seconds being stunned by the lights and a crystal that caught them. Unlike the Hanukkah menorah, he could not blow these out. Then, practical little creature that he is, he turned to a colorful mock-up of a kitchen complete with appliances and ware. My daughter and my son’s good friend had spent hours the night before putting it and everything else all together. It made me think of trying to put all that gear together when my kids were small: instructions translated by someone with English as a fifth language, screw holes a hair off, a threaded screw, one too few bolts in the bag. Drove me nuts but gives me pleasure watching my kids do it. It also made me think of it as a sign of the times. When my daughter was Dorian’s age we gave her a toy kitchen set that magnetized her from the time her eyes registered what it was. My son was given a train set. I’m sure you get my point. 

So, I’m sitting there this morning in my father’s chair - the same one I’ve been toting around since his death 60+ years ago - watching this little three ring circus, noting that my grandson was given a kitchen set but nowhere was there one of those small plastic basketball hoop set-ups. To be sure there were building blocks, construction stuff, race car tracks, and a plastic razor kit - Shave With Grandpa. I’m not suggesting these couldn’t or wouldn’t be used by a little girl, simply noting that there was no visible jock paraphernalia, and that mock-up kitchen really got him. Plastic taco, anyone? You would be surprised. I wouldn’t kid ya.

The thing is, they are happy in there. The living room is happy. This house is happy. If it could dance it would, not the kazatzka or a mazurka, not the Lindy or a do-si-do, but a waltz in some soft tempo. If it could sing, well, it seems to be doing just that right now, all the ages and voices and an occasional bark from one of the dogs, silence outside, all one. Joe Cocker sang, “You are so beautiful to me, yes, you are, you are so beautiful to me…” Elvis sang, “Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go, you have made my days complete, and I love you so.”

Bury me with this shit eating grin on my face.

As much as I have admired Joan Didion, I don’t think she would have admired me. Too sentimental. Perhaps too much chicken shmaltz on Shabbos as a kid or too many junkets to Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House on the Lower East Side. But, I have very smart, very big hearted Jewish friends who have an edge I don’t. An observation not a criticism. For a long time I wished I had that edge, and tried to, only I wasn’t an adept. It had to come as naturally as which hand you use, yet it didn’t, not to me. I’m not usually naive, only at critical moments when it really matters. Of course, this “flaw”  became another good reason to beat myself up. I wouldn’t say I’m a bleeding heart, but I do admit to needing the occasional tourniquet. Fine. Because I don’t care anymore. This “flaw”  has been known to fight for its right of return. A quick, full frontal counterattack drives it back. Dickens was sentimental. I should be so lucky, although I admit not being able to get through more than half of “Oliver Twist”.

I was raised in a violent household where we were taught “happiness is for idiots” aka “only idiots are happy.” My mother damned Portnoy’s Complaint as a batch of lies, especially that scene where his mother threatens him with a knife because he wouldn't

eat his liver. So, I reminded her, “Wait a minute, Mom, you forget, you once hit me with a knife because I wouldn’t eat my eggs.”

“I didn’t forget,” she shrugged, “I had to get you to eat your eggs somehow.”

Happiness is for idiots.

I swear.

Anyway, the point is, this happiness stuff: I could get used to it - that brush of butterflies fluttering happily in my belly, happily, I said, nothing fearful about them, just the trilleto of gossamer wings drawing light.

Just one of those things. 

Gossamer wings. Drawing light.

Just one of those crazy things. 

Water Starts In Wild Places

 My Godson, Reuben Sack, wrote this line: “Water Starts in Wild Places.” It got me thinking.

Is it true that every drop of water on earth has already been everywhere on earth a drop of water could ever be - above and below - every nook, each cranny - every crack and fissure, every undiscovered drip on the entire planet? Everywhere? Even the Gobi? A Cosmic Recycle? Somewhere I learned that.

I keep a sketch on my bulletin board of a whimsical little boy with his elbows on his knees next to a little stream. Its caption: everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen. Except for the fact that, as a little boy, I always thought I was fat, it could have been me. 

I stand on a small bridge crossing the creek in front of our house, and I begin to listen. The rush of Spring melt charges down the mountains taking no prisoners as it thunders through its channel. Trout get fat. The banks roar no matter where you walk. Summer water is quieter, still deep enough to cushion the sound, strong enough to chop water over rocks. Now, you can walk the banks and, if you listen hard, if you keep the flow in your ears, the water will tell you what’s beneath it. Come Fall the water feels lazier, flowing along, meandering at leisure. There’s less, so you can hear it better. Fresh water flows hoof deep over the flats. The deer will drink here. Come winter with its deepest snowfall under the full moon, come then a great hush. Is it any wonder? Is it any wonder at all? The creek is right underneath me. I fancy I can feel it’s vibrations through the soles of my boots. Its banks are too deep in snow for me to walk, so I stand on the little bridge and listen to the trickle of distant water right there beneath my feet.

This is why I write. I write to hear the water.

Poppa Took My Hand

           I finally wrote “The End” to novel #4 - “Been A Bad Ol’ Booger But He’s Come ‘n’ Gone”.  It’s a grandfather-granddaughter story that still needs work. The following is another excerpt. 

Please stay tuned.

Poppa took my hand and led me through the copse of ancient hemlocks as if I needed his protection. It was early spring. Daffodils had come up but lilacs were still a week away, mountain laurel three weeks from that. Jays were gone. Chickadees back. A blue heron fished the creek. We had to spray the dumpster with ammonia to keep a hungry bear at bay. Coyotes ambushed a raccoon near the chicken coop. All that was left of it were strands of grey and white hair. Coyotes eat everything but a gland in the anus. No sign of that, either. A morsel for something else. 

Poppa normally never hesitated to talk about anything at all, but this morning he stayed silent as we walked, setting his feet as if he were hunting, almost reverent, unwilling to disturb the peace. We stopped at the edge of a clearing where Poppa indicated something out there with his chin. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to see, but I followed him as he walked into the clearing until...There. Unclear to me until I moved closer. I had never seen anything like this before or since. Poppa had, but once. The racks and bones of two massive deer, thick-necked bucks with ten point racks, stout as cudgels, tangled, twisted, ultimately locked together, trapped, having fought until they died, socket to socket, smack against each other’s sight and smell, socket to socket, until they died. Much of the rest of them had been strewn about the clearing, vandalized by varmints, but those two skulls, now blind, remained, for eternity, locked in mortal combat.

A few days later, I found this on an index card that had fallen on the kitchen floor.

Talk to me of death

And I will tell you of a woodland dance

Hemlocks - a thick grove of them

A fitting place

A pas de deux - both dead

Like Romeo and Juliet

Only rivals

Beams eight points and ten

Thick as cudgels

Entangled by their horns

     And not their hearts

Titans locked in deadly battle

Crashing heads

Bucking for the “A” list

Eighteen tines tangled and trapped

Eye socket to eye socket

Call this place 

     Ozymandias

Someone with that name

Ruled over ancient ruins

This inscription left

  On a piece of stone:

“Look on my works and despair.”

Seed unspread

Scattered bones

Picked clean

Antlers gnawed by mites

     With yellow teeth

Ozymandias

  “Look on my works and despair”

Scattered bones don’t even get that.