Older and Wilder

I love the short winter days and the long, nuanced nights: I love getting up in dark, and picking my way to our little sun room, to squint up at the clouds packing themselves around the moon, or at the few stray stars vanishing westward. Sun is all very well, but a little goes a long way with me.

It's partly because I love this time of year, the long dream time, that I resent the holidays so much: all that aggressive, brassy cheer, all the noise and glare, which the perpetrators themselves confess is the expression of their own fear of the quiet and the dark. I like the quiet and the dark. I don't need the sun's company first thing in the morning every day. I can find my way about the house by feel, or the odd reflection of moon or streetlight, slantwise through beveled glass. It perplexes me that the same people who love being up late at night -- when, in case you hadn't noticed, it is also cold and dark -- make such a fuss about the cold dark winter mornings. It's supposed to be cold and dark. It's January. The earth has tilted this way for a long time.

I love walking, morning or evening, in the dark, with the towers of cloud swaying over my head, and slowly tumbling down to the horizon line. The glimpsed stars, marking the wheeling heaven. Not the boasting sun, which blots everything else out and pretends to be walking alone. The night sky obviously wheels in concert, every star inset in some larger movement. The sun encourages us to believe in its agency, but the night sky invites us to acknowledge that it is we who are moving, we who are whirling around and around and around. Everything seems to be falling down the slippery west of heaven, until you see it, actually see that it's the horizon climbing. Once seen, never forgotten.

Or you can crouch inside your house with all the lights on, and your garish lighted Christmas tree, and pretend your little human story is the fixed center of the universe. But it's still out there, the stars and the surging horizon. It's all far older and wilder than we are.

The Thing That Hath Been

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

The wind of Christmas hath whirled hither again, nor shall it be remembered, nor shall it return but as new: when all thy gifts are broken, then shalt thy heart grope for what it cannot find, and scraps of paper only wilt thou discover, unless it be a ribbon on a bare twig.

A new Christmas cometh only when the old is gone entire: therefore make haste to put away tree and ornament, light and music, and let the dead of winter possess thee. Sweep the needles from the hearth with care, for a single one remaining will hold the season in darkness; and thy carols shall be sung before untenanted houses, and thy cup shall be empty.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Busy

Oh for an age so sheltered from annoy

That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common sense!

I roundly dislike being busy, which I always am this time of year: it's the giving season, and every day brings a new surge of gifts to the Foundation. I am grateful for the gifts, which, to disregard more important things, keep me in a job I love, and in company with people I love and admire intensely. But my attitude toward holidays has always been grumpy. They interrupt my routines. They're trying, for an extreme introvert: everyone gets in my face and demands my attention.

I watch, with amusement, my mind constructing stories to justify and make moral the fact that I simply dislike the holidays. For days some semi-independent bit of my brain has been at work trying to construct a narrative about holidays being invented to distract working class people from the fact that their masters never have to work, that they never have to get up at a particular time of day, and that they wander off to Jamaica or the south of France whenever they damn well feel like it. If we weren't abject servants – says my mind – we wouldn't need holidays. We could make any day worth living.

This, of course, is arrant nonsense. People love holidays, the filthy rich as much as anyone. They love to get together and jabber repetitive inanities at each other, and trade formulaic expressions of approval, and jostle for status, whether on their way to Mecca or to the mistletoe. They love picking a day at random out of the calendar and investing it with huge significance. It's Christmas! They insist. And when I grumble, it's only Christmas! because you say it is, nobody has the faintest idea when that Nazarene carpenter's son was born, I know I've gone too far. You can only try the patience of extroverts so far: they are not thoughtful folk. You have to play along.

So. Merry Christmas! May you have all the merriment you can take on board, and get it out of your damn systems, so I can get back to the life I love. Which has parking spaces at Fred Meyer even in the early evening, and gifts rolling into the Foundation at a nicely manageable pace, and cafes that open for breakfast at the same time every day. My life is such a rewarding one that holidays are a disagreeable interruption: may God bless you, every one, with a life so good! Then maybe we could dispense with all this.

A Christmas Carol

The ghosts do come crowding, at this time of year.
It must be the dim and panicked backspin of the sun,
unable to find its footing, or maybe the long chain of money –
never long enough – jerking to its end,
punching the trachea. Last night your phantom
loaded me with gifts in gentle forgiveness,
and I woke up tearing the sheets with screams.


