Haiku for the Family

SIX KIDS THEN

















"Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders.
And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers,
complete with instructions.
Oh, easy for Leonardo!"

from A Child's Christmas in Wales
by Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953
Welsh poet, writer, and reader

My Haiku for the Family

I'll try to write a
Haiku for the Family
Once upon a time

The mother, the dad
Three little kids, two big kids
Then a new baby

Sunflowers in Kansas
Then Idaho, home of spuds
Show us Missouri

Few Acres, our farm
We could walk safely to school
Ah, the American Dream

"A little sparrow
Could not fall unnoticed Lord
By thee." Our first prayer

On to St. Louis
For a subdivision life
We passed through the Arch

(not the golden ones)
Gateway to the west Across
the Wide Missouri

Our oldest brother
A hero in Viet Nam
Plus, he wrote haiku . . .

That made sense to me
About our favorite sandwich
Titled "The Salmon":

"Bravely leaping falls
For love. They'll never call you
Chicken of the Sea" . . .

In a white notebook
Left behind when he grew up
But I cherished it

Our sister could sing
Took us everywhere with her
She loved the Beatles

If I was sick, she
Held my head when I threw up
Always there for me

Us four little kids
Little sister and brother
Twin brother and me

Born a Gemini
With a real twin, my brother
What's the connection?

"Love ya like a sis"
She wrote that to make me laugh
Well, we are sisters

The Little Baby
Jesus of our family
We adored him so

Childhood Games: Happy
Families, Snakes and Ladders
Monopoly Life

Why me, Oh Goddess?
Naturally curly, frizzy
What big hair you have

Ready to grow up
We each pick a way to go
What would we find there?

Boyfriend in high school
Touching but not forever
Time to walk away

Boyfriend in college
Oops, that was a big mistake
How to extricate?

Finished school at last
B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
The Ideal Husband

Inordinately
Realistic, said the quiz, yet
A true romantic

Remember that dream
A gentleman and scholar
From far far away?

Santa once brought me
Boy Doll with a big blond head
Then my two real boys

Looked just like that doll
But animated, not ours
They have their own plans

Another passage
Mid-life-crisis-empty-nest
Now it all makes sense

What keeps you going?
Obligation, holidays
Curiosity
Every day a new surprise!

SIX KIDS NOW












MY - NESS
"My parents, my husband, my brother, my sister . . .
I delight in being here on earth
For one more moment, with them, here on earth,
To celebrate our tiny, tiny my-ness."
by Czeslaw Milosz, 1911 - 2004
Polish poet, translator, Nobel Prize Winner

Nativity

The little tiny Santa was my mom's -- from the 1930s.
We always put him (& the lamp post)
in with our small white Nativity,
along with some canopic jars, that Sam created from Sculpey
for his 5th grade Egyptian project!
One Christmas vacation memory that I will always cherish is the year (1976, I think) when I had stopped by to visit my friend Marilyn and ended up spending the night with her family because it suddenly started snowing so hard that I couldn't drive home. We pulled on our boots and took a walk outside to see the lighted Nativity in her neighborhood. As we circled back around the block, Marilyn pointed to the fresh footsteps in the snow and said, "Look, someone has been to see the Baby."

Of course, they were our own footprints, for the snowy sidewalks were utterly quiet and untouched by any prints save our own. Yet, there was something so mystical about the way Marilyn said, "Look!" -- almost as if someone unknown to us was also out and about. Good King Wenceslas, perhaps? The Old Lamplighter? Or maybe the Little Drummer Boy.

I often wish that I had asked Marilyn at the time to tell me more about what she was thinking, but now I'll never know. Instead, it lingers as one of those poetic "ponder in your heart" Christmas moments, and that's good too. In fact, maybe that's why I will never forget.

Another favorite,
featuring Shepherd Girl (pink skirt) & Wise Woman (gold scarf)

Manger Scenes with Ben
1991 ~ St. Mary's Church ~ Little Crosby ~ England

1993 ~ St. Francis de Sales Parish ~ Philadelphia

1995 ~ Liverpool Cathedral ~ England

A Stable Lamp is Lighted
A stable lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky
The stars shall bend their voices
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
And straw like gold will shine
A barn shall harbour heaven
A stall become a shrine

This child through David’s city
Will ride in triumph by
The palm shall strew its branches
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
Though heavy, dull and dumb
And lie within the roadway
To pave the Kingdom come

Yet He shall be forsaken
And yielded up to die
The sky shall groan and darken
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
For thorny hearts of men
God’s blood upon the spearhead
God’s love refused again

But now as at the ending
The low is lifted high
The stars will bend their voices
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled

by American Poet Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)

Divine Homesickness: If Only In My Dreams

"When we are constantly focused on externals,
we are not centered, that is, we are not aligned
internally -- body, mind and soul.
Without that alignment,
we have a case of Divine Homesickness.
We feel empty and lost, always trying
to find our way Home . . . always
looking for something 'out there' to fill us up.
And nothing out there can."

