It’s been pouring rain here in Seattle for about a week.  Not the usual mild Seattle showers and mist, but a New York City kind of rain when you actually use an umbrella which a true Seattleite never does.  People think it rains all the time in Seattle- fine, you go ahead and think that if it means you won’t move here because our traffic is a much bigger problem than our weather- but it really doesn’t.  Except this week.

Last Thursday I came home at noon, wet and cold, to a garbled, semi-hysterical phone message from my friend Joan, the one with the theological chops.  This was alarming.  Joan never gets hysterical.  She has the BVM in her pocket, after all.  I caught the name Ileana—that’s her 20-something daughter—and the words “up a pole” and “24 hours.”

I called Joan at work where I elicited the crucial information I had not caught in the message.  Chica.  That’s Joan’s cat.  OK, Chica had been up a telephone pole for 24 hours and Ileana had been trying to call me.  Everyone in Joan’s office who had overheard the hysteria had assumed as I did, that Ileana was up a pole.

“I like that,” said Ileana.  “All my mother’s friends think it’s plausible that I would be sitting on top of a telephone pole for 24 hours in a rainstorm.”

Chica, the cat, was indeed perched atop a telephone pole and looked mad in every sense of the word.  Unfortunately the scene was familiar to me: the ladder, ten feet short, hitched up to the telephone pole. A broom with food tied to one end even though humans are the only animals who eat when they’re anxious.

My cat Winston scrambled up a telephone pole one hot 4^th of July; initially frightened half way up by a dog, the rest of the way by fireworks.  He sat there, puffed up to the size of a large raccoon.  A bunch of us stood at the base of the pole and talked baby-talk to him.  He attempted to descend head first, lost his grip and swung around til he was upright and hugging the pole.  He came lumbering down like Winnie-the -Pooh as though it had been his plan all along which I seriously doubt.  I love Winston, but he is a cat of little brain.  Something primal must have kicked in.

Unfortunately, the only thing primal going on with Chica after 24 hours was the fear.  Different weather, different cat, but still out of reach and crying fit to break your heart.

Ileana called City Light, the fire department, the vet, the emergency vet, animal control, pest control, and tree cutting services.  No one would officially help, of course, but one always hopes to catch someone who is maybe already in the neighborhood, maybe has cats and a sympathetic heart, maybe has a Sagittarian sun.  Nothing.

I called my neighbor, David, head of the Rat Mafia in our neighborhood.  David is good in an emergency.  He and his wife Grace, have removed more dead rats from my property and taken more live ones to humane executions than you need to know about.  Rats on my property are always an emergency.

“You know Joan, who house-sat for you that Christmas?  Her cat has been stuck on top a telephone pole for the last 24 hours being pelted with rain.  They say they need an extension ladder.  Do you think you could help?”

Five minutes later I heard David’s enormous pickup roar and saw it pull off the parking strip.  Ten minutes later he was back and my phone was ringing.

“Your neighbor, David,” Ileana said, “He’s our hero.”

“Chica’s down?”

“Yeah, he just climbed up the ladder and grabbed her.”

“He likes beer,” I said.  “And except for the beer, I think he’s gluten free.”

Chica spent the next 48 hours inside the box springs of Joan’s bed.  She was receiving guests when I was over there on Saturday but she’s got an opaque look in her eyes, like she’s closed the door to her mind—such as it is.

Cats no longer teach kittens to descend backwards because their mothers didn’t teach them.   As kittens, when they find themselves involved in long cylindrical phenomena like human legs, they dig in their needle-sharp little claws and hold on.  Put like that and when I think of the ways we human beings often behave, maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to talk about cats of little brain.

It’s Christmas time in Bartell Drugs, the only non-grocery store I will set foot in after Thanksgiving.  I know this because all the Russell Stover chocolates have been re-packaged in green and red colors and the motion sensor Santas accost me when I walk by them.

In addition, someone is whining a Christmas song through one of her nostrils.  If you read my blog, you know that I think whining –as an exercise—can help improve over-all tone; also I believe singing is a birthright.  I think everyone should sing.  But we all shouldn’t be making CDs and Bartells shouldn’t be playing them. Or failing that, at least not so loud.

Christmas brings out the wretched and the sublime when it comes to music.  In classical music I am particularly partial to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah.  Two songs I look forward to singing every year are Norman Della Joio’s “The Christ Child’s Lullaby,” and Brahms’ “Geistliches Wiegenleid.”

