There's no such thing

It's the day after Christmas and the three of us are glad to have the holiday over.  It started out when we woke Christmas morning to near blizzard conditions.  There are those who sing of "dreaming of a white Christmas", but the truth of the matter is a different thing.  The weather conditions by themselves made for challenging holidays for most of the people in the plains, but our Christmas was of the Garrison Keillor kind...straight from the shores of Lake Wobegon.  My husband started shoveling out, coming back in every twenty minutes to warm up.  His cheeks were so rosy he looked like Santa Claus.  I thought it was going to be a merry day, so I started preparing our Christmas dinner, thinking about "Julie and Julia" the movie which we watched the night before.  I was thinking how much I resembled Julia Child, not because of my cooking, but my propensity to make such a mess that I have to mop the floor after preparing for any major meal before the guests arrive.  In the middle of the stewed tomatoes, the phone rang.  It was my 90 year old mother from next door, hysterically crying..."Felix is dead", she wailed.  "What?"  I asked.  Felix is her ten year old cat who has always been the picture of health.  "I went down in the basement and he was just lying next to the washing machine.  I don't know what to do."   That was the beginning of Christmas day.  She's sobbing because we can't bury him in the back yard...obviously not because there is over a foot of snow on the ground which is frozen solid because the temperatures are hovering around five degrees.  So I yelled at my husband to stop shoveling because Felix was dead.  That woke Corina who came running down stairs to see what was going on.  Anyway, Phil went over to mom's and did the only thing possible with a dead cat on Christmas day...he put him in a double trash bag and put him in the trash where his frozen corpse remains,waiting for the trash man who comes on Monday.  That crisis averted, Phil kept shoveling and I put in a load of towels because we kept having to mop up all of the snow we were tracking in.  The next thing we know, the washer is overflowing because the drain from the washer has frozen.  Fortunately, I was doing a load on the hot setting and after only dumping a couple of gallons on the floor, it began to drain.  And on it went...My brother managed to make the 100 mile trek down from the city, only because he is a truck driver and they are used to any conditions.  My mother insisted on coming over to our house even though she has to use a walker to get around and they don't work very well in ice and snow.  Her care worker last week had a cold and passed it on to her, as if a 90 year old woman with a failing heart would be immune to any germs.  She comes over without even her face being covered, but she's stubborn like that.  While we were exchanging presents and there was none for my brother, I ran upstairs and found I had forgotten to wrap his.  I wish I could say it ended there, but later that night, just before I went to bed, the toilet upstairs stopped up.  I had to wake my sleeping husband, and after searching all over the house, we finally determined that the plunger was next door at mothers, and it was definitely too late to wake her up so we could only hope that no one would wake up during the night and use the bathroom without thinking.. 
This morning the toilet was still full to the brim, but with some work once we got the plunger, it is now it's normal self.  We had more snow during the night, but nothing that could not be handled.  We took mother to the emergency room and it seems her cold has turned into bronchitis, but with modern medicine, she is back home in her cozy house next door.  I finally laid down to take a nap this afternoon, exhausted, and thinking that this would have been described as the 'Christmas from hell.'  But then it occurred to me, there is no Christmas from hell.  Hell would never have and never will give us anything to celebrate.  And that is what this day and this season is all about.  It's not the gifts, it's not the decorations, it's not the food, it's not even our families.  It is "The Gift"  the one thing, the only thing that makes our lives worth living.  the only thing that enables us to be givers ourselves.  That's it, that's what we celebrate.

First Day of Winter

Today would be Aunt Myrtle's 93rd birthday.  Sadly, she has been gone from our lives for almost three years.  I wrote the following in February 2005.


We went to the Lied Center in Lawrence last night to see the baritone, Jubilant Sykes. I have been a fan of his for two or three years, ever since Phil gave me his “Jubilant” CD for Christmas. It was announced in the spring that he was going to be in Lawrence as part of the concert series but we had to wait until August to order tickets. On the first day, we got them, center seats, first row back, and what a performance!

