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Technically, it's full tomorrow, not today. But I went outside, around 5:00, with still a little twilight to the west, and there was the full moon as far as I was concerned, caught in the branches of a tree, big and soft and aglow. And who knows if it will be visible tomorrow night, anyway? Probably not. So this was it. The second full moon of the month, also known as a blue moon. (Possibly from the Old English word belewe, meaning "betrayer," for an extra full moon that came too early) Meant to be the last little window I open on this advent journey through December. Same as the full moon in the first window, also counted a day early.
This is one of those phenomena almanackers are especially keen on: a meeting of month and moons, rare but not too rare--it happens once every two to three years--and combed into the culture through idiom (once in a blue moon) and song (Rodgers and Hart: I saw you standing alone...; Nanci Griffith: just once [just once] in a very blue moon...).
It wasn't blue, but the sky around it was a soft navy peacoat and the moon a big brass button caught in the tree, but working its way out and up, slowly but surely.
So what does that give us for this December meander? Time to tally. Tomorrow has enough responsibility, glory, and auld lang syne, a year's worth, a decade's worth (also counted a tad early). From 1 to 30:
Full moon (blue)
"No man can live alone" (grafitti)
alien summer sun
New York City
American wigeon (winter duck)
kid on a sled
imagined Aboriginal petroglyph Down Under
"housepainter's blue" sky of evening
winter rain
a star to swing on, bearing the face of Bing Crosby
iceweeds
"Having troubles, bubbles?" (lost catch phrase)
4:12 p.m.
little drummer boy of time
bird box with or without a field mouse in it
Ring-necked duck (winter duck)
my reflection in a cowl
Hanukkah candle #6
streetlamp and its cone of light
amethyst/vermillion sunset on last night of autumn
Persephone in the underworld
Goats on a leash in Lexington center
Christmas tintype of boy with fake snow
King John's red rubber ball
A red-bellied woodpecker at the feeder
The wrong end of the binoculars
Rumpus of clouds
Butternut squash pie
Canada and the Alberta Clipper
Full moon (blue)
And what does it add up to? Lights + Birds + Winter + Gifts + Art + Tradition + Surprise...equals December. Cheers!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
O Pie! O Canada!
I've opened two more windows. Yesterday's revealed a wedge of butternut squash pie in a graham cracker crust. Today's revealed a map of Canada with a blue arrow swooping down on New England like a sword of vengeance.
*
I had never had a squash pie. Somehow I thought the contents would be like the fibrous, stringy squash of a Boston Market side dish. Then later in the afternoon, Alicia, who was creating the pie with Judy, her mom, invited me to spoon some of the filling from the bowl. Whoa. Cool. Fruity. Reminiscent of key lime, but less tangy, more, I don't know, mango-y.
The finished pie sat on the table like a promise, but it had a hard act to follow. Stuffed chicken breasts; acorn squash stuffed with wild rice; zucchini and rice; salad; merlot. Finally, after the dishes were done, the pie.
Of course. Squash is like pumpkin. Squash pie is like pumpkin pie, except lighter, more delicate. A gustatory revelation! We watched the second half of "Julie and Julia." They would have approved. Sometimes food goes beyond satisfying hunger to providing deep well-being, and evoking gratitude for the favor and the memory to come. This was like that. A yum with a deep bow.
*
Winter is over a week old. The sun sets five minutes later than it did last week, but it seems that we've gained more daylight than that. Lemony light now lingers through bare branches at a quarter to five.
But winter gives with one hand (daylight) and takes away with the other (degrees). Today was a day for seeing winter as a two-fisted god, or maybe its henchman, the icy north wind in the Ojibway tale who tries to freeze Shingebiss, the plucky little merganser duck who's safe and cozy in his lodge. I can hear the north wind out there whipping around our lodge tonight, but I think it doesn't want to be in here. Out there is its place to roam, the wind from Canada, the one we call the Alberta Clipper, racing down from the prairie provinces like a hockey player streaking for the empty net, no defenders in his way.
