Hoppy Christmas to all!!!!

 ....... and a Merry New Brew, Too !!!

If all things are relative......

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That's relativity

Einstein

......... how come I get the minute on the stove all the time?

Starry Starry night.... deux

Ok.  I need to get this up, get this on and get this over.
It has been bothering me all these years, see, so this year I am taking this story, wrapping it in the nicest goddam Christmas paper I can find and walk out in the woods and leave it there.  At least figuratively. Leave it.
See, the thing of it is my older brother and I have never been close.  He picked on me when we were kids, but not to an extent greater than what big brothers do, and I used to pick on my little brother, too, until he grew much taller than I did and that made teasing him somewhat dangerous.  There never was a bit of malice or hatred between my older brother and I ..... we just didn't communicate well.  We still see each other at some family gatherings, and he is generous with his family and nephews and nieces... and he is extremely kindly.  Really.  It was just him and I didn't... talk.  In the 27 years since his son died I don't think we have exchanged more than ten, twenty sentences.  When our father died I did a eulogy at the church, and it was a great one even if I say so, and he came to me afterward and said, "Nice speech."  That was it.  When his daughter and my son graduated together at UW-Oshkosh I hosted a small event for all the out of town folks.  He told me, " Nice party." That was it.  He also went and paid the bar bill without asking.  It was just the way things settled in.  All in all, no big deal.

Nicholas' funeral was no big deal back in 1983 either.  Small.  The family was small  back then.  I think there were only ten of us at the cemetery. But then Nick was small, too, just three months short of his second birthday.  The box that held his ashes was small too.  I think there was a priest there who said something, but I don't remember.  It was probably small as well.

He had started getting sick just a few months after his first birthday. No big deal, kids get sick alot.  It's what they do.  And you take them to the doctor and then back to the doctor and then to a specialist that the Doctor recommends and the to a different specialist that that specialist recommends and none of this aided by a little boy who cannot talk or tell you what hurts where, whose whole world has spun into days and nights of hurt and all he really has is the love his parents can give him.  One day the Love and the Hurt arrive together at the Mayo clinic and the parents are told their son has a brain tumor.

Now, I know there are other stories like this.  I know it has happened in different ways to different  folks..... it has.  But not to anyone close to me and I hope it never does again and I have nothing but heart for those folks who may have to go through it.  The deal here is that they were told that, in the miracle year of 1983 there was an operation they could perform that maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe could do the trick. That in the un-miracle year of 1982  there would have been no maybes.  So this is GOOD NEWS.  There is pain and there is love and there is HOPE!

The bad news that came three days later is that the operation was a success but the patient was just too small and too weak.  The cure killed him.  And then there were ten of us standing with a small box of ashes in a small cemetery on a small hill in Western Wisconsin. It's a big wide old world and it is amazing how small it can be sometimes.
I don't know what was said between the Hunter and his wife back then.  I'm guessing there was a lot of the 'blame' game about who should have done something sooner or whatever.

 But he made the drive down from Minneapolis that night alone. And now he sat in the middle of the Christmas that his father had made.  The lights, ribbons, presents, bows candles.......with just me and Cheryl, Mom and Dad. He congratulated us on our engagement.  I think there was small talk of how the drive was and he casually said his wife was not well, but mostly it was about a half hour of such silence that you could smell the heart ache in the room.  I could see my father's eyes trying to wrap around the grief of his son.... and could tell that the Old Man knew that all the Christmas he had made was only making the hurt worse, and I could sense that the Man wished he could just put it all away.  That was all there was for a good half hour and then the Hunter said,"I'll be right back," and left the room and was up the stairs.  We thought he had gone out for a smoke.  No smoking in my mother's house, but when he didn't come back in another half hour Dad said, "go find him."
There was a clean easy snowfall that night.  When I got outside there was maybe and inch of new snow, no wind and a very starry night. The flakes we light and downy.  His footsteps were easy to follow.  I thought at first that he was headed the three blocks towards my sister's house, but they veered off.  I then speculated he was headed toward Gus's house to find our younger brother, but when I got there the house was empty.  And then I knew.
I back tracked to our parent's house and his car was gone.  I got in mine and drove the miles south to the cemetery where I found one set of tire tracks heading in...... and another headed out.  The only tracks in the fresh snow.  I wasn't going to find him, but I drove in to the grave anyway.  I could see where he had stood and I stood there too.  The snow had stopped and the night sky in the country was a world of starry lights covering a land of pure white. "I love you," I whispered.  And then said it out loud.  Then shouted it.
Now,  maybe you are what you eat and  maybe what you breathe and maybe you should write about what you know......and then sometimes all there is .... is a starry night on fresh fallen snow.  And some pain...... and maybe.... some love. Maybe.