A response to a morning porch response.

Just the worst time of the year for a journey

Sometimes I want nothing better than the tack and gear of traveling: good old well-worn boots, backpack faded with sun and rain, a steel canteen that was new in 1945. Today or tomorrow is the shortest day of the year. Tonight is the night when we call the sun back. Unless we just want to follow it. What, after all, do we have to offer? We're hardly in a position to bargain.

Sometimes I want to make a numbered list, just for the relief of seeing the numbers appear on the page, each in its place, the reassurance of four coming after three.

Christmas doesn't come like that. It's dangerous, variable, driven by rumor and anxiety. It lies buried somewhere at the far edge of the year, like a landmine. Somewhere else, somewhere far and far beyond, are the pale blue mornings of March and April. It's hardly worth even thinking of, though. For now, there's wax under our fingernails and stray fir needles on the backs of our jackets, and the neighbor's lights reflected in the driveway puddles. There's clouds climbing the ridge and backing off, there's condensation on the windows or frost, depending on which way the thermometer tipped at three this morning.

Butter and sugar crusting over my slowly curing chest: a layer of bone, a layer of muscle, a layer of fat. I wash my hands and wait, wait for the hot water to come. When it does I let it pool in the cup of my palms, soften the connective tissue, loosen the joints.

Okay, I'm ready for the new year to start. Huddled over the sink, I lift my head and see that strange stout man with the twinkly eyes, that Santa Claus, who lives in mirrors these days, with his shirt hanging down over his belly, and a faint puzzlement at the corners of his pursed mouth.

Merry Christmas, old man, whoever you are! Pull yourself together and get to work.

Next Christmas

I take a deep breath, and feel the QL cautiously release a bit, the paraspinals ease, the curve of my lower back open a little. The extra pounds I put on over the holidays are pushing against the tenth and eleventh ribs, at my sides above my hips, and against the xiphoid process (that tip of bone at the bottom of the sternum). Sometimes I get back to a more human way of eating right after Christmas, but this year I kept eating like a mall-dweller, clear through till now, the official final day of the holidays.

Our counselor recently asked me to give him a physical description of my holiday anxiety, and seemed a little surprised, possibly a little disappointed, when I could give him a quite precise one, right off the bat. Hey, this is my territory: the body and the visualization of emotional states. It's a stiffness of the whole chest and abdominal cavity, knotted together by the abdominals and the QL, a turgid, steel blue mass, slightly colder than body temperature. As if an alien insect had laid its eggs in my thorax, midway between the xiphoid and the navel, and the egg sac was pushing everything outwards, and in the meantime all the muscles of the spine and abdomen were poisoned and ossifying, growing ever stiffer, weaker, and less serviceable.

I had played with the idea of radical withdrawal, of declaring unilaterally that I do not celebrate Christmas or any of its trumped up simulacra (Kwanzaa, Hannukah-on-Steroids, whatever.) And if I thought it would solve the problem, and give me back the last month of every year, I'd do it. But in fact it is my holiday, my ethnic tradition, for better and worse, and I'd be throwing out the baby with the bath. Whether the holiday is foisted on me, as a Buddhist, is a meaningless question. There's no such thing as a culture without festival times. The trouble is not the holiday -- commercialized and coercive and full of bizarre superstitions though it may be -- the problem is that I go limp and play possum in its presence, hoping that it will just nose me about a bit and then wander off, rather than deciding to eat me. I need to decide how I celebrate Christmas, and celebrate it that way, and the hell with everyone else.

I realized, as we celebrated what we call “our little Christmas” on December 26th -- “little” because it's what we do with “our little family,” rather than our extended family -- that I actually like the gift-giving, on a reasonable scale, and without the sense of obligation. It's the industrialized Christmas, with the extravagant feast and thousands of dollars of shoddy products changing hands in a feverish potlatch of mutual disappointment, that I hate. That, and having allowed “our little Christmas” to be marginalized. Our little Christmas shouldn't be the little one. It's the big one, and it ought to be the center of our celebration.

I've thought along these lines before -- a couple years ago I even went so far as to send out Christmas cards, for the first time in thirty-some years -- but I've never been so aware of it, and never so determined to change it. To make it happen, of course, I'm going to have to start preparing well beforehand, making my plans apparent to everyone before anyone else starts planning -- in August, say. And I'll have to make a strict list of the people I'm giving gifts, and figure something out for everyone, which will take sustained effort, and will require admitting to myself, long before December, that Christmas is coming and that I am going to celebrate it. Celebrate it. Not weather it.