Although he has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and in various venues throughout Europe and the United States, it was not a sell out crowd. Most of the audience appeared to be season ticket holders and unfamiliar with him, but after the first song, they were mesmerized as well. The first five songs were in Spanish with only a piano for accompaniment, and no microphone, not that he needs one. Then he moved into the more familiar classics and spirituals. Although there is probably nothing he can’t sing, the spirituals were the audience’s favorites. One thing I admire about Jubilant Sykes that he doesn’t wear his faith on his shoulder where it can easily be knocked off, but in his heart. That makes a difference in the audience response to some passionate statements of what he believes. He spoke briefly about the personal heritage of some of the songs, of hearing his grandmother, Paul Robeson and Leotyne Price sing them as a child and how they affected his life and his career. Then he sang "Deep River” acapella and the audience fell silent.

The only down side to an otherwise extraordinary evening were two instances when I saw younger women helping elderly women to their places. Both times, the care and concern was genuine, and so appreciated that I was reminded of my favorite aunt, all of the concerts and operas we attended and how we can no longer do so.

Aunt Myrtle meant almost as much to me as my own mother. With three younger brothers, one of whom was developmentally challenged; my mother didn’t have much time to invest in me so my father and my aunt shared their lives with me instead. My aunt gave me my first sewing machine, taught me to sew, showed me how to garden, how to cook well, and how to be a lady. She gave me an appreciation for the arts, took me to my first museum and to my first opera. For years, we shared the season tickets to the opera where I learned not to fall asleep during the most boring arias. I took her to see Star Wars where she fell asleep when Luke Skywalker was flying through the canyons of the death star being chased by the minions of Darth Vader.

Even though she grew up a hardscrabble farm girl during the depression, she was refined, cultured, and talented. She had a wonderful, artistic eye and was a dress designer before she married my uncle and never worked except as a volunteer, again. She was the most giving person I have known. You learned not to say you liked something in her house or something she had on because she would give it to you on the spot. I once saw her stop what she was doing to take off the dress she was wearing and give it to the person who complimented her on it.

Like Jubilant Sykes, she was proud of her heritage and not afraid to tell you what she thought. We had hours and hours of discussions about my grandmother and grandfather, what it was like growing up in that era, and how many in my generation were not living up to the standards of previous generations. All the while, she encouraged me to be the best I could be. I know she was proud of my success in the business world. Although I would sometimes run to her for advice when I ran into difficult situations, she wouldn’t let me quit or take the easy road. She always reminded me of the heritage of earlier generations.

Now that is all lost to Alzheimer’s. I remember the Christmas a couple of years ago when she came to dinner in an outfit that didn’t quite match. That was the first time I realized that something was wrong and knew that she was slowly leaving us.

I’m thankful I was able to take her to the Metropolitan Opera at Kennedy Center in New York when she came to visit us when we lived in New Jersey. For years she listened to it every Saturday afternoon and it was a joy to be able to share a live performance with her. I remember her commenting that she always heard ‘the lights are going up’ on the radio and didn’t understand what it meant until she saw the lights recede into the ceiling as the performance started.

Those days are forever gone. Instead she doesn’t get out of bed until noon and has worn the front of her head bald from pulling at her hair. Her caretakers try to keep her active, but she continues to go downhill into that long sad goodbye. I miss her. I wish I could dote on her as she did on me, as the two young women with their elderly charges last night.

There comes a time when all that is left is the heritage, the heritage that Jubilant Sykes lives up to so well in his concerts. I only hope I can pass some of my heritage on to my niece as my Aunt Myrtle did to me.

Creativity

The following is a piece that I wrote years ago, but it is very appropriate for this season.