Nicholas Orion
2-17-1982
11-28-1983

Hunt with the Angels, kiddo.

in media res...Christmas 1983

In 1983 I owned a ’66 Rambler Ambassador 990 Sedan. Light green with a huge steering wheel, white wall tires and more chrome that you will find on any five cars today. That sucker was in mint condition and I loved it more than I ever thought I could love a car. There was a style and a panache to it that I really can't describe fully.  I knew no one else that owned a Rambler or for that matter, no one who owned a car without a substantial amount of rust and dents. I had lots of rust and dents coming in my future but on Christmas eve 27 years ago…… it was all clean and fresh and neat and tidy and I am driving that machine straight west on Highway 21 across the state and beside me,the woman who had just agreed to marry me.  She was smooth, young and as pretty as a whistled tune breezed  through the woods. We were going to tell the folks on Christmas Eve about the engagement.  If I could ever put a feeling in a can to save it, would have been that three hour drive. How’s that for polished chrome? My only concern was for the Hunter, if he would come home and how he would be, but it was a thought I kept to myself in my back pocket.  I was more concerned about the Old Man and how he would be this Christmas.

The real deal, if there ever was a real deal about telling the truth and there isn't one that I know of, but my father invented Christmas. Straight up stuff, he did.  Two trees would be decorated, one in the front window and a second in the family room in the basement.  A wreath on the front door, ribbons and bough would be festooned on  the mantle, plates of cookies, and candies and nuts& chocolates would be decked  on the dining table and a pot of cider laced with cinnamon and orange peel simmering on the stove. Orchestral Christmas music on the stereo.  He would always wait in the front room for everyone to arrive. His sister, Aunt Helen, was already there when we pulled up.  So was my sister and her husband and their two young boys.  I guess it will be hard to see that house this year after remembering how all the arrivals then were treated then, how the house looked then.   Mom is in a nursing home now, the house mostly empty, the dishes are gone, the closets are bare and all the Christmas ornaments sit like bones in a pile of boxes in the old family room but back then all those bones were fresh, promises and love, and Dad, if he truly did not invent Christmas, was one of it's foremost practitioners, adherents, and the family room with the adjoining kitchenette was where he strategized it, directed it and admired it. Dad, I believe, thought of Christmas as one big nest of family and he would decorate as a way of welcoming all back, his only real wish for Christmas.

The afternoon was creeping easily into darkness when my young brother, all six foot eight of him, the rumble of his deep canyon voice of him, the sack full of unwrapped presents of him, arrived.  John eschewed wrapping presents, or would wrap them in old newspaper---"don't waste trees".  John's presents were always things like jars of honey and herbal teas or hand carved walking sticks, wild bird seed, home made beer or mead or wine.... it was a goodness he never learned to knit or there would have been wild hats and scarves, too. He would bring himself into a room and immediately the room would become small and then he would laugh and smile and like the magic only a giant heart can produce, the room would expand three times it's walls.   The Hunter, though, my older brother, and his wife had still not arrived from the Cities and, with a dread, I began to wonder if they would.
Dad's eyes showed the pain he felt when he finally said we would save some diner, but the rest of us should eat.  Even as he spoke I could see him look to the front window for that last set of headlights, that last piece of his nest. We all knew his heart was sinking, the old man's, and that he couldn't really shake off what had taken place three weeks earlier, that this year would not be Christmas as usual no matter how much he tried to make it so.
Dinner ended, the dishes cleaned and still no headlights in the drive and the old man's eyes, with a last glance out the window, looked at me for help.  "He'll be here," I said, " Let's go open some presents before the little guys get tired."  We opened family presents on Christmas Eve, Santa brings more in the morning. And we went to Christmas in the family room.
My older brother had always been my father's favorite despite all his efforts not to have favorites.  Chuck tramped the woods that my father, with his polio afflicted leg, never could.  Who fished, canoed, camped, traveled.  Older brother got married young, at twenty, and provided most of his and his wife's food by hunting and fishing.  I remember the stories.... how he would take to the woods after his college classes for white bass or deer or rabbit.  It was a passion that never left the Hunter.  Even when he turned into a Big Biz executive,,, the hunting and fishing were still a big part of his life.  Dad thought that was the stuff and that Christmas he eyes kept looking toward the window in the basement that looked out to the drive. for the headlights that should have been there long ago.
Now, all these years later, I have never been able to produce a Christmas  with all the trimmings like my father did.  I tried and I guess when my kids were young I pulled it off pretty good, but what happened that year has always rather prevented me from really getting into the 'Spirit' as it were, and even as I write this now, that year still chills me.
Here is how it went.

