Meal time is an exciting event in the lives of my cats.  When they were kittens, they engaged in extended periods of play, exploration, and swinging on curtains followed by restorative naps, and eating for growth and strength.  Now that they are cats, they engage in extended naps, brief periods of play if I play with them, and extended whining for food followed by my caving in and giving them something to eat.

I’ve got one grazer (Artemis) and two gobblers (Winston and Freud).  In order to accommodate their conflicting styles of dining and to appease their whining, I dribble snacks out to them over the course of a day.  It’s a kind of enforced grazing which led my friend Debi (aka Putzer, the attorney) to ask in incredulous tones, “How many times a day do you feed them?”

Let me elucidate the finer points of this.  Then you can decide if I’m as nuts as this will sound:

Winston was given a name to aspire to; but he chooses instead to spend his time sleeping, eating, going to the neighbors to watch football and having a nightly cigarette on the front porch.  He’s the whiner.  When Joan, my friend with the theological chops comes over, she always asks me to make him talk.

“Winston,” I say

“Weaaew.”

“Winston!”

“Weaaew.”

“Such a noise!”  Joan always says the same thing. “He’s singing to you!”

“Yeah, no he’s not.”

Anyway, Winston’s whine is the reason he weighs 18 pounds.  At mealtime, I scatter his kibble down the length of the kitchen floor so he has to work a little bit to eat.  It slows him down so he isn’t able to bother Artemis who likes peace and quiet with her meal over behind the Lazy-Boy chair.  Winston used to wolf down the food in his dish and then loom up over Artemis until she abdicated her meal to him.  If you’re keeping up with the math, that meant Winston got two meals and Artemis didn’t get any.

Freud, on the other hand, will only eat out of a bowl, and his bowl at that.  When he was a kitten and heard kitchen noises, he came running onto the scene and bumped anyone already eating, usurping her food.  As a kitten he learned that he had a bowl and it was always in a certain place and this arrangement was inviolate.   Now that he is a grown, gobbling cat, I would like to scatter food for him like I do for Winston, but he won’t eat anything unless it’s in his bowl.  In addition, his bowl has to be on the same square foot of floor.  Once I tried to move it a few feet out so I could see it while I was teaching, the better to keep Winston from getting into it later.  Freud gave me such a look as could make the tin man grow a heart without the wizard.

“How could you betray me like this?  I do nothing but purr on your lap, chase the laser pointer in delightful ways and burrow adorably under throw rugs and afghans purely for your pleasure, and then you refuse me food.”

I moved the bowl back onto his designated square foot of kitchen floor.  He pounced on it like it was his last meal which considering my perfidy, it might have been.

Freud has a meal station and Winston has the kitchen floor, but Artemis’ nosebag is pretty much wherever I am.  When I work at the computer, there’s a dish of kibble on a nearby book shelf.  When I’m working on music, the dish is on the top of the piano, awaiting her royal highness’s pleasure.  When I’m tucked up in bed, it’s in a drawer of the nightstand.  When she comes up and nails me with her gimlet eye that could bore through cement walls, I reach for her food without turning from my work.

So that is the everyday routine around here.  Holidays on the cat calendar come every other month and are observed by The Opening of New Bags of Cat Food.  It’s a Saturnalia and a year of Jubilee compressed into five minutes.  When I buy 17 pound bags of (expensive) cat food from the Vet, I decant it into restaurant size jars with tight lids so the stuff stays fresh.   I spill rather a lot of it in the process and all three cats are on the spot to hoover up the pieces.

The celebration is usually in the back of the house where I store the jars. But we’ve been having a cold snap and I didn’t much care for the idea of hanging out back there, so the other day I brought the bag of food and the big jars into the kitchen.  When the cats heard the Rustle of The Bag, they raced out to the laundry room.

I heard them milling around in the back.

“Where is she?”

“I think she went into the kitchen.”

“You said you heard The Bag.”

“I did.”

“Where is it?”

“I think she took it with her to the kitchen.”

“But this is where it happens.”

Presently, they all tumbled into the kitchen saying, “What the hell?”

“That’s not holiday language,” I said.

The three of them stood uncertainly as I made preparations for deploying the food into jars in the kitchen.  I think Freud re-checked the laundry room to make sure food wasn’t being served back there in some alternate universe.  I got ready to pour.  I looked at Winston.

“Sing the Cat Food Carol,” I said. “Winston!”

“Weaaew.”

From left clockwise: Winston,Freud, Artemis

The subject is women’s bodies.  I had a moment the other day that would have been welcome 45 years ago, and I have been thinking about it ever since.  The prep work for the moment began as I was reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants which was as funny and lively as I expected it to be.  In the midst of the snarky fun, she has some serious things to say to say about bodies.

For example, in a list of points on what it felt like when she was thin, she begins not with feeling sexy or being able to wear cool clothes.  She says she was cold all the time.  I don’t often hear anyone say there is a down side to being thin.

