If you were a photographer who was given the chance to go back in history to capture a Christmas (Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/New Year’s Day) photograph, where would you go and what year would it be?

I’ve been mulling over this on and off all day, as I read others comments, wrote letters to soldiers stationed in Korea and Iraq, worked on some fiction, and really, I’m at a loss for anything historical or particularly poignant with the possible exception of the first performance of Silent Night, on a cold night in Germany, with a guitar for accompaniment.

For a moment, I can almost see it, and then my mind snaps back to reality, and I think about my favorite Christmases, and what snapshots I wish I could have, and the thing is – I have them already, on film and in my memory – all the times my mother made miraculous Christmases on no money, all the times she filled the house with love and magic, even when it was just the two of us, and the nearest relatives were across the country. I remember my ideal Christmas, spent with Aunt Peg and her son Jay and his wife Allison, our first year in California, when they heard we were alone for Christmas and insisted we come visit them immediately – for that night I knew what it was like to have sisters and brothers and a huge family, and for one night I loved it, but I was grateful to get home to my own life, too.

I wouldn’t mind a photograph of my first Christmas with Fuzzy – not the part with his family, which was actually quite nice, in spite of my shyness, but the ride back to his apartment, after , through snow-covered prairie, under starry wintry skies. We pulled off the road and made love in the cadillac under pine trees and the stars. Cadillacs, by the way, do not retain heat terribly well.

I’d love to have had a photo of the first time I hosted Christmas Eve for my family, when my grandmother was still lucid, and for that matter, alive, and we melted the pewter sugar bowl when we stuck a second log in the wood stove. I remember the laughter and the warmth, but not the faces.

Mostly, though, I’d have loved to see a picture of my grandfather’s first Christmas at home after being overseas for so many of the early years of his marriage to my grandmother, because I’m sure that was special and tender.

What’s the biggest change in your life since last December?

I was going to write that the biggest change in my life since last December is that I’m not working full time, but since I’m starting a new job on January 2nd, that’s not quite accurate. Anyway, I’d not been working full time before I began at BigFinancialCompany.

So has anything changed? Well, I’ve become a lot more aware of what I want from life. Improv is helping that a lot, but the time at BFC really brought home to me that I’m as good or better as the rest of the people who work in the mortgage industry, and that I’m much happier when I’m in charge, even if the only person I’m in charge of is myself. Autonomy and flexibility are worth more to me than any money, and even though things have been a little tight around here this last month or so, I’m in a much better place. I mean, I spent the last three months at BigFinancialCompany coming home two or three hours after my scheduled ending time, so tired I was in tears, not sleeping well, and then going back in two or three hours early. NO JOB is worth that.

Is it wrong that I’m just not comfortable in a corporate environment? I don’t think so. I went through a stage where I felt like I wasn’t a real person without a demanding high-paying job, but I’m better now. Fuzzy and I can have dinner together, and I don’t have to rush through so I can get to bed. I’m cooking and baking again. I’m sleeping better. I’m writing more. All in all this has been the best decision I ever made.

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.

Today is the last day of Holidailies, but am I writing something deep and meaningful about the discipline of having to write every day, and being accountable to someone if you don’t? No. Am I writing a sweet post-project wrap-up about all the new blogs that I’ve added to my blogroll? No. Or at least not tonight.

Tonight I’m going to write about eBooks.
Continue reading →

He’s dressed in green denim overalls, with a straw hat on his head, and a rake or hoe in one hand. On his back is a sack, not of presents, but of soil, or maybe seeds. He has a snowy white beard, and the stereotypical portly figure, and there’s a bird perched on his shoulder. He’s not a person, though, he’s a candle I bought at Big Lots a couple years ago, while adding to my ever-growing collection of Christmas accoutrements, because he reminded me of my grandfather.

My grandfather had the same portly figure, for all the time I knew him, but I never saw him with any more than day-old whiskers that felt like sandpaper against my cheek when I hugged him. He had the softest hair, though, that he washed, for all his life, with whatever sort of bath soap happened to be in the shower. Bar soap. I think his favorite was ivory.