Susan Jeffers
The Little Book of Peace of Mind

Similarly, Anne Lamott writes that "all of the interesting characters I've ever worked with -- including myself -- have had at their center a feeling of otherness, of homesickness" (Bird by Bird, 200). From Jeffers, Lamott, and the following two passages, by Buechner and Rushdie, we can construct a poetics of divine homesickness, one that resonates strongly with me because I am from Missouri, I am from Kansas, not just metaphorically but actually.



The Child In Us
We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.

No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth. You pull the shade on the snow falling, white on white, and the child comes to life for a moment. There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall, that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears.

Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? The child in us lives in a world where nothing is too familiar or unpromising to open up into a world where a path unwinds before our feet into a deep wood, and when that happens, neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again, any more than it was home for Dorothy in the end either, because in the Oz books that follow The Wizard she keeps coming back again and again to Oz because Oz, not Kansas, is where her heart is, and the wizard turns out to be not a humbug, but the greatest of all wizards after all.
From Listening to Your Life, "The Child in Us * May 6"
by Frederick Buechner

Buechner analyzes the myth of Oz more thoroughly in Chapter 4 of his book, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Likewise, author, Salman Rushdie employs the Oz metaphor when describing the impossibility of a backward quest for childhood innocence.



Out of Kansas
So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that 'there's no place like home', but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
from Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992 – 2002
Essay #1: "Out of Kansas"
by Salman Rushdie

I still love to hear Karen Carpenter sing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” If Only In My Dreams," but I feel differently about this song than I used to. I used to think it was about people who weren't able to travel "home for the holidays" to be with everyone else. Now I'm more inclined to think it's about people who have to travel or have traveled, when all they really want is the privacy of their own home. There they are surrounded by all their loved ones, but what they crave is to be home alone -- if only in their dreams.

Not to be all bah - humbug about it, but now whenever I hear lyrics like "I'll Be Home for Christmas" or "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays" or "There's No Christmas Like Home Christmas," my response is Precisely! Home. H - O - M - E. Not someone else's home. Not someplace that used to be home. Your own home. Where your heart is. As John Denver sings:

Home is where the heart is,
And Christmas lives there too.
~ "Christmas Like a Lullaby" ~




Outside Looking In


"There's no place like home, there's no place like home."

Emmanuel, God With Us

"~ Look for a lovely thing and you will find it ~
~ it is not far ~ it never will be far ~"
Sara Teasdale

**********

"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Hebrews 13:2

**********
“Light one candle
for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.”

**********

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. . . . I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise so ever he shall appear. I know he is in my neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. . . . Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
From his essay“Experience,”


Yes indeed! Perhaps they are! Perhaps one of them might be King! Or the Peacemaker. Or an Angel, unawares! As poet Sara Teasdale says, "Look for a lovely thing and you will find it; it is not far -- it never will be far."

Brian Andreas, of StoryPeople fame, is a messiah for the New Age, if ever there was one , draws a similar conclusion in his story of the "Purple Madonna":

One time on Hollywood Boulevard I saw a young girl with a baby. It was a crisp winter morning & her hair shone dark purple in the sun. She was panhandling outside the Holiday Inn & the door clerk came out & told her to be on her way & I wondered if anyone would recognize the Christ child if they happened to meet. I remember thinking it's not like there are any published pictures & purple seemed like a good color for a Madonna so I gave her a dollar just in case.

And of the New Age, he writes:

"We're already in the new age, she said. What does that mean? I said. It means we can stop waiting and start living, she said but after she left, I still waited a little while more just to be safe."

(both selections from StoryPeople)

Madonna with us. Child with us. God with us. Angels with us.

Jeff Smith (1939 - 2004; aka The Frugal Gourmet and onetime chaplain) gives an excellent etymological breakdown of this very concept, and his enthusiasm is infectious. He provides a definition of The Messiah, The Holy One of Israel that encompasses the lord among the vagabonds and the Christ Child on the street corner:

The Holy One: "one who is so far above man and womankind, so distant and beyond our understanding, so heavenly and unapproachable, beyond the beyond, never near us."

Of Israel: "right here in town."

"That is to say, The Most Distant One is here in town with us, always. I love that!" (see The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas, 3)

In our neighborhood. Hidden among vagabonds. On the Boulevard. Here in town. With us.

Emerson, Andreas, and Smith all convey the importance of persistently acknowledging the humanity of others, at all times, just in case. "A golden impossibility" -- that's what Emerson says we are, but also an "inscrutable possibility."