She has a section where she flat out announces that yeah, yeah we all think there’s something wrong with our bodies, and here’s a list.  I started reading through the list.  I gave the book back (thanks, Julia) or I would quote from it but if you are a woman, you already know the list: things are too big, too small, too curly, too straight; and I understand men rarely have this complaint: too long.

I thought I might need to throw up.  Though my parents long ago made Unhelpful Remarks about my body, I still carry on the tradition in ways I wish I didn’t.  As exhausting a tradition as it is to keep afloat, it’s still hard to scuttle.

That’s the background, now we’re up to the day of My Moment. I went to my Yoga for Over 50s class which I have now attended 20 times.  I know this because I am keeping my class pass cards like they were trophies.  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/10/squadron-leader-over-50/.)I usually position myself in the front so I don’t get distracted with what other people are doing.  When we do the balancing postures, I get distracted by anyone who looks like she might fall backwards into me.

But the teacher had us turn to the side to do wide-legged forward bends which gave me, who I describe as ‘peasant stock,’ a view of everyone in the class.  Ahead of me was a large, rumply rump in black sweat pants, to its side was a slight body with hardly a bump in her white T-shirt.  Ahead of her was a large, angular body with narrow shoulders and broad hips.  That was the one.  That was the unlikely body that brought tears to my eyes.  I thought, “Majestic, dignified, beautiful.”

I looked around at all the bodies in the class.  “We’re all beautiful!”  I thought.  I looked at the rumply rump again just to test my new hypothesis.  “Yep,” I decided. “Every body in here is beautiful.”

If anything, the variety itself is just dazzling.  Why are women’s bodies the only thing in creation that aren’t generally celebrated for their variety?   Song collectors, rock hounds, horticulturalists, oenophiles, foodies, philatelists and See’s Candy all thrive on the concept of assortment.

It’s common to blame men for unrealistic, not to say inhuman standards of female beauty.  But we do it to ourselves.  We do it by envying or flaunting the ability to come close to fitting the template. We do it by rebelling or by complying rather than sinking into ourselves, befriending what we find there, and living the life we desire.

Some of us take a long time to pull out of the imitative world of adolescence, that small campus where our safety is provided either by looking like everyone else or by staking ourselves as someone who disdains to look like everyone else.  We have to go off-campus to find a home in the body that expresses who we are.

Those beautiful bodies in the Yoga for Over 50 class.  I expect everyone one of us has had some experience of humiliation around our appearance which then in turn informs who we are still becoming.  I think it’s all part of being alive and in the world.  And that’s hard to swallow because even if we look like nuts and chews, human beings all have soft centers.

New Years Day I went to church without being paid.  Usually I trade off with another pianist who I will not name because he is famously shy.  January 1st wasn’t one of my Sundays, but I had had a quiet, relaxing week after the tumble of Christmas.  I thought I would enjoy the luxury of not having to be there early to rehearse the choir, and not even having to be on time. In addition, it was Pajama Sunday.

I stopped for coffee at a drive-in and didn’t think dark thoughts about having to wait for the unorganized person ahead of me to collect his order, and spend two minutes getting his money back in his wallet or whatever he was doing.  I didn’t screech out of line and tear up the road like I often do when I imagine I will be too late to set an example for the choir who tends to wander in ten minutes late to run through the anthem.

I got to church in time for the pastor to thank God that he wasn’t the only one in pajamas.  When I have pajama week in my music studio, everyone says how much fun it is but they mostly come in street clothes and say, oops they forgot.  So I know how it feels to be the only fool in the room.  Pastor Dan was wearing dark blue satiny pajamas and moon boots.  I wore my red Scottie dog PJs and sat with Kay who was dressed in flannel leopard skins.  The three of us pretty much held down the pajama contingency since Jane came ambivalently dressed in what could double as gardening attire.

We sang one of my favorite hymns, “How Beautiful the March of Days,” and had a brief discussion about changing seasons. We were asked to name various things to which there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven, turn, turn, turn.

I said, “There’s a time to stop eating Christmas cookies.”

Kay said, “Who let her in?”

Someone introduced herself as a visitor and glad she had walked in the front door. Kay, who is one of those folks who does a lion’s share of work in a small church, looked across at the new face and murmured “Sign her up.”

That gave me the giggles. I gave them back to Kay and her partner Jerry.  The three of us made the row of seats shake.

So I can’t sit with Kay again.

Instead of the sermon, there was a “hymn sing” where we could choose the songs.  This is not the time to complain about how much I dislike what UCC has done to hymns.  Well, maybe just a little.  They’ve taken out the gruesome “blood of the lamb” images which is a good thing.  But they’ve tried to disguise the historical fact that Jesus was a man by taking out gender references.  So instead of the word he you’ve got the word Christ.  Like the word Christ is going to conjure up hermaphroditic images.  And try spitting out the word Christ on an eighth note.

