December 25, 2024: "If This Were a Job I'd Be Fired," Christmas Day, "Blue Christmas"

If you are related to a poet, you know that everything that occurs inside, outside, upside, downside, right side, or left side involving yourself and your poet relative is fair game for a new poem.  You must resign yourself to that fact.  Poems are like poet snapshots, written down to preserve an experience, including Christmas.

Billy Collins writes about the occupation of poetry . . . 

If This Were a Job I'd Be Fired

by: Billy Collins

When you wake up with nothing, 

but you are nonetheless drawn to your sunny chair

near the French doors, it may be necessary

to turn to some of the others to get you going.

So I opened a book of Gerald Stern

but I didn't want to face my age

by writing about my childhood in the 1940s.

Then I read two little Merwins

which made me feel I should apply 

for a position in a corner sandwich shop.

And it only took one Simic,

which ended with a couple on a rooftop

watching a child on fire leap from a window,

to get me to replace the cap on my pend,

put on some sweatpants and go for a walk

around the lake to think of a new career,

but not before I told you all about it

in well, look at this, five quatrains--

better than nothing for a weekday,

I thought, as I headed out the door.

It is the eve of Christmas day.  Presents have been opened.  Copious amounts of eggnog have been consumed.  Cookies have been popped into mouths like Tic Tacs all day long.  And lots of love has been shared.

First, blueberry/chocolate chip pancakes with my wife and son (per my son's request).  Then I played pipe organ for a 10 a.m. Mass--the last of my church musician duties this yuletide.  Afterward, I forced my son to stand in front of the manger scene for a picture in his ugly Christmas sweater, knowing full well I was gathering fragments for this poetic blog post.

Because that's what poets do.  While other people punch time clocks, stand in factory lines, or sit at desks crunching numbers for eight or nine hours, poets sit in sunny chairs near French doors to do their work.  This habit of being may not seem like labor to non-poets, but it can be tough and draining at times.

After Mass, we celebrated a pretty normal Christmas schedule.  Went to my mom and dad's house to for brunch and presents with my two sisters--ham and rolls and cookies and other goodies.  Then we opened presents, youngest to oldest.  I received two books (a copy of Billy Collins's latest collection Water, Water and The Best American Poetry of 2024) and a new fountain pen (both of my current pens are pretty beat up).  My Secret Santa turned out to be my daughter's significant other.

Then we returned home to open more gifts.  I got my wife a new Emmet Otter felted ornament--this time Chuck the stoat created by my artist friend Jody:

For my daughter, a felted fairy, also created by my artist friend Jody:

And my son got an objet d'art, as well, by another local artist--a beautiful, painted raccoon skull with an amethyst crystal in its jaws:

My wife and I purchased all of these gifts at a local gallery.  We decided to support local artists instead of contributing to the Walmart and Amazon MAGA billionaires of the world.  And everyone loved what they received.  To quote my son when he opened his present, "That is sick!"  (I'm assuming that's a good thing.)

Even my puppy got some treats and toys today:

So, it was a good day, with a couple long walks in the cold, clear day and evening for good measure.  We didn't go overboard or overbudget with any holiday thing this year.  We chose sanity instead of extravagance.

You may be wondering if the blue mood I've been writing about since Thanksgiving has lightened or disappeared.  It hasn't.  However, I thought my disciples might need a break from my onslaught of dark meditations.

I did think quite a bit about the empty chairs at the Christmas table this year.  Thought about my friend, Helen, who always put so much creativity and thought into her gifts.  Thought, also, about my friend, Sally Z., who was one of my biggest cheerleaders the entire 25-plus years I knew her.  I miss them all terribly tonight.

The other thing that poets do is examine their inner lives--cataloguing and anatomizing emotional and spiritual crises.  If you haven't noticed, I've been doing that quite a bit these last five or so weeks.  I guess it's a kind of therapy for me, instead of keeping everything bottled up inside.  I even wrote my annual Christmas essay about my current state of mind and soul (it is included below).  

Being a poet has saved my life on many occasions, reminding me--even in the well of despair--that I'm surrounded by beauty and grace all day, every day.

Saint Marty wishes all his disciples a blessed Christmas.

Blue Christmas

by: Martin Achatz

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

--- Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

1. Mom held off until Thanksgiving Day. Left up to me, our Christmas tree would have been assembled, decorated, lit at the first taste of winter in the air, which, since we lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, usually happened about mid-September. However, it wasn’t until our windows fogged with turkey steam and potatoes were boiling on the stove that Mom would allow ornament boxes to be dragged in from the garage and Bing Crosby to croon “White Christmas” from the stereo.

2. Being the youngest of nine kids, I existed on a yuletide spectrum, from an older brother who was one bullet away from being Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit around the holidays—ready to shoot anybody in the chest who touched him with a “Merry Christmas”—to myself, who slept with visions of sugarplums dancing in my head all year long. My other siblings fell somewhere between these polar extremes.

3. Eventually, living on my own, I freely indulged my Linus spirit. I listened to Christmas music all year long. If people came to visit, they often found my tree glowing like embers in the living room before the maples even started turning shades of pumpkin, mustard, and ruby. I put my toddler daughter down for her naps with Frosty the Snowman playing on the TV, and I sang “Silver and Gold” to my infant son while giving him baths.

4. Christmas is grace, sustaining me through some of my darkest moments, when the very idea of happiness or joy seemed as distant as the ice volcanoes of Pluto.

5. Since I was a teenager, I’ve experienced what I call “blue funks”—extended periods of sadness bordering on despondency. They’re not triggered by any one thing—not lack of sunlight or chocolate, not loss of job or car keys. They just show up on my front step, suitcase in hand, move into the guest bedroom, and set up shop. I’m never sure how long the visits will last. Sometimes a day or two, other times weeks or months.

6. Blue is one of the rarest colors in the natural world. There are pink flamingos and orange monarchs. Dandelions like scraps of fallen stars in fields of green. However, blue is more complex, dependent on cell structure and the bounce of light. If you see a blue butterfly flitting in a tree or a bluebird chasing a nuthatch away from a feeder, their hue is the result of sun reflecting off the tiniest building blocks of their bodies or wings.

7. In short, blue depends upon light.

8. In her book Bluets, writer Maggie Nelson writes, “It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death’s approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue . . . If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.”

9. This Christmas, I’m blue. That doesn’t mean I’m going to shiver into sapphire glory like a peacock or that I’m suffering from cyanosis. It means that a blue funk is sleeping in my guest bedroom this holiday season.

