No Fun

Those were cold, grey days growing up in Middle Haddam. Clouds promised snow but rarely produced enough to be useful. Somewhere in the back of an imagined scrapbook the snow reaches to the window panes but in reality we kids were lucky to see a foot and that didn’t last. Only the grey lasted all winter, through March and into April. Yet there was nary a new leaf on the big maples until well past my birthday in early May, when Mom was not quite ready to put away winter coats.

There was nothing to do because it was December. The snowman melted. After a terrific fight with the neighbor kids we obliterated the snowfort. There were some hard feelings with the only likely playmate, next-door Chris, a year older. He had surprisingly good aim for a kid who didn’t play baseball and he packed a nasty ice ball. Never mind I had thrown first yesterday, ice balls were cheating. Now there was nothing to do on a cold, gloomy afternoon.

“Go play outside. Get some fresh air. Go sliding. Did you wax Daddy’s skis?”

His old hickory skis were way too long and heavy for me to actually ski and they stuck to everything. Not only that, the gentle slope behind our barn was only a few hundred feet long and ended in trees so even if you could get going, you’d have to fall down to stop before you tangled up in the brush.

You never got enough snow in Middle Haddam. Not really good, deep snow. Our sled runners had worn right down to the grass and rocks the day before. Besides, skiing or sliding by myself was No Fun, that dismal category of existence that dogged my childhood.

No Fun. The afternoon stretched into eternity. My mittens were wet and so were the linings of my five-buckle galoshes. Rexie lay curled comfortably against the living room couch, his eyes shut tight.

“Wanna go outside?” I whooped at him but he only fluttered his tail politely against the floor.

“Mom, it’s starting to rain,” I whined.

“No, it’s not. Run along now. See if Chris is home.”

“They’ve gone to the Ice Capades,” I muttered. They went every year and didn’t take me again this year because I had done something horrible such as breaking a window accidently on purpose. Or they were going on to visit cousins in West Hartford. Such a happy, jolly family piling into their back Ford sedan, the three big kids in back, baby Alice in front between David and Henny.

We never went anywhere every year. My family was No Fun. And I was all alone on a dismal day.

“Where’s Tink?” I asked, again. My best friend, my age, who didn’t throw ice balls, lived in the next town.

“She and Maggie went shopping. Why don’t you go ride your horse?”

I pulled on my cold boots and mittens and let the storm door slam as hard as it would. There at the end of the driveway stood our old white-painted barn, two stories tall, wide enough for both cars and a workbench alongside one. I pushed one heavy sliding door open enough to squeeze through into the dank gloom. It smelled of motor oil and old, raw wood, an acrid, pissy smell.

Dad’s tools lay on a gouged-out plank counter among cans of paint thinner and glue, clamps and screwdrivers, signs of his household projects, perhaps tacking a painting into a frame or fixing a lamp. I glanced at the long-necked oil can and a screw-top copper mister of Flit bug killer, paint brushes, cobwebs, signs of long-gone summer, absolutely nothing of any relevance to me there. The lawnmowers, one power, one push, rested at the end of the bench.

Dust lay on every object, testimony to it’s disuse. Beyond the lawnmowers, at the very back of the barn, just past the front bumper of Mom’s car, a stair led up to the second floor.

There was nothing of any interest to me up there, only old oil paintings and trunks of Spanish shawls and ivory combs, old letters and journals. Stuff my dead aunt Edith had brought back. We kids wrapped ourselves in those black and gold shawls with long, long fringe and tried to stick the big combs into our girlish hair but they fell right out. Such long teeth on those combs and the fancy lace carving. Some were translucent, some light and brown. No one ever asked us to even be careful. One day that would all disappear.

In summer, bright sunlight pierced the siding and the little windows of the high cupola and brightened the dark matched-boards of the walls and ceiling. And it illuminated the bodies of dying wasps littering the old, rough plank floorboards. Overhead thickets of slow-flying wasps with long, dangling legs dipped and swooped too close as they came and went from their nests in the cupola.

There was one place in the barn I liked from the first moment I let myself believe it was what it seemed. What I longed for. Beyond the lawnmower, under the space of the stairs an old horse stall remained, about five feet wide and eight feet long, just the right size for a real horse. My parents always adamantly refused to let me have a horse and it was a constant battle between us.