In any case, wearing pajamas in church tends to blur more than standards of dress. When we got to “Go Tell it On the Mountain,” I got up and danced with Jane for a verse.  Then I danced with the new person who I found out later was a retired pastor.  Then I thought, “My god, like you need any more attention after this past month.” So I sat down.

We progressed through the service to Communion.  There’s the pastor holding up the Challah (nice touch, I like Challah; and there’s another basket of whole wheat bread in case you don’t want the eggs or sugar, UCC is so inclusive) and ceremoniously breaking the loaf in half.

Kay gets up first.  She is going to assist. Jerry takes a photo of Kay assisting.

“Is that for next year’s Christmas card?” I whisper to him.

People begin to file up the center aisle. Jane crosses the room to maneuver Mary Ann’s wheelchair to the front.  Jerry puts down his camera and assists Miriam, a fragile older woman.  My shy colleague plays a lovely melody I have never heard before.  He plays with such sweetness, I almost can’t bear it.  The sun breaks through the stained glass window, flooding the room with light and warmth.  Jane looks up, her smile is illuminated.

Sitting alone, watching people helping other people, my eyes fill with tears that run down my cheeks.  Jane is now crying, too.  I hear a sniff and look behind me to see Tom and Thea both wiping their eyes.  Sam tears up and holds out his hand to invite me into line.  It might have been a Saturday Night Live sketch which is certainly one way to go when you can’t bear the intensity.

I bore it. I loved it. I was happy to be included in this sunlit group that welcomed and helped each other up the aisle to that good-looking loaf of Challah.  I always liked that line, “Let us keep the feast.” The original idea was to keep the feast with unleavened bread which was what, purer than yeasted bread?  Please don’t any exegetes kill the magic. If you’ve read many of my blogs, you’ll know I don’t care.  I feel happy to know I started the new year with love, and as to all the old leavened crud squatting where it found a roof, I am learning to make friends with what I can’t let go of.

The Christmas cards have given way to thank you notes.  The transition is easy when one uses blank cards.  Now I am on to the subject of gifts which I described to my friend Nancy who can tell every time I have deconstructed a thought, as fraught.   Gifts can be a mine-field and I’m sure it has something to do with the trafficking of women in ancient tribal societies, but I don’t want to research this in Wikipedia or even examine this cavalier statement.  The truth is: I love gifts.  I love choosing them, wrapping them, giving them, getting them, unwrapping them, and standing them all around in a glorious glut.  I hate to ruin the moment by thinking about why that is.  I’ve read Unplug the Christmas Machine, thank you.

As a teacher, I get lots of fun things to unwrap.  A student comes in the week before Christmas, face beaming, and proprietorially hands me a wrapped gift.

“Ooh, can I open it now?”

“Sure, I want to see what it is.”

Certain traditions develop.  Genevieve of the unearthly beautiful voice, bakes something every year.  Last year it was an orange layer cake, thick with frosting; this year the most piquant gingerbread I’ve ever tasted.  For the ten years the Banobi kids were my students, I got a delivery of homemade sticky buns every Christmas Eve.  This is my second year of blackberry jam from berries handpicked on the Olympic Peninsula and cooked by Travis of the creamy baritone voice.  Max’s mother, Carla makes cards and I look forward to seeing what her imagination brings forth every year.  Michiko’s dad makes springerli, all puffy and smooth along the edges, unlike mine.

The gifts from across the pond and continent come with those little custom declarations which I find so exotic.  This year it said “confectionary.”  There’s always candy of some kind–this year it was chocolate Tiddly Penguins– in the gifts from England so that’s not exactly a surprise.  It’s the word itself.  Confectionary.  To someone who lives in the wild west, it just sounds so Dickens. (I am not going to continue in this vein because I think the reason readers of my blog who live in Germany outnumber those in England three to one is because the British don’t really care to be slobbered all over the way anglophiles will do.  Americans just say “do,” not “will do.”  Did you ever notice that?  OK, I’ll stop now.)

There’s a bitter sweetness in the confectionary this year because Mervyn, one of my British family, died last summer.  It was a completely unexpected death and a great shock to everyone.  For years Mervyn had written me long, long letters, full of news, English idioms, and stuff to savor.   In person he was just as loquacious.  He once asked me the old, old riddle, “What’s worse than finding a worm in an apple?”

I smiled patiently, “Half a worm?”

It was as if I hadn’t spoken.  “Half a worm,” he said. “You see, it’s because if you see half a worm, it’s because the other half is in the piece of apple in your mouth!”

“Yeah, I get it.”

He liked to extend his enjoyment verbally.  Much like I do.

I wish he were still here to repeat a story I’ve heard at least twice: During The War (that would be WW II) Mervyn was a boy in Cornwall, not sure how old, but old enough to play in the road with the other children.  When the Americans went over in 1942, the word got round that when their vehicles came through the village the men threw candy.