Smith's book, The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas is the best holiday cookbook I know of. More than a collection of recipes, it is also a fascinating narrative of cultural history and seasonal tradition, ingeniously illustrated and creatively organized. Each chapter presents a dish for a different character from the traditional manger scene: angel hair pasta for the angels, green olive soup for the shepherds (I tried this recipe one year -- odd), lamb chops for the tax collector, Persian meatballs for the Magi, right down to milk and honey for the Baby Jesus.

In addition to the tempting recipes (both my latkes and my mincemeat are taken from here), this book beautifully achieves the author's stated mission of bringing "the Manger and the Donkey, the Angels, and the Blessed Mother with Child into your Christmas," thus helping the reader to "better understand this profound and joyous holiday" (xviii, xx).

An ordained minister as well as a chef, Smith recalls an epiphany of sorts that occurred one Christmas during his graduate school years when he and a group of fellow theology students were singing "O Come All Ye Faithful":

I realized it was the first time in my life that I understood the words: “Word of the Father, Now in Flesh Appearing.” The fact that God had to go to such extremes to explain the meaning of our place together. God declares Himself / Herself to us by becoming a baby in our midst. The greatest sign of weakness, “living flesh” in its most vulnerable state, a tiny baby, becomes the greatest sign of the strength of the Holy One, a strength born out of love beyond our furthest imaginings, a strength that, I suppose, still looks to many of us like weakness. (xvi - xvii)

After reading Smith's unforgettable explanation, the song took on a whole new meaning for me. Every time I hear it now, I listen a bit more closely than I ever did before:

Light from Light eternal . . .

we too will thither, bend our joyful footsteps . . .

who would not love thee, loving us so dearly . . .

I love that!

JANUARY ROOFTOP

Fast Away the Old Year Passes

"And now let us welcome the new year,
full of things that have never been."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Why is it that the world seems to spin a bit faster with every passing year? At midnight on Halloween, I crossed my fingers in hopes of some magic that would make the calendar still say "October" when I turned the page over. The golden days had flown by so quickly, I could have used another go at the entire month! But, no, November it was! And no sooner had the rush toward Thanksgiving begun than we had overtaken yet another feast day and finished off another month. Any chance that we could repeat November? None whatsoever. It was December! It was Christmas! It's almost New Year's Eve! Time not only to turn the calendar over, but to hang up a brand new one.

One great thing about our neighborhood (probably yours too) is the talent that our neighbors have for keeping up with the rapid succession of holidays, no matter how quickly each arrives and departs. What a seasonal thrill it was to drive down the block the day after Halloween and spy the houses already illuminated for Christmas -- houses which only hours before had been festooned with spider webs and scarecrows! By Thanksgiving, it was possible to take the family on an evening drive and admire the winter wonderland of wreaths and trees and reindeer that our celebratory neighbors had devised for our viewing pleasure.

You can't say we weren't ready! Does anyone really wish that the decorations went up later and came down sooner? I certainly don't! In fact, I like to make a game of predicting which lights will last the longest . . . and with so many possible conclusions to the season, it's anybody's guess: The Twelfth Day of Christmas, Martin Luther King Day, Ground Hog Day, Valentine's Day, The Ides of March. Can anyone hold out until Palm Sunday?

January is a time of new beginnings, promising many more holidays to come, but like the slowly fading decorations on our front doors, it contains a lingering echo of the month and year just past. It's good to remember that this month is named after the old two - headed, two - faced Roman god, Janus, who possessed knowledge of the future and wisdom of the past. Conveniently, he could see forward into the New Year and backward into the Old. It was customary to place his image, maybe a small statue or amulet, at the front entrance of every home where he could look outward at the passersby as well as inward toward the home dwellers.

So, indulge in a few contemplative hours this month, gazing forward and glancing back. When you take that wreath down and put those cards away, think of the words of Malcolm S. Forbes, think of your friends, think of your neighbors:


"I hate these days immediately following the holidays. Emptying the house of Christmas trees, decorations and children is like emptying a home of warmth. But at least there’s the pile of Christmas cards to be looked through again before you do whatever you do when done with them. They serve as a cheerful handshake during the uncheerful letdown after Christmas. Don't stop sending them. Christmas cards are worth all the bother. In fact, the bother’s a good part of the pleasure."
~ Malcolm S. Forbes (1967)



New idea this year:
An extra tree by the front door, just for displaying
Christmas Cards.