I like all the carols in the church hymnbook, minus the inclusive language, thank you very much, and most of the traditional secular songs like White Christmas and Winter Wonderland.  I have never gotten into the (apparently) funny but (obviously) tacky ones about Grandmas and reindeers but it’s fine with me if they are available for people who live in Ballard.

I have been a song collector for as long as I can remember.  I know hundreds of songs.  Maybe thousands, I’m not that great with numbers. Of all those songs, there are actually only three songs in the world that I actively despise, and two of them rear their heads at Christmas.

“The Christmas Song” sounds like a string of banalities a bunch of drunken guys strung together in a 1940’s Las Vegas lounge while they were in a sentimental phase of inebriation.  Seriously, how does a turkey and some mistletoe help to make a season bright?

They thought of the brilliant last line just before they passed out:  “Although it’s been said many times, many ways, merry Christmas to you.” That ranks right up there with “Well, it’s that time of year again.”  The English language would be richer if those two lackluster lines were never repeated again.  They need to make it into the congressional record because Congress is where language goes to die.

Anyway these same mothers’ children with their eyes aglow met again the next night in the same lounge.  This time they went into a stupid –as opposed to sentimental–drunk and started looking at each others’ red noses.  Then one of them said, “Reindeer. That’s a funny word.”  And through some soggy trail of associations they came up with the whole Rudolph concept.  And then unfortunately, they remembered it the next morning.

I don’t understand why these songs are so popular but then I don’t understand the attractions of Disneyland either.   On the other hand, I like “Santa Baby,” and it’s not exactly packed with redeeming sentiments.  But at least there’s no contrived sentimentality.

I loved “Angels We Have Heard on High” when I was a kid.  I loved the cascading Glorias.  Like so many things in my life, even the cascading Glorias improved when I got older.  (In case you are new to my blog, I love being middle-aged; even though my friend Nina, who has known me for 30 years and understands why I am the way I am, tells me that if I am middle-aged, I am currently planning to live to 112)  There’s a song called “Ding Dong Merrily on High” that has five cascading Glorias and it starts even higher than “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

As a kid, I loved “The First Noel,” too.  I loved the rising and dipping “Noels.”  I was rapturous when I heard the sopranos rise while the rest of the voices dipped.  Now as a (middle-aged) adult, I am orgasmic when I hear the tenors do their stealth climb inside the other parts.

I’ve always liked the reliably pagan “Deck the Hall.” Once a student and I found all the “Deck the Halls” in my collections—about sixteen of them in different books.  We did a tally of how many were called “Deck the Hall” and how many “Deck the Halls.”  More often than not, it’s the singular.  It’s an English carol.  They have those big houses, each with its Great Hall.  We Americans have apartment buildings with lots of halls, I guess, so there’s the confusion.  I find this quite interesting and I don’t drink.  Actually tallying up the titles was a lighthearted thing to do with a student who hadn’t practiced that week and was afraid I would be mad at him.

I do love it that Christmas-time gets people singing even if they occasionally whine my hated songs through one nostril. But you can’t go wrong with the Noels, Glorias and Fa la las, drunk or sober.



I started the OK Chorale as a University of Washington Experimental College class in 1992.  I remember the year because one rehearsal fell on Election night.  My best friend had instructions to call and let the phone ring twice when Bill Clinton went over the top of the Electoral College vote.

Back then, the class was called Part Singing.  Not the catchiest of titles.  Not the most elucidating either.

“Does it mean people sing only part of the time?”

“Does everyone sing in the same register?”

“Hey, can you teach me to yodel?”

When I changed the name to The OK Chorale five years later, attendance doubled.  The same people began coming back quarter after quarter.  I had a community choir, not a class.

I started the Chorale in part because I wanted to hear voices singing in harmony and I wanted to improve my alto and learn to sing tenor and bass.  I also wanted to sing different kinds of music than you generally hear with choirs.  There are plenty of church choirs with their limited repertoire, and plenty of big auditioned choirs that sing magnificent choral works and wring your life out of you the weeks of the performances.  But where could you go to sing “April is in my Mistress Face” and “Zombie Jamboree” all in the same quarter?  I set out to create a choir that I wanted to be part of.