We think we know North? We've got a lot to learn about North.
*
I had never had a squash pie. Somehow I thought the contents would be like the fibrous, stringy squash of a Boston Market side dish. Then later in the afternoon, Alicia, who was creating the pie with Judy, her mom, invited me to spoon some of the filling from the bowl. Whoa. Cool. Fruity. Reminiscent of key lime, but less tangy, more, I don't know, mango-y.
The finished pie sat on the table like a promise, but it had a hard act to follow. Stuffed chicken breasts; acorn squash stuffed with wild rice; zucchini and rice; salad; merlot. Finally, after the dishes were done, the pie.
Of course. Squash is like pumpkin. Squash pie is like pumpkin pie, except lighter, more delicate. A gustatory revelation! We watched the second half of "Julie and Julia." They would have approved. Sometimes food goes beyond satisfying hunger to providing deep well-being, and evoking gratitude for the favor and the memory to come. This was like that. A yum with a deep bow.
*
Winter is over a week old. The sun sets five minutes later than it did last week, but it seems that we've gained more daylight than that. Lemony light now lingers through bare branches at a quarter to five.
But winter gives with one hand (daylight) and takes away with the other (degrees). Today was a day for seeing winter as a two-fisted god, or maybe its henchman, the icy north wind in the Ojibway tale who tries to freeze Shingebiss, the plucky little merganser duck who's safe and cozy in his lodge. I can hear the north wind out there whipping around our lodge tonight, but I think it doesn't want to be in here. Out there is its place to roam, the wind from Canada, the one we call the Alberta Clipper, racing down from the prairie provinces like a hockey player streaking for the empty net, no defenders in his way.
We think we know North? We've got a lot to learn about North.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Worff, Harff, Worra-Worra
On the road again, staying with our friends Judy and Paul (who first planted the seed of this blog) in the nw corner of Connecticut, trim little die-cut state I grew up in, though that was down south in the stubby panhandle of Fairfield County, but I digress. Not easy to get a grip tonight. I'd set up at the dining room table, near the couch where my son Matt was trying to sleep, but he kicked me out after observing drily how little I'd written. So now I'm in bed, trying again.
Maybe my problem is the unconscripted, demobilized quality of these days out of uniform, like Confederate soldiers coming home after the war. Not fully post-Christmas because they’re also pre-New Year. They’re either free of the holidays or trapped by them. Or something else.
Sunday was at least Sunday, busy with year-end and decade-end reviews in the Sunday papers. M, T, and W are freestyle. Offices depleted (take a long lunch). Kids on vacation. If not bored, then uncertain. Betwixt and between.
This could be an opportunity. Three days to devote to another cause: what a friend, artist Walter Kopec, calls pondering. Yes, of course, read the new book, listen to the new CD. But also stare out the window. Sit in a café and watch the world go by. Take a walk with little to show for it. Do nothing and say nothing with full expertise. Consider the fate of the tree in the living room, still on duty but facing in “January” that same undefined future that the jack o’ lantern faced in “November”. Contemplate the blank calendar, the blank screen, the blank sky. Welcome the three wise guys: As If, Not Even, and It Is What It Is.
*
My advent calendar is winding down, but to not be Advent (about which I know bupkis), it needs to go past Christmas. Sunday’s revelation was the roaring, feral clouds above Route 2, I 95, and the Mass Pike before they finally shook themselves to tatters and yielded to the blue over Belchertown. Clouds have messages, whole pages of mute Shakespeare, especially when they tower and roughen and bellow and insist and take on larger-than-life El Greco Miyazaki Noh Yes Maybe wind-whipped temperaments and seem to have names like Harff and Worff and Worra-worra like wild things having a wild rumpus.
Maybe my problem is the unconscripted, demobilized quality of these days out of uniform, like Confederate soldiers coming home after the war. Not fully post-Christmas because they’re also pre-New Year. They’re either free of the holidays or trapped by them. Or something else.
