November 25: Peaceful and Clean, Small and Big Blessings, Billy Collins, "Aimless Love," Off the Top of My Head

At around eleven that night, a predicted snowfall had come.  He and Annie looked out about midnight before pulling the plug on the tree lights and going to bed, and mutually agreed how peaceful and clean the streets of New York seemed in such weather.

Ives and Annie have spent an evening appreciating small things like Italian cold cuts and pastries, Spanish wine, bubbling Christmas ornaments, young people in love.  Now, as they prepare for bed, they stop at a window to appreciate one last thing:  snow falling on the street below, making everything soft and cold.

It is the end of the work week.  Tomorrow, I will sit down with my family and celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving.  For my international readers, that's a day where people in the United States are supposed to give thanks for the blessings in their lives.  The small and big blessings.  Mashed potatoes and good health.  Cranberry sauce and beautiful kids.

Tonight, I will be cooking.  My house will be filled with the smell of baking pecans and sugar.  Maybe I'll have a drink when the pies are in the oven.  Something root beerish that can knock you on your ass after a couple of sips.  My kids will be there, staying up a little later because they don't have school tomorrow.  Maybe we'll watch A Charlie Brown Christmas or Frosty the Snowman.  Then, when it gets late, and the pies are cooling on the front porch, we'll go to bed, and I will say a little prayer.  Give thanks for pecans and sugar, my son and daughter, Linus and Snoopy, my wife, my life.

It is going to be a good night, filled with gratitude.

And by the second hard root beer, Saint Marty will be wearing his candy corn hat and singing "Over the River and Through the Woods."

Aimless Love

by:  Billy Collins

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

Off the Top of My Head

December 29: Good Read, Truman Capote, Fruitcake Weather, New Cartoon

”Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”

One of my favorite Christmas novellas is by Truman Capote.  A Christmas Memory is about a young Capote (“Buddy”)  and Miss Sook, a child-like old maid cousin Capote lived with as a youngster in Alabama.  The plot centers on Miss Sook and Buddy’s annual tradition of making fruitcakes for family, friends, missionaries, and even Eleanor Roosevelt.  They collect pecans.  They buy whiskey.  They go hunting for the perfect Christmas tree.  They make tinfoil angels.  They give Christmas kites to each other.  Reading the book is like staring at a daguerreotype, tinged in sepia and clouded around the edges with memory.

A Christmas Memory was the first book I ever read by Truman Capote.  I knew Capote’s name, had seen pictures of him.  I didn’t know anything about his alcoholism and drug addiction.  I didn’t know he was gay.  I didn’t know he had written the first nonfiction novel (In Cold Blood), a book that changed the literary landscape.  I didn’t know he started working for The New Yorker as a copyboy when he was a teenager.  I didn’t know he was eventually fired from that job for offending Robert Frost.  Basically, I didn’t know anything about Capote when I first encountered his tale of Buddy and Miss Sook.

In a way, I’m glad I didn’t know any of those details about him.  It would have colored my enjoyment of A Christmas Memory.  There’s something incredibly innocent and beautiful in Capote’s prose.  It touches a place that, I think, exists in most readers’ Christmas remembrances.  It’s a place that’s warm and happy.  A place where darkness and anger and death are held at bay.  A place where Buddy and Miss Sook can forever make their fruitcakes and decorate their tree.

Capote starts the book in much the same way Dickens begins A Christmas Carol, with the hint of fairy tale:

Imagine a morning in late November.  A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.  Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town.  A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it.  Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

Dickens begins his Christmas story in earnest with the words “Once upon a time”; Capote does much the same with his instruction to “Imagine a morning…”  Both writers invoke a primal childhood response, telling us to get ready for a good story.  The scene Capote describes could be Grandma’s kitchen in “Little Red Riding Hood.”  It’s warm and inviting.  It reminds me of my mother making sugar cookies on a December afternoon, of the smell of ham baking in the oven on Christmas Eve.

Of course, Capote cannot hold off the real world forever.  Throughout the novella, it keeps intruding on Sook and Buddy’s adventures.  Angry relatives chide Sook for letting Buddy get tipsy on leftover fruitcake whiskey (“A child of seven!  whiskey on his breath!  are you out of your mind?  feeding a child of seven!  must be loony!  road to ruination!  remember Cousin Kate?  Uncle Charlie?  Uncle Charlie’s brother-in-law?  shame!  scandal!  humiliation!  kneel, pray, beg the Lord!”).  A rich mill owner’s wife tries to buy Sook and Buddy’s perfect Christmas tree (“Giveya twobits cash for that ol tree.”).  For most of the story, however, Capote maintains the silver tones of memory.  Until the end, when reality reasserts itself.

Capote writes,

…a morning arrives in November, a leafless, birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim:  “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!”

And when that happens, I know it.  A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting loose like a kite on a broken string.  That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky.  As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.

New Year’s Eve is in a couple of days.  We will gather at my parents’ house on December 31 to play games and eat a lot of food.  An old friend who lives in New Zealand will be at the party this year.  He was the best man at my wedding.  At midnight, we will hold up cups of juice and toast memories of the past and look to the future.  We will reflect on all that is good and happy in our lives.  For one night, we will be Buddy and Miss Sook, eternally young, eternally together.

Saint Marty will hold onto that Christmas memory. 

The Confessions of Saint Marty