We opened the presents. And waited.  Cheryl and I announce our engagement and it was good.  Despite my brother not being there we brought in a little cheer.  My sister and her husband took their boys home as the hour grew later.  Aunt Helen retired. John went off to see his old HS buddy Gus. Cheryl and I kept vigil for the headlights which, finally, at about 10pm did arrive.  The Hunter had come home.  But without his wife.  His son was not with him either, but we knew Nicholas would not be along this year.... we had buried him in the cemetery south of town just three weeks previous.

I have to break this off.  I need to take a walk.

KT Tunstall | 2000 Miles (live)

They say you are what you eat in which case I am a bizarre combination of potatoes, peanut butter, chicken cordon bleu, hamburger helper, Cajun meatloaf, Oreos, smoked oysters, extra sharp Cheddar, ham hocks and beans, cornflakes, eggs benedict, bouillabaisse, brie, bratwurst, and whatever else is expedient at any moment I am hungry and have neither the ambition to cook nor time and enthusiasm. I truly do not want to be what I eat. And I have always been suspicious of that whimsical designation of ‘they’. I have met enough of them. I could say that I am what I breathe, but that would be Marlboro’s and whatever pot I can find.. Again, just like eating, breathing is an expediency that I tolerate merely because, when you think about it, it is more a reflex than a choice..

Ralph, when I could still afford to see him and before he retired, would ask me about my dreams. I would never talk about them and that was the cool thing about Ralph that when I would just shake my head and snicker a bit, and call him an asshole, is that he would just smile and never push the issue. I guess he was satisfied that he made me think about them, even if I would not talk about them, but the truth is that I remembered the nightmares more than I remembered any dreams, which I always separated, you know, A dream being where you want to be and a nightmare is where you have been or a place you do not want to go to. Sometimes those sessions with Ralph would piss me off so much that I would immediately head to the store and get a couple of cans of sardines in mustard sauce and a couple of packs of cigarettes, some Ritz crackers and some cheap beer, thus ensuring nightmares. Ralph would piss me off… but he would also stock me up with free Prozac from samples he would get, he knew I was on a tight budget. I think he also knew that Prozac and sardines produce great nightmares and that wrestling with nightmares beats titling at windmills. I miss Ralph

So I cannot be what I eat, that is mostly crap, and I cannot be what I breathe, that being mostly toxic,, and what I dream is nonexistent and the nightmares have become merely friends I drink with, chumps that never buy a round, so I am stuck with what I write and they, there they are again, say that you should write what you know

Lately… that is nothing. No, that is incorrect. It is a bunch of scrawls in tablets and notepads. Sentence fragments…mostly, but occasionally whole paragraphs. But I do have something. That I haven't written.... that slaps me in the face every Christmas. Maybe I will get to it this year. It is a story 27 years old. I've breathed it, ate it, dreamt it.... it is what I know. Maybe tomorrow.

all I want for Christmas

Only four days till film-maker/boy genius/  comes home from Portland.

He's already told me how "little" time he will have to spend with me and the family...... there are all his adoring friends he must must must hang out with.

On a positive note.... and remembering what his college apartment looked like.... I am rather relieved that he be staying at his moms.



What I saw while in search of my feet

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell one's name -- the livelong June --
To an admiring Bog! 

Emily Dickinson

just feeling oblique.  I need a haircut and a beer.... and while it is too early for the later... and overdue for the former,.............