Sunday was at least Sunday, busy with year-end and decade-end reviews in the Sunday papers. M, T, and W are freestyle. Offices depleted (take a long lunch). Kids on vacation. If not bored, then uncertain. Betwixt and between.
This could be an opportunity. Three days to devote to another cause: what a friend, artist Walter Kopec, calls pondering. Yes, of course, read the new book, listen to the new CD. But also stare out the window. Sit in a café and watch the world go by. Take a walk with little to show for it. Do nothing and say nothing with full expertise. Consider the fate of the tree in the living room, still on duty but facing in “January” that same undefined future that the jack o’ lantern faced in “November”. Contemplate the blank calendar, the blank screen, the blank sky. Welcome the three wise guys: As If, Not Even, and It Is What It Is.
*
My advent calendar is winding down, but to not be Advent (about which I know bupkis), it needs to go past Christmas. Sunday’s revelation was the roaring, feral clouds above Route 2, I 95, and the Mass Pike before they finally shook themselves to tatters and yielded to the blue over Belchertown. Clouds have messages, whole pages of mute Shakespeare, especially when they tower and roughen and bellow and insist and take on larger-than-life El Greco Miyazaki Noh Yes Maybe wind-whipped temperaments and seem to have names like Harff and Worff and Worra-worra like wild things having a wild rumpus.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Two Quiet Days
Christmas and Boxing Day seem cut from the same cloth, tuned to the same music; not the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but their horses, Silver and Scout, roaming free in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains under a waxing moon. Both days are quiet postludes in a way. Today is post-Christmas; Christmas was post-itself, in that the day felt like a calm following the turbulence that led up to it. The presents were opened, and were worth the anticipation. The tree presided over the ceremony with dignity, a perfectly behaved tree in a living room, decorated with colored lights and small animals, like a large upstanding bear with winking lights in its fur. And many games of Bananagrams were played at the dining room table while outside a custom of birds whirred in and out of the bird feeder: chickadees, tufted titmice, house finches, goldfinches, cardinals, blue jays, and most surprising of all, a slim and handsome, sand-bellied, ladder-backed, red-cowled, Red-Bellied Woodpecker.
And there were walks on the beach at Sears Point in the afternoon and evening like stepping into a Dutch winterscape, except with lighthouses on the far shore instead of windmills. And a distant raft of winter ducks on the placid gray inlet, mostly scoters or scaups with a handful of buffleheads for variety.
Today was a day for coming home, doing crosswords, and walking down to Spy Pond, under the same overcast sky as yesterday, along with a few quirky by-joves to choose from. A crisp, laundered, twenty dollar bill in the clothes dryer. A snowman, created by 4-year old Ella and her dad down the street: three chubs high with a flowerpot hat, a snub carrot nose, and a brown weed-sprig for a pipe, with miscellaneous pebbles for the rest. And a genuine revelation. Down at the Pond, while Carol shot videos of the ice cover (slabs near the shore the shape of New York's boroughs), I tried the wrong end of the binoculars. Excellent! A beautiful dinner-plate frame of shore, pond, and sky! The Dutch masters would have approved, or would have sucked on their long meerschaums and shrugged, but that would be good enough. "We call it 'the wrong end,'" I would have added, thinking to win them over with irony. But by then they would have waved me away and set up their plein-air easels, pleased, after all, by the gunmetal sky and the bare trees. Though a few ravens wouldn't have hurt.
And there were walks on the beach at Sears Point in the afternoon and evening like stepping into a Dutch winterscape, except with lighthouses on the far shore instead of windmills. And a distant raft of winter ducks on the placid gray inlet, mostly scoters or scaups with a handful of buffleheads for variety.Today was a day for coming home, doing crosswords, and walking down to Spy Pond, under the same overcast sky as yesterday, along with a few quirky by-joves to choose from. A crisp, laundered, twenty dollar bill in the clothes dryer. A snowman, created by 4-year old Ella and her dad down the street: three chubs high with a flowerpot hat, a snub carrot nose, and a brown weed-sprig for a pipe, with miscellaneous pebbles for the rest. And a genuine revelation. Down at the Pond, while Carol shot videos of the ice cover (slabs near the shore the shape of New York's boroughs), I tried the wrong end of the binoculars. Excellent! A beautiful dinner-plate frame of shore, pond, and sky! The Dutch masters would have approved, or would have sucked on their long meerschaums and shrugged, but that would be good enough. "We call it 'the wrong end,'" I would have added, thinking to win them over with irony. But by then they would have waved me away and set up their plein-air easels, pleased, after all, by the gunmetal sky and the bare trees. Though a few ravens wouldn't have hurt.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Red Rubber Ball
It could easily have been the candle. Or even the figgy pudding. But I'll go with the red rubber ball.