We are a motley, fun-loving bunch.  We get together after a day’s work in the middle of the week. People come in tired and pre-occupied with their concerns.  They want to relax and enjoy themselves. They don’t want to be confronted with a tyrannical prima donna manquée and I don’t want to be one.

A lot of singers come to their first rehearsal with some species of this story to tell me:  “The nuns told me to mouth the words and I’ve been afraid to let anyone hear me ever since.”

OR “My father told me I sounded like a chicken so I stopped singing.”

OR “My sister wouldn’t sing with me because she said I was flat.”

Anyone who signs up for my class even after they were told to mouth the words because they sing like a flat chicken is someone who has the joy of singing pushing to come out.  I understand that it takes courage to let our voices sing.

Then there are the people who have had a lot of choir experience.  They approach me with lists of things they think I am not aware of.  They asked if I am going add dynamics.  They point out that the sopranos are holding their half notes for three counts.  I take their lists and say thank you.  Sometimes I give the most persistent “supervisors” a copy of the Seattle Times choral round-up which lists forty or so choirs in the area and say they might enjoy one of these groups more.

I do what I do by design, not because I am hopelessly incompetent.

I don’t have a sound or finished product in my head that I expect The Chorale to fulfill.  I want us to play together with what we’ve got.  I like to try different things and see what works.  I arrange a lot of the music we sing and the Chorale is my test group.  I match the music to them not the other way around.  It’s a joint creative effort.  That’s what keeps it alive.

I let the spotlight whores romp around and the shyer types stand in the background and just sing.  One tenor who sang with us for quite a while finally told me he wanted to be part of a choir, not a “troupe.”  I still miss him but I get it.  We are a troupe.  Continuing the medieval metaphor, we are like a conference of court jesters. We don’t have matching choir outfits and our sound is not sculpted.  There are plenty of other places to go for that.

The Chorale has given me more than I ever imagined it would back when I conceived of a Part Singing class.   My appreciation is inestimable:

They laugh at my jokes.   They laugh at my jokes!

They have been patient while I learned to direct.  I don’t think many of them realized this but, I learned on them.

They understood I was afflicted with the need to make everyone happy so they put up with my learning to arbitrate amongst the chorus of suggestions and advice: “I know there’s high Latin, low Latin, finger and toe Latin but when you get to excelsis, just sing ‘eggshell’.”

After all these years, I am still not very good at setting the tempo.  They smile, put up and we get on.

They give me harmony.  I get to hear voices singing in harmony.  I wasn’t raised with this.

If you live in the Seattle area and would like to hear the OK Chorale, we are singing a little concert on Friday, Dec 10, 7:30 PM at Broadview Community United Church of Christ.  The next evening, Sat, Dec 11, we sing at the Green Lake luminarias 5:30 to 6:00 at the aquatheater.  More details are on the web site: www.okchoraleseattle.com.

Maybe you’ll join us one quarter. As I say in my course description: Rehearsals are fun and no one gets hurt.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, says she admires the way I speak out without worrying about what others might think of me.  Actually, I’m not sure she said admire.  She might have just said she noticed.  As for me not worrying about what others might think of me, that’s entirely in the mind of the on-looker.

But I wish to say at once that I am not proud of what I am about to relate.  I could have handled it better.  But it wouldn’t have made as good a story.

Last Sunday, I was fresh off a successful batch of springerli cookies and ready to tackle the next holiday project.  I usually send my cousins in England a pound of See’s chocolates for Christmas, but it’s gotten to where the price of postage is twice the price of the candy, pardon me, the sweets.   I don’t want to go to Northgate or downtown to a See’s Candies.  We need one here in Greenwood.  Actually, no, we don’t.

In any case, I wanted to buy local –in every sense of the word–this year.  There was blue sky and feeble sunshine so I decided to walk to the QFC that used to be Art’s, and that some of us still refer to as Art’s, on Holman Road, to see what they were asking for a small box of Dilettante truffles.

I was in the seasonal aisle trying to sort through the Dilettante, Theo and Seattle Chocolate offerings when a woman and man strolled through and stopped about 5 yards away from me.  The woman proceeded to lean on her shopping cart and start a conversation on her Bluetooth at the volume, but not with the quality, that reaches the nosebleed section from the stage of the opera house.

