October 14: Went About With Him, 24th Wedding Anniversary, My Favorite Things

Everyone beamed at him [Zaphod], or at least, nearly everyone.  He singled out Trillian from the crowd.  Trillian was a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently while visiting a planet, just for fum, incognito.  She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes.  With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress, she looked vaguely Arabic.  Not that anyone there had ever heard of an Arab of course.  The Arabs had very recently ceased to exist, and even when they had existed they were five hundred thousand light-years from Damogran.  Trillian wasn't anybody in particular, or so Zaphod claimed.  She just went about with him rather a lot and told him what she thought of him.

There is no real love story in Hitchhiker's, unless you count Zaphod Beeblebrox being in love with himself.  The closest to a "normal" love relationship is the one between Zaphod and his girlfriend, the Earth woman, Trillian.  According to the passage above, Trillian "just went about with him rather a lot."  That's it.  No real commitment to each other.  They are conveniently involved, each giving the other something the other needs.  Zaphod needs a glamorous girl on his arm at governmental occasions, and Trillian needs someone to get her off her home planet.

Today is my 24th wedding anniversary.  That number surprises a lot of people.  It certainly surprises me.  It hardly seems possible that my wife and I have been married for close to a quarter century.  We have been through some pretty rocky times.  Yet, here we are--still together, still in love, still struggling with life's slings and arrows.

I have written essays and blog posts and poems about our life together, chronicling both the good and not so good.  Tonight, however, I want to simply tell you some of my favorite things about my wife:

• She can make me laugh, even at my very worst times.
• When I'm feeling particularly beaten down, she doesn't try to fill me up with false praise or empty hope.  She just loves me in my misery.
• She loves my poetry.
• She will tell me when a poem I write is crap.
• She tells me when I've fixed that crappy poem.
• She gave me two beautiful kids who have filled my existence on this planet with meaning.
• She forces me to be a better person than I am.
• She gave me another family to love--her sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews.  She multiplied my love.
• She has taught me that love is full of peaks and valleys.  Highs and lows.
• To this day, she is still the most beautiful woman I've ever known.
• She isn't perfect, and she doesn't expect me to be perfect.
• When I climb into bed tonight, I will feel her body next to mine.  She will keep me warm in the darkness.

Saint Marty thanks his endless love for 24 of the best years of his life.

November 11: "Snowmen at Night," My Favorite Thing, New Doorknob

It was my brother's birthday, and I gave him a wonderful present:  I let him replace the doorknob on my front door.

The doorknob broke about two weeks ago.  It wouldn't open.  It took me five minutes to get off the front porch.  I fixed it with masking tape.  Actually, I taped it so it wouldn't engage into the lock.  Of course, there was no way of locking the house up at night, and that made my wife and daughter a little nervous.

So, today, I decided to let my brother fix it for his birthday.  He had a great time.  In fact, he enjoyed it so much that he fixed the deadbolt and squared up my threshold, as well.  I was so glad to make his special day even more special.

Speaking of special, today I'm supposed to talk about my favorite things.  I decided to discuss one of my favorite children's books, Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner.  My daughter got it as a birthday present when she was four years old.  She had it memorized by the time she was five.  The artwork is gorgeous, full of whimsical detail.

I just started reading it to my son a few days ago.  My daughter had stuffed it into a box of books in the attic.  It took me an hour to find it.  Now, both of my children are enthralled by it.  My son loves the poetry and pictures.  My daughter spends hours looking for the hidden shapes in each illustration. (I still can't find all the rabbits and cats and Santas and Tyrannosaurus Rexes in each painting.)  I love the idea of snowmen coming to life at night.

Maybe I'm being nostalgic.  Maybe I'm being sentimental.

But Saint Marty loves Snowmen at Night.  It really is one of his favorite things.

Two of my favorite things:  my daughter and Snowmen at Night

November 4: My Favorite Things, Christmas Porch, New Cartoon

Can you hear Julie Andrews singing?

