Christmas Is So Just About Over

The tree is starting to smell old, the votive candles are banished to a box Jerry labeled "candle cups," and all appealing chocolate treats have been eaten, if only to get rid of them.  January's breathing down my neck.  Time to reflect.

One of the very best presents I received was a card from my friend Evelyn.  You may remember a blog post I wrote about her in July ("Being 89").  She's had some health problems lately, and  I thought, why not mail a copy of that post to Evelyn in a Christmas card?  Might cheer her up.  In return I received a homemade card, which you are lucky enough to share:

Front of the card, felt glued to sparkly paper

A message from Evelyn

High Dudgeon

This morning I threw open the little window in the closet of Jerry's study. If I stand on tip-toe, from there I can see directly into Laura's courtyard next door.  I called to her daughter Leah,  freshly arrived home from college in Boston.  She looked splendid, red hair bouncing, with a new green handbag, off to meet someone for breakfast.  Then Laura appeared at their door.

"Come to our Hanukkah party tonight," she called up to me.  "Between 6 and 6:30."

"I'll see," I said.

"Are you in a dudgeon?" she asked. 

"Yes!" I answered. That sounded right.   I came straight indoors and looked up "dudgeon" in the dictionary to make sure: "a fit or state of angry indignation usually provoked by opposition."

Well, if the opposition is the pressure to conform at Christmas, then I've been in an annual December dudgeon ever since I figured out there wasn't a Santa Claus. At that point, it just became a matter playing along.  One year Jerry and I escaped to Hawaii.  Another year I took down the Christmas tree on Christmas morning. Boxed up the ornaments and threw the tree out the door. Laura's been my neighbor for 24 years, and she's heard my complaints many, many times.

This year we have houseguests (Jerry's daughter and her husband) and a number of people coming for Christmas dinner.  It's important to keep up my spirits.  Today's remedy:  A brisk walk around Lafayette Reservoir--nearly three miles--and then a peppermint hot chocolate at Starbuck's.

Sorry State of Personal Chocolate Supply

Day 4 (or is it 3?):  6 left out of 30

Not A Casual Undertaking

I know--another Christmas post, but aren't we subsumed by The Season?  It's hard to get away from it and everything it dredges up.

Here's a Christmas card my cousin Marion sent from England:

Horseguards Parade

This card made me pine for England, and I began to cook up a plan to make a quick, family-only trip, in April. I called United Airlines, with whom we have frequent flyer miles, to find out about upgrades.  In so many words: forget it.  Try about a year in advance and you might be able to score a confirmed upgrade.  For $795 each, we could fly round-trip Economy in April, and for a mad moment--having many of them these days--I considered it.  But we're old, and we find  transatlantic hours in Economy to be physical torture. 

Is there any way to make a casual trip to England, the way we fly from here to LA or even to New York?  Of course, we'd have to make plans for staying overnight.  But where overnight?  London (expensive)?  With relatives (not a good houseguest)?  How would we get around (renting a car is out, too weenie for British roads)?  Are the passports up to date?  And what about the plug adapters I can't find?

After I spent a half hour at the computer,  the dream evaporated.  And yet all of my family, except for my sister and Jerry, live there.  I keep thinking of my mother, who kept a daily vigil at the mailbox, watching for the fluttery blue airmail letters from her family.

Pub lunch: Jerry and me with  three of my cousins and spouses

Family resemblance?  My cousin Marion and me, Yorkshire

Domestic arrangements

We've been having our deck repaired, a two-week job that started in mid-October and still isn't finished. I've agreed to go with Gunmetal Gray paint on railing, even though I didn't choose it.  The stucco is repaired, the new rain gutter about to be installed. In our last conversation, the surly-sexist contractor was so polite  it was unnerving.

This morning on the way home from Safeway, Jerry and I were talking about arrangements for our houseguests, who arrive on Tuesday. My arrangements, anyway.

"You'll move out of your bathroom into mine," I instructed.  "The guests get all the towel racks in yours.  Then when my sister comes, she'll use my bathroom."  We pulled into the driveway, past all the construction junk flung around the yard.

"Then I'll move to the porta-pottie," he said, without missing a beat.   Problem-solving: the Man's Job.

Jerry's bathroom while we have houseguests?

Objet (dans le Salle de Bains?)

Approximately 5" tall. 

Yesterday I bought the above item.  I was quite taken with it.   

This morning I couldn't decide what the hell it is, let alone why I bought it, though it was cheap.  I decided to run it past Jerry.


"What do you think this is?" I said, handing it to him.

"A candle?"  he said, giving it the scientist squint.  "It's hollow," he added, helpfully.

At the mad moment of purchase (what is it about Christmas?) I, honest to God, imagined placing it in the upstairs bathroom next to the Kleenex box.  Nancy Reagan, in her memoir, refers to small decorative items as "objets" and says they "warm up" a room.  Jerry refers to such things as knick-knacks, and he doesn't understand them at all.  Neither do I, except in a mad moment at Pier One just before Christmas.

Here is the object in its intended setting, except I can't actually imagine stationing it here:

When does sanity return?