We've come over the Sagamore Bridge and through the woods to Chatham, Mass. at the elbow of Cape Cod, to keep a rendezvous with Christmas.
It's Christmas Eve, which seems to me to be where the heart of Christmas beats even more than Christmas Day. (With the disclaimer again that as a Jew, I don't know bupkis, though as the rye bread ads used to say, you don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's.) This, after all, is the territory where Scrooge saw the error of his ways, where the narrator of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" saw Santa, and where George Bailey saw that he really does have a wonderful life. To say nothing of the magi seeing the star. Tomorrow it will be a fait accomplis: the gifts, the dinner, the closed stores and trafficless streets. But today is where Christmas stops first.
And I think I saw it. Not in a big revelatory way like Rusty seeing the white buffalo in "Rin Tin Tin." But in a quiet, oh, okay, way.
We're staying with my sister-in-law and brother-outlaw, Jacqueline Schwab and Edmund Robinson. Edmund is the minister of the Unitarian church in Chatham, and tonight we went to the 5:00 Christmas Eve service. It was a full house, and understandably so, because who doesn't like singing Christmas carols with their neighbors, a couple of hundred voices strong? And the evening was stuffed with carols like a scone with currants: "O Holy Night," "Angels We Have Heard On High," "The First Nowell," "Joy to the World," "O Come All Ye Faithful," and more. There were also readings. "If Christmas Eve Happened Today" set the scene under a Texaco star with three Hell's Angels in attendance. And of course Edmund read A.A. Milne's "King John's Christmas," in which King John, who "was not a good man" and who is regularly stiffed by Father Christmas, hopes once again for chocolate, nuts, a knife that really cuts, and if not those, then at least (and most of all) a big, red, India rubber ball.
The climax of the service is the singing of "Silent Night" while the congregants all hold lit candles in the darkened sanctuary. What is it about candles? The small but concentrated light? The obvious power of fire yet reduced to this personal, hopeful potential? And with "Silent Night," a song as peaceful as they come. This wasn't commercial Christmas or even charitable Christmas. This was just beautiful Christmas.
So it could have been the candle for the penultimate advent window surprise. Or even the mysterious figgy pudding that was invoked in the Christmas Wish after the candles were extinguished. But I'll go with the big, red, India rubber ball that comes sailing through King John's window just as he's given up all hope (and which Edmund reveals from inside his robes with a climactic bounce), because even bad guys need encouragement, maybe even more than good guys do.
We've come over the Sagamore Bridge and through the woods to Chatham, Mass. at the elbow of Cape Cod, to keep a rendezvous with Christmas.
It's Christmas Eve, which seems to me to be where the heart of Christmas beats even more than Christmas Day. (With the disclaimer again that as a Jew, I don't know bupkis, though as the rye bread ads used to say, you don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's.) This, after all, is the territory where Scrooge saw the error of his ways, where the narrator of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" saw Santa, and where George Bailey saw that he really does have a wonderful life. To say nothing of the magi seeing the star. Tomorrow it will be a fait accomplis: the gifts, the dinner, the closed stores and trafficless streets. But today is where Christmas stops first.
And I think I saw it. Not in a big revelatory way like Rusty seeing the white buffalo in "Rin Tin Tin." But in a quiet, oh, okay, way.
