Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

Christmas has come and gone, taking with it my expectations (which are premeditated resentments) and illusions.  The party turned at Chateau D despite my premonition that it would not.  Tweets, text messages, and phone calls from the Valley of the Cumberland lead me to believe that, while perfectly fine, the events of the day there were not going to grace a Saturday Evening Post cover anytime soon.  It definitely would have been nice to see Ace, Elvis, and their respective clans but on the whole my sense of “being ‘here’ while ‘it’ is happening ‘there’” was relieved.  Hearing that Nemo and trAce were expecting 35 in the Mothership sounded more overwhelming than enviable.

So with our celebration of the solstice (dressed as it was in the socially acceptable guise of the birth of Our Lord) under our belt, and following a long winter’s nap, my Sweet Lady, Tallulah and I decided to take a little bit of the hair of the dog what bit us and head out into retail land.  Tallulah had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that she had scored about $25 cash this year.  This kind of purchasing power has never been hers before, so she was not sure how to wield it.  She did know better than to make a temporary loan to her father, but I have to remember to warn her about combining her money with Beavis’.

It’s easy to see how a seven year-old could be overwhelmed in the full-contact retail environment that is the post-Christmas sale.  Of course all the — now outdated — Brumalia decorations were on sale.  Up at the entrance (and well picked over by 1pm) was the seasonal display of hugemongous plastic containers.  I am confident that Rubbermaid doesn’t go into the black on the day after Thanksgiving.  They have to wait for the day after Christmas.  I want to ask the people buying these over-sized under-bed storage containers why they bought all that crap if they just had to turn around and put it away.  Such a question would probably be as welcome as a denizen of Ahriman at the feast of Ahura Mazda.  I kept my mouth shut and bought some underwear.

This is my favorite Christmas Poem. It was written by Wendell Berry.

They were into the lambing, up late.
Talking and smoking around their lantern,
they squatted in the barn door, left open
so the quiet of the winter night
diminished what they said. The chill
had begun to sink into their clothes.
Now and then they raised their hands
to breathe on them. The youngest one
yawned and shivered.

“Damn,” he said,
“I’d like to be asleep. I’d like to be
curled up in a warm nest like an old
groundhog, and sleep till spring.”

“When I was your age, Billy, it wasn’t
sleep I thought about,” Uncle Stanley said.
“Last few years here I’ve took to sleeping.”

And Raymond said: “To sleep till spring
you’d have to have a trust in things
the way animals do. Been a long time,
I reckon, since people felt safe enough
to sleep more than a night. You might
wake up someplace you didn’t go to sleep at.”

They hushed awhile, as if to let the dark
brood on what they had said. Behind them
a sheep stirred in the bedding and coughed.
It was getting close to midnight.
Later they would move back along the row
of penned ewes, making sure the newborn
lambs were well dried, and had sucked,
and they would go home cold to bed.
The barn stood between the ridgetop
and the woods along the bluff. Below
was the valley floor and the river
they could not see. They could hear
the wind dragging its underside
Through the bare branches of the woods.
And suddenly the wind began to carry
a low singing. They looked across
the lantern at each other’s eyes
and saw they had all heard. They stood,
their huge shadows rising up around them.
The night had changed. They were already
on their way — dry leaves underfoot
and mud under leaves — to another barn
on down along the woods’ edge,
an old stripping room, where by the light
of the open stove door they saw the man,
and then the woman and the child
lying on a bed of straw on the dirt floor.

“Well, look a there,” the old man said.
“First time this ever happened here.”

And Billy, looking, and looking away,
said: “Howdy. Howdy. Bad night.”

And Raymond said: “There’s a first
time, they say, for everything.”

And that,
he thought, was as reassuring as anything
was likely to be, and as he needed it to be.
They did what they could. Not much.
The brought a piece of rug and some sacks
to ease the hard bed a little, and one
wedged three dollar bills into a crack
in the wall in a noticeable place.
And they stayed on, looking, looking away,
until finally the man said they were well
enough off, and should be left alone.
They went back to their sheep. For a while
long they squatted by their lantern
and talked, tired, wanting sleep, yet stirred
by wonder — old Stanley too, though he would not
say so.

“Don’t make no difference,” he said
“They’ll have ‘em anywhere. Looks like a man
would have a right to be born in bed, if not
die there, but he don’t.”
“But you heard
that singing in the wind,” Billy said.
“What about that?”

“Ghosts. They do that way.”

“Not that way.”

“Scared him, it did.”
The old man laughed. “We’ll have to hold
his damn hand for him, and lead him home.”