10. About 2 a.m. the night of Thanksgiving, I could feel myself getting sad for no apparent reason. It just happened, like some kind of cerulean weather front moving in. I couldn't fight it off. Suddenly, I was crying uncontrollably. Not just sniffing and wiping my eyes, but big, gulping sobs that I was afraid would wake the entire house. It continued until I finally fell asleep, despondent and exhausted. When I woke, my eyes were rimmed with blue circles.

11. I mask my blue struggles really well, perhaps out of some stupid stereotype that a "real" man needs to be strong all the time. Usually, only those closest to me know when I'm in the throes of one of my blue periods. It's harder for me to concentrate and be around large groups of people. At night, I withdraw, become uncommunicative or short-tempered. I don't even want to be around me.

12. Every famous Christmas movie or book or TV special is about family and togetherness, taking care of the less fortunate, angels getting their wings, Ralphie receiving his official Red Ryder, carbine-action, two-hundred-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.

13. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, at this time of the rolling year, want is keenly felt. So are grief and hunger and isolation. I've been thinking a great deal about my ghosts of Christmases past. As I sit on my couch typing this essay, I can feel them reading every word on my laptop screen with their steady, blue gazes.

14. In the last ten years, losses have stacked up like cordwood in my life. A brother, two sisters, both parents, and one of my best friends. I go for long stretches without their spectral chains rattling in my ears. Other times, like now, they haunt the periphery of my vision like flocks of turquoise sparrows.

15. At night, when light is rarer than an albino moose, blue becomes something different. Dark. Almost black. The waters of Lake Superior become a vast sea of oily waves, and the sky deepens to pitch, as if you’re standing at the bottom of a deep mine shaft.

16. This morning, I watched the sun rise over Lake Superior. I do this frequently. In the spring and autumn, it's a glorious way to start a day. It allows light into the deepest corners of the heart. In winter, it's a different experience. Still beautiful, but coupled with a blue, aching cold.

17. The cobalt tarantula of Thailand glows like a moonlit ocean. Its venom causes muscles to seize and swell.

18. When I'm in one of my blue funks, the tiniest of kindnesses (a word of encouragement, a hug, a smile) is like seeing the brush strokes of van Gogh’s The Starry Night up close. Joy and grief layered so thick the eyes seize and swell.

19. Raynaud’s phenomenon makes fingers and toes turn blue due to constricted blood vessels caused by cold and stress. It’s a common symptom of lupus.

20. Flannery O’Connor died at the age of 39 from lupus complications. In a last letter to a friend six days prior to her death, she scribbled, “Cowards can be just as vicious as those who declare themselves—more so.”

21. I declare my blueness this Christmas season—decorate my front porch with blue lights, blue garland, a blue wreath.

22. My therapist says that blueness can be good—a time of tilling and plowing and planting. Of harvesting bushels of plums that sit in trees like sweet bruises, waiting to be eaten.

23. Blue tears: when the ocean appears to weep blue light, caused by microscopic bioluminescent organisms that glow when agitated by waves or swimming.

24. The Eastern Orthodox Church’s Advent wreath consists of six candles, each a different color. On the second Sunday, a blue candle is lit, representing hope.

25. Tonight, sitting in my dark living room, I am a blue candle—flickering, guttering—tarantulas of light climbing the walls and ceiling. When sleep comes, I dream of walking on a Pacific of blue tears, my toes sparking with sadness.

December 25: "When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention," Christmas Day, "Joy to the World"

Mary Oliver learns about joy from roses . . .

When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention

by:  Mary Oliver

"As long as we are able to

be extravagant we will be

hugely and damply

extravagant.  Then we will drop

foil by foil to the ground.  This

is our unalterable task, and we do it

joyfully."

And they went on.  "Listen,

the heart-shackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain,

unrequited hope, not loneliness but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,

selfishness."

Their fragrance all the while rising

from their blind bodies, making me

spin with joy.

Merry Christmas to all my loyal disciples!

Today has been all about family and spinning with joy like Oliver's roses.  We spent the morning opening presents and having breakfast quiche with our kids.  Then I took a little nap before heading to my sisters' house for lunch and more present opening.  Ham and cookies.  After the last gift was unwrapped, we sat down to play board games.

And the world was green and foggy, nary a snowflake in sight.  One of the warmest yuletides I can ever recall, with temperatures in the forties.  

Now, I'm watching Christmas with the Kranks, still spinning with joy.

It's going to be difficult going to work tomorrow after all this food and family and happiness.

Saint Marty's Christmas essay for Public Radio this year was all about joy . . . 

Joy to the World

 Joy is elusive.

 I have a poet friend who’s been chasing it for years.  Hers is an albino whitetail that haunts the woods and cemeteries and trails around our town on the shores of an arctic inland sea.  Ever since she moved here, she’s longed for a close encounter with this scrap of winter, its marble haunches and swan neck.  I often wonder if, when she sees it, she will burst into blossom, shudder into glory like a peacock.

 Another friend, a physicist, searches the heavens for joy, magnifies with binoculars and telescope the shadows of lunar craters, blurs of comet tails, flashes of Geminids flinting through December stars.  When he finds it, will he blaze like an aurora, an emerald waterfall at the birth of night?

 Still another friend listens for joy in the green cantatas of birds, The whistle of Black-capped Chickadees, rubber-ducky squeaks of nuthatches, weirdo-weirdo-weirdo of cardinals.  I imagine when she finally hears joy, she will bristle into down and plume, leap into flight.

 The poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “We shake with joy, we shake with grief.  What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.”

 I often think of joy and grief as best friends climbing the hills of Croagh Patrick in Ireland, hiking the miles of the Camino through Napoleon Pass in the Pyrenees.  Every once in a while, they sit down and share a lunch of foraged raspberries or blueberries, perhaps at the edge of a field studded with grazing sheep.  They listen to the bleats and baas, fill their mouths with wild, sweet wonder.

 I have known joy in flesh and blood.  Have written poetry with her.  Gobbled kumquats with her.  Sat around a fire with her, telling stories of dying sisters, Bigfoot rambles, Christmas, and cormorants.  Joy’s name was Helen.

Helen was simultaneously tiny and huge, containing multitudes.  The first time I saw her, sitting in her English Department office, legs pretzeled underneath her, speaking with a student about his essay, I thought to myself, “She’s a Sandhill Crane, gawky and graceful.”  When she saw me standing in the hallway, she smiled . . . no . . . she beamed at me, waving both her hands, as if one hand wasn’t enough to communicate her excitement.