Another Faraway Auld Lang Syne

Ghost of Christmas Past
Though it is not a holiday piece, there is something about the following story -- maybe it's the foggy weather or the gathering of friends -- that always brings New Year's Eve to mind. "The Faraway Night" was first passed on to me thirty years ago by a co-worker, someone I knew for only a short time and never knew well. We never kept in contact; yet, she is memorable to me for adding to my frame of reference this very short story by an author that I had been unfamiliar with until that time. Would I have discovered the story anyway, in some anthology or other, or through some other acquaintance? Perhaps so, but maybe not. I prefer to believe the Fates arranged for our paths to cross so that I might have this sad beautiful story in my life.
The Faraway Night
by William Saroyan
Armenian - American Author, 1908 - 1981
Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1949
Academy Award for Best Original Story, 1943
This was a day of fog and remembrance of old days and old songs. I sat in the house all afternoon listening to the songs. It was darker everywhere than light and I remembered a song I sang to girl on a bus once. For a while there we were in love, but when the bus reached Topeka she got off and I never saw her again. In the middle of the night when I kissed her she began to cry and I got sick with the sickness of love. That was a young night in August, and I was on my way to New York for the first time in my life. I got sick because I was going my way and she was going hers.

All this day of fog I sat in the house remembering the way a man's life goes one way and all the other lives another, each of them going its own way and a certain number of young people dying all the time. A certain number of them going along and dying. If you don't see them again they are dead even if it is a small world: even if you go back and look for each of them and find them you find them dead because any way any of them go is a way that kills.

The bus came to Topeka and she got off and walked around a corner and I never saw her again. I saw many others, many of them as lovely as she, but never another like her, never another with that sadness and loveliness of voice and never another who wept as she wept. There never will be another with her sadness. There never will be an American night like that again. She herself may be lovelier now than then but there will never be another sadness of night like that and never again will she or anyone else weep that way and no man who kisses her will grow sick with the sickness of the love of that night. All of it belongs to a night in America which is lost and can never be found. All of it belongs to the centuries of small accidents, all trivial, all insignificant, which brought her to the seat beside me, and all the small accidents which placed me there, waiting for her.

She came and sat beside me, and I knew the waiting of all the years had been for her, but when she got off the bus in Topeka I stayed on and three days later I reached New York. That's all that happened except that something of myself is still there in that warm, faraway American night.

When the darkness of day became the darkness of night I put on my hat and left the house. I walked through the fog to the city, my heart following me like a big patient dog, and in the city I found some of the dead who are my friends, and in laughter more deathly and grievous than the bitterest weeping we ate and drank and talked and sang and all that I remembered was the loveliness of her weeping because the years of small accidents had brought us together, and the foolishness of my heart telling me to stay with her and go nowhere, telling me there was nowhere to go.

*******************************
It's that line, "A certain number of young people dying all the time," that cuts straight to the quick. He's right, of course. Some do die young; others just die away from our reality: "If you don't see them again they are dead even if it is a small world."

We are fortunate that the world is smaller these days than it was when Saroyan was writing; with email and facebook, people don't slip away quite so easily. And even without technology, there is still the occasional, good old-fashioned coincidence. It could happen in real life, just as it does in Dan Folgeberg's song "Same Auld Lang Syne," old friends meeting unexpectedly in the grocery store on New Year's Eve, picking up last minute party supplies -- paper hats, balloons, eggs, a bottle of champagne. It could happen.

Happy New Year! Auld Lang Syne!

Winter Dreams

"Winter Dreams"
China Pattern by Waechtersbach*
I hope you've had a moment to glance at my recent Fortnightly blog post: "Another Faraway Auld Lang Syne" (December 28, 2010). And I hope you were touched as I and my family have been by William Saroyan's short short story "The Faraway Night." (My talented son Ben actually memorized this entire piece and recited it at a school Declamation program when he was in junior high!)

If you enjoyed Saroyan's reverie, you might also like to take a look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's story of youthful infatuation and gradual disillusion -- "Winter Dreams" (click for text).

The opening and closing lines caught my imagination long ago and have remained as one of my own winter dreams:

"In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter's skis moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course. At these times the country gave him a feeling of profound melancholy--it offended him that the links should lie in enforced fallowness, haunted by ragged sparrows for the long season. It was dreary, too, that on the tees where the gay colors fluttered in summer there were now only the desolate sand-boxes knee-deep in crusted ice. When he crossed the hills the wind blew cold as misery, and if the sun was out he tramped with his eyes squinted up against the hard dimensionless glare.

"In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into Black Bear Lake scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the season with red and black balls. Without elation, without an interval of moist glory, the cold was gone. . . .

"As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.

*******"For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished."

*More Winter Dreams: Years ago, when my sister Peg was living in Germany, she sent me a gorgeous teapot, cups and saucers in the above pattern. I've since acquired a few coffee mugs and dessert plates, perfect for serving a late afternoon pick-me-up by the fire on a cold January day.