“We’re here in Seattle visiting my brother,” she bellowed.  “We’re just in the QFC, picking up an anti-diarrheal for my sister-in-law.        .   . some kind of fungus, they think.   .  .  .  . suppository, yeah.  And my nephew needs $500 to pay his rent this month so we’re trying to help out with that.”

I turned around and caught the woman’s eye.  “Yes?” she inquired.

“Do you think you could not talk so loud?” I asked.

She stared at me, “Are you kidding?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

She advanced toward me, “Are you so unhappy with your life?”

I haven’t felt baited with such an offensive—in all its definitions– maneuver since my mother died three years ago.  My non-engagement skills are rusty.

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t concentrate.  I’m over here trying to pay attention to my own crap and I don’t want to have to listen to yours.”

Her husband crouched in the aisle pretending to look at a can of peanuts.  He looked up at his wife and supportively grunted, “Oh my god” in a small voice.

She came closer to me.  “Are you serious?

“Look,” I said, “No one wants to hear your private information being broadcast all over QFC.”

“Private?  Rent money?  How is that private?”

She left out the anti-diarrheal.  I was in over my head, so to speak.  I know from experience that no one wins an atavistic argument like this one.   I remembered that my mother was gone.  My skills seeped back.  I held up my hands in surrender.

“Truce!” I laughed.

“You’re lucky I’m in a good mood.   She lumbered past me.  “Your pants are stupid.”  Her husband followed her silently.

A fellow shopper with a package of Ghirardelli chocolate dangling from her hand, about to drop on the floor, watched the couple’s retreating backs.

“Nice,” she remarked.  Ambiguously, I thought.

I was nervous walking home.  This woman seemed capable of following me in her car for a mile and half just to heckle me.  But I made it home un-heckled and called Gwen to present her with a reason to not cultivate my habit of speaking my mind.

Gwen laughed, “The best part of that story is that she is visiting Seattle.  That means she’s leaving.  And I admire your bravery.”

It’s not about being brave.  I like to participate.  But it gets me into useless exchanges.  I get that from my mother.

It finally happened:  After ten years, my springerli is a success.  I was missing an ingredient, the same one apparently that my mother missed for, I don’t know, 45 years. There’s a deep psychological truth in there but I don’t know that I have the energy to go looking for it.  Maybe it will surface later.

Of all the cookies my mother baked at Christmas , the springerli were the most peculiar and maybe for that reason, one of my favorites.  Which is odd because they were barely edible; on the other hand, my whole childhood was hard to swallow so that and the springerli were all of a piece.  I liked them because I liked the licorice flavor of anise and it was fun to nibble the hard little squares, or to pelt them at my brother.  Either way.

A month before Christmas, the pale, unbaked rectangles with embedded flower impressions appeared on cookie sheets in the cold little room off the kitchen.  After a couple of days, my mother baked them into hard little building materials.  She stored them in Tupperware with a slice of apple to try to soften them up.  She put a few on the plates of cookies she gave away and on the ones she served guests in December.  In February, the remaining springerli were either thrown out or used for war games.

About ten years ago, I bought a springerli rolling pin.  In case you don’t know, these are the rolling pins with designs carved into the wood.  A kitchen utensil to be used for one purpose, once a year: to make little cookies that no one wants to eat either because they fracture the teeth or because a surprising number of people in the world don’t like the taste of black licorice.

I don’t know what possessed me because the frigging rolling pins cost about $25.  I might have hoped it would help me uncover some deep psychological truth about my childhood for less than I was paying for analysis.  When I bought the pin, I told myself that I had to use it every year until I die, to make it worth the expense.  So for ten years I turned out hard little building materials, thinking this was the way life was.

But a few years back my first painting teacher, Molly Hashimoto, (http://www.mollyhashimoto.com/)  brought some springerli to our last class before Christmas.  She apologized for them, saying she didn’t think anyone really liked springerli these days.  I bit into one and it was chewy.

“Oh my God, Molly, how do you get them to be chewy?”   We went through her process step by step but I found no clues.

However it was a revelation to me: I began trying to get my springerli to turn out chewy, like Molly’s:  I varied the flour, the cookie thickness, the baking time, the beating time, the number of eggs.   I looked at recipes on the Internet but they all used the same ingredients I was using.  My mother had three different recipes in her recipe box and I tried them all, then I tried kludging together one recipe from bits of all three.  My springerli could still black an eye at close range.