 “Troy,” she said to her student, “this is Marty,” pulling my name out of thin air like a magician.  The Great Helini.  We’d never spoken before.  “He’s a wonderful writer and teacher,” she said.  She’d never read my poems or seen me in a classroom.  “And,” she said, “he’s my good friend.”

 That’s what joy does.  It takes you by surprise, appearing like thunder snow or a wedge of Snow Geese in a November sky.  Something so ordinary and so astonishing it stops you mid-breath and, forever more, you are changed.

 Helen always spoke in metaphor.  In a world of calculus and physics, she embraced the unknown, unknowable, transformed them into oceans and moonlight.  When I was struggling with the loss of my mother a few years ago, Helen texted me, “I want to be salt air, wild raspberries, Bigfoot strength.  I want poems to flow . . . I hold you in love . . . I hold your mom in love.”  For Helen, a hummingbird was the finger of God; the Mediterranean, a teardrop.

As I sit writing these words, snow has begun to fall outside my window—big, thick flakes that look like a riot of Snow Buntings.  It will soon stop, I’m sure, because nothing so joyfully beautiful can last long.  It appears, slaps you in the eyes, then vanishes like a comet to the other side of the galaxy.

 In 2020, the comet Neowise returned to our neck of the Milky Way for the first time in 6,800 years.  June and July, it was visible to the naked eye, a cosmic checkmark in the stars. 

 Wonder?  Check.  Beauty?  Check.  Joy?  Check. 

Helen and I became comet chasers.  The first time she saw it, she texted me, “I saw Neowise in the V between the trees across the street.  What a wonderful bedtime blessing it is!”  Eventually, she chased it to the top of Jasper Knob near her home, gazing into the heavens, stunned and undone.

 Me?  I climbed to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain one night with my family.  As I stepped onto the summit, my head pointed upward, I tried to orient myself, searching for the Big Dipper.  I knew that, once I located that constellation, I could easily find Neowise.  It took only a moment.  The sky was milky with stars, and there was the handle and pan of the Dipper.  I imagined a stream of water cascading from the pan in an arc (not hard to do with the sound of Lake Superior's surf in the dark below).  At the base of that arc was Neowise, a smudge of powdery light.

 It was a moment almost 7,000 years in the making.  I stood there, mouth open.  I felt connected to something much larger than myself.  The last time Neowise appeared in the sky was roughly 5,000 years before the nativity of Christ.  The wheel had just been invented.  Farming was a fairly new innovation—having only started in Mesopotamia around two millennia prior.  The woolly mammoth could have seen Neowise, but not any of the pharaohs.  The Egyptian civilization wouldn't appear for another 1,800 years.  No pyramids.  No mummies.  Hammurabi and his code weren't even a twinkle in the universe's eyes.  The Trojan War hadn't been fought.  Homer wasn't singing.  And Rome wouldn't be built for almost 5,000 years.

 And there I stood, in the middle of a global pandemic, gaping at Neowise the way, I imagine, those mammoths 7,000 years ago never did.  They simply went about the business of eating, sleeping, moving, and mating.  Meanwhile, that smear of light kept climbing away and away.  The mammoths disappeared, and humankind took over, with its stupid need to explain and dissect and define.

 Helen was a magi that summer.  So was I.  Following a star.  Filled with hope and joy.

 The snow has stopped outside my window now, those icy Snow Buntings settled into hungry flocks, eating the ground and sidewalks.  As I said, nothing with such beauty and joy lasts forever.

Helen died a year-and-a-half ago, on a late August Sunday filled with light and warmth.  Two weeks before, she’d phoned me one last time.

 “Marty,” she said, her voice both weak and strong, “I’m ready.”

 I sat with the phone at my ear, took a deep breath.  I told her I loved her.  Told her how much joy she’d brought into my life.  How she would always be a shining part of me.  A piece of polished sea glass.  A gift.

 “I love you, too,” she said.  “I’ll be with you.  Always.”

 This Christmas, winter is late in coming.  The maple across the street is still clothed in rust-colored leaves; patches of green grass, still visible beneath a thin dust of white.  As the days grow shorter and shorter, solstice approaching, I think of a snow-white deer in alder and pine.  The flash of cardinal against a sky so blue it hurts the eyes. 

 And I think of Helen, shaking with joy, shaking with grief, dancing through the constellations, following Neowise to some distant Bethlehem on the other side of the universe.

December 25: Her Lightness, Christmas Day, "Christmas Roses"

Santiago knows he has to stay strong . . . 

Now, he thought, I must think about the drag. It has its perils and its merits. I may lose so much line that I will lose him, if he makes his effort and the drag made by the oars is in place and the boat loses all her lightness. Her lightness prolongs both our suffering but it is my safety since he has great speed that he has never yet employed. No matter what passes I must gut the dolphin so he does not spoil and eat some of him to be strong.

No matter what, the old man realizes he has to eat in order to finish the battle with the fish.  He has to be stronger than his adversary.  That's what life's all about, I guess.       

 For the past two days, my adversary was a Christmas blizzard.  It started on December 23 and pretty much raged until early Christmas morning.  According to the National Weather Service, we received about 27 inches of snow.  The worst part, however:  the winds.  Sixty to 70 miles per hour at times.  There were hip-deep drifts in my driveway yesterday afternoon.  All the Christmas Eve church services but one were cancelled.  (Catholics never cancel.  They just wrap a rosary around their fingers, get in the car, and let Jesus take the wheel.)

Despite all this, Christmas came.  On Friday, as the storm was really ramping up, my wife's side of the family gathered for an Italian smorgasbord and gift exchange.  Christmas came.  Last night, I drove through the snow-clogged streets of my little hometown and played the pipe organ in the church I grew up in.  My wife and son sang "O Holy Night" together, and one of my best friends came up to the choir loft and celebrated with us.  Christmas came.  And today, it was presents and family and games and Christmas movies.  Christmas came.  

Christmas always comes.

I know that I have been mostly absent from this blog for a good portion of the year.  I have been struggling for many months with sadness and anxiety.  At a time when writing about my thoughts and emotions in blog posts would have been therapeutic, I just couldn't do it.  Most times when I got home at night, I found myself too exhausted from just . . . functioning.

Yet, this December has been full of blessings.  My daughter turned 22 years old at the beginning of the month, and we had a wonderful, late party for her on her birthday.  She has become such a beautiful, caring, poised young woman.  Blessings.  My son has been thriving at his new school, winning awards and maintaining all A's.  I haven't seen him this happy in years.  Blessings.  I have a wife who struggles with mental illness, but she never gives up.  She gets out of bed every morning, goes to work, and loves us all fiercely.  Blessings.  I have a job I love at a library, and friends who care about me deeply.  Blessings.