Winter Mantel Display

Blue Moon

"The start of a decade always seems ten times
as auspicious as the beginning of a mere new year."
Thomas Mallon
Although as children we all practically memorize "The Night Before Christmas" without even trying, this story contains some phrases that surely no child can fully understand. I was always puzzled by "The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow / Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below" and "As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, / When they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky." What could those words mean?

At last, after paying closer attention to twenty or thirty autumns, the imagery makes sense, and I am able to visualize the coursers (now that I know coursers = reindeer) rising swiftly like the dry leaves that cyclone up through a swirling fall gust.

And the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow? The luster of mid-day to objects below? That's what I've seen the past few nights, looking down the street, or out of my window at the brilliant blue-white landscape and stark silhouettes back-lit by the luminous Blue Moon that appeared on New Year's Eve to welcome in 2010, a most auspicious decade . . . as foretold by prophecy!

Rarely does the Blue Moon appear on New Year’s Eve, but it did in 2009. The last Blue Moon on a New Year's Eve was in 1990 -- Ben's first Christmas!

Stars, Moons, Phosphorescence

Falling asleep and waking up to the intense light of this month's full moon made me think of my sister Diane's pre - Christmas epiphany. Back in mid - December, she wrote:

"Early this morning I took our garbage to the curb. Our subdivision is very dark, as we have no street lights and the lots are big. Other neighbors are hard to see. It was raining a little, and I almost changed my mind about going in the dark. But when I opened the front door to look out, I saw a big bright star. It was only a decoration on my neighbor's house, but it shone down on my driveway just enough so I could tell where to walk. Taking that walk so reminded me of that long ago walk taken by Kings to see our Savior. God bless your day."

Reading her description of the bright Christmas star, even if it was "only a decoration," brought to mind my favorite quote from the movie Apollo 13, when the television reporter asks Jim Lovell (as portrayed by Tom Hanks) if there is "a specific instance in an airplane emergency when you can recall fear?"

Both Lovell's revelation and my sister's epiphany give me goosebumps. Reading their words, I feel exhilarated and humbled at the same time.

Lovell:"Uh well, I'll tell ya, I remember this one time - I'm in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there's no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone... because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was - it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I'm lookin' down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can't even tell now what my altitude is. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there's this uh, there's this green trail. It's like a long carpet that's just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was - it was - it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I'd ever been able to see that. So uh, you, uh, never know . . . what . . . what events are to transpire to get you home" (ellipses in original text).

Awhile back (see "How to Keep On Hoping"), I mentioned a favorite passage from E. L. Doctorow, quoted by that Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, describing a similar phenomenon: " 'writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you are going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you" (18).

That's what stars are for . . . and moons . . . and headlights . . . and phosphorescence . . .

Joni writes: "The moon has been amazing this week. In my life I have made my way home many times by its light. I love it Kit. We have all the light we need. Ever."

Happy New Year

May your party be just the right size!













"I like large parties. They're so intimate.
At small parties there isn't any privacy."

from The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

HAPPY NEW YEAR!



"And
now
let us
welcome
the new year,
full of things
that have
never been."

--Rilke

Celebrate All Commemorations With Verve!

Wooden Toys from Dresden
at the Chicago Christkindlmarket, 29 November 2012

A few thoughts from Padgett Powell, Rainer Maria Rilke and Carole Maso
on various and assorted impending holiday festivities,
along with a few more photos from the Chicago Christkindlmarket.
~~ from Powell's book, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? ~~
p 33 . . . When you are in charge of satisfying children at Christmas, how serious are you about stuffing the stockings?

p 104 . . . For New Year's Eve, do you prefer a big loud drunk party at which say someone pogos nude across the room, or would you like to stand beside a tree alone and see if there is any wind in it?

***********
The Star Store

~~ from Carole Maso's novel AVA ~~

You have to love a novel whose very
first line is a celebration of celebrations!
p 3 . . . Each holiday celebrated with real extravagance. Birthdays. Independence days. Saints' days. Even when we were poor. With verve.

p 53 . . . It was Christmas Eve Day. I wore bells.

p 66 . . . Mardi Gras. The farewell to flesh. I dressed in feathers. Pointed beak and glitter. How we danced, through lights and confetti. The good-bye to the body.

Not forever, but for now.


p 84 . . . We were racing toward death, Francesco. We knew it even then.

How we celebrated each holiday, each saint's day. With verve.

Touch then this moment. Caress it with your mind.


p 108 . . . How we celebrated each Epiphany, each Bastille Day.

p 199 . . . It is the week before Christmas. In the apartment across the way, a man works on a dollhouse. So what if we are doomed? He will die rubbing a small chair smooth.

p 231, 241 . . . At the top of the stairs. A far - off green light in the night.