“Candy,” Mervyn relished the word fifty years later. “We wondered what this candy was.  We were so excited to see the candy.  But when the Americans came and threw us candy, we were so disappointed.  ‘It’s just sweets,’ we said.”

So gifts can be fraught.  In this dark time of year, we get frantic with the activities, the gifts, and the food because the dark is such a reminder that life can be fraught. Our lives are finite and will one day go dark.  Traditions end. This year I’ve missed getting my long chatty Christmas letter from Mervyn.  He was a sweet man.

I sealed up the last Christmas card this afternoon to be delivered at tonight’s Lessons and Carols service which begins an hour past my bed-time.  I voted against this schedule because not only do I have to be there, I have to be alert.  I direct the choir for one song and I play the organ on all the noisy carols. I need to not fall asleep and trod on the pedals in the middle of the readings. But I digress.

I love the idea of Christmas cards, at least in theory.  It isn’t de rigueur for my generation.  When I was growing up my mother commandeered half the dining room table for her Christmas card operation.  For a month and a half we ate off TV trays and listened to how onerous it all was.

My mother always sent religious cards.  Once she sent me out to buy a Christmas card for my teacher and I came back with one that referenced Tom and Jerry which I thought were cartoon mice.  She wouldn’t let it out of the house because a Tom and Jerry is *alcohol.* I found that card 50 years later in my mother’s estate.  There it was all unused and looking like the 1950’s.  I gave it this year to Nina (rhymes with Dinah).

My mother disapproved of Christmas cards made of family photos.  Christmas was about Jesus.  It was conceited to put your family on a Christmas card.  She also disapproved of family newsletters; they were impersonal.  This was before Xerox when you had to have your letters printed at a print shop at great expense so there was that –the expense–as well.  She always wrote little notes in her cards.

Now people do e-cards.  Or no card.  But there’s a world of Christmas card senders: a little community, like the Facebook community.  If you like Facebook, you enjoy the world of other people who like Facebook and connect with everyone else some other way.  If you like to exchange Christmas cards, you have your Christmas card list and a roll of stamps.

When I say I like Christmas cards in theory, it’s because I always start out with great ambitions.  The day after Thanksgiving I make a long list of everyone I would send a card to if there were world enough and time. I put the list under the stack of everything that I know will realistically take precedence over writing cards.

When I finally get to the cards in mid December, the first thing I do is cross off half the names.  At least.  Good, that’s done.  Then I divide the list into my first tier people and my second tier people.  The first tier includes the aforementioned little community of avid Christmas card senders.  I usually manage to send those cards.   I send a card made from my newest watercolor to all the regulars who got last year’s watercolor card.  To new people who have recently entered my Christmas card community, I send “Artemis Among the Packages,” because everyone seems to like it, including me.

Like my mother, I prefer to write a little note, even if it is the same note written over and over.  By the time I have done a half a dozen cards, I have usually hit on a clever and succinct paragraph or two which I don’t mind writing 25 more times.  Sometimes if I am still writing Christmas cards in January, I turn them into New Years cards or thank you notes for cards or gifts that got to me on time.

I save my favorite cards.  They go through a rigorous screening and are subject to an annual review.  Here are some that have made the cut for the last 25 years:

First of all, a whole caroling village of pop-up cards from my British family.

A card from a college friend and fellow English major pictures a snowman smiling and smoking a pipe; and reads:

The trees are lovely, tall and svelte,

But I have snow beneath my belt,

And weeks to go before I melt,

And weeks to go before I melt.

Another is a Glen Baxter cartoon featuring a family bundled into an open air roadster.  One member is tossing the head of the driver out the back.  The caption reads: “The holiday began with another petty family squabble.”

And finally there is a Christmas table with a centerpiece made of olives.  A Botticellian looking toddler wears an olive on each fingertip.  Inside the card it says: “The Christ Child at the Olive Platter.”

One friend sends me the same card every year.  She bought a box of cards at Bartells some years ago, and has been slowly depleting her supply long enough for me to have caught on.   Considering what an ordeal it was to choose the cards in the first place, I think she has found quite a sensible routine for sending them.  We all make these decisions in our own way. Nothing is de rigueur.

In that spirit, I wish to say that it’s Christmas Eve in my corner of the world which is turning and tilting toward the light.  Whatever your beliefs and traditions, may we all know we are loved!

Artemis Among the Packages

“Writing a poem is an attention-getting act, so it might be worth asking whose attention are you getting and why?”  says Billy Collins in an interview in The Paris Review, Fall 2001.  Billy Collins, a rock star among American poets, knows something about attention.