I did a fundraiser this December for the U. P. Poet Laureate Foundation.  For a donation of seven dollars, I wrote personalized poems for people to give their loved ones for Christmas.  When I conceived the idea, I thought I would receive, at most, ten or 15 requests for poems, mostly from friends and family.  After all, we're talking poetry, the subject that drives fear into the hearts of most school-age kids and causes PTSD (that's Poetry Traumatic Stress Disorder) in adults.  How many people want the gift of poetry for Christmas?

The answer:  44 people.  That's right.  In the space of about 17 or so days, I wrote an entire book of poems.  And it was a blessing.  People entrusted me with their stories of love and loss and grief.  It was both an honor and a huge responsibility.  I'm not sure if I rose to the occasion every time, but I tried the best I could.  And over the last 24 hours, people received my poems as Christmas presents.  Blessings, I hope.

Despite my ongoing struggles, I was able to write those poems.  I was able to write my annual Christmas essay, as well.  I struggled with that project for close to five months.  False starts.  Blazing inspiration that quickly fizzled.  Frustrations.  The essay slowly took shape.  I recorded it on December 13 for Public Radio.  I included it in my annual Christmas letter.  It seems to have had strong impact on many people this holiday season.  Blessings.

As the above passage from The Old Man in the Sea touches on, when facing a difficult adversary (a really big fish, a blizzard, a half-year depression), you just can't give up.  And there are blessings all around you.  

This Christmas night, I give thanks for all the blessings I received this December.  They have been multitude.  We are past the solstice.  The planet is slowly tipping back to light, and I will embrace each extra second of sun in the coming days.  Because darkness never wins.

I wish all of you a blessed Christmas.

Saint Marty's Christmas essay . . . 

Christmas Roses

 Dear Santa,

This letter will not be easy to write.  Or is not easy to write.  Or wasn’t.

I guess it all depends on when you’re reading it, what path of time you’ve traveled in order to receive these words.

Maybe this letter is just a thought, flashing from one synapse in my brain to another as I sit beside my sister Rose’s hospital bed, listening to her lungs take one-two-three-four more bites of air before shutting down quietly, the way autumn shuts down when that first snowfall pixilates the world into winter.

Or maybe I’ve already written this letter, left it on my dining room table next to a plate of thumbprint cookies and mug of eggnog on December 24^th, the hard work of scratching words on a piece of paper done.  Because I can’t imagine a world where you and your sleigh aren’t called to flight by my sister’s belief.  How she would spend hours conjuring you with pen each Christmas Eve, starting with that initial incantation:  “Dear Santa.”

I am surrounded by Christmas Roses.  From eight-month-old Rose in my stubborn mother’s arms:  a baby with an extra chromosome facing a world that doesn’t believe in her.  To the Rose who can barely speak, her brain plaqued with Alzheimer’s, whose Christmas gift to me is a smile after a forkful of baked ham.

I’m shuttling back-and-forth this year, watching Christmas in time lapse, Rose growing old and young again, budding and blossoming, withering and dropping petals, then retreating to seed and promise in the universe of our mother’s belly.

No matter what theory of time travel you believe or don’t—Einstein at the speed of light stretching a second into a century, Rod Taylor saving Yvette Mimieux from the clutches of the Morlocks in The Time Machine, or Emily Webb haunting her childhood in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—we’re all subject to the passage of minutes and hours and days and years.  Our lives all episodes in The March of Time newsreels, Westbrook Van Voorhis narrating each breath and war, each plague and Christmas ginger snap. 

I know in these Santa letters, authors usually proclaim how good they’ve been over the past 365 days and then provide catalogues of Christmas wishes, from the material to the ethereal.  New iPhones and Nintendo DS5s.  World peace.  Good health for an ailing mother.  That’s how it works.  Has worked.  Will work.  Wishes are just alternate universes for each wisher.  Ones where the wisher has traveled backward or forward to change some string of time.  Stop grandpa from smoking two packs a day.  Say “yes” to that boy in high school who asked you to the Holiday Formal.  Buy your son that God of War computer game.  Hold your dead sister’s hand one last time.

Santa, I know that, in one of these threads of time, you’re reading a note left for you by one of these Roses on Christmas Eve.  She’s been a good girl.  She always is.  Was.  Will be.  And she wants new ballpoint pens to write letters with.  Stationery.  Hubba Bubba bubblegum, as many packs as you can spare.  Another Santa reads that Rose misses our father and mother, hopes God is letting them win a few hands of gin rummy.  To a third Santa she writes that I wouldn’t let her drink another Diet Coke after dinner, and maybe he should take one present away from me.

In all of these Christmases, you exist/did exist/will continue to exist for me because all the Roses still exist—providing the plutonium for Marty McFly’s DeLorean, phone number for Bill and Ted’s next excellent adventure.  Through all the years of her life, Rose’s belief in you never failed.  Never fails.  Will never fail.  There was/is/will be cookies and milk left on the dining room table for you every Christmas Eve as sure as the moon turns Teal Lake silver on August nights and geese chase the sun across the country when frost pinches the air toward winter.

In the play Our Town, the main character, Emily Webb, dies in Act III, ending up in the town cemetery, surrounded by ghosts.  One of those ghosts is her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs.  When Emily declares she’s going to travel back to a happy time in her life, Mrs. Gibbs tries to talk her out of the idea.  Emily remains determined, so Mrs. Gibbs cautions her:  “At least choose an unimportant day.  Choose the least important day in your life.  It will be important enough.”

I’ve reached that point in my letter where I’m supposed to tell you what I want for Christmas.  I want a time machine, like the one Rod Taylor rode, past to present to future to present again, with its upholstered Victorian chair, spinning sundial, flashing lights, and throttle stick capped in crystal.  So I can return like Emily to the least important day of my life.  Emily chooses her twelfth birthday.  Maybe I’ll choose my twelfth Christmas.

It had been snowing for several days, but the snow stopped that morning.  The sun came out, making the world so white it was hard to look at.  My dad, young and flinty as steel, sat in his chair, sipping his third cup of thick, black coffee.  My mother, her hair only slightly peppered with gray, was in the kitchen, pulling the ham from the oven, its back studded with cloves.  On the couch, Rose ogled the gigantic pile of presents spilling across the living room floor, trying to find ones with her name on it.  Slowly, my other siblings appeared, pulled by the smell of the ham or the voice of Willie Nelson on WJPD, twanging, “Pretty papers, pretty ribbons of blue . . .”