At the lip of the sea on Christmas night . . .

He bundled up the sea - soaked steps, carrying oysters, clams, sea urchins, crayfish, mussels, lobster. The fruits of the sea, he said in English. The jewels of the sea, and laid them at my feet. Twelve fish. It was Christmas Eve Day. That night we ate twelve fish. The green light of the lighthouse, snow on the beach. He knelt at my feet. One wave after the next over me. The sound of the foghorn. The smell of the sea. And sex. Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me?

I will.
***********
The Candle & Lantern Store

~~ from Rilke ~~
Two of Rilke's ten Letters to a Young Poet are Christmas letters. In Letter #6, written on December 23, 1903, Rilke writes:

"My dear Mr. Kappus,
I don't want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that is is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast . . . ."
Rilke urges Kappus not to exchange "a child's wise not - understanding . . . for defensiveness and scorn," not to be deceived by the pseudo - dignity of "grownups."

" . . . if you suspect Christ was deluded by his yearning . . .
Why don't you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? . . . living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? . . . Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling that perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin . . . ."
(pp 53 - 63)
Five years later, Rilke writes Letter #10 from Paris, the day after Christmas 1908:

"You must know, dear Mr. Kappus,
how glad I was to have the lovely letter from you. The news . . . was very good news indeed. That is really what I wanted to write you for Christmas Eve; but I have been variously and uninterruptedly living in my work this winter, and the ancient holiday arrived so quickly that I hardly had enough time to do the most necessary errands, much less to write."
(pp 1-5 - 09)
I must confess to taking some comfort in the realization that I'm no different from Rilke when it comes to completing after Christmas many of the tasks that I hoped to complete before!

***********

Magi at the Market

"The natural tendency of time to obliterate ancient customs and silence ancient sports, is too much promoted by the utilitarian spirit of the day; and they who would have no man enjoy without being able to give a reason for the enjoyment which is in him, are robbing life of half its beauty and some of its virtues. If the old festivals and hearty commemorations . . . had no other recommendation than their convivial character, the community of enjoyment which they imply, they would on that account alone be worthy of all promotion . . . We love all commemorations. We love these anniversaries, for their own sakes, and for their uses. . . . We love all which tends to call us from the solitary and chilling pursuit of our own separate and selfish views into the warmth of a common sympathy" (emphasis added).

Thomas K. Hervey, 1799 – 1859

introductory comments from his Book of Christmas
initially published 1836
then by George P. Putnam, & Co New York, Circa 1848
and Roberts Brothers in Boston, 1888

One hundred and fifty years later, Barbara Ehrenreich observes similarly that "human festivities -- probably going back to the Paleolithic era -- featured the universal ingredients of feasting, dancing, costuming, masking and / or face painting, for days at a time . . . around bonfires, in the streets . . . Holidays bonded whole communities . . . assembling costumes, cooking up treats, crafting musical instruments and rehearsing dance steps, not to mention the festivity itself."
Ehrenreich's advice:
"Fight for your right to party!
Our ancestors lived for holidays.
Keep that in mind this season."

Twelfth Day ~ Twelfth Night

"Lucinda had the gift for festival.
She spread out Christmas to last from Saint Nicholas Eve
until Twelfth Night; and burned the greens on the hearth
with a choked feeling of utter desolation."

from Roller Skates
by Ruth Sawyer

Twelve Little Drummers
Montessori Re-enactment of the Twelve Days of Christmas
Philadelphia ~ December 1994
featuring Ben McCartney (front, center)

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas . . .
my true love gave to me . . .
12 Drummers Drumming
11 Pipers Piping
10 Lords-a-Leaping
9 Ladies Dancing
8 Maids-a-Milking
7 Swans-a-Swimming
6 Geese-a-Laying
5 Gold Rings
4 Colly Birds
3 French Hens
2 Turtle Doves
And a Partridge in a Pear Tree.



Can it really be time to take down the greens?
Seems so short a time ago that we were bringing them home.
In fact, this picture of Ben and our neighbor Tammy,
carrying home her greens from the Farmers' Market,
was taken a long time ago --
just before Christmas 1995, on Beaumont Avenue, Philadelphia

*********
If you start counting with Christmas Day as the First Day, then January 5th is the Twelfth Day of Christmas (as in the song), and the evening of January 5th is Twelfth Night (as in the Shakespeare play), and January 6th is the Epiphany -- the day the Wise Men arrived with the gifts.