As a sop to my obsession and no doubt at my mother’s insistence, Dad set a barrel on home-made sawhorses in that stall, screwed a plywood neck and two-dimensional head on that. Clothesline reins dangled from a notch in this head that faced out through the heavy sliding doors. I stepped up onto the milk box and swung my leg over this doll-horse’s dusty barrel and settled myself on it’s horribly bulging, slippery shape. Try as I might, this was no live horse. I clucked and kicked my heels against the air, feeling like a fool.

Nothing happened, of course, except I had a higher view into the front seat of my mother’s car just a few feet away. So many obstacles. A terrible sadness filled me, a certain knowledge that I would never feel a live creature under me, that I would never put my hand on a warm neck, that no powerful body would gather itself to take me out of the barn and into sunny fields. Beyond, into my real life.

No, that December afternoon would last forever, all dust and darkness.

Then my mother’s voice called me from the back door, high and sweet.

“Reedie? Come on in and get cleaned up. We’re going over to Maggie’s for dinner.”

It wasn’t always No Fun. Inside my boots eventually dried. The neighbors came back and eventually it snowed enough to ski down that hill and in just a few years when I had my own barn my mother gave me $250 to buy a real horse I could sit on in his stall when the December sleet sifted down and as long as I can help it there will always be a real horse. Fun!

Talk to Christmas animals

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/20/mark-wahlberg-talks-to-ch_n_398436.html?fbwall

So, talk to them. Who? Them! Christmas animals! Aren't your reading this blog??

Talking Houses

If the walls could speak, what stories they could tell. Old houses would have many tales of lives begun and ended within their rooms. Family battles. A drunken aunt, a sickly father, money coming in and going out. Old houses remember the irresistible smell of roast chicken, the horrible stink of burnt lima beans. The time the roof leaked, the time the snow beat on the window panes and the furnace roared to keep everyone warm and safe inside.

New houses? Well, you have to start somewhere. But I don’t think gypsum board can tell as good a story as the plaster some tired man mixed with a trowel. Plywood floors do not remember the sounds of your heels as well as real oak or pine. Real wood never dies, it becomes more beautiful as it ages. And those efficient, new plastic windows that never warp or shrink certainly keep out the drafts and mosquitoes and the sound of traffic a few blocks over. Keep out the smells of the neighbor’s barbeque and the sounds of a wailing baby, too.

Old trees guard old houses, tall, leafy shade in the summer and bare branches in winter to catch the stars. New houses have to wait years for this sweet embrace. Old houses may once have looked alike in a builder row but they have grown wings and ells and second stories and character. Old houses have old gardens where tomatoes grow every summer and all the birds for miles around know the birdbath will be fresh every morning. Old houses’ doors may not close tightly and they don’t have garages in front but they do have porches to sit on so you can wave to the folks pushing baby carriages along the sidewalks.

If you live in an old house, that is, a house that’s older than you are, take a moment to listen to the creak of the radiator, the squeak of a certain floorboard, the sounds of water running through the pipes. You may hear the footsteps of those who came before you. Where did they go? Where do any of us go when we move on?

Our houses remember us and hold the sound of our footsteps through all the years ahead.

Old Mothers

You can be outside of Christmas, looking into the cozy scene with longing, and you can also feel beyond Christmas. Looking back at my mother’s brave efforts to make wonderful holidays for me and my father when there wasn’t much money to spend, I see the image of a woman rowing a small boat into a storm-tossed sea. Goodness, did I ever, ever, even as an adult, ask her what her life was like? Really listen?

No. The late spring bulbs of sympathy and understanding toward her are only now poking their noses up through the compost of my many years. So, Mom, this is what you went through, the joy of parenting a child, the heartbreak of watching her go and the long impatience waiting for her to recognize you. Duh.

Did she know the stockings she stuffed, the doll she made and the hip-roofed doll-barn she encouraged my father to build me, the expensive, beautiful horse books she bought me, all the more credit to her since she disliked horses in general, would go unappreciated? Sure, I was polite but I never gave up my grudge against her: that I never got the one thing I wanted which was a real, live horse of my own in our real barn. A real saddle, a real bridle with a real bit. Brushes and a hoof pick. The sweet smell of horse on me day and night.

Mom really flexed her creative muscles to make up for this permanent loss. But it was never enough for me. Selfish, bratty kid that I was.

But now, years later, I salute my long-departed Mom. Perhaps not departed altogether. Perhaps sitting on top of a snowy cloud, clicking her heels together as she peers down at me.