They all look so young and beautiful and happy.  Yet, they don’t know it.  It’s just another Christmas for them.  Another of my mother’s gingered hams.  Another December filled with snow.  Another December 25^th when Rose asks over and over, “Can we open presents now?”  Just like Emily in Our Town, I can’t look at everything hard enough.

Part of me wants to hold each one of them for a long, long time.  Tell them how this life we know goes so fast, and we never really look at each other or notice all the little things of each and every day. 

But Rose.  Somehow, she saw and knew what we all didn’t or couldn’t know.  The smell of coffee.  Our mother’s homemade bread.  The clock chiming on the dining room wall.  Old Hank Williams songs on the radio. Dad spreading mustard on his ham sandwich.  Mom humming along to Judy Garland.  The furnace ticking one, two, three times before rumbling to life.  The poinsettia from Midnight Mass sitting in the middle of the dining room table, surrounded by plates of spritz cookies and snickerdoodles.  Going to sleep at night, and waking up to the gift of another day.  The tinsel and wrap of each and every moment.  Rose knew.  Believed in a world where reindeer can fly faster than starlight. 

Perhaps that’s my real Christmas wish this year.  I don’t need an H. G. Wells time machine.  A nuclear-powered DeLorean.  An omnipotent Stage Manager with a pocket watch.  I just need a Christmas Rose to remind me how truly wonderful the world was.  Is.  Will always be.

And a cookie.  The good kind—peanut butter with a Hershey’s kiss pressed into its center.  They were always her favorite.  I’ll sit down, put that cookie in my mouth, feel Rose’s arms reach across time to wrap around my shoulders.  I’ll hear her voice in my ear, asking if she can have one more Diet Coke.  Because it’s Christmas Eve.  And Santa is coming to take her to the North Pole, where our mother and father are waiting for her to open presents.

With love,

Martin

December 25: A Genuine Answer, Christmas Day, "How Lovely Are Your Branches"

Merton looking for a sign from God . . .

I looked, and the answer practically floored me. 

The words were: “Ecce eris tacens.”  “Behold, thou shalt be silent.” 

It was the twentieth verse of the first chapter of St. Luke where the angel was talking to John the Baptist’s father, Zachary. 

Tacens: there could not have been a closer word to “Trappist” in the whole Bible, as far as I was concerned, for to me, as well as to most other people, the word “Trappist” stood for “silence.” 

However, I immediately found myself in difficulties which show how silly it is to make an oracle out of books. As soon as I looked at the context, I observed that Zachary was being reproved for asking too many questions. Did the whole context apply to me, too, and was I also therefore reproved? And therefore was the news to be taken as ominous and bad? I thought about it a little, and soon found that I was getting completely mixed up. Besides, when I reflected, I realized that I had not put the question in any clear terms, so that, as a matter of fact, I had forgotten just what I had asked. I did not know whether I had asked God to tell me His will, or merely to announce to me what would happen in the future in point of fact. By the time I had got myself completely tied up in these perplexities, the information I had asked for was more of a nuisance, and a greater cause of uncertainty than my ignorance. 

In fact, I was almost as ignorant as I was before, except for one thing. 

Deep down, underneath all the perplexity, I had a kind of a conviction that this was a genuine answer, and that the problem was indeed some day going to end up that way: I was going to be a Trappist. 

But as far as making any practical difference, there and then, it was no help at all. 

I continued to walk in the woods, in the pastures, and in the old tank lots at the wood’s edge, down towards the radio station. When I was out there alone, I would go about full of nostalgia for the Trappist monastery, singing over and over Jam lucis orto sidere on the ferial tone. 

It was a matter of deep regret to me that I could not remember the wonderful Salve Regina with which the monks ended all their days, chanting in the darkness to the Mother of God that long antiphon, the most stately and most beautiful and most stirring thing that was ever written, that was ever sung. I walked along the roads, in Two Mile Valley, in Four Mile Valley, in the late afternoons, in the early evenings, in the dusk, and along the river where it was quiet, wishing I could sing the Salve Regina. And I could remember nothing but the first two or three neumes. After that, I had to invent, and my invention was not very good. It sounded awful. So did my voice. So I gave up trying to sing, humiliated and sorrowful, and complaining a little to the Mother of God. 

Merton is looking for some kind of definitive answer from God about his vocation (or non-vocation).  He asks a question and then jabs a finger into the Bible to find an answer.  It's sort of like using the Bible as a Magic 8-Ball--that childhood oracle in the shape of a black ball filled with liquid and a tiny icosahedron die imprinted with 20 possible answers to a Yes or No question.  Of course, God doesn't yield up answers that simply.  Merton learns that.

Life isn't a series of easy answers.  At least not in my experience.  Since I was very young, I have been bouncing from question to question.  Answers weren't even on my radar.  In fact, I'm not even sure I wanted to know the answers to the questions that were driving me.  Perhaps if I did have the answers, my life would have been easier, although I doubt.  I would simply have found more questions.

It is Christmas Day, and I've been absent for a very long time from this blog.  I think I've been looking for some answers, but I'm not really sure what the questions are.  When you think about it, the Christmas narrative is full of questions.  Joseph questions how Mary got pregnant.  The shepherds question why angels appear in Bethlehem skies.  The magi question where the star is leading them.  Herod questions the magi about a newborn king.  And Mary questions what she has done to deserve to be the mother of God's son.

The big difference with the Biblical narrative is that the answer was born in a manger 21 centuries ago.

This Christmas, I have been struggling for most of the Advent season with feelings of darkness.  Because of the death of my mother.  Because of all the loss and struggle of this pandemic.  Because Donald Trump is still a free man.  Because my sister, Rose, has Alzheimer's and is almost non-verbal now.  Because I haven't won a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize.  Because people think getting a vaccine is a political choice instead of a medical necessity.  Because good people get sick.  Because death sometimes comes in a snowstorm two days before Christmas, and it just doesn't make sense.

On top of all that, I have not been a good blogger this year.  My life has seemed out-of-control, verging on chaos, and my writing life has suffered because of that.  I have written some poems.  I released two spoken-word albums.  I won an award for arts advocacy.  In short, I've been pretty busy in very good ways.  However, every night, I find myself exhausted by about 9 p.m., and when I get home, I can barely summon up enough energy to change into my pajamas.

So, the answers I seek range from the practical to the metaphysical.  How can I eliminate stress from my life?  What is the meaning of my life?  You get the idea.  Small things--how do I carve out time to write every day?  Big things--why do human beings seem to thrive on hatred and intolerance?

I guess we're all magi, in a way.  Seeking out answers every day of our lives.  Following our own stars.  We may be 21 centuries removed, but, in a lot of ways, things haven't changed all that much since that first holy night.  The world is still full of flawed creatures who haven't learned anything about love and tolerance.  