For the last hundred years or so, in England and the U.S. anyway, the Christmas Season pretty much comes to a close with a New Year's Eve Party & New Year's Day Parades; but pre - Dickens, it was more the custom to celebrate the full Twelve Days (as suggested by the elaborate gifts in the song; or in the church with a saint for each day). Twelfth Night was the time for a big party with a huge frosted King's Cake, containing hidden surprises (nowadays the British Christmas Cake or the American Mardi Gras Cake).

In either tradition -- whether you conclude the season on New Year's Eve or Twelfth Night -- January 5th was considered a good time to put away all the decorations, though earlier medieval custom allowed the greens to hang until February 2nd, the cross - quarter day that brings the Winter Solstice half-way to the Vernal Equinox (which explains why we celebrate with the Ground Hog on that day).

PS. My personal tradition allows me to keep the trees up way past any of the above designated dates . . . but that's another story! It always seems to me that you can leave the tree up beyond Twelfth Night if you want; however, any leftover Christmas Cake or Pudding must be polished off before midnight!

Epiphany

An extra minute of light ~ January Sunset

"Haven't you noticed the days
somehow keep getting longer?
And the spirit - voices whisper in us all
Haven't you noticed the rays?
The Spirit Sun is stronger
And a New Day is dawning for us all."

from "Hummingbird"
by Seals and Crofts

Epiphany. . . according to James Joyce:
Claritas is quidditas

Orientar

Often heard at Christmas is the joke about the children who misunderstand the words to "Silent Night" and ask about "Round John Virgin." Who is that guy?

What always mixed me up was that faraway exotic place where "We Three Kings" were from -- Orientar. Now where was that, I wonder?

How was I to know that the Wise Men were merely placing their verb at the end of the sentence? I knew I was from Kansas, but no one in my family had ever been heard to say, "We Carrikers of Kansas are." So as far as I was concerned, those three kings were from Orientar.

Orientar. Even now, I think it sounds like an enticing geographic location, mysterious, full of possibility and hidden truth and camels!

Epiphany. May wisdom and syntax be made manifest!

And for later this month:

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. . . .

Let no one pull you low enough to hate. . . . ."

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Candlemas Eve

One of my favorite things is growing the rosemary all year long,
then bringing it in to decorate the house at Christmas . . .


and making miniature wreaths . . .


and at last, taking it all down again . . .

"Down with the rosemary . . .

[ . . .it's time . . . ]

To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing its turn does hold ;
New things succeed, as former things grow old."

from "Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve"
by Robert Herrick
English Poet(1591–1674)

Imbolc

February 2nd is not only Groundhog Day; it's also the birthday of my oldest brother Dave(b 1947), the birthday of James Joyce (b 1882), and Candlemas Day -- a good day for taking down the Christmas greens if you haven't done so already. As the old 17thC poem goes:
Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall . . .

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe . . .
Thus times do shift: each thing its turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

from "Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve"
and "Ceremonies For Candlemas Eve"
both by Robert Herrick
English Poet (1591–1674)
Following Herrick's advice, I removed all the pine roping from the porches yesterday and dismantled the big tree. Sad, but it had to be done. Today is not only Candlemas but also Imbolc, the Cross - Quarter Day that falls half-way between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, a time of clear vision into other worlds and festivals of purification.

I recall a day back in college when my professor, Jim Thomas read "Ode to the West Wind" aloud to the class, concluding with his own cynical answer to the hopeful romanticism of the poem's closing question:

"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
"Yes, Shelley, Yes!" he thundered. "It can be a long way behind!"

Well, whatever the Groundhog decides today, we're halfway!

It's not easy being a Groundhog on February 2nd . . . or a School Superintendent the night before a Snow Day! With his usual veritas and hilaritas, Bian Andreas captures the dilemma of the prognosticator:

"I'm best at predicting the old year,
she said, & you'd be surprised how many
people are even skeptical about that"

from www.storypeople.com

One StoryPeople reader shares this from Peanuts; so irrational, yet, so hard to stop hoping for that better past:

Linus:
"I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow.
Maybe we should think only about today."

Charlie Brown:
"No, that's giving up. I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better."

Wise Lily Tomlin says:
"Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past."

And Anne Lamott's version, just slightly different:
"Forgiveness means giving up all hope of having had a better past."

Keep Christmas With You

Presents From A Friend!

"But while we often like to comfort
or flatter ourselves with the thought that the future is now,
the brute truth is, the future is not now. The present is now.
The future is later -- in some cases much later."

quotation from the humorous little book,
Santa Lives! Five Conclusive Arguments
for the Existence of Santa Claus
by wry humorist Elllis Weiner (b 1950)
Coauthor of Yiddish with Dick and Jane and The Joy of Worry

********************************************************
The following poem by W. H. Auden is one of my favorites, but with all the presents put away, and the neighbors' (not mine! not yet!) undecorated trees abandoned by the curbside, I was afraid that I might have left it too late for blogging. You often see this poem appearing last, in the final "end - of - season" section, in the holiday anthologies and poetry collections. The opening lines tell you right away that it is a post - Christmas poem, appropriate for the day or even the week after -- but the middle of January?