I’ve gotten almost more attention than I can stand this past week. There was the book launch for 99 Girdles on the Wall at the Secret Garden Book Shop in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. An hour before it began I realized I had never even been to a book launch.  I had a vague idea that I would be signing books and people would stand around talking and eating what my witty, not to say wise-ass, friend Susan calls “fiddlies on crackers.”  I called the Secret Garden to ask what exactly was I expected to do.

“Well, of course you’ll want to read.  And to say some things about the book.  We’ll have a book signing table for you”

Book signing is a whole new skill set for me.  Jenni, who single-handedly improved my sight-reading ability by learning new music at an alarming rate, handed me her copy of my book and said, “Write something clever.”  I froze.   The above-mentioned Susan gave me an even more clever-quelling assignment when weeks ago she e-mailed me to say she was buying a copy for her sister and one for herself and I could now start working on an inscription.

So I started a list of pithy things to write of which I will share none.

My memory of the book launch is of faces beaming at me.  Like those camera angles where you see all the cooing adults from the point of view of the infant in the crib.  The faces in the book store advanced upon me in groups of three or four, not saying much, just beaming.

I haven’t discussed this with everyone who has ever lived but I think I am on solid ground when I say everyone needs attention. And I believe that although the preferred form varies, everyone likes attention; and there’s a common tendency amongst our species to not be able to admit it.

Attention is a form of love.  This is what I felt at the book launch to the point that it was almost unbearably intense.  I felt loved.  All those people did not come to the launch because I had written a book.  They came because they loved me.  The vulnerability I felt after an hour and half made me ask the event planner if I could go home now.

Fast forward to the end of last week when I did something hadn’t done in 14 years, something that none of my current friends have ever heard me do:  I sang a classical vocal solo in a Christmas recital.  I sang Norman Dello Joio’s “A Christmas Carol.”  It climaxes on a luscious high G, a soprano’s most beloved note, although B-flat and high C are great fun, too.

I judge my vocal solos by how much I enjoy myself; this is directly related to how present I am when I sing.  While I was a real neurotic all day long, when it came time to sing, I enjoyed myself; and the performance presented me with a metaphor for life.  When I got to that G which sings for 8 counts, I started with an easy onset, a small portal in which the sound could seed itself.  Then I fed it.  I poured breath into it until it filled up the sanctuary, a hall so alive it almost sings itself.

This is a different form of attention.  I attend to my note, starting small, paying attention, and loving what I am doing.  This is my job from start to finish.  What happens after that is out of my control. People listening, people attending to me, hear what they hear and have the experience they have.  Some people hate classical singing. Some people are just impressed that a singer can sing so loud without a microphone. Others feel thrilled or blissful. Others are in the smile and nod category.

One answer to Billy Collin’s question is that I am getting attention for the purpose of both enjoying and sharing myself.   Narcissism, the new bogey word that has replaced dysfunctional, shame, and trauma as a collective diagnosis for the human condition, is not a preoccupation with ourselves.  It’s a preoccupation with an image we have of ourselves coupled with a desire to control how others perceive us.

In this week that I have gotten so much attention, I am happy to remind myself to just start the note and send breath into it.  Then let it go.

The full moon is waning and I am following it down the backside of my Christmas schedule.  Three performances were crushed into this past weekend and my book launch was scheduled for Monday, or in other words, on the day I would typically expect to crash.  Just as I was about to cry “uncle,” on the events that had accumulated, a college friend who I hadn’t seen in 35 years wrote to me out of the blue that he would be in Seattle on this busy weekend.

I sat down and breathed.  I often have a hard time living in the moment.  It’s easy for me to get exercised about something I imagine might happen (read: go wrong) in the days that are yet to come.  I have had many moments in the past three weeks when I have heard myself say something in this vein: “You know what?  Nothing is happening.  You are sitting here knitting.  There’s nothing going on to be anxious about.”

I managed to convince myself that what I was calling anxiety could just as accurately be termed excitement.  My body might not know the difference but my mind knows and it makes life more manageable.  I told myself that since I am 57 years old, there wasn’t all that much coming up that I hadn’t been through at least 150 times.   The only surprises left were either the fun ones—like if someone farts during a music rest– or the gratifying experience of knowing I could get through a disaster –if I am the one who farts–philosophically and with humor.

The Chorale did its usual fearless job at the church concert on Friday night.  When the Chorale was in its early years and I told people to dress casually and wear Santa hats and elf tights, one or two brave souls came partially costumed.  Friday night nearly everyone had reindeer antlers, angel haloes, elf hats, santa hats, or bobblies of some kind. When we sang Cool Yule, out came the sunglasses and straw fedoras.