Letter from Home

I'm coping, more or less. My back is occasionally sending jolts of dazzling pain to keep me from getting complacent.

The lot we were looking at, with the possibly unlivable house on it, got bought, so we're sad (primarily Martha) and relieved (primarily me) about that. I was having nightmares about trying to get under that house and jack up bits of the foundation, while rats and their fleas nibbled on me, and the floors split open.

Only two more days and this Christmas mania will die down and we'll be able to do things like grocery shopping again. Hooray! I'm very fond of Dickens but at this time of the year I have a hard time forgiving him for his part in launching the Christmas juggernaut. Weeks of international dementia. I know I could make some money by touting gift certificates but I can't stand to participate in the madness.

So we drive around some, looking at dismal little houses in dismal parts of town. It's a blessing that we have the same responses to places.

"What do you think of that one?" A little beige box among little beige boxes.

I'm quiet for a little bit, and then I say, "Well, there's nothing really wrong with it. It's just . . . sad."

"Oh, that's a relief. When you didn't talk right away I thought maybe you liked it."

What we most want is a spacious yard -- overgrown and ratty is fine -- with some mature trees, not necessarily with a view but not at least in dead flat terrain. Any old shack will do: we'd actually like to buy cheap and improve. We're perfectly willing to take something down to the studs and redo it. That would be fun, in fact.

We're going to a counselor and try hard to implement his advice, which is twofold: 1) to keep inquiring about each other's experience and feelings, 2) to refrain from trying to ratchet down each other's anxiety. He's fond of quoting Kierkegaard: "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." His idea is that rather than trying to soothe ourselves down, we should let our anxiety rise to the next level, where it will actually impel us to do things. And he's right, I think, that we spend an inordinate amount of time protecting each other and assuring each other that everything's just fine as it is. We generally respond to anxiety by trying to make it go away.

Dark Sweatshirts

Actually, what I'd really like for Christmas is a couple dark sweatshirts, double extra large, endowed with some cunning technology, or hidden (to me) uncoolness, that would prevent my descendants and their partners from making off with them. How many dark sweatshirts have I bought? A dozen at least. And how many do I have now? None. There's something about a dark sweatshirt that speaks to the deeps of twenty-somethings, and inspires them to think, “The old man doesn't really need this: it's more my kind of thing.”

Some Nativity Scenes

She came to the door carrying a glass of wine from home: tonight was a night for drinking chablis and she meant to go on as she'd started, whether she was dropping in on a neighbor's Christmas party or not.

She was in her fifties, all in black, with a pleasing décolletage. Not dressed to the nines, at all, but the sort of woman who goes on good-humoredly making the most of what she's got. She immediately perched in the most comfortable chair by the fire and became, effortlessly, the center of attention.

Her husband preferred to stand, having obtained a beer, and watched her fondly. A builder, an unreconstructed Northwesterner, of the sort of who simply doesn't talk when he has nothing to say, so comfortable with his silence that there's nothing awkward about it. You could see that in his view, his wife was the clever one about talking, so he delegated all that to her: he cast a professional eye on the remodeling my friends had done. Eventually asked a question or two about it, in a voice so soft I couldn't catch the words. He never did sit down.

“How pleasantly inclusive we're being with these older people!” I found myself thinking, as the conversation bubbled along. It was a few moments before it occurred to me that, to the thirty-somethings in the room, the newcomers were of a muchness with Martha and me.

I've accepted my gray-and-white hair and beard without resentment. I don't mind the physical changes I've gone through, especially since, generally speaking, I feel healthier and more vibrant than I did in my twenties. But I still unconsciously categorize myself with the young adults. When I worked in a cubicle for IBM I felt middle-aged, but now I don't.

My public status, however, has definitely changed. I'm of that age at which a man is well past the fork in the road, where the sign on the left says “Distinguished” and the sign on the right says “Invisible.” I'm on the right-hand road. Only particularly kind or polite young people take any notice of me, now. Which is a good thing: my time is no longer wasted on young people who are selfish and rude. There's a certain luxury in being middle-aged, in this country of the obsessively young. You fall off the radar. No one's tracking you any more: you can make your life whatever you please.

