Baltimore, after the fact...

I was meaning to take my laptop to Baltimore so I could sent out posts but forgot it in the rush to get away on Sunday. Just as well, with two 7 year old girls and a 4 year old, when would I have found time to write?

We drove in heavy rain through New York City and light rain until half-way to Delaware. Driving in rain makes me more tense than driving in snow.

The girls were still up when we arrived a little after 9. Presents were opened and their excitement was contagious. It will be remembered as The American Girl Christmas. At Thanksgiving they had seen and played with two American Girl dolls from Mimi's childhood and it was obvious Morgan and Emma and Tegan were hooked! So Bern and I and Bern's brother gave them dolls and outfits and beds and a table and chairs and even closets for their dolls' clothes. The next day, while Josh and Cathy were at work, Bern and I (mostly Bern) helped the girls create 'the American Girl apartment' in the huge open room on the top floor of the town house. It was really great and the girls would spend a lot of the next days up there playing. Josh even told Bern that the gift of a separate play space was the 'best give you could give me'.

Exhausting as they are--and they ARE exhausting--they were great and we had a wonderful time with them through Wednesday.

And the greatest thing about grandchildren of all the many, marvelous and amazing great things about grandchildren is this: Wednesday afternoon after three days of being with them and after hugs and kisses a plenty, Bern and I got in our car and drove home to our quiet little house in Connecticut....

Baltimore

We're going to Baltimore tomorrow to have a second Christmas with Josh and Cathy and their three daughters--our granddaughter.

We have to take the dog at 3 to the puppy motel and we'll leave from there. We'll be in Baltimore, with any luck, by a little after 8.

We're taking Auntie Mimi's gifts as well as ours and the trunk of my small car is nearly full. I'd be humiliated by the extravagance of it all if it wasn't for Morgan and Emma and Tegan....

My friend John gave me a laptop when we were in North Carolina last September. I believe I can blog from it and if so, since I'll take it with me, I'll be in touch here. But I can't do email on it because I'm a media idiot and can't figure out how to do that.

I hope Christmas was as mellow and sweet for you and it was for me.

And I hope the year bearing down on us--2014, who could imagine living this long?--brings you joys you didn't expect and wonders you don't deserve and surprises you'll never live up to.

That would be a good year indeed.

Be well and stay well.

innocence

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. You can read about it in Matthew's Gospel. The Magi/Wise Men/Three Kings went home 'by another road' rather than returning to Herod to tell him they had found the Child the star foretold. And Herod gave the order to kill all the boy children under 2 in Judea.

Joseph, warned by a dream, took Mary and Jesus to Egypt and Jesus was saved. But others were not.

Innocents is an odd word. Who, after all is innocent? Children, that's who.

We are two weeks removed from the slaughter of the Innocents in Sandy Hook a year ago.

Twenty children--innocent as they could be--died 379 days ago in an elementary school not 40 miles from where I sit typing.

But the horrific thing about the Feast of the Holy Innocents is that every day children die in war and in abuse and by hunger.

Every day should be the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

Children die every day in ways too horrible to imagine and because the world does not care or make a difference or protect them.

I'm going tomorrow to Baltimore to be with my three granddaughters. They are 'innocent'--though sometimes naughty and stubborn. But 'innocent', none the less.

My greatest fear is that something horrible and painful might happen to them.

You have children you love as well as I love Morgan and Emma and Tegan.

Your greatest fear is that something horrible and painful might happen to them.

This feast day is Our Day. We must pray for the innocent ones we know and love...and for all the Holy Innocents around this cruel and dark world who die from violence or want or neglect each day.

This is a solemn day. A day of reflection and pondering. A day dedicated to those least able to defend themselves.

Today is a Holy Day to remember all the innocence in life. Even the innocence we still have, somehow held onto in spite of all we have experienced.

It is a day to hold innocence fiercely near and to ponder how a world would look that took innocence seriously and held it up as the highest value....

Ponder that....

Feeling guity about being blessed

I let more water run until it was hot today than much of the world's people had water today.