His hands were strong and square when I was young, but by the time I was twenty-one – the year he died – they were cracked and gnarled, their strength much diminished. Where once he was accustomed to kneading bread, puttering with small electronics, or even braiding little girls’ hair, he lost all his dexterity, in the end, and tried to hide his embarrassment at being clumsy.

He used Old Spice. He wore cotton button-down shirts, khaki pants, and suspenders, and work shoes, every day. Even at the beach. If he was doing manual labor, and it was hot, he might concede to the removal of his shirt, to reveal the plain white t-shirt ever-present beneath it. He carried cloth handkerchiefs, that were my job to fold, when I was visiting.

He’s close to me tonight, the night before Epiphany, because I spent time looking at the still-trimmed tree, this evening, planning tomorrow’s adventure in Un-Decorating. I collect Santa Claus ornaments, and am partial to Victorian Santas in heavy robes of fur and velvet, but until tonight, I never realized that I’m drawn to them because they remind me of my grandfather.

He’s close to me, also, as I write this, because he was a geek at heart, the first on the block to have color television, a microwave, cable, a cd player, but he never had a computer. He died before my love of All Things Technological manifested itself, and I miss him whenever I play with a new toy, because I know he’d have gotten a kick out of whatever it is that I have.

He wrote me carefully printed letters once a week, the whole time I was in elementary school.

He taught me how to make the perfect loaf of raisin bread, the most scrumptious Thanksgiving turkey, the most soothing hot toddy. He taught me how to hammer a nail, the difference between phillips and flathead screwdrivers, and how to kill and clean a freshly caught bluefish (though I never enjoyed the cleaning part).

He taught me how to make a telephone out of tin cans and string and how a lever works. He wouldn’t even blink when I asked him to play with me, easing himself onto the floor to direct my adventures with blocks, legos,tinker toys or erector sets (though he required me to lay out an orderly ‘lumberyard’ first).

As much as my mother is responsible for my love of art, crafts, folk music, literature, and political activism, my grandfather is responsible for my love of gardening, baking, tool kits, model trains, and deep-sea fishing.

He never met my husband, but I know they’d have liked each other. And I think he and my father-in-law would have totally bonded.

The “gardener Santa” candle looks nothing like my grandfather, but it stands for him, anyway, and when I see it tucked in a corner of my house each year (part of the family tradition of carrying Christmas throughout the house), I smile, and think that maybe he’s watching over me, after all.

I collect greeting cards. Not Hallmark cards, or American Greeting cards, but, the expensive wrapped-in-cellophane high-style cards that they sell in places like Papyrus and Barnes and Noble.

One of their lines from a few years back featured pithy quotations by famous authors. Among these was a card featuring a quotation from Mark Twain, “You say there is nothing to write about? Then write to me that there is nothing to write about.”

I’m feeling that way tonight – that I have nothing exciting to say, today, and that I need a night off, but that I can’t take one because I committed to doing a post a day til Epiphany, and I haven’t missed a day yet.

In Scrabble, there are these nifty blank tiles, which, once drawn, can represent ANY letter the player needs at the time. I need the journal-equivalent of a blank tile – a generic bit of text that I can paste into this box and call mine.

In my attempt to find something to write about, I even suggested that my husband be my guest-blogger tonight. When he vehemently declined my gracious offer (by shrieking NO! at the top of his lungs), I then tried to play word association with him, in a futile effort to generate blog-fodder. “What do you think of when I say ‘glitter’?” I asked. His response was to waggle his eyebrows, and kiss me, and offer a near-synonym. At least the kiss was nice.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the folks I’ve read through Holidailies are keeping digital Commonplace Books, and I’m drawn to the notion. I’ve done this with notebooks for as long as I can remember, without having a name for the habit (though the notebooks were generally titled ‘Melissa’s Magic Notebook’), and I think it would be useful to revert to this childhood habit, as it’s much neater than the vast array of post-its that I usually acquire when I start logging snippets for later expansion into entries.

But that’s for another time.
Right now, I’m going to go make tea, and fold clothes.

Because I have nothing to write about.