We're staying with my sister-in-law and brother-outlaw, Jacqueline Schwab and Edmund Robinson. Edmund is the minister of the Unitarian church in Chatham, and tonight we went to the 5:00 Christmas Eve service. It was a full house, and understandably so, because who doesn't like singing Christmas carols with their neighbors, a couple of hundred voices strong? And the evening was stuffed with carols like a scone with currants: "O Holy Night," "Angels We Have Heard On High," "The First Nowell," "Joy to the World," "O Come All Ye Faithful," and more. There were also readings. "If Christmas Eve Happened Today" set the scene under a Texaco star with three Hell's Angels in attendance. And of course Edmund read A.A. Milne's "King John's Christmas," in which King John, who "was not a good man" and who is regularly stiffed by Father Christmas, hopes once again for chocolate, nuts, a knife that really cuts, and if not those, then at least (and most of all) a big, red, India rubber ball.
The climax of the service is the singing of "Silent Night" while the congregants all hold lit candles in the darkened sanctuary. What is it about candles? The small but concentrated light? The obvious power of fire yet reduced to this personal, hopeful potential? And with "Silent Night," a song as peaceful as they come. This wasn't commercial Christmas or even charitable Christmas. This was just beautiful Christmas.
So it could have been the candle for the penultimate advent window surprise. Or even the mysterious figgy pudding that was invoked in the Christmas Wish after the candles were extinguished. But I'll go with the big, red, India rubber ball that comes sailing through King John's window just as he's given up all hope (and which Edmund reveals from inside his robes with a climactic bounce), because even bad guys need encouragement, maybe even more than good guys do.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Secret Santas
It's the eve of Christmas Eve as I write this, a shadow eve. I spent it wrapping these things that up until a few hours ago were just merchandise. Now they are singular things, dressed in fine disguises, along with a bubble of promise that the recipient will grin and exclaim and be better, and gladly so, for having it.
A powerful thing, Christmas. It's not exactly what it seems to be. It seems to be about money. But underlying even the most venally motivated purchase in the frantic atmosphere of a store filled with secret Santas rummaging and overturning goods, buying something so as not to leave someone ungifted or buying something because so-and-so may be buying you an expensive gift and you don't want to look like a skunk at the potlatch, no offense to skunks, or even not buying something because it's too expensive for the likes of so-and-so—-underlying all that is the practice of giving, which we learn at some point as kids, having received and received for years, and now we bring our own wad of bills down to the marketplace and roam the aisles like neophyte SITs (Santas in Training), picking up this, putting down that, picking it up again, shlepping it around for now until you find something better, which maybe you do--the perfect thing that you know so-and-so will take pleasure in. You can even picture her grin, and maybe the hug afterwards. And even if you take reflected pleasure in her pleasure because it reflects well on you, hey, you've taken one step further toward earning your beard.
To shore up this posturing, as if I, a Jew, knew more than bupkis about Christmas, I open the little window today to reveal a card from my friends Pat and Dave down in snowless Orlando:
And with it they added this sentient sentiment:
"Fake snow, fake dog, fake urn, fake wall, fake sky, fake rosy cheeks -- but real, actual, heartfelt season's greetings!"
Thanks to them and pleasant surprises to you all.
A powerful thing, Christmas. It's not exactly what it seems to be. It seems to be about money. But underlying even the most venally motivated purchase in the frantic atmosphere of a store filled with secret Santas rummaging and overturning goods, buying something so as not to leave someone ungifted or buying something because so-and-so may be buying you an expensive gift and you don't want to look like a skunk at the potlatch, no offense to skunks, or even not buying something because it's too expensive for the likes of so-and-so—-underlying all that is the practice of giving, which we learn at some point as kids, having received and received for years, and now we bring our own wad of bills down to the marketplace and roam the aisles like neophyte SITs (Santas in Training), picking up this, putting down that, picking it up again, shlepping it around for now until you find something better, which maybe you do--the perfect thing that you know so-and-so will take pleasure in. You can even picture her grin, and maybe the hug afterwards. And even if you take reflected pleasure in her pleasure because it reflects well on you, hey, you've taken one step further toward earning your beard.