     Yesterday, May 17th, Sammy Davis Jr, and Jim Henson, both considered to be creative geniuses in their respective fields died and someone paid 82 million dollars for a Van Gogh at Sotheby's. As a fitting end to such a day, my husband and I watched "Dead Poets Society" and I am left to ponder the part that creativity plays in our lives.
     Do we have to be creative? Who is the judge of that creativity? Is it merely a fragile monument to our existence, or something more?
     For some reason yesterday, even before I had heard all of the news of the day, I kept thinking of my friend's father, Mr. Kannard.
     I hardly remember him. I met him only once, a long time ago in Wichita, Kansas. My friend and I had driven down one weekend in her brown '72 Oldsmobile as I recall, the only car she ever bought new and the one which found a premature death in some small Kansas town up by Abilene. I was going to spend the weekend with my college roommate, but on the way we stopped by her parents’ house to visit.
     He had retired from the post office by that time because of his emphysema. All I remember of that meeting is a dark room, even though there were sheer curtains at the windows, and a tall skinny man breathing through an oxygen tube in his nose. He had a care lined face, the kind of face that should be stern, but he wasn't...just quiet.
     From that meeting though, he remembered me. He would send gifts home with his daughter for me. Little things which he made in his workshop in the basement, since he could no longer do any work which required physical exertion. Little stone animals -- the stones polished until they shone. Carefully chosen smaller stones became legs, ears, and noses, larger stones, bodies and heads. He would finish them off with those little plastic eyes with black discs that wiggle around.
     And once, my friend brought me some Christmas decorations. Two carolers made out of acorns. Acorns from a Turkey Oak tree I believe. The shape of the acorns fascinated me so that I looked them up in "Trees of North America."
     They were large acorns with fuzzy, prickly, caps which he used for the heads of the carolers. He sprayed the caps white and painted faces; bright big, blue eyes and red lips on the acorns. Then he added brown cardboard cone shaped bodies with cotton trimming for fur.
     I don’t recall that I ever sat those carolers out except for the first year they were given to me. They were a little too simple for my taste. But although it's probably been at least 15 years since he sent them home with his daughter, I have yet to throw them out. I probably never will. They were one man's gift to me of his creativity...a precious thing indeed.
     He didn't live too many years longer with the emphysema. My friends’ mother is gone now too. But every Christmas, when I take out the ornaments, all the fragile glass ornaments, I find his two snow men made from cardboard, nuts and glue with cotton around the bottom nestled in the bottom of the ornament box, wrapped in tissue which yellows more with every passing year. I find them and I think of him. Occasionally I stumble upon the little rock animals which I have not been able to throw away as well. These too remind me of him. He was only a postman. A postman who's disability forced him to retire sooner than expected. He had nothing to do with his days, so he created. Not great things, not even good things, but cherished things none the less.
     And every Christmas as I unwrap those ornaments, I remember once more, a tall, skinny, quiet man who loved to create.
     Creativity is so fragile and fleeting. It resides in each of us, in such different ways that sometimes we don’t recognize it when we compare it to what we see in the world. Creativity does not have to be measured by the world’s standards, because it is ours, ours alone. 
     Often, we don’t struggle hard enough to protect it and it slips out of reach. People, even those we love, will take it away if we let them. Not from vicious motives, but by filling up our time so we can’t be creative, or by something as simple as not acknowledging our unique perspective, whether it be in art, music, writing, or even baking.  We don't even have to be good at what we love to do...we just have to love doing it.

I wrote the above almost twenty years ago, but I still have at least one of those little acorn ornaments.  It is still cherished.  This year, during this season of giving, let's resurrect creativity, both in ourselves and in others.  Let's give gifts that truly speak of who we are, not what our money can buy.  Let's give someone something they can cherish year after year...something that will keep us in their lives long after we are gone even if it's just an ornament made out of acorns.

Baby It's Cold Outside

It looks like winter is finally here.  We woke up this morning to nineteen degrees and frost covered cars.  It's snowing from Texas to Georgia, but hasn't made it this far north yet.  It would be a good day for curling up with a good book, but there are too many things to do for the upcoming holiday's.  The Angel Tree gifts still need to be purchased which means we will have to venture outside.  For the time being, the new furnace and windows are doing their job.  Inside the house we're warm and toasty.