Cards on the Mantel

Cards on the Mantel

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As snail mail becomes extinct, the handwritten, hand-addressed Christmas card becomes evermore precious.

For years, maybe since we’ve lived in this house, I’ve displayed them on the mantel. They are a crucial part of my holiday decor.

Every year different, every year the same. Reds and greens. Birds and trees. Stables and stars. Snowmen and wise men. They warm up the hearth and dress up the house.

What they do best is remind me of the people who sent them — family and friends near and far.

It’s a Wrap!

It’s a Wrap!

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Gift wrapping can be a meditative experience. Last night as I was cutting and taping and smoothing edges, I thought about my
system, that it’s a little like painting. I spend as much time prepping as I do
actually wrapping.

Prepping means finding the items, removing their price tags,
matching them with their gift receipts, swaddling them in tissue paper and arranging them in a box. Only then can the wrapping begin. Of course there are
items that need no boxes. Books are good for this. Or other things (can’t be too specific here or I would spoil some surprises) that come already boxed. God bless ’em.

And then there are gift bags. I’ve been late
to jump aboard the gift bag train. Seems like cheating to me. But when it’s 11 p.m. and the back is hurting from bending over the bed (which is how I always
wrap gifts and probably always will), the gift bags and the perky colored
tissue paper start to look pretty good.

I finished a lot of wrap-prep and even some
wrapping last night. Enough to tell me how much more buying I have to do. So now – yes, I know, I know – I will have even more
wrapping to do tonight. What can I say? ‘Tis the season.

Checking It Twice

Checking It Twice

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This year, for the first time, my Christmas list is electronic. I’m using the “notes” feature of my smart phone.

It has worked surprisingly well — with one exception. There’s no easy way to “check off” the purchased items. I’m making do by typing an asterisk beside each one.

How I wish I could draw a thick black line or make a decisive “X” through the gifts I’ve bought. I suppose I could just delete them, but that’s no fun.

Makes me realize that a list is not just about what I have to do; it’s about what I’ve already done. Checking off the finished tasks makes me feel competent and efficient — which at this time of year I most decidedly am not! All the more reason to crave the illusion.

It’s a pathetic little revelation, but a revelation just the same!

Where We Are

Where We Are

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Lights strung along rooftops, wound around tree trunks and lampposts. Nets of lights on shrubs and hedges. Spotlights on wreathed front doors.

At the far end of my neighborhood is a house with a backyard that dips down into the woods. I never know where the yard ends and the woods begin. Except this time of year.

We light our lives to taunt the darkness. But along the way we outline them too.

The lights tell us where we are.

Christmas Itself

Christmas Itself

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A week till the big day, and there is still much to do. Gifts that need buying. Cookies that need baking. Cards that need mailing. Packages that need wrapping.

It’s easy to get caught up in seasonal hysteria.

But then I look at our tree and remember how pleasant it was to trim it this year. I think of dear ones here and far away. I see the dog biscuit the UPS man has left on top of the packages by our door, a funny peace offering to the canine who drives him crazy.

I take my time on the cookies, the notes, the ribbons and bows.

These aren’t way stations on the road to Christmas. They are Christmas itself.

For Beethoven: One Day Late

For Beethoven: One Day Late

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His birthday was yesterday but I’m thinking about him today. Remembering the Beethoven extravaganza on the radio: the measured cadences of the Seventh Symphony’s second movement (the one popularized in the film “The King’s Speech”), the off-stage trumpet of the Leonore Overture No. 3, the slow movement of the Third Piano Concerto. 

Years ago, on a shoestring student trip to Europe, I drug my friend Nancy into at least a half-dozen decrepit Viennese apartment buildings, each one of them places the composer was believed to have  lived. They were not pretty or in a nice part of town. They were often up a flight or two of poorly lit stairs. They made clear that Beethoven’s personal life was unsettled and on the edge.

But yesterday these places were the furthest thing from my mind. What remains of Beethoven, of course, is the music — timeless, placeless, soaring above it all.

Light from Inside

Light from Inside

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A gray morning. I turn on the tree lights early. I sit and work beside the fir.

At first it distracts me, so many ornaments have stories. And even the shape of the tree this year — a widened base, giving it a solid, grounded feel — draws my gaze.

But I strengthen my resolve. I will myself to see it only from the corner of an eye.  To work beside it, to let its presence spur and not derail the day.

Less than a week until solstice; the light must come from inside.

Wreathed Whimsy

Wreathed Whimsy

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Some people put wreaths on their car; they deck the wheels instead of the halls. There was a time in my life — the “Carpool Years” — when that would have made sense.

For the most part, it makes sense to wreathe a stationary object — a door, a window, a lamppost.

The other day on my way to work I noticed a tall, dead tree with an equally dead branch all decked out with a, well, dead wreath.  Dead only in the sense that it was fashioned of clipped boughs. It was still fresh and green. And it made me smile at 7 a.m.

Here on our street a neighbor has wreathed her mailbox. At night it glows.

Wreathed whimsy — ’tis the season.

The Transcriptionist

The Transcriptionist

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My work these days calls for lots of interviewing — which in turn entails plenty of transcribing. While I’ve adapted to many new technologies, my taping equipment is decidedly non-digital.  I transcribe interviews as I always have, slowly and labor intensively, with many hits of “pause” and “rewind.”

This gives me time to ruminate on the human voice, on the pitch and timbre of it, and mostly on the pace of it.

Some reflective souls, bless their hearts, speak so slowly that my typing can keep up with them. Those conversations are a cinch to get down on paper.  Other subjects — I call them fast-talkers — are fun to interview but a nightmare to transcribe. They chatter, they enthuse, they barely pause. An hour with them takes four or five hours to capture.

Best of all are the conversations that seem opaque in real time but in transcription reveal a deeper, richer undertone. Makes me wish for a more all-encompassing rewind button — a replay for life, I guess you’d say. What would I choose to listen to again?

Needlework

Needlework

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The other day I sat in on a preview of a Supreme Court oral argument, a job perk as unique as the program it represents. I’m bound by confidentiality to say nothing of what I heard — but that’s not what I want to write about anyway.

I want to write about needlework. I want to write about the woman who sat beside me for two hours, and as complex legal arguments flew across the room — a room designed to look exactly
like the real Supreme Court, right down to the color of the drapes, the
style of the clock and the pattern of the carpet — her fingers flew, too.

She was knitting a sweater of warm burgundy wool, cable stitch. And every time my eyes would glaze over with strategies and counter-strategies, I would glance down at her hands, the surety of every knit and perl. I watched the sweater as it grew. Work of the hands, not of the head.

It was precious time for the petitioner, taking his strategies out for a test drive just days before facing the black-robed justices themselves. But it was precious time for the knitter, too, for the sweater that advanced several rows that morning — and for the person who will be wearing it soon.