Luckily, I came across an incredibly insightful, helpful essay, by ethics professor William F. French, entitled "Auden’s Moral Comedy: A Late-Winter Reading."   Not mid - January, mind you, but "Late - Winter." Clearly, I still have plenty of time! Actually, I'm early!

French writes that Auden's poem "has more to do with the serious confrontation with emptiness in late winter than with holiday good cheer in December." He suggests reading it near the end of January or during February, "when the chilling winds and numbing routine have taken their toll . . . Only a late-winter reading allows access to the deeper layers of meaning in the poem." Although it is better known by its subtitle ("A Christmas Oratorio"), French prefers to focus on the title -- "For the Time Being," a concept that he defines in his analysis as "the deadeningly mundane . . . the monotonous sludge . . . the general drudgery . . . the flat stretches." That's the Time Being for you! (See Ellis Weiner above for a more humorous explanation, but just as true.)

As the ennobling sentiments of the season recede, we must accept the fact that "our ordinary existence is lived out in a post-Christmas world . . . the mundane world of the everyday," the quotidian, shall we say.  The theme of Auden's poem is just right for my everyday blog, "The Quotidian Kit." The Time Being is just so daily, so commonly thought small.  French explains it very well in his analysis of the poem, concluding that we

" . . . are so accustomed to thinking of the moral life in the flash-and-bang terms of dramatic decisions and heroic choices that our daily routines and quiet virtues are regarded as morally insignificant.

"But Auden is no fool. His humor is designed to remind us that our attitude to our own limitations may govern how we respond to the harsh times of tragic choices. Auden’s comic voice reminds us that patience may well be a quiet form of courage, and self-awareness and humility contain a silent power all their own. In redeeming the everyday, he reminds us that moral heroism need not always be dramatically displayed."

Here is a brief excerpt from Auden's lengthy (around fifty pages) "Oratorio":

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed.
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility . . .

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are . . .

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all . . .

In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

by W. H. Auden (1907 - 73)
Anglo-American poet
Born in England, later an American citizen

********************************

Consistent with Auden's "unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought / Of Lent and Good Friday," contemporary poet Steve Turner presents a somewhat bleaker vision:

Christmas is Really for the Children
Christmas is really
for the children.
Especially for children
who like animals, stables,
stars and babies wrapped
in swaddling clothes.
Then there are wise men,
kings in fine robes,
humble shepherds and a
hint of rich perfume.

Easter is not really
for the children
unless accompanied by a
cream filled egg.
It has whips, blood, nails,
a spear and allegations
of body snatching.
It involves politics, god
and the sins of the world.
It is not good for people
of a nervous disposition.
They would do better to
think on rabbits, chickens
and the first snowdrop
of spring.

Or they'd do better to
wait for a re-run of
Christmas without asking
too many questions about
what Jesus did when he grew up
or whether there's any connection.

Steve Turner (b. 1949)
British music journalist, biographer, and poet

**********************************

And finally, some excellent post-seasonal advice from Sesame Street. If you're not familiar with this song already, perhaps from watching Christmas Eve on Sesame Street a couple hundred times with your kids, then you are in for a treat.  If you can, rent or buy a copy so that you see the children's surprising and touchingly rendered sign language presentation:

Keep Christmas With You 
Keep Christmas With You All Through the Year
When Christmas time is over
and presents put away,
don't be sad
There'll be so much to treasure
about this Christmas day
and the fun we've had
So may happy feelings to celebrate with you
And, oh, the good time hurry by so fast,
But even when it's over
there's something you can do to make
Christmas last:

Keep Christmas with you
All through the year,
When Christmas is over,
You can keep it near.
Think of this Christmas day
When Christmas is far away.

Keep Christmas with you
All through the year,
When Christmas is over,
Save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments,
Hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you
All through the year.

Christmas means the spirit of giving,
Peace and joy to you,
The goodness of loving,
The gladness of living;
These are Christmas too.

So, keep Christmas with you
All through the year,
When Christmas is over,
Save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments,
Hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you
All through the year.

lyrics by David Axelrod (b. 1936)
American lyricist,composer, and producer

music by Sam Pottle (1934 - 78)
American composer, conductor, musical director
from Christmas Eve on Sesame Street

~~ Reminds Gerry of his grandfather's "Old House" in England ~~
Urban Garden Under Snow
by Douglas Percy Bliss (Scottish Painter, 1900 - 84)
*******************************************