My ex-stepmother calls, brimming with holiday glee. She loves Christmas and makes a flannel nightgown for me every year. She”s my absolute favorite ex-stepmother, but I already have holiday burnout. Christmas is three weeks away… then there’s the New Year… and we just had Thanksgiving!
My advice on acting cheery about the holidays: pick a perky mood before you improvise on a holiday phone call.
I’m feeling merry! “I’m singing “Jingle Bell Rock.” You know: “Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock.”
I’m feeling hopeful! My exercise regimen? Getting the mail.
I’m feeling sentimental! Have you seen The Bishop’s Wife? Well, Cary Grant is an angel.
I’m feeling nostalgic! Yes, Cary Grant is literally an angel. He’s in love with the bishop’s wife. Kind of like Wings of Desire.
I’m feeling incredulous! You’ve never seen Wings of Desire? No, no, Cary Grant is not in Wings of Desire. It’s a Wim Wenders movie.
I’m feeling smart! Wim Wenders is a German director. Yes, it’s “Vim.” Not Jim
I’m feeling ecstatic! I ate your Christmas cookies! Thank you so much.
I’m feeling virtuous! Yes, I did send you that Christmas cactus! It’s minimal maintenance.
I’m feeling Christmasy! An advent calendar? I’ve never had one. Thank you so much.
I’m feeling envious! You’re going to Hawaii for Christmas? So much fun.
I’m feeling overwhelmed! No, that’s too kind. I can’t go. I have plans, unfortunately.
I’m feeling exhausted! Buying gifts… forgetting to get gift receipts… losing the other receipt.. talking the manager into giving me gift receipts without the receipt…
I’m feeling annoyed! Oh, nobody keeps the gifts. No, they dash to the mall with eggnog hangovers to buy something they’ll decide later they don’t like. It’s consumer madness.
I’m feeling so happy for you! Talk to you soon, darling ex-stepmother.
I would never share the dark side of Christmas with that sweet, hopeful, cheerful, Christmas-loving ex-step. It would shatter her world.
I was looking for reading socks, which are essentially slippers, at B&N when a former employee approached and asked, “May I help you?”
We both giggled. I am startled to say that, after a certain age, I have become a “character.” I famously have been known to mistake bookstore customers for bookstore employees. “Could you help me find such-and-such a book?” They are always delighted to assist me.
This cracks up the former employee. “Are you trying to put people out of work?”
“Oh, well, I couldn’t find anyone on the floor,” I say vaguely.
The Christmas cards are on the display tables, but I’m not thinking about the holidays. And then… “What are you doing for the holidays?” he asked.
I blanched. I panicked. Oh no! The holidays? Already? “Oh, we’re having a turkey,” I said. That, I find, covers Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving is about food, and Christmas is also about food. Actually, Christmas is also about books: we go to the store and each pick out a book to read on the holiday.
Most people travel, if only to Nebraska or some adjoining state. Not us. We stay home. And I found myself saying inappropriately, “Well, we don’t travel because everybody’s dead.” Then I gripped his arm. “Sorry, I should not have said that.”
And so I told him about the poinsettia greenhouse. That is my most cherished Thanksgiving memory. After our turkey dinner, the hostess drove us to a vast greenhouse on the outskirts of town. (She knew the proprietor.) It was filled with what looked to me like acres of pink, red, and white poinsettias. It was more beautiful than some historic gardens I have visited.
As for Christmas, well… That’s still far away. But I may try to find Zoom book groups to take my mind off that perfectionist holiday where you must prove yourself by making your own wreath (I flunked the adult ed class), assembling a ginger bread house, trimming the tree, and learning the lyrics to the Christmas carols you used to know.
In a tiny midwestern town we strolled to the community center to play ping pong after Christmas lunch. The women were cleaning up, but I followed my dad out the door. The brick building was shabby, the kind of place that does become a community center in dead downtowns. There was also a roller rink. In that town there was nothing to do except go to the community center or the roller rink. That was my impression. So we played ping pong lackadaisically.