The Maccabean tenors (always the tenors) had cigarette lighter apps on their i-phones for “Light the Legend” and socks for “When shepherds washed their socks by night, all seated round the tub, the angel of the Lord came down and they began to scrub.”  The tenors plan these things when I am working with the other parts.  It’s why they like to sit as far from the piano as possible. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/11/screaming-the-legend/

“Carol of the Bells” is the song with the soprano ostinato:  Harkhowthebells,sweetsilverbells, allseemtosay, throwcaresaway, Christmasishere, and so on.  You’d recognize it if you heard it. The other voices join in one by one, building in excitement to the moment the sopranos break out of their pattern and cut loose with “Gaily they ring” on a high G.  Except that what so often comes out is not a glorious ringing of a soprano’s most beloved note, but a series of little bat squeaks.  I don’t just mean in my choir, I mean in many choirs.  It’s a difficult passage.

The problem is that the note is high and exposed and singers lose their nerves at the 59^th second and back away from it.  One rehearsal I told them all to fling their arms in the air when they sang the G.  The sound reverberated through the sanctuary.  It was stunning.  I encouraged them to fling their arms every time we practiced the song.  Some did, some didn’t.  If at least one soprano threw her arms in the air, the note rang like a bell.  I was pretty certain I could count on Susan (in her second career as domestic goddess), to come through in the performance.  After all she once brought down the house prancing around like a chicken while we sang “The Hen’s Duet” in the Charlotte Martin Theater at Seattle Center.  This was chicken feed compared to that.  She didn’t disappoint, the sopranos were marvelous and I have never worried less about that piece.

The night after the church concert we sang at University House where I heard a resident say “Look, it’s a herd of reindeer!”  I told the tenors that if they were going to brandish their socks they ought to go all out and hang them on their antlers whereby Jean, the civic minded tenor, threw her pair at me, civic minded not being the same as civil. So I backed off.

From University House we trooped down to our annual stake-out of the 6:00 time slot at the aqua theatre and the Green Lake luminaria.  This is my favorite December activity, baking Christmas bread running a close second.  The lake is lined with 3,000 tea-lights sunk in sand and housed in plain brown paper lunch bags.  Music groups are scheduled at three locations along the pathway.  On a warm-ish dry night like last Saturday, 10,000 people were expected to walk along at least part of the three-mile lake.

The OK Chorale has sung at the luminarias for 15 years.  For most of those years, it’s rained.  The poor little candles go out and the bags wilt but we carry on.  True Northwesterners come out in their rain gear.  One year it snowed big, fat flakes. Another year we sang on a full moon.

My first experience of the luminarias was magical.  It was a clear, cold night.  This is what people did before TV, I thought.  That was in the nineties.  Now I think it’s what people did before the Internet.  It’s a different kind of magic with the tenors lighting their Smart Phone candles.

Cool Yule

At the Green Lake Luminarias

The Great Bazaar Weekends are over.  In spite of all the work they entail, I look forward to them.  All the stuff that didn’t sell last year comes back like favorite Christmas tree ornaments, along with artists and crafters I only see once a year.

The Dibble House Craft sale is an institution.  I was a shopper for fifteen years, back when Sue Gregor, the Dibble House proprietor, was a mythic figure.  I had heard her name, but I had never seen the person who went with it.  It’s still true that you can’t blink if you want a sighting of Sue because she moves with the speed of a hummingbird.

Some of the guests at Dibble House Bed and Breakfast don’t believe in her actual existence.  When I was lugging my watercolor card display into the house, I met a couple who had been coming for five years and had yet to meet Sue.

“It’s like living out The Elves and the Shoemaker,” the tall distinguished man told me. “We make the arrangements by e-mail, she’s not here when we arrive, but our breakfast tray appears at our door the next morning.”

“Well, she should be along shortly,” I said. “You can meet her then.”

“We’ve heard that before,” they laughed.

Sue has more energy than is decent in a middle-aged woman.  Besides single-handedly running Dibble House with its four rooms, she works as a caterer, a dog-walker, a dog sitter, a house cleaner, and on weekends, as a barista.  In her free time she works out at the gym, and does volunteer work as well as things that she says I can’t write down.

She opens up her home once a year for artists and crafters to invade and set up their creative output.  It’s a neighborhood affair.  Greater Ballard is full of knitters, painters, and jewelry and candy makers.  I have bought sheaves of holly, fleece hats, cards made by children, and elderberry syrup.  I began by first selling my watercolor cards, added my organic raspberry liqueur the next year, and this year I also sold *my book.*

There were some changes this year.  There was new and controversial signage.  (By the way, when did we all start saying signage?  The word sign wasn’t specific enough?) On my way to Dibble House the afternoon of the set-up, I saw Sue’s familiar signs announcing the sale.  I’ve seen them for twenty years.  But at one intersection sat a huge green sign with a swath of blood red running down the middle like a face out of Braveheart.  “Holiday Sale” it announced in bold, black letters.

“Cool,” I thought. “Another sale on the same street.”

But when I pulled up to Dibble House, a second red and green sign was perched on a stepladder, leering at me as I went up the front walk.  Inside the house I detected a bit of tension.  The husband of one of the crafters, laden with knitted children’s sweaters, followed me in.