Sunday means it's time for My Favorite Things.  I wish I could be Oprah and offer free things to you, like books and iPads and Kindle Fires.  Can't do that, unless Apple or Amazon wants some free publicity, and the last time I checked, neither company is really desperate for business.  No free stuff this week.

As you can tell by the photograph, I'm going to focus a little on Christmas for this post.  You see, yesterday afternoon, I put up the Christmas decorations on my front porch.  I always pride myself on being the first person on our block to put up Christmas lights.  That's why I always do it the weekend following Halloween.  Nobody is as ambitious (or crazy) as me.

So, my favorite thing this Sunday is decorating for Christmas.  I love doing it.  I love the work.  I love the result.  I love the feeling I get when everything is done, and I can stand back and admire the results.  Each year, one member of my family picks the theme for our front porch decorations.  This year, it was my wife's turn.  Her theme is "Silver White Winters," as in the song "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music:  "Silver white winters that melt into spring..."  Next year is my turn.  I'm leaning toward some kind of It's A Wonderful Life motif.  We'll see.

If you're walking by Saint Marty's house tonight, stop for a few minutes and enjoy the view.  Think of Julie Andrews on a mountainside.

Confessions of Saint Marty

October 29: My Plans, Oprah, "Carol" Dip Monday

OK, so last week I wrote about reinventing Saint Marty.  This morning, when I logged on at 5 a.m., I only had 64 page views.  I need to do something about this situation.  I therefore have decided to impose some structure on my posts.  Each day, I will write about a generalized theme.  I have come up with a tentative schedule.  Think of it as the TV Guide for this blog.  Here goes:

Monday:  Carol Dip.  (This day will change once my year with A Christmas Carol is over.  Perhaps I'll do Bible dips instead.  We'll see.)

Tuesday:  Saint of the Week.  Yes, I am returning to the roots of this blog.  If you look at my earliest posts, they all concern various Catholic saints and how they relate to modern life.  I will be revisiting this feature on Tuesdays.

Wednesday:  Worry Wednesday.  Instead of writing about all my fears and worries all week long, I will pile them on this day.  It's the middle of the work week, so it seems like a good day to fret about things a little bit.

Thursday:  Blessing Thursday.  I will follow up my day of worry with a day of blessings.  I will discuss one thing in my life for which I'm grateful.  Just to balance things out.

Friday:  P.O.E.T.S. Day.  That stands for Piss On Everything Tommorow's Saturday.  On this day, I will unveil a new poem I've written.  I call myself a poet.  Therefore, I should be writing poetry.  This day will keep me writing and experiencing incredible guilt when I don't get something written.  That's for the Catholic boy in me.

Saturday:  Good Reads.  I will discuss books, short stories, authors, poets I like reading.  Think of it as Oprah's Book Club for this blog.

Sunday:  My Favorite Things.  Yes, I'm stealing another page from Oprah.  On Sundays, I will talk about something I love.  Anything goes on this day, from books to movies to foods to vacations to people.

There you have it.  That's what you can expect on this blog in the future.  Of course, this schedule is not Stonehenge.  Nothing is made out of stone here.  I will deviate for special occasions--holidays, birthdays, elections, when something pisses me off.  For example, I will be posting a Halloween special on Wednesday.  I've already got the graphics for it.  And, not to worry, I will still be fulfilling my promise of focusing on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol for an entire year.  I do not go back on my word.

We'll see how this new schedule works out.  I may be adjusting things.  Even the television networks cancel programs and bring in mid-season replacements.  For now, this is what you can look forward to.

Now for the Carol dip.  My question this morning is simple: 

Is my new blog schedule going to get me named a Blog of Note by the good people who run Blogger?

And the answer from the great Dickens is:

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, "Bah!" again, and followed it up with "Humbug!"

Well, that's not the answer I was hoping for, but I'll take it.

Saint Marty isn't going to argue with Charles Dickens or Ebenezer Scrooge.

I won't be giving away any cars, folks!