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‘Always on Christmas Night …’

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The closing lines of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” My favorite part of one of my favorite poems. Merry Christmas, wherever you are on this Christmas night.

“… Always on Christmas night there was music.
An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang
‘Cherry Ripe,’ and another uncle sang ‘Drake’s Drum.’
It was very warm in the little house.
Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip
wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death,
and then another in which she said her heart
was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody
laughed again; and then I went to bed.

“Looking out my bedroom window, out into
the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow,
I could see the lights in the windows
of all the other houses on our hill and hear
the music rising from them up the long, steadily
falling night. I turned the gas down, I got
into bed. I said some words to the close and
holy darkness, and then I slept.”

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Holiday Lights

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Somewhere out there on the flatland streets, the luminaria squads are at work. I heard them earlier when I was up on the roof–kids shouting as they went up and down the blocks of nearby streets, distributing paper bags, poured sand into them, and put a candle into each one to light after it gets dark (that would be about now).

I was up on the roof to install my homemade Xmas Star, which one former neighbor last year correctly said “looks suspiciously like a cross.” (Why a cross is suspicious, I don’t know.) Anyway, it’s up there now, strapped onto the chimney with some hanger wire. After dark, the moon rose, creating the opportunity for a juxtaposition of heavenly and earthly lights. I don’t casually pass up such opportunities.

Above, the moon takes top billing to the underexposed star lights. Below, they’re a little more evenly matched. And yes, the frame for my star is an old bicycle wheel.

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Holiday Light

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This holiday that’s coming? It’s been sneaking up on us. The main event in our lives day to day–work, and it seems to start before dawn and continue until bedtime. Even then, it’s not finished, but just suspended until the bell rings at the other end of a short sleep.

So today, I pulled out Christmas lights to start hanging them. I have been partial to those strings that have the strands that hang down from the gutters–icicle lights, I guess they’re called. Putting them up requires a trip up to the roof, after I untangle everything I thought I put away so carefully last year. Then I have to scoot and crawl along the edge of the eaves, hooking plastic clips onto the gutters and flashing and stringing the lights through clips.

Today’s light-hanging extravaganza took place a little while after a heavy but brief rain shower. Looking east after I climbed onto the roof, the sunlight was refracted in a curtain of rain blowing up into the hills. We didn’t get a rainbow, exactly–just the righthand leg of one bending up into the clouds, with a faint double. I grabbed my camera, snapped a few frames, and the lightshow faded in just a few minutes. Then I went back and hung the lights. They were on tonight when the next heavy burst of rain moved in.

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After the Shooting’s Over, How to Protect the Kids

We had a short-lived debate in our public-radio newsroom this afternoon on whether it’s wise to advise parents to “turn off the TV” to shield their children from unfiltered news of today’s school slaughter–at least until mom and dad can figure out what they’re going to say and sit down with the kids to discuss the terrible event.

It wouldn’t have been a debate except for me expressing the apparently way-out view that it’s inappropriate to try to shelter the kids from the news. First, everyone the kids know is already talking about what happened today, and they’re very savvy about finding and sharing information. Of course, it is a good idea to try to talk to them and be attentive to the emotions they express (or may find it hard to express) today and in the weeks and months to come.

But I also wonder what it is we think we’re protecting them from. Is it the horrible act of violence we’ve witnessed today?

My generation grew up with unfiltered views of one nation-altering assassination after another, not to mention intimate and graphic views of the Vietnam War. Occasionally, our parents would talk to us about what we were seeing. What spoke most eloquently to me, though, was seeing how they reacted to these tragedies as they unfolded. I remember a close family friend, a newspaper editor in Chicago, weeping the evening Bobby Kennedy died. That said more to me about the nature and the import of the event than any carefully framed message ever could have.

It also meant something that my parents and some others in the neighborhood each tried in smaller or larger ways to change what they saw happening around them. That wasn’t part of a carefully crafted lesson for us kids, either. They felt something was wrong–with the war, for instance, or the fact that families in a nearby town were living in converted boxcars–and decided to march or volunteer. Again, that told us a lot more about the world we lived in (and about them) than anything they could have said. Thinking about it now, maybe I wish more of what they were doing had rubbed off on me.