“Great signage!” he announced.

The sign painter beamed.  She was new, didn’t know the traditions, hadn’t gotten the memo.  A few repressive looks quelled the subject of the sign.

I studied the red and green sign the next morning when I arrived for my shift.  “I suppose someone could just lay the thing down on the ground and put all of us out of our misery,” I thought.  I am more than capable of such an action.

One of the crafters murmured, “I was thinking I would just push it over, but then I remembered that I am too old to be so passive-aggressive.  I don’t do stuff like that anymore.”

We all lived with the sign. Or signage, if you prefer. It wasn’t all that bad.  Just better suited to a garage sale which I have nothing against.  It’s just that we were going for more class.

Bigger than the great signage controversy was the move we all made to Mary O’s house for the second weekend.  The new venue pulled in new people from a different corner of the neighborhood, and demonstrated that we were all vital, vigorous artists and craftspeople, willing to try new things.  We tried having live music.  Specifically, me.  Mary owns a Boston grand piano.  And I have piles of Christmas music.

I said I would play the piano, sing, and not grumble about being background music. This latter was a Must See.  For the most part, I kept to it.  But two crafters who were supposed to be greeting got to chatting heavily eight feet from where I was vamping “Santa Baby’ and fluting “Lo, How a Rose.”  When I crescendoed, they talked louder.  It was too much.

Once when The OK Chorale sang at the Phinney Neighborhood Center Winter Craft sale, a couple sitting in the first row of the audience were conversing when we started to sing.  Rather than move to a quieter area, they yelled over the choir.  I couldn’t concentrate on directing.  I get to seething when this happens.  I’ve been known to walk over to people in the audience and say, “You know we aren’t background music.”

I wanted to whirl around to this couple, and shout, “Why the fuck are you yelling when we’re singing? Do you understand we are live human beings? If you want to talk, go someplace quiet where there isn’t a group that’s been rehearsing for eight weeks just to entertain cretins like you!”

I did not make any such scene at Mary’s house.  I slipped into the kitchen and tattled on the chatterers. (Is that passive-aggressive?) Mary had A Word with them.  They de-crescendoed a bit, or at least they turned away from me.

I foam up over the subject of live performers as background music. It’s pitiable, really, because it’s such a futile fight.  I need to stop now and have a quiet, little break-down.  We’ll talk later.

I met Fletcher when I was gunning the engine of my car preparatory to screeching away to an appointment for which I was already late.  He was perambulating down the street and further detained me by draping himself on my car, singling that he wanted to talk to me.  I rolled down the window.

“Hi,” I said in that bright voice that women of my generation learned to use when we needed to mask any number of conflicting feelings.

“I was wond’ring.  What kind of tree is that?”

“Apple,” I started to roll up the window.

“Now what kind of apples would they be?”

“Spartan.”

“Cause you know, I walk down this street a lot and I’ve noticed.  .  .   say, my name’s Fletcher.”

He stuck out his hand. We shook.  I inched up the window.

“I’m an electrician.  If you ever need anything—”

“Really?  An electrician.” I rolled the window back down.  “Do you have a card?”

“And a plumber.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah I’ve done some plumbing.”

He pulled about 175 cards out of three different pockets and began sorting.

“I just had some new ones made. Darn.  Must have left them.  .  .  here’s one. Wait, I need that phone number I’ve written on it right there.”

“I’ll write your number down and then I need to shove off,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, good.  You write down my number and you call me if you need any plumbing or electrical work. Yeah.”

I was going to throw the number away.  I don’t hire electricians and plumbers off the street.  On the other hand, I am on an austerity budget.  And being one of their kind myself, I am often willing to give an odd duck the benefit of the doubt.

My kitchen faucet had been making death groans for some time and the gasket was disintegrating and leaking black gunk.  I had two electrical outlets that needed new boxes.   Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, knows how to perform both these household chores.  I was to learn later that so does Nina (rhymes with Dinah) and Chris, the unclassifiable.  But they all lost out to Fletcher because he lived close and demonstrably had the time.

He arrived on foot with three bags of tools hanging off him but he didn’t have the one tool he needed nor were the two electrical replacement boxes useable.  I took in the situation along with a couple of deep breaths.  Fletcher had told me the job would take an hour.  I was working on re-writing the bass part of “Cool Yule” so the tenors could sing it.  It needed all my concentration.  I needed him out of my hair.

I took him to Fred Meyer, swung by the bank, and stopped at the liquor store for bottle of Jameson.  When I returned to Fred Meyer, Fletcher was still wandering the aisles.  I drove him to his house where he recovered the one crucial tool he had neglected to bring the first time.  In short, the job that was supposed to take an hour, took four.