For Dad, this little town was the world. He knew everyone at the café, the community center, and the church. Yet he was gloomy. “You’re lucky if you have one friend in the world.”
Yet it was more comfortable for a farm boy with a high school education, to live in a Faulknerian hamlet than in my larger, more sophisticated hometown, where he alienated co-workers, made inappropriate comments, harassed waitresses, and reduced us to tears in public.
And this Christmas he outdid himself. He described his 15 years with his first family, i.e., Mom and me, as “the bad old days.”
That was his take-away.
Hey, Dad, remember me? I’m your daughter, K, who just gate-crashed the Community Center with you and the guys. He did not consider my presence. He thought such cruel comments were funny. He never took it too seriously that he was my dad anyway. At this point, I couldn’t take it too seriously, either.
Still, I was determined to have a real conversation with him before the day was done. By my calculations, we hadn’t had a serious conversation that didn’t end in tears since the holidays when I was fifteen.
For complicated reasons, I moved in with Dad when he left Mom, or rather I moved in with the poet who let him sleep on the couch and me in the basement. The poet’s wife spent all day casting horoscopes. “She should clean her house,” Dad said. As a feminist, I thought he should clean her house if it mattered.
And then on Thanksgiving Dad and I were on our own. No idea what we ate for our holiday dinner– maybe pancakes? – but we did take a walk together. I remember crunching through dead leaves, crossing the bridge, and looking at the river. Like any uninhibited teen, I babbled about school, what my witty best friend said, and the satire she and I were co-writing. “It’s so witty!” That riled him up a bit: he resented it when anyone did anything even faintly “artistic.” But except for that glimpse behind the mask, it was a relatively ordinary father-daughter conversation.
Finally we moved into a tiny apartment, and Dad worked nights and was seldom around. The apartment soon became a salon for my friends and me. We co-wrote our satire, baked cookies, glittered tampons to hang on trees (feminist art), and watched old movies on TV like Auntie Mame and Georgy Girl. We got into trouble only once, when an incense burner clattered down the stairs and broke – but without burning the house down, thank God. But, yes, I was punished for breaking a “beautiful thing.” I did not bother to explain that the incense burner was mass-produced in a factory, because no one ever said Dad was a connoisseur.
But back to the community center: Me to Dad: “Do you really believe it was ‘the bad old days’ when you lived with our family?”
He looked at me. Apparently I was invisible before. “It’s time to be heading back.” He got out of there fast.
I hit the ping pong ball against the wall a couple of times and wiped away tears before walking back to the house with my husband, who said that Dad was “an asshole who didn’t deserve you or your mom.”
This “bad old days” comment was a turning point. It was the pattern for all conversations with Dad. Yes, he was my dad. But we made other plans for the holidays.
I have been reading very short books in this heat: anything over 300 pages seems too demanding. A little Barbara Pym here, a little Margery Allingham there. And I reread Cranford, which I cannot revisit too often.
And then I perused two more short books, one a novel, the other a nonfiction book. They do not fall short of excellence, but they made me think, which I had planned to avoid till the temperature drops. I do recommend both of these books, with the following caveat: the former may depress you, the latter will scare the hell out of you.
The English novelist Stanley Middleton’s Holiday won the Booker Prize in 1974. I am enthusiastic about most of Middleton’s novels: oddly, this is the one I like least. The dispassionate protagonist, Edwin Fisher, a keen observer and an intellectual education professor, has recently left his wife, Meg, and is on holiday alone. Out of nostalgia, he visits the seaside town where he vacationed as a child with his family.
