For the longest time, I would see all the yellow “support our troops” signs in our neighborhood, and bitch about them First I was annoyed because the HOA set them up in front of everyone’s houses without bothering to ask, and then I was angry because really, I don’t think people are sporting those signs because they particularly care, but because everyone else is. Those t-shirts that say “I support whatever’s trendy” are more accurate than most of us care to admit. (They’re also funny, and I want one, but that’s beside the point.)

Around Halloween, I took the sign I’d ripped out of the lawn back out of the dusty spiderweb-infested back corner of the garage and put it back out, not because I felt like our lawn was somehow naked or incomplete, but because I realized I actually know real people who are in the military, even if I only know most of them via blog, and I support them, even if I might disagree with their views. They’re the human face for me. They’re the people who make it real.

So, last night, I was surfing websites and watching the tivo’d American Girl movie about Molly and WWII, and found blogs talking about sending Christmas cards to soldiers overseas, and I was reminded by the letters my grandparents had written back and forth, when he was overseas during that generation’s war. His always ended with a plea for another letter.

And I thought about how much I love getting mail – even now. I mean, email’s great, but snailmail is SPECIAL. It’s more real somehow.

So this morning, I picked a site I liked – Soldier’s Angels, and adopted a soldier. I gave them my name and contact info. They gave me the name and APO address of a woman currently in Iraq. The deal is to send a letter a week, and a small parcel or two once or twice a month, both things I can easily do, and will cost me less than what I generally spend on designer coffee in a similar length of time. My intro letter has already been sent (I *just* made today’s mail pickup) and there’s a goody basket on its way. Am I a sucker for doing this? Maybe. Do I agree that the other women and men who do this are angels, as they call themselves? Well, there are many definitions of angel. So, I guess I can accept the term, in a sense roughly akin to the theatrical backer usage, because I don’t think there’s anything particularly angelic about reaching out in basic human kindness. I mean, we all live here together, we have a responsibility to give back in whatever way is individually appropriate.

And the thing is, whatever my feelings are about the war – this war, any war – (and I’m a California liberal, so you can pretty much guess), the men and women who are actually fighting it are not at fault. They’re doing jobs I wouldn’t consider doing, and risking life and limb to do it. And that deserves respect.

After all, it’s Christmas.
And even just being on a business trip is rough enough at Christmas.

So really, I decided to do it for him, for them. For their stories of being under blackout conditions in Panama, for my grandmother’s endless repetitions of the tale of her return by (commandeered) cruise ship to the US, and the zig-zag course it had to sail, for their 50 years of marriage, and for the man who, years later, while watching CNN’s coverage of Desert Storm, took out a globe and explained to her exactly how that part of the world related to the parts she knew, her beloved Italy, her even more beloved America, with loving patience and endless repetition.

And I hear his words in my head right now, a phrase from one of my grandfather’s letters to my grandmother: “You looked like an angel, my angel.”

The last week, and the weekend, were filled with calls, meetings, questions, answers and negotiations, but the end result has been worth it. Beginning January 2nd, I have a job doing blog stuff and helping to edit other stuff, and writing still other stuff for the company my former boss owns.

I never worked for that company, as I was in his mortgage brokerage, instead, but we talk from time to time, and we trust each other, and he lets me have nearly complete autonomy, which is cool.

And between now and then? I’m delighted to have my own version of Christmas vacation, to get the house ready for the parents, finish some fiction projects, do some baking, and practice a lot of mime – space and object work – and, oh yeah, I play at ComedySportz at least once each weekend between now and the end of the year (12/09, 12/15, 12/16, 12/22, and 12/30), as well as having Lessons and Carols at church on the 17th.

It’s really too bad I’m not busy, or anything.

If only DFW had Trader Joe’s and BevMo, I’d be almost completely happy.

They say that if you want something to happen, even if it’s the merest wisp of a dream, you have to own the idea. They say that you should begin each day with affirmations of your best qualities, and declarations of what you will achieve.

I’ve been working on a series of short stories. I put them aside for NaNoWriMo, but they were what was speaking to me. I do that a lot. Make bad choices. Shoot myself in the proverbial foot.
But the stories are still whispering. I wanted them finished for Christmas. There’s still time.

This is a newer dream. For years I swore I would never get married, swore I’d never have a child. I like my life, I’d tell people. I’m too selfish to share that way.

Except I’m not, really. Selfish, I mean. And I enjoy our nieces so much, and even our nephews, even if we never get to see them for very long, and even if they terrify me a little. It tool me a long time to admit it, but I do, now. I do. I want a child.

Here’s the dream. It’s 2013. Fuzzy and I are in San Francisco, at one of our favorite bookstores, and our five-year-old daughter is wearing a red shirt and a plaid skirt, tights, mary janes and a hat. Fuzzy’s got a suede jacket. Chocolate brown. A red shirt beneath it. Me? I’m in green, rich stonewashed silk in forest green, black slacks, heels with subtle silver trim, a green fedora. We’re not shopping, I’m there to read.

Everyone I love is there with me. Friends include the ethereal counselor who designed my perfume –all natural and brewed to enhance my best qualities, the successful writer/actor/powerhouse who is currently running an avant-garde sketch show broadcast from San Francisco, the other friends who run a home-based arts and crafts business in the Midwest, and led the movement that knit together gay rights once and for all, the friends who live in Colorado with their dogs – their children are bilingual, of course, my parents, though my stepfather is nearing 80 at that point.

