I don’t usually write postscripts, but today calls for one. I wrote yesterday’s entry hours before the tragic school shooting in Connecticut. It was a post about guns — not a topic I usually cover.
And now this.
There is everything to say, and there is nothing to say.
Could the tears shed over mass shootings fill an ocean?
I think maybe they could.
I do most of my shopping in a two- to three-week period in December — not a perfect system, but it works. In order to buy lots of gifts in such a short time, however, I’ve had to head out after dinner — when I’d typically be curling up with a book or a movie — onto the cold, dark highways of suburbia, pulling in and out of massive parking lots, threading my way past holiday displays and shelves of sweaters in search of the right gift for each person on the list.
The other night, looking in vain for help in a large sporting goods store (what is a lure? and how do you tell one from the other?) I found myself in the one section of the establishment that was bustling, the one section where you could find clerks. That would be the gun department.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen so many guns in one place before. There were camo models and long sleek menacing ones and short, stubby almost cute ones. People were milling around cases, speaking animatedly to staff, pawing through boxes of ammunition.
I told myself that guns must be a big seller around the holidays, that these guns are for hunters. Put out of my mind the frightening alternatives.
Still, it was hard to forget that in this entire cavernous store the only place where there was life and activity and conversation, the only place that was lively … was where the guns were sold.
It’s a matter of perspective, I tell myself. Of angle and scale. I see the birds, their outline against the sky, their large size and hulking shape not robin or jay-like. Their stillness predatory, dangerous. Must be hawks. Hawks in trees.
Three times in the last week I’ve seen them — twice in the suburbs, once in the city. Are there more of them or am I simply spotting them more often? Are they desperate for food this time of year?
I read a little about them, their exceptional vision, their annual migration patterns, their behavior — more peaceful than you would think (when you rule out what they must do to eat!). Though I’m seeing them in trees, I’m imagining them in flight, seeking, soaring, alone among the clouds.
Allaboutbirds.org
Yesterday on Metro, uncharacteristically bookless, I stare at the scenery passing by. The clouds were winter ones, thin, remote. So different from the fat summer cumulus. They reminded me of whitened animal bones.
The light almost gone, me half asleep, wishing myself home in time to catch a walk in the brief dusk.
But before Vienna, a bonus — the sun, sinking fast, lights up the clouds, turns dross into gold.
Some houses have candles in their windows. Others, tasteful white twinkle lights around trees limbs and branches. There are spotlit doors with wreaths. And there are icicle lights, easiest to install if you have a slight overhang, which we do not.
A few years ago people started putting not just one large wreath on the front door, but smaller wreaths on every front-facing window, a holiday-decorating escalation that seems like it would be overkill but can look surprisingly nice when glimpsed from afar.
The house behind us drips in icicle lights and spotlit trees, and the house behind that features a snowman and reindeer and strings of lights shining from tree to tree, giving the place a fiesta feel.
Our own house has colored lights along the roof line, around the door, across the shrubbery and up the lamp post. The window candles are missing in action but should be up soon.
We are, in short, decked out for the season. At least we are until I plug in my hair dryer and blow the fuses (which has been happening far too often lately). But except for these black-outs, our house and the others in Folkstone have become what we need most right now: candles in the darkness.
Photo of Bull Run Lights Festival: Virginia.org
Discussing seasonality with a Millennial:
“Why can’t you buy eggnog year round?”
“Because it’s a holiday thing.”
“But if you like it so much, why not drink it all year?”
Because life is not about the words but the space around them. Because music is not about the sound but the silence, too. Because eggnog tastes better when you sip it only a few weeks a year.
The lesson is lost, though. This is a generation raised on winter strawberries and music you download instantly and sometimes for free from the Internet. They do not save dimes and quarters and trudge up to Wheeler’s Drugstore to buy a single.
For them, there is no time between action and reaction. They don’t yet realize that can be the sweetest time of all.
I try to keep luddite posts to a minimum, but the new phone is making this difficult. To begin with, I’m intimidated by the thing. When I do slide it out of its special pocket in my purse, I hold it like a Ming dynasty vase. This is making it difficult to familiarize myself with its amazing features.
My children are horrified that I continue to use it like a 2005 flip phone: “Have you tried the GPS yet?” … “Have you bought any apps?” … “You don’t have any contacts, Mom.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. For some reason I have the email address of a high school counselor from 2009 but no numbers for people I actually need to reach.
And then there’s the way that the phone completes my words and sentences. I’m a writer; I’d rather do this myself.
But there is hope. Last night a satisfied user I met at a party told me what made him buy his iPhone — an app called Night Sky. “The phone knows where you are and it shows you all the constellations and their names,” he said.
Then he whipped out his iPhone — and the roof flew away and the people, too. And it reminded me of once when Tom and I were driving in Wyoming late at night and stopped to put oil in the car and looked up, almost accidentally, and could not believe our eyes.
A phone that brings the heavens into view. I’ll buy that.
It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 17 astronauts’ famous photo of earth from space, the Writer’s Almanac tells me. It was the first time our planet was photographed whole and entire, its mountains and deserts and oceans in clear relief. Clouds like tufts of baby’s hair after a bath, when you comb it, still wet, into ridges and whorls.
It is a snapshot in time — a cyclone forms over the Indian Ocean — but so much more. It is our own precious, fragile earth. And it was the last time humans would be in a position to photograph it. (Robots were in charge of subsequent lunar missions.)
Just coincidentally, the Writer’s Almanac informs me that today is also the birthday of writer Willa Cather, who said, “We come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”
When we see our planet from space, how can we not love it more? Not just our own corner of it, but all of it. How can we not want to do everything we can to protect it?
Photo: NASA
In his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal tells the story of 264 small Japanese figurines called netsuke that generations of his family collected, displayed, lost and found. Made of ivory or wood, these tiny carvings of people or animals are delicate but strong. A cooper making his wheel. A rat with a curved tail. A hare with amber eyes. If you carry one around in your pocket, it “migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget it is there.”
The netsuke are by no means the most valuable artifacts the Ephrussi family possesses, and when the Nazis storm their Vienna home in April of 1938, a loyal maid with an ample apron manages to smuggle the statues out of the house. Everything else — the paintings, silver, porcelain, jewelry, an entire library of cherished incunabula — “the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions” — was taken.
I’ve read other accounts of the Holocaust. This one moved me more than almost any other. The objects people touch and cherish are the keenest and saddest reminders of their absence.
After the war, the maid, Anna, gives the netsuke back to the family, and de Waal eventually inherits them. He treasures the figurines, but he also finds them an affront. “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more.”
This book is not only about people and places and things; it’s also about love and loss and endurance.
(I cherish our old cuckoo clock, and — even though my family disparages me for it —the worn wallpaper, too.)
It was almost 70 degrees yesterday as I made my way along New Jersey Avenue to the Capitol. A small wind was whiffling the pansies, stirring the purples and yellows and the dark green leaves. I moseyed down a section of tree-lined street that reminds me of Paris, with the U.S. Capitol winking through what’s left of the leaves.
The broad plaza of the East Front entrance was filled with shirt-sleeved tourists snapping photos, but noon light drained color from the scene. I turned left down East Capitol, passing the Library and the Folger and a bookstore I always intend to visit but never do. Roses were still blooming, tumbling along fence posts and garden gates. In the air, the smell of new-mown grass.
Everyone was out in the warm weather — dog-walkers and nannies pushing prams and office workers on a lunchtime jog. There’s a park where I usually turn around, and today I strode right through the middle of it. I never knew what it was called until I checked a map after my stroll. It’s Lincoln Park — and not at all like its Chicago counterpart — but now I’ll never forget the name.