Addendum:  My friend Lin suggests it's a placecard holder.  I think she's right. Got it all wrong.

Looking Micro

 I was all set to outline My Recent Social Whirl, dinners and gifts and generosity (and also some weariness at quite so many dinners out on consecutive nights), but today I came across a slew of posts on my Facebook page about the death of Christopher Hitchens.  He died yesterday of esophageal cancer at 62.   For months, he's been writing about his decline in Vanity Fair, clear-eyed and brutally honest.

 Hitchens's brother Peter wrote a heart-breaking tribute to his brother ("In Memoriam, My Courageous Brother Christopher, 1949-2011" at www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133).    I read it and felt  such a resonance with the recent death of my friend Rob.  Both of them, too soon.  So sad, so  unfair.  My God, is this what lies ahead for one after another of us?  I could feel myself sliding into a global funk, beyond sadness into what Jerry calls  "doooom."

When they were small, my adoptive nieces next door could instantly transport me out of these funks. One day when Leah was eight, she and I counted all the lavender plants in about a six-block radius, which takes a lot of careful looking. I couldn't believe how quickly I shed my worries. And it wasn't about distraction or denial: her world was very real.  Is very real.  Today  I'm trying to figure out the equivalent of counting lavender bushes. Just thinking about it makes me feel on more solid ground.  Doooom is quicksand.

Wall Candy

So, yesterday I'm in a waiting room leafing through an issue of  "Architectural Digest," a magazine that brings out my inner communist, and I come across the description of a Palm Beach penthouse owned by an art collector and philanthropist named Emily Fisher Landau.

"When the wall candy runs from Willem de Kooning to Ellsworth Kelly to Agnes Martin," as [the interior designer] put it, "who's going to look at a piece of upholstery first?" 

Indeed.  But describing paintings by de Kooning et al. as "wall candy"?  Describing any art as wall candy?

The Season of Exasperation

A first, perhaps?--My hairdresser returned his Christmas tree.  A real one.  It was too short  for the room and the branches didn't hold up under the ornaments. He got a taller one and brought it home, scratching his newly refinished floors.   He painstakingly threaded strings of lights through the branches.  When he finished, the tree lights went off. He re-worked all the plugs on the strings. The lights came back on.  He decorated the tree.  All the lights went off.

He's put in 7-1/2 hours of work on the tree, and the lights are still hit-or-miss.  He says when Christmas is over, he's throwing out the lights with the tree.

Pockets of Community

We all have them: groups of people we know from jobs or recreational activities or volunteer work, or whatever.  I have several POCs,  and right now all of them seem to want to gather to mark the season.  I feel run off my feet but thankful.

A week ago,  the Food Pantry had a dinner for its volunteers, potluck but mostly cooked by Wes, the most faithful volunteer of all, who works at the Pantry every day it's open.   There were couple of dozen volunteers, plus some spouses, around thirty all together.  And six pies.

Gifts for my quilt mini-group's party

Yesterday,  five us who met in a water exercise class had Chinese food in a restaurant and then a batch of highly-carbed,  decadent cupcakes I brought from "Love at First Bite," a shop in the Gourmet Ghetto.  One of the women had a birthday (70, but who's counting?).

Next week, my quilt mini-group, twelve of us, meets for its annual Christmas party, which always includes a feast and Prosecco. Also next week, three of us who worked together twenty years ago are having dinner at LaLime's in Berkeley; one is bringing his girlfriend.

After that, it's all about family and the handful of other people coming to Christmas dinner.  But now that I think about it, that will include my good friend and neighbor Laura and her two daughters, so that's another POC:  neighbors. 

Contractor Hell

Oh, readers, you are hearing from a weary woman.  I have friends with much worse stories, people  who had exterior walls removed and then the contractor disappeared to McLaughlin, Nevada, to gamble away what they'd paid him.   My story is about a deck railing painted a color I don't want and didn't choose.   The railing is languishing in a warehouse in San Leandro because I don't want it installed.  The clerk who answers the phone at the ironworks says the railing is "real pretty."

The long view:  How much can a deck railing color matter?  People are hungry ; I see it every week at the Food Pantry.

The short view: The contractor didn't listen.  I'm right, he's wrong.

Didn't sleep well last night.

How About a Suggestion, Ho, Ho, Ho?

Jerry's got the door to his study closed, and I can hear him mumbling into the phone.  I'm pretty sure he's ordering my Christmas presents.  I helped him by tearing pages out of catalogs and supplying 800 numbers. (He doesn't do online ordering, too much frustration re forgotten passwords.)

Years ago, pre-internet ordering, I was in a golf shop buying a putter Jerry wanted,  and I mentioned to the salesman that I supplied Jerry with a list of things I'd like for Christmas and the names of stores where he could find them.  "Oh, boy!" the salesman said.  "If my wife did that, she'd get twice as much."  These days, I'd order the putter online, but I'd still need direction about which putter. 