“You got your horse, after all,” she says. “So Merry Christmas and stop whining.”

Darkness at Solstice

Finding Christmas, leaving the year

Winter solstice is the end of a season of life and for many of us the memory of the year brings sadness and loss. When the leaves have fallen and your bare trees hold the stars at night, find an evergreen. Cut a few branches that smell of sap and set them by the hearth.

Light a bright fire to hold the longest night at bay. This will remind you that after billions of years, since before anyone imagined keeping time, our planet has spun like a top around our sun. On December 20 it begins again its endless tilt toward heat and light and growth. Every single day after is two or three minutes longer than the day before. You might ask, who pulls the string to keep this top turning?

What is Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanza but a bright passage to the new year? Make a rich altar over that fire. If you have them, set out the tiny crèche figures who promise that birth follows death. Lay greens and berries and sparkly garlands. Light candles to assuage that dread of darkness the way our ancestors lit torches around the bodies of their dead. The flames that guide the soul into the hereafter also illuminate the faces of those of us who remain behind.

Love what you have. And watch for the narcissus.

Good News

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/#business-1

Just when you thought the world was coming to an end, here are some really wonderful ideas for all the problems we struggle with.

You see, our fellow citizens are ALSO smart, creative and very, very busy.

In the darkest days of the year, hope.

“I hate Christmas,” my husband said.
“Me, too,” I replied.

We are not alone. Lots and lots of people feel quite gloomy every December. Not children, of course, and probably not the parents of small children who are passing on the tradition of Christmas to those youngsters so one day they will transmit it to theirs and so on. Spending their treasure on the kids with the usual profligacy, continuing to blend nostalgia into debt.

Big news. Duh. Even we blonds know Christmas is for children. This is a good thing. We are showing how much we love children or at least, like them, or some of them. But—what if you don’t have any children around to carry on your personal, traditional, HoHoJollyChristmas role? What if there's.. no one.

Then you are in reality outside of Christmas. Of course you feel blue. Or suicidal. Outside of Christmas means you will not go shopping for fuzzy toys or buzzing motors, you will not imagine the cuddles and the shining faces around the glittering tree. No, like the Scrooge of the dreaded Christmas Past, you will suffer the long December nights, watching the phone not ring. Shuffling through the mail, grateful for a card from the car dealer, the insurance agent and a hopeful Realtor.

Not that you send any cards. Oh, you think, why bother? They don’t care. Sure, I’m a grandpa but I’m too far away. Outside the family.

Maybe you’re not even a grandpa. You’re an aunt, a perfectly healthy 60-year-old aunt with a generous heart, lonesome for your nieces and nephews. Somebody else’s kid to snuggle. But no, they are all busy ripping the paper off a thousand gifts and the ones your sent are at the bottom of the pile. You will have to call later to ask them if they like what you sent and they won't remember which was yours.

While the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings Silent Night you will spend a lonely Christmas Day in a tree-less living room. You will swig a too-sweet eggnog, then go-ahead and sweeten that glass with another slosh of scotch, all the better to enjoy your misery, your no-stocking fireplace with not even a good old dog to keep you company. You have a roaring case of the Christmas Blues.

Here’s the remedy: number one: get over it. Understand that your happy childhood Christmases were wonderful because somebody else made them that way. Those folks are gone now.

But other parts of your life were pretty damn good, too. Think of really great sex in the back seat of some boy's car. Think of that trip to Paris when you snuck off with your boyfriend, leaving the children with your clueless husband. Start planning a really good vacation for yourself.

Number Two, Nostalgia increases wrinkles. Stuff the Blues into a scrapbook you open every December first. Have a good cry but as you reach for the Kleenex, find a morsel of humor in your slobbering. Is it not ridiculous for a grown-up to pine for the stocking she once hung by a long-dead fire? Was it really that great?

Three: Stuff someone else’s stocking this year. Yeah, I know you always do. My mother always told me to bet big on the Now. So, whatever you gave last year, an old frozen turkey (a pox upon you!) or a check for $10.000, double it.

Dance all night

Here's a delightful column Sister Maureen sent me from the Philadelphia Inquirer by Francesca Serritella, an honors graduate at Harvard.