“It don’t even bother you,” Billy said
“You go right on just the same. But you heard.”

“Now that I’m old I sleep in the dark.
That ain’t what I used to do in it. I heard
something.”

“You heard a good deal more
than you’ll understand,” Raymond said,
“or him or me either.”

They looked at him.
He had, they knew, a talent for unreasonable
belief. He could believe in tomorrow
before it became today — a human enough
failing, and they were tolerant.

He said:
“It’s the old ground trying it again.
Solstice, seeding, and birth — it never
gets enough. It wants the birth of a man
to bring together sky and earth, like a stalk
of corn. It’s not death that makes the dead
rise out of the ground, but something alive
straining up, rooted in darkness, like a vine.
That’s what you heard. If you’re in your right mind
when it happens, it can come on you strong,
and you might hear music passing on the wind,
or see a light where there wasn’t one before.”

“Well, how do you know it amounts to anything?”

“You don’t. It usually don’t. It would take
a long long time to ever know.”

But that night
and other nights afterwards, up late,
there was a feeling in them — familiar
to them, but always startling in its strength –
like the thought, on a winter night,
of the lambing ewes dry-bedded and fed,
and the thought of the wild creatures warm
asleep in their nests, deep underground.

- Wendell Berry
“The Birth (Near Port William)”
from “Farming: A Handbook”

used here without permission but hoping that will be alright.

Standing at the North Star Farms stall at the Farmer’s Market yesterday, it was hard to credit the predictions of snow.  Given that Tallulah’s birthday is today (Happy B-day little one!) and that she wanted to get the tree on her birthday, we decided it was better to play it safe and get the druidic symbol of unity with nature now and not be left holding the knitted string.  My Sweet Lady and Tallulah did most of the trimming, although they saved the teapot ornament which belonged to Grandma Bec and a couple other ornaments for me.

I also lifted Tallulah up to place the star on top of the tree, a ritual which is sure to end soon.  Today’s snow combined with the tree’s lights and the uninterrupted sound of fingers on keyboards led me to want to hear a little Charlie Brown Christmas music.  Flexing my penny-pinching skillz, I fired up the hoopty-machine and downloaded the album from Amazon, subsequently burning it to a disc.  Yes, I do have an iPod touch with iTunes and a jack that runs into the stereo, but my California Audio Labs CD player still does a better job of playback.  By the time the slightly spooky Peanuts Christmas song came on, I was feeling fine.

You know the song I mean, right?  “Christmastime is Here.”  Kind of weird, right?  Also kind of a nice break from the “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” type songs.  The note of melancholy rings true with that part of me that always generates expectations for this time of year that are bound to be disappointed sooner or later.  I’d like to say that these expectations were in some way unique, but I am afraid they are pretty much the same Norman Rockwell inspired fantasies that plague many holiday planners.

So a little wistfulness is a welcome thing.  They made a big mistake when they took it out of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  The song originally went, “Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow / Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow / So have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.”  They replaced that middle line with the title of this post, and I think the song is worse for it.  Let’s be honest, some of our highest expectations may not be met this year, but that does not mean our holidays won’t be bright.

I want what I want.  Prestigious jobs, fancy cars, wicked phones, nice houses, you name it, I have wanted it.  I have been willing, at times, to do things to get what I wanted that, in retrospect, do not make me proud.  It’s worth noting that often when I get what I want, it turns out not to be so good for me.  Sometimes the only thing worse than not getting my way is getting my way.

So once I’m headed down one stream, it’s hard to convince me to portage to the next.  Any indication that there are rocks ahead will be met with a response varying from, “I don’t see any rocks,” to “This is going to be just fine, damn it.”  When it comes to the holidays, my resolve is doubled.  Especially since you can see the boulders looming from Halloween.

Past years have found me on the shore — or in the woods — as my Sweet Lady and Tallulah go pitching over the falls.  (The falls include, of course, Thanksgiving and Christmas not to mention Tallulah’s and Palindrome’s birthdays, countless church services, several parties, and consistent reminders that we have chosen to live far from most family.)  Yours truly could often be heard whistling “I love to go a-wandering” in order to drown out the screams.  I was off in search of a “great Christmas.”

As the current picked up this year, I heard the call of the woods again.  I thought, “Heck, this is not something to get worked up about.  The holidays happen every year.”  And while it is true that they happen every year, they are something to get worked up over every year too.  It’s just overwhelming.  As I saw my Sweet Lady’s eyes get wider as the sound of the fall approached, I decided to stay in the boat and go over the falls myself.  I can’t stop it from happening, but maybe we can all sing on the way down.  It’s been good so far.