To shore up this posturing, as if I, a Jew, knew more than bupkis about Christmas, I open the little window today to reveal a card from my friends Pat and Dave down in snowless Orlando:
And with it they added this sentient sentiment:
"Fake snow, fake dog, fake urn, fake wall, fake sky, fake rosy cheeks -- but real, actual, heartfelt season's greetings!"
Thanks to them and pleasant surprises to you all.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
At the end of the day
It's a favorite phrase on the BBC and NPR, usually when some pundit is coming to a healing or damning conclusion: "At the end of the day..." Meaning in the final analysis, when all's said and done; except boiling it all down to one day gives it a very simple, almost Biblical, feel. Because we can all relate to the measuring of our lives in quotidian doses. As if each day is the whole play, especially these short winter days. At the end of the day, what you gather is what you got. However random those gatherings are.
I begin with this foolosophical fanfare because of what I got today. Not a big catch, just two, one early, one late. It started with hearing about the baboons. A story on NPR, by way of Radiolab (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121713610). A scientist, Barbara Smuts, spent two years in the close and constant company of a troop of thirty baboons in Kenya. She recounts one day when she was walking back with them to their sleeping quarters. They were following a stream, and at a certain point, at the edge of a pool, the baboons all stopped. They fell silent. Adults and babies alike. No noise. And they remained like that for about five minutes: seated on rocks, contemplating the pool, but in an unfocused way. Barbara had never seen this before, and only once since. Baboons apparently in communal meditation. Or some shared reverie.
Hearing this mystery was a kind of driveway moment, where you dare not turn the radio off. (In this case, a bathroom moment.) It wasn't that it was such a deep mystery. More like a dream, a code. We don't know everything. There was some hope in that.
I could easily have not been listening, and my day would have contained no baboon mystery. Also, if I hadn't entered the Emery Park turnaround in Lexington center, around 3:45, after buying Matt a pair of winter boots the size of two Louisianas, I would have missed the goats. A white one and a brown one, at the end of a leash, being walked by a lady like big dogs. "Goats!" Matt yelled. "That totally made my day!" Of course it did, mine too, smashing into the mundane like a ball-rocketing break shot in a game of pool, sending the predictable and the typical fleeing to the pockets. Someone walking a pair of goats in the center of Lexington, MA has that effect.
I'll go with the goats for today's advent window. But at the end of the day, it's probably the baboons I'll remember.
I begin with this foolosophical fanfare because of what I got today. Not a big catch, just two, one early, one late. It started with hearing about the baboons. A story on NPR, by way of Radiolab (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121713610). A scientist, Barbara Smuts, spent two years in the close and constant company of a troop of thirty baboons in Kenya. She recounts one day when she was walking back with them to their sleeping quarters. They were following a stream, and at a certain point, at the edge of a pool, the baboons all stopped. They fell silent. Adults and babies alike. No noise. And they remained like that for about five minutes: seated on rocks, contemplating the pool, but in an unfocused way. Barbara had never seen this before, and only once since. Baboons apparently in communal meditation. Or some shared reverie.
Hearing this mystery was a kind of driveway moment, where you dare not turn the radio off. (In this case, a bathroom moment.) It wasn't that it was such a deep mystery. More like a dream, a code. We don't know everything. There was some hope in that.
I could easily have not been listening, and my day would have contained no baboon mystery. Also, if I hadn't entered the Emery Park turnaround in Lexington center, around 3:45, after buying Matt a pair of winter boots the size of two Louisianas, I would have missed the goats. A white one and a brown one, at the end of a leash, being walked by a lady like big dogs. "Goats!" Matt yelled. "That totally made my day!" Of course it did, mine too, smashing into the mundane like a ball-rocketing break shot in a game of pool, sending the predictable and the typical fleeing to the pockets. Someone walking a pair of goats in the center of Lexington, MA has that effect.
I'll go with the goats for today's advent window. But at the end of the day, it's probably the baboons I'll remember.
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