And that gets to the heart of what I find most disturbing about today. Perhaps this horror will shake us out of our collective complacency and acceptance of this particular kind of crime. Maybe there will be a “One Million Parent March” and we’ll take some effective steps to limit the sale of weapons to the deranged and enraged. But how many of us really expect that?

I say let the kids see the TV news, and watch it with them.

The news we mustn’t let them hear is that the adults they depend on let today happen and don’t really have any plan to prevent the next tragedy.

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Portrait: Mom, 1964

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My sister Ann reminded me, by way of a Facebook post, that yesterday, the 26th, was Mom’s birthday. She would have been 83. That’s her in a shot my dad took in May 1964, when she was 34. She’s posing in our Park Forest living room, and I think the occasion was that Dad was trying out a camera he had bought recently, a Minolta twin-lens reflex model. There’s a series of other shots taken the same time; my brother Chris scanned them after Dad died earlier this years.

So much of this scene is evocative and immediate: The painting, by a family friend, was a fixture in every place we lived (and now hangs in Ann’s house). I know Mom was sitting on a slat bench that also made it from house to house through our infrequent relocations (it’s at Ann’s or Chris’s now). The vase of pussy willows over Mom’s right shoulder–I don’t know where that came from. But I can see the living room, with a black linoleum floor, half-paneled in redwood, a set of bookshelves Dad had installed, the closet where his stereo system resided, the Danish modern chairs and love seat and round coffee table, the doorway into the kitchen, the hallway back to our bedrooms, the picture window looking out onto the lawn, which sloped down to the street, bordered on the far side by a field and woods.

And part of this scene feels odd and distant, almost false: There’s a tension in Mom’s pose, for one thing. She had a way of putting on a face sometimes in a way that I don’t see in photos taken much earlier or much later in her life. I might be seeing something that’s not really there, but I know what she and my dad had been through at this point: raising five kids, for one thing, and the death of one of them, and other troubles that I feel are barely contained beneath this serene-looking scene.

And also I know what’s to come for her. She’s about to go into psychoanalysis, get a driver’s license, join Operation Head Start, move out to the woods into a new home, become a foster parent to untold numbers of stray dogs and cats, and help organize a campaign to save the forest from an ambitious local developer. She’s going to use her considerable intellect and talents as a newspaper reporter, go back to school, and work in several other challenging jobs. She’s also about to confront deep and lingering depression, the reality of a husband and brother sinking deep into alcoholism, several angry adolescent boys and a daughter who was pushed into the background by all of the above.

It feels like all that is hiding inside the frame here, somewhere behind that composed smile.

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After the Storm

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The view looking north from the Highway 36 bridge between Highland and Sea Bright, New Jersey. That’s the Shrewsbury River in the foreground, which opens into Raritan Bay and then New York Harbor. That’s Sandy Hook National Seashore in the middle distance, which is still closed because of damage from Hurricane Sandy. The Atlantic is rolling in from the right. Beyond that is a Hapag-Lloyd container ship, then the south shore of Brooklyn and the skyline of Manhattan in the distance. All quiet and benign.

I got the barest idea of how much the storm has affected life in this part of the world. Looking south from the bridge, I could see groups of big houses in Sea Bright that were almost all dark as dusk descended. There was a highway sign advising of a 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew in the town, much of which was washed off the map. Utility crews rolled past, still working on getting lights on three weeks after the storm. I met a couple on the bridge and asked if they’d been around when the storm arrived. Yes, but they lived high enough up that it hadn’t affected them. It was a different story for the other town nearby, Highland. Most of the business district was wrecked. I didn’t go take a look.

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Morning Rituals

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We got up early this morning in Brooklyn Heights to play a pursue a favorite neighborhood pastime: moving the car from one temporarily illegal parking spot (it’s a street-sweeping day) to a spot that will be temporarily illegal tomorrow (or maybe not, since it’s a holiday). We found a gorgeous new parking space on the north/east end of the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The view across the East River where it opens out into New York Harbor was dazzling. As I started to climb out of the car, I saw a procession of people walking up the promenade. Scores of them, all in business attire. My surmise: They were all headed to the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters, just down the street. The church is a major landowner in the neighborhood where the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges touch down on the east side of the river, with several large buildings bearing the legend “Watchtower”–the name of the church’s publication.

We stayed and took in the view, watched the parade to The Watchtower, then walked through the stream of parents and kids and commuters to get our first coffee of the morning.

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