We toast the night with coffee served in red ceramic mugs, laced lightly with amoretto or kahlua. There is hugging and the sparkle of digital camera flashes. The local NPR station has sent a representative – the next morning, I will operate the digital optical aquaphone as author-in-residence on the 2013 edition of West Coast Weekend (other guests include Jason Robert Brown, Kathleen Norris, and a former improv troupemate who is one of the country’s hottest comedians).

But that’s tomorrow, tonight, I’m sitting in a red leather wingback chair, brought from my house as a tribute to my grandfather, who held me in his lap and read me stories. I’m not reading from the new book just yet, I tell the crowd. First I want to share a piece from my first collection…it’s about a woman who buys a café, and ends up fostering a group of street gypsies in their various personal and artistic endeavors.

*This entry inspired by Sky, who lets me babble, and proofreads some of my worst drafts.

Last night, perched in bed with my laptop, I couldn’t get the song “The Man with the Bag” out of my head. I’ve always loved it, but I’d never really sung it. So I downloaded it, and then I downloaded the lyrics, and THEN I found the karaoke track. By the time we left for choir practice this morning, I knew the song, but it was still stuck in my head.

It’s had me thinking, also, about how much our relationships, and I don’t mean just the romantic ones, inform our choices, not just of politics, but of everything. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the songs we love.

I grew up in a house filled with protest music – folk tunes and seventies rock. Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, John Denver: these were the voices of my childhood.

At my grandmother’s house, I found a love of musicals, and a treasure trove of soundtracks – My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music (I remember that there were two copies of that record, because the original one had been scratched and skipped on the word “naive” in “Sixteen going on Seventeen.”), Pippin, Camelot and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, month others. I loved those records, because they were filled with singable songs that had real stories. (Always with me,there had to be a story.)

Modern musicals – Chess, Phantom, Les Mis – entered my personal vocabulary in high school. After all, it was a performing arts school. This was natural. (Two years before I started there, I’d wanted to be Puerto Rican, after seeing West Side Story for the first time. Ironically, my Caucasian-ness is what got me into my school, as much as my audition.)

My first really serious relationship – and I don’t mean my first sexual one – but my first grown up affair, was with a jazz musician. That he ended up being slime is secondary to the fact that he increased my mucial lexicon, introducing me to jazz and standards. Tony Bennet, Frank Sinatra Dean Martin, all the singers we mostly heard at Christmas – Perry, Bing, Nat, Rosemary and Judy – were suddenly surrounding me with decidedly non-holidayish sounds. And it wasn’t just the standards. Coletrain, Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald…their music was wrapped around me as well.

Those introductions continue to inform my choices. My collection now includes the Indigo Girls and Antigone Rising, and, leftover from college in San Francisco, Voice of the Beehive – but it also includes Madeleine Peyroux, Vienna Teng, Celtic Woman, Harry Connick, Jr, and quite a lot of stuff by Jason Robert Brown (who I maintain is the best storyteller who ever sat at a piano), as well as the requisite Erasure, Barenaked Ladies, Loreena McKennit and Billy Joel cd’s.

And of course, as a cellist, there are the classical pieces – YoYo Ma and Jaqueline DuPre, yes, but also Apocalyptica and Von Cello, the latter two who use the instrument for metal and rock.

Why am I thinking about this?

Because today at rehearsal, I realized that I’ve grown to really love liturgical music, as well. I mean, I’m never going to CHOOSE to listen to the Christian rock praise music that Fuzzy loves, though I’m complaining about it less, but the hymns we sing each Sunday morning, and especially the traditional pieces we get to do during advent, are insinuating themselves into my brain. Example: I realized today that I love the song “Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming,” after years of thinking it was dull, and our new Lessons and Carols anthem “A Stable Lamp is Lighted” has this haunting Celtic-y/MiddleEastern influence that is just really amazing, and the imagery in the text is gripping:

A stable lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
And stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbour heaven,
A stall become a shrine.

(That the alto part is wonderfully complex and interesting, is a mere enhancement to my attraction. Witness: I actually asked Clyde if we could do it for “regular” choir instead of just Lessons and Carols. He said it’s already on the roster for Advent IV.)

So, this is what my brain is centered on today. Not that this is unusual. After all, I’ve often explained that I think in music. And it’s true. I have a song in my head for every mood, every experience. I can’t name them all, but music is how I relate to the universe.

Rainy Street (night shot)

Originally uploaded by Ms.Snarky.

With a single sweep of the clock hands, a single flip of the calendar page, November is over, and December is here.

In my neighborhood, November ended with meteorological drama: 70+ degrees in the afternoon descending to a rainy 35 before midnight on the morning of the 30th, with snow – SNOW! – during the morning and early afternoon.

I usually wait til the first weekend in December to decorate my house, but I wanted to take advantage of Wednesday’s warm temperatures, and I also wanted the lights up so I could watch them shimmer in the mist. Lights seem to twinkle more when there’s rain or snow.

As the day progressed, the sky almost cleared, then grew blacker, though when I took the dogs out into the icy yard just a few moments ago, the moon was shining brightly, and the running lights from planes high above the trees were sparkling in the frosty air.

And now it’s December, and Christmas is coming bringing family with it, and somehow, somehow, after dreary November, everything seems bright and full of hope again.