Or maybe, this is just the trajectory of my own life, and I'm generalizing unwarrantably. But life feels less and less a burden, and more and more of a gift, as the decades go by. I was so hagridden by expectation, when I was young. Now everyone knows that I will never be anything distinguished. The pressure's off.

---

Of course, sadness, too: we have given our hearts to things that are bound to be lost. But unlike them, I have the gift of men. I will not have to see the end of them.

Yesterday Mt Hood stood out with incredible clarity, covered with freshly fallen snow, a few ragged wisps of cloud caught in his hair. His scoliotic western spine is turned towards us, here, graceful curves running up to his peak. Too pretty, maybe, in a photograph: too symmetrical, but in life an overpowering vision of what is beautiful and remote. I'm not quite sure how people live without a mountain peak on the skyline. In Olympia we had Rainier, and here we have Hood. I missed it terribly, when I was in New Haven: I never got used to knowing that, whichever way I looked to the horizon, there were only more of the same miserable little hillocks with multitudes of human beings crawling over them.

---

But oh, quiet, Dale. It's wind and rain now, and a smudgy whitish sky, cold and stark for Christmas. I feel the rain tip-tapping on my my ancient bones, filling the bowl of my skull: sweet rainwater gathering in the little lakes dammed by the gathering of my finger-bones in the mud. It sings softly:

Oh sweet dear God, oh sweet dear God, I'm ready any time.

I hold baby Jesus against on my chest while he sleeps. A big day this week, getting born, taking on all the frantic hope and desire of the breeding world. But the two of us have this morning to gear up for it all. No one's paying attention to us now: it's just the two of us. When the time comes we'll play our parts gamely enough, whatever they are. But for now we're going to catch up on our sleep.

Procedures Manual: Thanksgiving

Create an effigy. It need not be lifelike: a gesture at representation will be enough.

Set it in a convenient chair. It may slump from time to time, and require to be “punched up.” So long as it doesn't fall, you're fine.

As soon as food is present, set it on “automatic eat”: from this point on, it will pretty much run itself.

Very, very quietly, slip back and draw the curtain. You may think someone will notice something wrong. Well, they will, but the last thing they will think is that the effigy is not you.

Now you're at liberty, so long as you stick to the empty parts of the house. Wander from room to room. Daydream. Thanksgiving will soon be over, and real life will start again soon. Just come back often enough to reach through the curtain and make sure that the puppet doesn't fall out of the chair: remember, you'll need it again at Christmas.

A Calm and Dispassionate Assessment

I have lost my face. I have only a raw pulpy mass of sensitivities, hanging off cheekbone and brow. I look out of the bloody caves of my eyesockets as if out of reversed telescopes, and see tiny, busy, ant-like figures far away. Not ready to appear in public. Wind me up, wind me up in linens brushed with petroleum jelly, darken the room, and wait. Just wait, dear.

I write blog posts about the Third World War, or medical practice in America, or building for passive solar in the Pacific Northwest, or neo-Pagan family structures in the post-industrial world, and edit them until they disappear. What I have is a face of raw hamburger and a clutch of blue-penciled paper. I walk backwards, explaining my positions carefully to non-existent juries, and feel with my toes for the edges of the cliff. Wait.

At the same time, I am, inexplicably, a comfort to my family. I read aloud to them. Last night, after Thanksgiving was finally over, I read them “A Bit of Luck for Mabel” -- that grand short story of Wodehouse's. They laughed and laughed. I do lovely, effective massage: I'm at the top of my game. Do I even need a face? Do I need to convince the juries? Maybe this is a life, after all.

But the holidays come, inescapable nightmares, huge paste-like smears over the calendar. When the holidays come I despair of ever having a face. Let me buy a plastic Ordinary Joe mask, and keep it by the door. Nobody cares to look closely anyway. It should do. Just make sure it's buttered on the inside, so it doesn't stick: things are painful enough already.

Christmas 2009

The fir needles prick my feet like kitten claws;
every room is sharp and green; my hands

smell of sandalwood, tree sap, lavender.
On the table you fall asleep at once.

Squalls pass over the sky of your face,
dreams of the dying, of hospitals,
auditoriums and admonitions:

I draw them out through my fingertips,
eat them like kale. Underneath
there is a sweetness.

The swell of your throat,
the camber of your chest under my palms,
your breathing that rocks my shoulders --

this longest night of the year lifts its muzzle,
sighs happily when it catches your scent,
curls up to sleep again till summer.