For a while, I quit trying.  Then this week, I hauled out the $25 rolling pin, which doesn’t seem all that expensive in today’s economy, and found my tear-stained recipe card.  I went on-line one more time to search for a clue to what I was doing wrong.  The first recipe I pulled up said to use two teaspoons baking powder.  I had never used baking powder.  I don’t believe I had ever seen it on a recipe for Springerli.  It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that I had never noticed. When I added 2 teaspoons baking powder to my mother’s recipe, I got chewy springerli.  That was the homely ingredient that I had overlooked all along.

By my count, there are at least three psychological insights in this blog, not necessarily deep.  Can you spot them all?  And then tell me your favorite Christmas cookie.

I love yard sales but when the weather turns wet, some of us yard sailors go through a dry period that is refreshed only by the appearance of holiday bazaars in the middle of November.  When my British friends read about the U.S. and our stupid, interminable election brouhahas, or when they hear a quote from politician celebrities of little brains and even less empathy, I want to trot out the bazaars as evidence that some of us over here are still identifiably human and not part of a psycho cartoon family.

When I was a girl holiday bazaars were the provenance of older women in the church who made jelly and knitted things like toilet paper roll covers.  You can still get the jelly but the quality of items to be found at holiday bazaars nowadays far exceeds the Victorian beauties who sit on the toilet tank stuffed with the spare roll of TP.

I invited Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about everything, to take in a few bazaars with me.  She went down the list and nixed the ones she considered too commercial.

“I like the ones where the turquoise and white hand crocheted tea cozies are next to the fresh made brownies next to the bird houses made out of old license plates and half-rotted fences,” she said.

I, too, prefer the sales where there’s a St. Agnes Guild running the show, where the church ladies wear aprons and seem unflappable in their energy and good cheer. Every effort has been made to make you feel so welcome, you think you have just walked into Christmas dinner.  Unlike your own family, you don’t know ahead of time who the irritating people are, but at a bazaar you can walk away, so really it’s the best of all worlds.

The ones I walk away from are the vendors who go in for bludgeoning people with their sales pitch, who follow my eyes and try to sell me anything I look at.  If I touch something, to feel if the texture is as revolting as it looks, they are already whipping out their receipt book.

And then there are the chatty ones: “Hello how are you today these pendants were made from leaf fronds gathered under a full moon in the Palouse last summer let me show you on this county map the exact square mile of our camp-site and then I have the funniest story to tell you about my sister-in-law.”

A woman selling a scarf/shawl/evening wrap with a dozen ways to drape and tie, was still demonstrating its versatility as I waved $35 in front of her.

“You know, I am already buying this.  You can stop selling it to me.”

Ok, I am glad to have gotten all that out of my system.  Thank you for reading this far.

Here’s what I love about the bazaars, besides the St Agnes Guild ladies, and the way the word bazaar sounds like both brassiere and bizarre and allows for sophomoric humor when I’m in the mood for that, which I’m not just now because I can’t wait to get to the fudge:

1. Fudge –made on the stove-top not killed in the micro-wave.  I recommend getting to the bazaars first thing because the fudge goes quickly.

2. The Christmas cut-out cookies in garish food colors.  I would have starved for a week to have had purple food coloring when I was a kid.

3. Jam, honey, salsa, spiced nuts, jars of legumes and seasonings, ready to toss in a pot for soup; dip mixes.  I don’t buy the dip mixes because I think they are over-priced, but I usually spend some time sampling them on pretzel sticks while I muse about how I might make them myself.

4. The stuff the kids make: bags of marshmallows labeled “Snowman poop;” candy cane reindeer with pipe cleaner antlers and tiny googly eyes, handmade Christmas cards encrusted with Elmer’s glue and every other word mis-spelled.  I especially love the ones where the first three letters of “Merry” take up a third of the card and “Christmas” gets squashed into an inch on the right and “Happy New Year” runs down the edge, turns over and goes around the corner.  It’s like the finger technique of some of my piano students.

5. Knitted afghans, baby booties, mittens, caps, scarves; quilts, rice or lavender bags to heat or freeze, unusual cards made from plant rubbings or origami; planters, games, and furniture crafted in someone’s woodshop; enough hand crafted jewelry to decorate every Christmas tree in the city.

And now here’s the real point of this blog:  The Dibble House Holiday Craft Sale, hosted by Sue Gregor, who has more energy than a room full of pre-schoolers.  7301 Dibble Ave NW.  (Seattle, WA) Sat and Sun Nov 27-28 AND Dec 4-5, 10 AM-4 PM.