I have three functioning indoor toilets when many in the world don't have any.

I waste enough food to feed several hungry families well.

I took my daughter to catch the train today and she is wondrous, shining, glorious--so good. And my son and his wife and three daughters are flying back from California on Saturday at a cost that would be the annual income of a significant majority of people in the developing world.

I've spent my life's work doing something I would have done for free it was so much fun.

And whenever I pee, I give a little prayer of thanks because the radiation I got after the removal of my prostate scarred my bladder and from time to time I pee blood and blood clots which are hell to clean up because they go off in odd directions.

I give thanks when my pee is clear--which it is 99.9% of the time. I give thanks all the time for having water and sewer pipes and food and two incredible children and a wife I couldn't have 'made up' any better than she is.

I have all the money I need and everything I want (except that Lexus 12 series) and, good health and a clear mind.

And all that makes me feel a little guilty.

My grandmother used to say, "be sure to count your blessings because they might run out...."

Folk wisdom at its best--but my blessings never seem to run out.

And I'm properly thankful for all that. Most of my prayers are prayers of thanksgiving.

So, why do I feel guilty about being so blessed?

Some accident of time and space and DNA and my own skills and gifts have made me a blessed man. And so, so many had less fortunate 'accidents'. 

Perhaps my guilt is a gift as well--one of the multitude of gifts I've been given (great friends, hard work, an above average intelligence, all that I need and all that I want, a wondrous family, a love of reading...God, the list is endless).

Perhaps my guilt at being so blessed keeps me human and humble and thankful. I did nothing to deserve how well my life turned out and yet turn out well it did.

Maybe it's a bit like 'survivor guilt'--when you walk off a crashed plane and most didn't--mine is 'blessed life guilt'. Don't get me wrong, the life I have is the life I love. But sometimes I don't feel like I deserve it.

Maybe that too is a gift. Maybe that keeps me humble and thankful and never able to believe for a moment that I deserve all this joy.

I'll ponder that for a while. (The pondering too, as always, will be a gift I rejoice in and scarcely deserve.)

Maybe it's just that around Christmas I'm a little embarrassed at how fortunate I am when others aren't. Maybe we all should, always but especially at this time of year, ponder how 'well off' we are compared to others....

I invite you to join me in that pondering as we approach a new year and new blessings....

Mellow Christmas

Very quiet here--not a bad thing at all. A good balance to the Christmases when our 3 granddaughters are her. Just Bern and Mimi and John and me. We had an nontraditional dinner--olives, pate and blueberry goat's cheese as appetizers, beef tenderloin with a herb, butter, crushed bread stick topping, Swiss char cooked in lemon, oil and garlic and twice baked potatoes (John kept calling them "potato boats" which none of the rest of us had heard to our knowledge) with sour cream, yogurt, butter, chives and goat cheese. For dessert we had little pastries--an assortment--from the bakery at Everybody's.

We talked about how when Bern, John and I were children, family visited after Christmas and you'd lay your opened gifts under the tree to show them. Mimi thought that weird. But I remember it vividly--aunts, uncles and cousins dropping by and looking at our stuff and us going to their houses and looking at their stuff.

Today Bern and Mimi and I went to see American Hustle which may be the best ensemble acting I've ever seen in a movie. Jennifer Lawrence proved she could do comedy with the best of them (in a movie that was not really a comedy), Amy Adams and Christian Bale deserve Oscar nominations along with screen writers, costumes, sound track and cinematography. No kidding a must see (aside to MC, you know who you are--don't go see this on my recommendation....)

Having Mimi around is a gift in itself. She fits right into our rather laid back lifestyle perfectly, taking care of herself and reading a lot under a quilt in the living room since she thinks we keep the house much too cool. She's mellow in herself and matches us so very well.

But Mimi and Tim (who I missed having around this Christmas) sponsored a black Lab named Bradley, of all things, who needed surgery at an Animal Hospital before he could be placed with an adoptive family, in our names for our Christmas gift. That's what we've asked our children to do for us for several years now--make donations to animal shelters and pet adoption centers in our names. It was wonderful to have a dog with our name this year!