My grandmother, whom you know as Mother Mary, just turned 86 years old, and so I gave her a call. I sang "Happy Birthday," we discussed the usual topics, and then she asked me one of the questions she always asks: "Kitten, are you having fun?" And for once, I had a real story for her.
I answered, "I had the best night of my life."
Last weekend, my cousin invited me to a charity ball. I expected it to be a formal, bordering on stuffy, occasion, one that intimidated me. But I had a red dress in my closet, and sometimes that is reason enough.
The night turned out to live up to every possible promise a red dress can make. The event was held in a beautiful old New York building. There, I met a British man who was so handsome, so debonair, I could hardly speak when he started talking to me, much less move when he asked me to dance.
He led me to the dance floor, where we remained for the next two hours. He spun me around like a pro, and on the last beat of every song, he'd toss me into the most daring, thrilling dips, the sort of trust-me-or-die, hair-grazes-the-floor dips that make other people stop and look.
A group of us, including Prince Charming, ended the night at an authentic piano bar - a tiny place where a gifted pianist played song after song, and the waitress and bartender took turns singing long after last call.
Finally, it was time for me to bid my reluctant farewells. I stepped outside and saw that my golden coach was once again a yellow taxi, and the evening rain had released smells of the city not found in fairy tales.
Driving home, replaying the evening in my mind, I could barely believe such a night could be real. As I stepped out of the cab, I looked down at my feet and saw that both of my shoes had an ugly bit of glue exposed over the peep-toe. And then I realized I had my proof that the night had really happened:
I had danced the bows off my shoes.
"Oh, Kitten, that's marvelous!" my grandmother cried. Her tone turned serious: "But did you sing at the piano bar?"
I laughed. "No."
"No?! Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know, I'd be too embarrassed. I don't think I even know all the words to any song."
"You know all those Sinatra songs! I always used to sing at piano bars when I was young. Anywhere I went, if there was a piano, I would sing. You see, I was a bit of a show-off then."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh yeah! I would go to a party in a great dress, and I'd dance all night in the center of the room, and I'd always sing at a piano. That was 60, 70 years ago, but I loved it. You should never be embarrassed. You should have sung your heart out."
The picture she was painting of herself was far different from the grandmother I knew, but it was one I could see clearly. I realized that inside the woman who survived an impoverished childhood, who selflessly raised two kids and worked when few women did, who despite arthritic fingers and worsening eyesight can still assemble 100 perfect ravioli on any given afternoon, inside my grandmother, was a woman who loved the limelight, who could dance all night, and who sang at a piano, always.
We said goodbye, and when I hung up the phone I had a different perspective on my night at the ball. At the time, I had tried my hardest to live in the moment, to savor every minute of that night. The next day, I had rushed to tell my friends before I forgot a detail; I'd even been tempted to write it down in a journal, get it on the record, anything to preserve a magical evening that was over too soon. But now I know it was a night I will carry with me. A night I will tell my grandchildren about - the night I danced the bows off my shoes.
I know I will remember that night, because my 86-year-old grandmother still does. But the next time I'm in a piano bar, I'll sing.

Talking Animals

It wasn’t just Christmas Eve, the talking animals. The idea that I could speak with critters always lay at the bottom of my consciousness like a persistent fog that humidified and nourished my waking mind.

Banished from Eden, Eve and her husband got dominion over all the creatures of the earth, or so they have said. I think the garden gates slammed shut on that hapless couple just before the Maker could grant the power to understand their fellow creatures. Ever since, animals have survived exactly because none of Eve’s children ever learned to really listen to them. Or ever bothered to, too busy slaughtering them, enslaving them, or, I have to admit, enjoying the great pleasures of riding them, if they are horses, although I have ridden terrified cows as a child--unsucessfully--without knowing one damn thing about their thoughts.

When I looked into my hound dog's deep, brown, forgiving eyes, I felt I was almost there, at that magic point where I knew exactly what he was saying.

The dog wasn’t asking anything for himself. He was transmitting a Superior Light of Understanding. And a sweet forgiveness no human could ever bestow.

I’m sure that’s what he meant. Said.

Running late!

Wait, wait, I'm almost finished with the barn story. Be right back.

Christmas Magic

At what age did I begin to understand that Santa is a only a dream? Five or six? By the time I was seven or eight there were dismaying inklings he might not really exist. Belief shrunk a little every year. First that Santa lived with Mrs. Santa and the elves all year, then he existed only a month or so before Christmas and then only on Christmas Eve and finally only at midnight for one magical hour. Even that was hard to hold onto.