As many of you know, I lost my mother this past October, a few days before Halloween.  My mother knew a few things about the cruelties of the world, having raised a child with Down syndrome at a time when most doctors recommended institutionalization and abandonment.  She followed her own star for her whole life.  My annual Christmas essay was a tribute to her . . . 

How Lovely Are Your Branches

by: Martin Achatz

This is a true Christmas story, or it isn’t. It was told to me by my mother 65 or 70 years after it occurred or didn’t occur, at a time when my mother’s memory was a silver trout slipping downstream in the rush of winter thaw.

Memory is like that. It runs away from us like a swallowtail in a field of goldenrod or a toddler chasing waves on a lakeshore. The swallowtail keeps plucking the air with its wings, forever searching for some old song sung by kids in Sunday school or hummed in the ear of a lover on sticky summer nights. The waves keep rolling to a distant, unseen Canada.

My mother was born in 1931 in the Motor City on a late June day. It may have been one of those city days where the streets seem to sweat, or it may have been gray, full of Detroit River mist and auto factory smoke. Second oldest of four sisters, she grew up in the time of the New Deal and “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” She was eleven when her father, my Grandpa Edgar, died of stomach cancer. Near the end, she would bring him bowls of chicken broth or vegetable barley, tell him, “Mommy says you need to eat.” He would spoon down the soup for her, kiss her, possibly tell her she was a good little nurse. When she carried away the empty bowl, she would hear him throwing up in the bucket beside his bed. When she told me this, 50 years later, I could see in her face that she still heard that sound in the anvils of her ears.

But that’s not what this story is about.

This story is about Christmas trees.

Come November and December, Grandpa Edgar sold Christmas trees in his front yard. At least that’s where I imagined he sold them. I remember my mother telling me this detail 15 or 20 years ago. So this is a memory of a memory of something that may have happened. Evergreens sold from a makeshift forest in front of my mother’s childhood home on Hilger Street, walking distance from the Detroit River’s industrial waters flowing from Lake St. Clair down to Lake Erie.

In the 1940s, at the start of World War II, Christmas trees were in short supply. No men to harvest greens. No space on trains to ship them. I don’t know how Grandpa Edgar got his trees. Perhaps he had a buddy with a truck who picked them up at the rail yard. Or maybe he drove out of the city to some farm with that buddy, where they spent the day sawing trees and sipping schnapps. But I’m sure my mother remembered the smell of pine in her bedroom at night. Maybe dark sap in the creases of her dad’s knuckles.

I would guess Grandpa Edgar didn’t sell trees in the last years of his life, when sugar and rubber and gasoline were as scarce as snow in July. No, the story I’m about to tell you happened before the London Blitz and Pearl Harbor, after the shanty towns and soup kitchens of Black Thursday. My mother was probably old enough to buy penny candy by herself at the corner store, young enough to believe her father would live forever.

I assume it was the late 1930s, when trolleys still plied Detroit streets and platoons of factory workers marched by my mother’s childhood home mornings and evenings on their way to and from work. And my mother probably smelled smoke from their Luckies, heard them complain about sore backs and the price of a bottle of Goebels.

I also assume it was a couple days prior to Christmas, when Grandpa Edgar’s trees were discounted from their seasonal price of 75 cents to “Make Me an Offer.” There may have been ice on the ground, frost etched on glass. Or it may have just been a December of cold, dry air, the kind that makes nostrils bleed after 15 seconds.

I like to think Grandpa Edgar had just sat down to a plate of boiled cabbage or liver and onions. Something that filled the house with an effluvium that could be smelled from the front porch. His little girls were probably sitting around the table with him, forking at their dinners with the enthusiasm of the condemned. Maybe Grandpa Edgar said something about starving children in China or India, and my mother imagined tiny faces pressed against the dining room windows, licking the panes.

I’ve only seen one or two pictures of Grandpa Edgar, ten or so years ago. Before that, he was the ghost of a memory, spoken of only when family trees were assigned in grade school. His branch remained fairly bare of buds or shoots, as if his entire line had been raked up and burned with the leaves of autumn. Going through an old photo album, my sister found him, standing in a field of dirt rutted with tire tracks. Behind him, what looked like the wreckage of a spaceship and a silo or well. He was dressed in dungarees, work boots, and a denim shirt. It looked as though a pack of cigarettes sat in his breast pocket. His hair was dark to black, his face weathered and craggy like a marble bust of Jefferson or Hamilton.

Perhaps there was a knock on the front or back door. Maybe a voice called out from the porch, “Mr. Edgar?” Or maybe my mother had been assigned lookout duty in the tree lot, in case any customers showed up while Grandpa Edgar ate dinner. My mother never really said. But, at some point, someone showed up, looking for a tree. Or maybe someones, though I doubt it. Because this narrative makes more sense to me if it was just one man or woman in a thin winter jacket standing on his doorstep.

Let’s say it was a man with sunken eyes, bristled chin. Let’s also say he was holding a worn fedora in his hands, wringing its brim with his fingers. He had the look of a man who hadn’t eaten for a couple days, or who had divvied up his portions between his children (maybe a boy and girl with chronic colds) because he could tell they were slowly starving. These details are all imagination because my mother never said whether it was a man or woman, alone or with children. And, in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that it was December twenty-something in nineteen thirty-something. Times were Depression lean, and Christmas dreams were simple as oatmeal.

Grandpa Edgar met the man (or woman—again, it doesn’t matter) at the door. Edgar was probably wiping his mouth with a napkin, the cabbage or liver floating around him like a vision. He squinted at the man as if he was staring into the sun. Let’s say he knew the person in front of him because he knew everyone in the neighborhood. Let’s also say he greeted the person by name because I like to think that’s the kind of guy Grandpa Edgar was.

“Henry,” Grandpa Edgar nodded at him. I choose “Henry” because I like the name, and it seems like the name of a man who would be tree shopping a couple days before Christmas during the Depression. “What can I do you for?” Grandpa Edgar might have said.

The man probably stood there, unable to speak. He knew what he had to say, but the words sat on his tongue like ice, cold and heavy and pressing behind his eyes like a headache. Maybe he opened his mouth and closed it again. Perhaps he did this a couple times and then simply nodded at the remaining Christmas trees, dark and green, leaning against the house.

And Grandpa Edgar nodded back at him. A small nod, not so much affirmation or permission as understanding. An unspoken exchange from one father to another.