I am selling my watercolor cards.  My homemade framboise will be nesting with my friend Anne’s handmade chocolate truffles.  My friend, Mary, has made holiday aprons I can’t wait to see.  And you must see the hilariously irreverent Christmas cards created by the mysterious Hilaire Squelette.

On Sunday, Dec 5, walk into another world at the Sakya Monastery (108 NW 83^rd –just up the street from Fred Meyer if you appreciate the ironic and incongruent) annual sale of Himalayan handicrafts, 11-4.

A good reason to go to the Laurelhurst Holiday Art Sale (4554 NE 41st St) Fri, Dec 3, 1-8:30 PM and Sat, Dec 4 10- 3 PM is to meet Molly Hashimoto, my first painting teacher, and see her paintings, prints and Pomegranate holiday cards.

When you Christmas shop this year, think about buying handmade.  You don’t have to get me anything: just read my blog and save me some fudge.

How are we all doing?  When it gets like this, I can’t decide if I feel like watching Dr. Zhivago or Body Heat. In any case, I’ve had a quiet 20 hours without phone, TV or internet connection.  Since I got rid of TV cable a month ago–by choice—I rather expected to still be without it when this weather hit.  Since the internet has been restored to our neighborhood, I have learned I needn’t have worried that my inbox would fill to an unmanageable degree.

But being without phone service spooked me just a bit.  I am the last person on earth to not have a cell phone, but there it is: I don’t have a cell phone.  Last night, I put on my bibs and tucker and went across the street to my neighbors (not Gwen who knows something about just about everything, but David and Grace, the rat mafia people; see blog: Rodent Incident Report I) to borrow their cell phone and to whine about the cable being down.   A fierce wind whipped razor sharp bits of snow in my face.  This in itself was material to whine about.

If you don’t live, and have never lived, in Seattle, you probably have no idea what I am going on about.  You see, it snowed a few inches yesterday and they haven’t yet dug out Seattle’s three snow plows, rusting in the back of some city storage barn.  I don’t think they have even found the barn yet.

We are nuts here when it comes to snow.  At the sign of the first few flakes, people are already leaving work early and schools are canceled for the week.  In our defense, I will say that we have a lot of hills, hills; and driving on hills is not the same as driving on level streets.  Plus we none of us have gotten over the year of the snow when school children were still being delivered home by city buses at midnight of the day that no one took the weather report seriously.  And that was at least a decade ago.

The cats are getting on my last nerve.  They need to go outside because they don’t like their litter boxes any more than I do.  But they don’t want to walk in snow to get to the organic vegetable garden which is their grand litter box of choice.  It is completely outrageous that there would be snow outside the back door as well as the front.  Maybe they were mistaken: they need me to open the front door again.

It’s bad enough that they pester me during my waking hours.  But since they slept every second they weren’t bothering me yesterday, they were wide awake and prowling last night when I wanted to sleep.  When I finally fell asleep, I woke up because the bed felt oddly cold.  At three o’clock in the morning, I found a cat claw size hole in my hot water bottle, (Yes, yes, very funny: she doesn’t have a cell phone but she does have a HWB) and a big damp patch on the sliver of egg carton foam that the cats allow me to align myself on at night.

By the time I heated up a rice bag in the microwave and smoothed a towel over the damp spot, I was both thoroughly awake and cold.  Then the cats disappeared –probably because I was so vocal about the hot water bottle—and took their 110 degree bodies to the antipodes of the house so it took hours—or so it seemed –to warm up and get drowsy again.  When I got up I was greeted by their insistent protest against the starvation diet I impose on them.

As soon as I could manage it, I bundled up and went for a walk in the cemetery behind my house where no one ever complains.  Mine were the first footsteps, everyone was happy to see me, and no one wanted anything more than my presence.  When I walk in the snow, I like to sing a song by Randall Thompson set to a text by Elinor Wylie, one of the first songs I learned to sing when I started voice lessons as a teenager:

Let us walk in the white snow

In a soundless space

With footsteps quiet and slow

At a tranquil pace

Under veils of white lace.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:

Wherever we go

Silence will fall like dews

On white silence below.

We shall walk in the snow.