It didn’t matter what older kids told me. By seven I had learned to ask hard questions for myself: Do reindeer actually fly? The North Pole had a definite geographical location and it was pretty darn far from my house. How could one person, if Santa really was a person, visit everyone in the whole world?

By eight I knew Santa did not visit many children especially poor, hungry children in faraway countries. Or even poor children not far from our own house because Mom and Dad delivered grocery bags to poor families down the road in Haddam Neck and sometimes grocery bags of my own toys and books that I had played with and didn’t mind saying good-bye to.

As I began to notice that Santa Claus was fatter than any grown-up I knew, he seemed to melt like a snowman. How could he jump down the chimney when I burned my fingers hanging up a stocking? Even on Christmas Eve my parents argued. The world was becoming a painful place because all my senses denied Santa Claus.

I held on as long as I could. I loved the tooth fairy and the little people who lived under the morning mushrooms. But when I stopped looking under toadstools I could still find them in books. Of all Mom’s tales, I loved best the story of how the animals talk at midnight on Christmas Eve.

Of all the magic in my state of grace, communing with the animals was dearest. Ah, I longed to hear what my dog and cat could tell me, the words of the birdsongs, the conversation among those bony cows in the pasture and when I could find one, a horse—oh, to talk to a horse that might sprout wings and fly—that would be better than a tooth fairy and little people and even dear, fat Santa Claus.

“How come animals can talk at midnight, Momma?”
“Because Baby Jesus is born. That’s a miracle. Strange and wonderful things happen when there’s a miracle.”

“But why can’t I hear them talk?”

My mother shook her head. “It’s too late for little girls. But I know they do. I’ve heard them. Now snuggle up and Daddy will read “Twas the Night Before Christmas."

She put her finger beside her nose and cocked her head as if to hear something faint. "And listen for Santa’s sleigh bells.”

Talking animals. Would they tell me they were happy? Now, the birth of Baby Jesus was mildly interesting, Joseph was the father but not really a father like my Dad. A real Dad was much better. I knew that people had babies all the time and visitors came to admire them, although not kings on camels, at least not in Middle Haddam. I knew the whole story of Baby Jesus because every year I played a small part in our Sunday school’s Christmas pageant. Never Mary or even the Angel, those star roles went to the big kids. No, the best I could do was to wear an extremely scratchy burlap shepherd costume over my undies and carry a heavy stick. There was not one live sheep or donkey in the crèche. Even Baby Jesus was just somebody’s doll.

It was cold being a shepard. My bare arms and legs froze because the rector wouldn’t waste heat on a twenty-minute kids’ pageant. Grownups in the congregation wore their coats and scarves and hats and couldn’t wait for us kids to thump up the aisle, take our positions and hold still while the choir and congregation sang “Oh Holy Night,” “Silent Night” and “We Three Kings”. Even the organist wore gloves. Then we could go home and have supper.

After supper I put on my velvet dress and Mary Jane shoes to go to a real, grown-up Christmas Eve party. Handsome David and his wife, Henny, greeted me as solemnly as if I were a delightful guest and not a bratty kid that hung around with their kids every single day. This inspired me to behave like a lady for the whole evening. Every room in the lovely old colonial house gleamed and flickered with Christmas swags and wreaths, red and gold ribbons, lit only with candles. Candles upstairs and down, in every room, in every window: highly dangerous around folks tipsy on David’s eggnog. That only added to the excitment of watching the growups talk as if we children were invisible elves.

I did not horse around or almost tip over the tree or spill my eggnog cup on younger Helen or Alice to torment them. I was very, very good, good for David and Henny and my parents, maybe for Santa whose time was drawing near and especially for the animals who would talk later that evening when I would lie in my little bed up under the sloped ceiling.

After we got home, Mom and Dad puttered around downstairs, perhaps speaking to the dog, perhaps speaking with the dog. I wished they’d told me they were going to do that, wished I could rouse my sleepy self to tiptoe down the stairs to listen in on them. At that moment, as warm waves of sleep washed me into the ocean of dreams, I knew all the animals were talking and although I would miss it this year, it was really happening. And Santa Claus was really going to eat those cookies I left on the hearth. Tomorrow morning would prove it.

In the dim light of dawn, the house utterly silent, I snuck down the stairs to capture my dream one more time. Lights gleamed on the tree and there, right where I had hung it, proof: the fattened stocking.

I was nine or even ten that year when I could, for one last moment, hear the faint sound of bells as Santa's sleigh lifted off the roof.