When he finally left, the wall around the electrical outlets looked like a kindergartener’s project.  The first time I turned on the water in the kitchen, the faucet handle snapped right off.   I wasn’t going to confess any of this to anyone but the decision was usurped by Fletcher when he knocked at the door two days later during Nina’s voice lesson.

“Hi, how’s it going?  Say I was wond’ring if you found my green work gloves anywhere?”

I pretended to think carefully. “No, sorry.”

“How’s everything working?”

“Fine.  I’m working here, too.”

“Oh, sorry to interrupt.  Look I have a few cards for you if you know anyone who-” out came the 175 cards– “needs a plumber or an electrician.  I’m up here a lot and –”

“OK, I’ve got your number and I’ll call you. Bye.”

Nina looked amused.  “What was that about?” she asked when I shut the door.

Once the whole story came out, I meekly accepted Nina’s offer to replace the kitchen faucet.  No, gratefully accepted.  She came the next Saturday afternoon with a most impressive collection of tools, a baseball cap on her head, and no butt crack.

“I’ve replaced at least five sink fixtures in my life but I’m having a small crisis of confidence at the moment.  I don’t mind screwing up my own house.”  She looked at me.   “On the other hand, you let an itinerant hack into your walls.”

Nina replaced my kitchen faucet, not without incident, but I need another blog entry to do it justice.  Suffice it to say that she has a friend who knows how to sweat copper.  And Nina knew that sweating is what one does with copper.  I was no end of impressed with the venous quality of her knowledge.  I need to spend more time around scientists.

By the way, Fletcher called last week to see how things were going—a good business practice—and to tell me that he also fixes cars.

Nina at work

Nina in full confidence

Yesterday morning the church choir sang an old-fashioned romantic piece of music that I first learned as a beginning voice student.  It’s called “Thanks Be to God” by Stanley Dickson and it has the word “bedight” in it.  That’s enough to mark it as a piece for Aunt Maud to sing for The Special Music at a Sunday evening church service.  It schmaltzes along in a waltz meter, full of romantic harmonies as only Noble Cain could do, and we loved singing it!   The song begins:

                                                                                                                   Thanks be to God for roses rare.

My childhood church would have considered that line too secular for Sunday morning.  Or Sunday evening.  Or Wednesday night pray service.  The second verse continues:

Thanks be to God for lovely night,

    For mystic fields with stars bedight,

       For hours of dream and deep delight.

Now this would have been downright pagan, especially the usage of “dream” in the singular.

Even though I was raised fundamentalist Protestant, I can get religiously verklempt.  And I did when this little church choir got up there, a dozen strong, and sang their UCC hearts out in four-part harmony which I had transposed down and re-written so there was no screeching:

For all the joy that now is mine, thanks be to God.

This is not the time for me to engage in hermeneutics and I don’t want to ruin the moment by bloviating about my notion of the meaning of “God.”  (N.B.-See other blog entries for that.  They’re under “Spirituality.”)   By the time we finished singing, I felt full and complete.   I have too often in my life under-estimated the amount of joy– and hope and love, for that matter– just laying around for the taking.

Thanksgiving Day, the American holiday least susceptible to the influence of popular culture, is this week.  Then comes a series of events like –as my longest known friend, Mary-Ellis says—storms from Alaska. (  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/11/doin-our-stuff/.) One after another, here they come: Dibble House Holiday Sale, Home for the Holidays Sale, the OK Chorale’s concert and Green Lake luminaria concert, an annual dinner at the home of my painting buddy, Susan, my *Book Launch* at the Secret Garden Book Shop, singing at yet another Christmas concert, a Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Christmas afternoon, and finally the Christmas Eve service.  I must have been out of my mind to agree to any of this, except maybe Susan’s dinner and of course, the *Book Launch.*

So it’s good that Thanksgiving is going to be quiet.  This year my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, is in residence.  We decided that we would share the dinner and dispense with all parts we didn’t care about.  Pursuant to this decision, I stated frankly that I didn’t care about the turkey; I just wanted lots of stuffing and gravy.

So Gwen is doing a chicken because it’s easier and to get the gravy. She’s making the stuffing because I have never been good at it.  She’s also responsible for the potatoes but I don’t think she knows it yet.  Baked is fine, I don’t care about mashed especially with the outrageous trend to mash garlic into them.  Garlic has its place but not in the mashed potatoes, thank you very much.

I am baking a pumpkin pie because only recently, for the first time in my 57 years, have I tasted a good pumpkin pie.  Now that I know how good they can be, I am game to try one; game in the sense of it being diverting, not as in a slaughtered Thanksgiving turkey.  I am also doing cranberry sauce and my mother’s celery almondine which tastes better than it sounds like it would.

We will share a meal, watch a movie at The Gwen, drink some Irish whiskey and spend the other 21 hours of the day in our respective caves.  Whatever your plans for Thursday, whether it’s a holiday or a regular work day, be safe and well; and don’t underestimate the love, joy, and hope that is there for the taking.