Henry went and picked out a tree. Not the biggest or tallest. Not one with cones still nestled in its limbs. He picked one that he could imagine in his home, its needles filling the pot belly heat of the rooms with the promise of light and coming spring.

He nodded at his choice, and Grandpa Edgar nodded back.

Henry picked the tree up in his arms, swung it onto his shoulders, and stumbled off into the darkness of night and memory.

When my mother told me this story so many years later, I never questioned it. Even though she couldn’t remember my name, knew me only as the nice man who fed her pecan pie and tapioca pudding, I could tell this memory was as vivid as stained glass to her. That she could still feel her father reaching down, picking her up as Henry disappeared into the December shadows. Or moonlight.

A month or so ago, just before All Souls Day, my mother slipped into memory. Her last day, I sat by her bed, held her hand, mapped its papery skin, knobs of bone with my thumb.

I think she did the same thing with her father that night so many Decembers ago. She pressed her fingers into the palm of his hand, felt its callouses and splinters. She held on and on, not really understanding why she didn’t want to let go, not understanding the physics of memory. How it floats down river, vanishes for a lifetime, and then blazes forth again.

Like a Christmas wreath in a winter window, a shadow that may be your father or grandfather or mother standing behind it, or not standing behind it. On the threshold between what we know and what we remember.

Here is what I know: in her last moments, my mother sat straight up in bed, as if hearing a knock on the door. Here is what I remember: she drifted back into her pillows, her face glowing like a candle in the green boughs of Henry’s tree.

Saint Marty wishes you all blessed and merry Christmas, full of wonder and starlight.  

December 18: Human Nature, Nativity, Permutations of Love

 Merton goes to Catholic Mass for the first time . . .

Sometime in August, I finally answered an impulsion that had been working on me for a long time, livery Sunday, I had been going out on Long Island to spend the day with the same girl who had brought me back in such a hurry from Lax’s town Olean. But every week, as Sunday came around, I was filled with a growing desire to stay in the city and go to some kind of a church. 

At first, I had vaguely thought I might try to find some Quakers, and go and sit with them. There still remained in me something of the favorable notion about Quakers that I had picked up as a child, and which the reading of William Penn had not been able to overcome. 

But, naturally enough, with the work I was doing in the library, a stronger drive began to assert itself, and I was drawn much more imperatively to the Catholic Church. Finally the urge became so strong that I could not resist it. I called up my girl and told her that I was not coming out that week-end, and made up my mind to go to Mass for the first time in my life. 

The first time in my life! That was true. I had lived for several years on the continent, I had been to Rome, I had been in and out of a thousand Catholic cathedrals and churches, and yet I had never heard Mass. If anything had ever been going on in the churches I visited, I had always fled, in wild Protestant panic. 

I will not easily forget how I felt that day. First, there was this sweet, strong, gentle, clean urge in me which said: “Go to Mass! Go to Mass!” It was something quite new and strange, this voice that seemed to prompt me, this firm, growing interior conviction of what I needed to do. It had a suavity, a simplicity about it that I could not easily account for. And when I gave in to it, it did not exult over me, and trample me down in its raging haste to land on its prey, but it carried me forward serenely and with purposeful direction. 

That does not mean that my emotions yielded to it altogether quietly. I was really still a little afraid to go to a Catholic church, of set purpose, with all the other people, and dispose myself in a pew, and lay myself open to the mysterious perils of that strange and powerful thing they called their “Mass.” 

God made it a very beautiful Sunday. And since it was the first time I had ever really spent a sober Sunday in New York, I was surprised at the clean, quiet atmosphere of the empty streets uptown. The sun was blazing bright. At the end of the street, as I came out the front door, I could see a burst of green, and the blue river and the hills of Jersey on the other side. 

Broadway was empty. A solitary trolley came speeding down in front of Barnard College and past the School of Journalism. Then, from the high, grey, expensive tower of the Rockefeller Church, huge bells began to boom. It served very well for the eleven o’clock Mass at the little brick Church of Corpus Christi, hidden behind Teachers College on 121st Street. 

How bright the little building seemed. Indeed, it was quite new. The sun shone on the clean bricks. People were going in the wide open door, into the cool darkness and, all at once, all the churches of Italy and France came back to me. The richness and fulness of the atmosphere of Catholicism that I had not been able to avoid apprehending and loving as a child, came back to me with a rush: but now I was to enter into it fully for the first time. So far, I had known nothing but the outward surface. 

It was a gay, clean church, with big plain windows and white columns and pilasters and a well-lighted, simple sanctuary. Its style was a trifle eclectic, but much less perverted with incongruities than the average Catholic church in America. It had a kind of a seventeenth-century, oratorian character about it, though with a sort of American colonial tinge of simplicity. The blend was effective and original: but although all this affected me, without my thinking about it, the thing that impressed me most was that the place was full, absolutely full. It was full not only of old ladies and broken-down gentlemen with one foot in the grave, but of men and women and children young and old—especially young: people of all classes, and all ranks on a solid foundation of workingmen and -women and their families. 

I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down. As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously. I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church. She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there. 

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfil a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes. 

Since it was summer time, the eleven o’clock Mass was a Low Mass: but I had not come expecting to hear music. Before I knew it, the priest was in the sanctuary with the two altar boys, and was busy at the altar with something or other which I could not see very well, but the people were praying by themselves, and I was engrossed and absorbed in the thing as a whole: the business at the altar and the presence of the people. And still I had not got rid of my fear. Seeing the latecomers hastily genuflecting before entering the pew, I realized my omission, and got the idea that people had spotted me for a pagan and were just waiting for me to miss a few more genuflections before throwing me out or, at least, giving me looks of reproof. 

Soon we all stood up. I did not know what it was for. The priest was at the other end of the altar, and, as I afterwards learned, he was reading the Gospel. And then the next thing I knew there was someone in the pulpit. 

It was a young priest, perhaps not much over thirty-three or -four years old. His face was rather ascetic and thin, and its asceticism was heightened with a note of intellectuality by his horn-rimmed glasses, although he was only one of the assistants, and he did not consider himself an intellectual, nor did anyone else apparently consider him so. But anyway, that was the impression he made on me: and his sermon, which was simple enough, did not belie it. 

It was not long: but to me it was very interesting to hear this young man quietly telling the people in language that was plain, yet tinged with scholastic terminology, about a point in Catholic Doctrine. How clear and solid the doctrine was: for behind those words you felt the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition. And above all, it was a vital tradition: there was nothing studied or antique about it. These words, this terminology, this doctrine, and these convictions fell from the lips of the young priest as something that were most intimately part of his own life. What was more, I sensed that the people were familiar with it all, and that it was also, in due proportion, part of their life also: it was just as much integrated into their spiritual organism as the air they breathed or the food they ate worked in to their blood and flesh. 