(OK, I realize this whole post  has been pedestrian and not a little boring! I'm still in 'mellow Christmas' mode. I'll get back to provocative and philosophical ponderings soon. I'm just enjoying how relaxing and joyous and quiet this Christmas has been.....)

So forget yesterdays blog....

I was feeling so bad about the memory of the TV set that wasn't as big as Mrs. Martin's and the guilt of all that that I told Bern and Mimi and John Anderson our friend and fourth at Christmas dinner about it all and they told me several things:

1) That's what any 12 year old would have said...it was just a statement of fact and my father's actions were just to make me happy.

2) I could have said "Oh, God, I hate it because it's too small" and my father's actions would have been out of his guilt of not satisfying me.

3) Perhaps my father's never mentioning the trouble he went to, getting Adrian Vance to open his store on Christmas to exchange a TV was designed to make me feel bad, in which case, it worked.

I've been carrying this memory for, Lord God, 54 years and now I can let it go.

What a Christmas Miracle!!!

And to all a good night.....

A Christmas memory I would rather forget....

I was the only child of Virgil (41) and Cleo (40) when I was born. What a surprise for them!

Everyone in our families was afraid I'd be horribly spoiled. I wasn't really, but I do have a Christmas memory that is cringe-worthy.

We didn't have a TV when I was growing up. I used to go to Mrs. Martin's house, which was behind 'Martin's Hardware Store' that her husband owned and ran to watch TV. It was only a vacant lot away and Mrs. Martin was pretty much wheelchair bound and enjoyed my company. (This was a really small town--400 people tops--so everyone knew who had a TV and who didn't.)

Then one Christmas when I was 12 or so, my father (who was a frugal man with a capital F--like this, he bought a new black Ford every 3 years with money he'd saved over the three years...for cash. My father was so 'frugal' that when he tried to get a credit card in his 60's, it was difficult because he always paid cash and had no credit record. I was a college student by then and got a credit card in the mail every few weeks. My parents also bought the only house they ever owned--I grew up in a rented apartment in a part of the world where everyone either lived in a house they owned or a house the coal company owned--they bought that house in Princeton with cash.)

Ok, that was the longest and most wandering aside I've probably ever written and I lost the gist of what I wanted to say, so let me start over.

Then one Christmas when I was 12 or so, my father decided to buy a TV for me for Christmas. For him to part with that much money for something he considered frivolous was an incredible gift and commitment to me. When I got up on Christmas morning and went into the living room and saw it, the first words out of my mouth were, "It's not as big as Mrs. Martin's TV."

So my father drove to Adrian Vance's house, the man who owned the appliance store in Anawalt and got him to come out on Christmas morning to exchange the TV my father had bought for one that was as big as Mrs. Martin's. On Christmas day he did that because his 12 year old son was an ingrate of an asshole.

And he never once said something snarky like, "is this big enough, asshole?"

He just did it, for me.

If I could speak to my father, dead over 30 years now, I would tell him I was an awful and ungrateful son on that Christmas morning and everyone in our families had been right--they had spoiled me horribly and I was an asshole back then, 52 years ago now.

And the second thing I would tell him is that I hope and pray I turned out better than I might have, given the 12 year old I was. I would tell him that why I turned out better than I was at 12 and complained about a gift of love that wasn't big enough was because he and my mother taught me about gratefulness and wonder and joy in ways they never imagined. In ways they never knew.

I'd want to tell him that his asshole son of 12 became a person of compassion and understanding and love--because he showed me all those things even when I didn't deserve them.

That's what I'd like to say to my Dad this Christmas Eve.

Thank you for understanding what an asshole a 12 year old can be and never holding it against him. I think that made me who I am and have been.

And the memory of that Christmas makes me cringe and regret and almost weep.

Unconditional love is so difficult, so hard. and such a gift to 12 year old's when they look back on it and cringe.

I love you, Daddy, wherever you are. Merry Christmas.....