When I was growing up, my mother was a force majeure at the dinner table and nowhere was that more evident than at Thanksgiving.  She created a huge meal for the immediate family, supplemented by people pulled in from the highways and byways, members of the church, and occasionally, some of my father’s cousins.  She did the turkey-stuffing-mashed potatoes- gravy as well as green salad, fruit salad, and an assortment of vegetables–way more than anyone would want given that they had been taken out of their freezer bags, boiled to death and served without butter.  Since this was the 60’s, there was always a relish tray of canned black olives and sweet pickles, a roll of canned cranberry sauce, and a dish of butter.  We could have buttered the bland vegetables but we didn’t know that would help them.  Although she always allowed guests to bring pies, she had always baked several of her own: pumpkin, mincemeat, and apple.

Every important meal in our house featured crescent-shaped refrigerator rolls, which you will hear more about shortly; and celery almondine which I dis-liked as a child, except for the almonds, but which I came to love as an adult.   She sautéd the onions and almonds and kept them warm in an electric frying pan on the floor of her bedroom until she was ready to add the celery and finish the dish.

I always had to set the table.

“Elena, would you please set the table?  I’m in here trying to finish this dinner and the rolls are ruined and it’s the least you could do since you are younger than me and you kids could help out once in a while my goodness I do everything for you and you have it so easy and people will be coming in half an hour.”

The refrigerator rolls– which were never ruined– had been rising in a cool room since the day before and they smelled yeasty and sweet.  They were fabulous, always my favorite part of any meal.  My mother baked them in the hour before the meal began and they were warm when I bit into them.

More than once, they were served in the middle of a meal. The serving dishes had made a few go rounds, my mother stationed in the martyr’s chair closest to the kitchen, barely touching her bottom to the seat as she supervised first the serving, then the actual progress of food moving from plates to mouths.   She watched people’s mouths chewing her food and assessed their expressions.

“How is everything?”

“Oh, just wonderful, Mary!”

“Elena, what can I pass you?”

“Why are you being so polite to me all of a sudden?”

“Why is no one eating the beans?  Chuck, have some beans.”

“Mary, will you sit down.  I don’t have room on my plate.

The moment came when having exhausted her immediate supervisory duties, my mother scraped back her chair with a huge gasp before bellowing, “OH NO, I FORGOT THE ROLLS!” and ran to the kitchen, knocking over a bowl of something in the process.  Forks paused in mid-air.  Conversation stopped while we all listened (in mortification, speaking for myself) to her yank open the oven door, scream when she burned herself, run water, bump into the open silverware drawer,  and carry on a loud monologue of whatever she thought might fill the inexplicable –to her– lull in the conversation in the dining room.  She emerged a few minutes later, still talking loudly, with a cloth covered basket which she shoved at the guest seated to the right of the martyr’s chair.

“Here are the rolls, they aren’t the best but they’re still pretty good if I do say so, I’ve been working on them for two days, I left the burnt ones in the kitchen, Chuck and the kids can eat them later.”

My mother died three years ago today at the age of 89.  I still occasionally make her celery almondine.  And I think of her when I’m the one in the martyr’s chair.

Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold.

Do you remember singing that song in grade school or in Girls Scouts?  Pigtailed little girls holding hands in a circle, ensconced in a swirl of harmonies.  I, for one, didn’t know what the hell the song was about.  I still don’t have a lot of long-time friends but now I understand why they are golden.

I had a tumultuous growing-up and I haven’t exchanged Christmas cards for forty years with anyone in the world.  My longest-known friend is a roommate from college.  I am convinced the only reason we remained friends over the years is because we didn’t live in the same city and though the contact was regular, it was also long distance.  Very few people were equipped to survive my early adulthood at close range.

At Whitman College Mary-Ellis had the energy and joie de vivre of a 5th grader at camp.  She was a magic elixir.  Her laugh that came from deep inside her was gurgling and infectious.  She could do a spot-on imitation of the Cowardly Lion singing “If I were King of the Forest,” and on rare occasions, would jump on a table and do Elvis.

We sang together with our guitars.  Mary-Ellis taught me the kinds of songs I would never have learned at Black Lake Bible Camp.  Songs like “I’m a ding dong daddy from Dumas and you oughta see me do my stuff.”   I, for one, had no images for “ding-dong” and I’m certain neither of us had opinions about what his “stuff” was but we loved the song.