When I was college,  I worked at a department store during Christmas breaks, and I saw many bewildered husbands buying gifts for their wives.  Once I waited on Willie Brown and two other lawyers.  They commiserated.  "I see you've got some bills there," said WB,  surveying the clothes one man was buying for his wife.  "Yeah," said the man.  "It'll add up to enough so she can return them for something she really wants."

Sigh.  Is this a way to run Christmas?  Probably not.   Catalog-page suggestions are a better fit for us, even if it doesn't leave a lot of room for surprise. I tell myself it's a form of communication, and God knows I would have never known Jerry longed for a tome on native plants (Done!  Courtesy of  the UC Press website).

When You Run Out of Netflix

So here's how it looks:  PBS is on near-permanent pledge, and I can't take another round of Peter, Paul, and Mary, let alone those inspirational speakers.   The ads on network TV drive me crazy.   Last night, at loose ends, Jerry and I tried to figure out if there are any DVDs or videos around the house that we hadn't seen yet.  Yes!  The videotape that came with our Corian countertops in 1999, and a DVD he was supposed to watch when he got a knee brace in 2007.  Still haven't watched them.

Encounter with a Fellow Traveler

One of the things I really like about travel is that I meet strangers on  trains and planes who tell me things about their lives.  Without fail, each person seems remarkable:  The mail carrier's wife from Long Island; the secretary to the former owner of the Warriors; and one of the most interesting--during a 50-block shared taxi ride down Fifth Avenue--an interior designer who'd tired of the Dalai Lama ("everything he says is so obvious").  I love these encounters and sometimes write about them in travel blogs.

The other day, taking a break from helping out at the Pantry,  I was eating lunch when a man sat down across from me with a pot of tea and a banana.  He introduced himself as Stanley, from Kenya.   He's a Quaker and  works as a custodian at the Friends Church four days a week.

Stanley

He began asking friendly questions.  How often did I volunteer?  How did I like it?  Usually I'm the questioner in encounters with strangers, revealing little about myself.  I countered with questions. How long was he in the U.S.?  Three years,  accompanying his wife while she earns an MBA and soon a Ph.D.  What was he doing while he was here?  Helping his wife with research, working at the church, and mentoring young African-American men in East Oakland.

He asked what I'd done when I was employed.  I said I'd been a writer. And what did he do in Kenya?  He's a writer.  Ha!  After that, we got down to what we like to write about (him: young people.  Me: everything, including mortality,  a topic he vigorously protested, waste of time, he said).  I took his picture and told him I might write a blog post about him.   He laughed and said fine.

While he's here, Stanley's writing feature articles in Swahili and sending them back to Kenya.  He seemed to think Jerry's job sounded pretty interesting and hinted that he would be a good subject for an article.

Christmas Cooking

Year after year, my sister and I struggled to cook Christmas dinners.  We've produced overdone pork roast, underdone prime rib, and only passable turkey.  We've cooked blurred by cocktails and stone-cold sober (not as fun).  Things got so desperate that several years ago, I began keeping track of what we did each Christmas so we could do a better job the next year:

1996: "Potato casserole got overcooked.  Dad complained green beans were stringy."

1999: "Dinner not so successful. Green beans would NOT cook; Yorkshire pudding was flat."

2000:  "Beef tenderloin too rare. GET A NEW INSTANT MEAT THERMOMETER."

2002:  "Christmas dinner was  excellent!  M. and I made a detailed schedule that was so helpful because we made it up while we were sober."

2003:  "Read this before doing a damned thing!  Make potato casserole the night before and cook it,  otherwise the onion and garlic are too sharp."

2006:  "Pork roast  that should have taken 75 minutes according to cookbook easily took two hours.  Took it out when thermometer read 135 degrees but was too soon."

2009: "Be sure to plunge thermometer DEEP into meat.  Don't start with  chilled roast."

And 2010?   In late middle age, with no more elderly relatives to cook for, only forgiving pals and younger family members, we threw in the towel and ordered the entire dinner from A.G. Ferrari.

Blocks

My friend Rob is  much on my mind these days.  It's been two months since he died, a  dear friend of 49 years lost to  cancer.   Even though I didn't see Rob often after we graduated from college,  I feel haunted by the loss of  him.   Laura, my good friend who's also a therapist, says that each death stirs up memories of other deaths.  This feels right to me.  I'm preoccupied not only with Rob but with my mother, who died 19 years ago.

I'm a quilter, and I've been working on a quilt that is all about green vines.  Apparently.   It's going nowhere.  The other day, I suddenly had an image in my mind of a new quilt block, completely unrelated to vines. I thought, what the hell, and rummaged around in my fabric collection. Then I sewed what I saw in my mind's eye:

  I felt better.  After I stared at that block for a few days and tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a "real" quilt, a bed quilt, I gave up. My hand reached for other fabrics:

The hand-dyed fabric in the center has the suggestion of a horizon.  I can't tell you what this block means exactly, but I can tell you it's in synch with how I feel about Rob right now, that he's just off-shore, in the amorphous blue. When my mother died, I collected pictures of rowboats, and sewed paper xerox copies of them onto plain gray fabric.  I was comforted by the image of her rowing to heaven.