What was he saying? That Christ was the Son of God. That, in Him, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God, had assumed a Human Nature, a Human Body and Soul, and had taken Flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth: and that this Man, Whom men called the Christ, was God. He was both Man and God: two Natures hypostatically united in one Person or suppositum, one individual Who was a Divine Person, having assumed to Himself a Human Nature. And His works were the works of God: His acts were the acts of God. He loved us: God, and walked among us: God, and died for us on the Cross, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God. 

Jesus Christ was not simply a man, a good man, a great man, the greatest prophet, a wonderful healer, a saint: He was something that made all such trivial words pale into irrelevance. He was God. But nevertheless He was not merely a spirit without a true body, God hiding under a visionary body: He was also truly a Man, born of the Flesh of the Most Pure Virgin, formed of her Flesh by the Holy Spirit. And what He did, in that Flesh, on earth, Fie did not only as Man but as God. He loved us as God, He suffered and died for us, God. 

And how did we know? Because it was revealed to us in the Scriptures and confirmed by the teaching of the Church and of the powerful unanimity of Catholic Tradition from the First Apostles, from the first Popes and the early Fathers, on down through the Doctors of the Church and the great scholastics, to our own day. De Fide Divina. If you believed it, you would receive light to grasp it, to understand it in some measure. If you did not believe it, you would never understand: it would never be anything but scandal or folly.

And no one can believe these things merely by wanting to, of his own volition. Unless he receive grace, an actual light and impulsion of the mind and will from God, he cannot even make an act of living faith. It is God Who gives us faith, and no one cometh to Christ unless the Father draweth him.

Unlike Merton, I have been attending Catholic Mass ever since I can remember.  All of the things that strike him as revelatory have been a part of my life since infancy.  The whole Jesus narrative is sort of part of my DNA.  I think every Christian, Catholic or Protestant, is drawn to certain parts of the life of Christ.  For some, it's the Passion--from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday--and all the accompanying bells and smoke.

For me, it's always been about the Nativity--God taking on a human nature.  Body and soul.  Christmas.  Here I sit, staring at the tree glowing in the corner of my living room.  All of my life, I have loved every narrative element of the birth of Christ, from the angel appearing to Mary, to the shepherds scared shitless by the heavenly host.  It all fills me with joy.  Every year.

I think the part that I find the most moving in the Nativity is the idea of God becoming human.  Taking on a body, being victim to all the indignities that plague each one of us on a daily basis.  Jesus Chris got diaper rash.  Went through puberty.  Had a favorite color and food.  Maybe fell in love with a neighbor girl.  Suffered heartbreak.  And died.

I'm sipping a glass of wine right now, thinking about two people who used to love each other.  They were together, day and night, for the better part of four years.  And now they're not.  It has been painful to witness.  Instead of remembering the joy and happiness of their time together, being thankful for it, they hurt each other.  

I suppose that's all part of being human, as well.  That impulse to inflict pain on other people who have caused us pain.  Now, I can't imagine Jesus doing that.  Even though he was human, Jesus had a God part, too.  And that God part probably gave him greater compassion and understanding of the human condition.  And he forgave.  That's sort of what he came into the world to do.

I don't see a whole lot of forgiveness going on between these two people at the moment.  That makes me incredibly sad.  They are stuck in painful humanity, forgetting that, at some point in their lives, they would look into each other's eyes and see something beautiful.  Something divine.  Love.

That's the part of the Christmas story I hold onto the most.  God loved us so much that he became human.  Being human, he endured suffering.  Accepted it.  There's the old saying that grief is the price we pay for love.  Or something like that.  If you love something or someone, you will eventually experience its loss.  It's inevitable.  

So, tonight, I lift up these two people who are experiencing the flipside of love.  I wish happiness for the both of them, and that they, eventually, remember the joy they used to bring to each other.  Being in quarantine has given me a lot of time to reflect on things like this.  I truly believe that love conquers all manner of hurt.  That's what the Christmas story is all about.

A few snapshots from my day:

• My beautiful poet friend Amanda reached out this afternoon to see how I am doing.  Amanda is enduring her own struggles with sadness and depression.  Yet, she wanted to make sure I am okay.
• I got takeout Thai food from one of my favorite restaurants tonight.  I ordered it, drove to the restaurant, called when I got there.  The beautiful owner of the restaurant brought out our food.  Put it in our backseat.  After she closed the door, she stood by the car window and said, "You guys doing okay?"  
• Working today for the library, I was able to send out some emails to some beautiful poets.  I'm creating a poetry event in celebration of Inauguration Day.  
• I was able to get some work done on my Christmas essay.  Don't know if it's going to be beautiful or not, but it felt good to be writing again.

In this strange Christmas season, I am embracing love in all of its permutations.  In grace and loss.  In joy and grief.  For God so loved the world . . . 

Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of love.

December 23: Yule Love This Poem, Done, Magic 8-Ball

Yes, my Christmas poem is finished.  I worked on it for another four hours this morning.  That's after four hours on Friday, eight hours on Saturday, and two hours on Sunday.  In total, 18 hours of writing.  Now, that may sound horrible to some of you.  For me, it was the best part of the holiday season.  I actually accomplished something of value, which hasn't happened for a long time.

With that task accomplished, I can now turn my attention to the minutiae of Christmas Eve.  Wrapping presents.  Getting a haircut.  Practicing music.  Shoveling snow for a friend who recently had surgery.  Feeling bitter and devalued.  Going to therapy appointments.  You know, the usual.

Not to worry, my disciples.  You will get a chance to read my poem soon.  I will be posting it on Christmas day, along with my essay.  That's my present to you guys.  Please note that over the next two days (Christmas Eve, and Christmas day) I will be posting only once a day.  That's my Christmas present to myself.  A little time to relax.

I'm at the point with my poem where I'm not sure it's actually any good.  I've been working on it too long.  I've lost my objectivity.  Words and images have started to run together.  Plus, I'm really tired.  So, I'm going to turn to Holden to answer the question:

Is my Christmas poem good?

And Holden's response is:

Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler.  I mean you don't just go up to somebody and say, "You're a terrific whistler."

So Holden thinks his former roommate at Elkton Hills, Harris Macklin, was a really good whistler.  He never tells Harris.  But, if Harris is a good whistler, then, by extrapolation, I must be a good poet.  I know that logic isn't quite foolproof, but I'm going with it.

Saint Marty's poem is "terrific."

Ho, ho, ho!