In our twenties, we saw a lot of each other.  We made a trip to Victoria together and explored Seattle where I live.  I spent months at a time with her when she worked at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco.  We explored the city by bus, two twenty-somethings in the 1970’s, not as characters from Armistead Maupin, but more like pig-tailed girl scouts.

I helped Mary-Ellis move from a boarding house in Pacific Heights to an apartment in the Marina district.  In those days when you left a residence you had to physically take your rented telephone back to the phone company.  At large in the city with an unattached telephone, I pretended to have an argument with my mother (an easy gig for me) over the phone while waiting at the bus stop.  Once on the bus, Mary –Ellis held the phone out the window to pedestrians, “It’s for you!”  Good clean fun.

Except for a cousin in Wisconsin, I no longer have any family connections.  When I did have family, we were like hillbillies defending our property with shotguns, receiving each other with suspicion, not welcome.  So I don’t take for granted the continuity of an old warm connection.

Mary-Ellis spent last weekend with me.  It was the biggest chunk of time we had spent together since I visited her in the Bay area in 1997.  I was so excited to have my old friend staying with me that in the morning, I wanted to wake her up and play with her like she was a Christmas present.  We smoked a few Mrs. Madrigals this weekend, but since Mary-Ellis has a position in society and I work with children, beyond that I will not elaborate.  It was good clean fun.

The first week after we all “fall back” is always hard for me even though I love the morning light because I get up early.  Just wait until we “spring forward.”  If I am still writing this blog (and I hope to be), you will never hear such ferocious whining as I will do in March when my early morning light gets—by an act of Congress—snatched from me for an extra month of darkness.  But beyond the light in the morning, I have trouble sleeping and am tired most of the week.

I once had a student, a boy of 5, whose father carried him into my house under protest the week we “fell back.”

He screamed, “But I don’t come for my lesson at night!”

I understand this so well.  It bothered me, too.  He was a “daylight student.”

I used to think that tampering with the clocks for no good reason – i.e. an act of Congress– twice a year would confuse the cats.  But they are like Arizona.  They don’t observe daylight and standard time changes.  They just whine at me earlier or later to serve them.  But cats are Zen about everything except the vacuum cleaner and other cats.

I used to run a spook house every year in October.  I have the perfect set-up for it.  There are two structures on my property: there’s the house I live in, built in 1936, and a little homesteader cabin built in 1880.

The cabin in the back was just asking to be made into a spook house.  When the previous owners painted the two structures preparatory to selling, they sprayed Prussian green paint right over the leaded glass windows in the old cabin.  That’s enough provocation to be haunted by earlier residents, many of whom are no doubt buried right next door in Crown Hill cemetery.  But what I discovered the first year we did the spook house was that mostly all you need is the dark.

We didn’t have any special effects.  We had mechanisms like the “ankle grabbers.”  These were usually kids who had gone through the spook house once and wanted to be behind the scenes.  I let them hide in corners until someone came along, then they could reach out and grab an ankle.  We made ten year old tough boys cry and earned the respect of some of the dads by means this simple.  We had the Dark.

Because I am fascinated with the unconscious, I think a lot about the dark, the subterranean depths.  We are afraid of what we can’t see because we think that to see something means we know what it is.  Yet we believe in all kinds of things we can’t see: the wind, love, evil, goodness.

We think that if we can’t see something, it isn’t there.  As long as we aren’t actively aware of jealous feelings, as an example, we feel quite righteous about saying we haven’t a jealous bone in our body.  But if there’s not a jealous bone is someone’s body, that person is dead.  Feeling jealousy is part of what it is to be human.  With other people, it’s their tenderness that’s in the dark.

The light can be just as obfuscating as the dark.  I get impatient with new age thinking that champions the light and with people who are eager to reach what they call enlightenment.  Superimposing eastern ideas over a western upbringing usually results in thinking as simplistically as those Christians who think there is an actual heaven located somewhere above the clouds.  Once someone “gets” to heaven or to enlightenment, it’s not like he or she is actually going to “be” there to enjoy it.  You’re gone at that point.  There’s no ego left. To my friends who want only light in their lives, I say good luck to you. When all you’ve got is light, you’re going to explode.  Being in the light is not like lying in the warmth of the sun at the beach.

The dark defines the light and the light the dark.  As long as we’re breathing we need both.  I am letting this thought help me through these next few weeks.