Not much happens in this slight, if beautifully-written, novel about a man benumbed. We first meet Fisher in a church. He is the last person one expects to find there, but again it is from nostalgia. He notes humorously that the congregation “were almost all middle-aged or elderly, and the majority women, in flowered hats, bonnets of convoluted ribbon and pale summer coats.” And though he doesn’t necessarily set out to meet women, his warmest encounters are with women. He enjoys chatting to three charming sisters on the beach, though it is clear they have no sexual interest in Fisher. Then he begins going to the pub with two working-class couples he meets at the hotel: on a walk with the two wives, he feels them up. One wondered if there would be a menage a trois.
His father-in-law repeatedly visits him in the seaside town to persuade him to go back to Meg. Fisher seems indifferent about the future. He doesn’t particularly want to return; he and Meg have had some hellish, violent fights. His father-in-law is adamant about saving the marriage, but admits that Meg is ambivalent about the situation. Perhaps it is Fisher’s encounters with the kind women on holiday that make him consider reuniting with Meg.
Whatever the future, the marriage or the solitary life, we gather it may be bleak. Fisher does not seem capable of deep emotions. As for Meg, we don’t know her. We wish that Fisher had some strong emotions, but he seems to prefer living on the surface. This could be a fascinating book, and yet I found it irritating. So is this because I dislike Fisher? I seldom judge a book because I dislike a character, but in this case it’s probably true. The novel is perfect in its way, but should Middleton have won the Booker for Holiday? I prefer Valley of Decision, a stunning novel about musical careers and a marriage on the rocks.
Jeff Goodell, an award-winning environmental writer, describes the human recklessness destroying our beleaguered planet in his smart new book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Goodell knows how to shape a story: this dramatic nonfiction narrative about climate change is laced with statistics about the impact of rising temperatures, interviews with survivors of killer heat waves, a report of the death of a young couple and their baby from hyperthermia on a hike on a hot day, the impact of the tragic heat waves in Phoenix, the Pacific Northwest, and Delhi, and the limits of technology.
People assume that turning on the air conditioner will solve the problem of rising temperatures on Earth. Ironically, air conditioning warms up the air outdoors. And not everyone can afford air conditioning, though people now die without it in the intense heat. And then some have AC but can’t afford to pay the electricity bill. Even for the middle class and the rich, air conditioning depends on a fragile grid of power lines: when the grid is overloaded and crashes. there is no air conditioning.
Goodell emphasizes the cause of the rising temperatures: the human predilection for burning fossil fuels.
The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm up by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get.
Every politician should read this lucid, well-organized book.
It’s a three-day weekend. Yes, another freezing-cold holiday to spend with loved ones.
There are, in my opinion, too many winter holidays. First there’s Christmas: OK, we enjoy that moderately. By New Year’s Eve, everybody is restless. Despite our grown-up status, there is regressive whining: “What can we do now?”
And then the three-day weekends start. First it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. And then it’s Presidents’ Day weekend. Forget the people we’re honoring: long weekends aren’t always good for your mental health. Yes, experts say you get more family time, but whether that’s a good thing or not depends on the family, doesn’t it?
A friend and I made a pact that if things got too crazy we’d meet at the coffeehouse. We went, we saw, we conquered. The line was almost out the door. She sniveled, “I was literally moving a plastic truck across a ’60s board game when Josh threw a tantrum about the rules.”
Oh, lord. Don’t get me started. Her husband Josh is forty, not four. In his defense, he was arguing with their four-year-old son. It’s not much of a defense.
As for me, I’d watched an episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and then I’d cleaned the kitchen. And it turned out I was allergic to the strong cleanser, so my hands were red and bleeding. I decided not to go to the gym since my hands were open wounds. I could have placated my husband by pretending to go to the gym, but I’m neither four nor forty, so I told the truth: “I’m going to the coffeehouse.”
Tidying up with Marie Kondo
Did Milton-Bradley know that Game of the States, a cute board game where you buy and sell “products” and haul them in plastic trucks from state to state, would cause such a ruckus? Did Marie Kondo know she was dooming me to eczema and Band-Aids?
I can’t take another holiday. Tomorrow I’m staying in bed.
