Blue Christmases

A Dirge

                 Rough wind, that moanest loud

                    Grief too sad for song;

                 Wild wind, when sullen cloud

                    Knells all the night long;

                 Sad storm, whose tears are vain,

                 Bare woods, whose branches strain,

                 Deep caves and dreary main,—

                    Wail, for the world’s wrong!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Monday morning, we awoke to headlines in the local paper that a 16-year-old boy had died in a car crash the night before, less than a mile from where we were putting our children to bed, and it turned out that he and his family lived more or less literally in my mother's back yard. I didn't know the young man or his family, but it was still heart-rending. The boy had just gotten his license recently. Another young man in the car with him is in the hospital, in critical condition last I heard. 

I can only imagine the one family's grief, the other's heart-sick worry. "Wail, for the world's wrong!" And so close to Christmas, I fear the season will come around with grief for years, if not for ever.

Another poem that perhaps speaks their heart is W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues":

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Less dramatically, but even closer to our hearts, Lauren's father called to tell us that her mother is in the hospital after what has turned out to be a non-heart-attack cardiac event. Due to further issues that arose while she was in the hospital, she will remain there until Thursday or Friday. She's expected to be fine, but of course it's worrisome, and although we'll be visiting her in the hospital tomorrow, it just won't be the same as waking up to Christmas morning with her or spending Christmas even all together as a family. It was strange to get to their house and not see her usual warm welcome. Splitting Christmas between my in-laws' house and the hospital is not what we expected.

Still, knowing the kind of tragedy that others are dealing with this Christmas,we feel fortunate that it doesn't appear to be anything more serious than it is.

Under Pressure: Thank You

We've made the trip to Ohio, with the first stop being my Mom's place. It's nice to see her and she's a works very hard to be a good host, but for those of us who are super-connected, it's a tough place to be. She has no internet--not even dial-up--and our cell phone reception is spotty. She also doesn't have a DVD player, and the first night we were here, the DirecTV was out.

I'm getting coffee and internet while Lauren and I are out Christmas shopping--Mom is watching the girls and basically shooed us out to go get our shopping done.

But I'm feeling the pressure to write a blog entry and post it while I can, but I can't decide what to say. So I guess I'll just say a big thank you--thank you to my mother for watching our girls, thank you to the weather for finally clearing up after two days of rain, thank you to the other drivers on the road Saturday for not wrecking into us, thank you to my wife for letting me sit here and stew about writing this (hey, I let her stay in Toys 'R' Us too, so fair is fair).

Ready for break?

The Winter Break is nearly upon us. It's already got Lauren in its grasp; I'm just waiting for one last boy to leave the barrack and then I will surrender myself to vacation as well. Many people were asking me yesterday, in the midst of the storm before the calm, if I was "ready" for vacation.

And the answer is yes and no.

I mean, sure, I am absolutely ready to take a break from the hectic pace of life that we have while school is in session, to spend time with family, to do some reading, all that stuff.

But at the same time, as of Friday afternoon when I was answering these questions, I had nothing packed, even though we were planning to leave Saturday morning. Well, late morning. Maybe around lunchtime. Or early afternoon. Would you believe late afternoon?

We'll be there before Christmas--promise!

Because really, there is no "surrendering" to break--I've got to go out and grab this vacation by its horns and wrestle it to the ground like a recalcitrant reindeer.

Because it wasn't just packing that isn't done: oh no. We've also got a number of presents that we haven't got yet. Some we haven't even totally settled on. And the time we have to figure that out is...?

And the fridge smells, and I don't know what leftovers were overlooked and left to stink up the joint, but we should probably find them and expel them.

And then, just about as soon as we get back from our travels, we're having major work done on our basement, which means we need to do some serious work moving stuff out of the basement or at least moving it to the center of the basement. And we have to pull up a bunch of the boards from our deck.

So yeah: totally ready for break... and not even close to ready for break. At this rate, it could break us.

Catching Fire (and a few other film bits)

Earlier this month, I indicated that probably the thing I wanted most for Christmas is time. Our wonderful nanny gave us exactly that last night, as her Christmas present to us was to take our girls for the evening so that Lauren and I could go out.

Date night found us at the local movie theater watching Catching Fire. Back in 2010, after our first daughter was born, we found ourselves driving a lot--in part to show off the first grandchild on both sides--and one of the things we did a lot of was listen to audiobooks together, including the entire Hunger Games series, which kept us so rapt that we would find ourselves sitting out in the driveway after we had arrived somewhere, waiting to finish the chapter.

So how was the film adaptation? Especially given my recent comments denigrating the ability of film as a medium to do book adaptations (vs. the television series format)?

It was really, really good. Really.

I should say that it's been a solid three years or more since I  read this book, which in some ways is probably a good distance from which to view a film version, because my comparison between the two is mediated by the fraying strands of memory. And I haven't seen The Hunger Games since it was on the big screen in... whenever that was. But we both thought the film version of Catching Fire really nailed it.

It worked as an adaptation, hitting all the main points of the book. But it also worked as a film (which in this case is ultimately more important). The writers resisted any urges they may have had to over-write the script, instead managing a perfectly understated script that allowed the actors to act, and with all the talent in this film, they could certainly be relied upon to carry the film, to bring the characters to life and tell the story without any more words than were necessary.

Also, from the previews, another YA dystopian book-into-film series looks like it could be solid, as we saw the preview for Divergent. I've still only read the first two books in that series, but the film looked really good (as much as we can draw any conclusions from a preview!). I, Frankenstein, on the other hand, looked pretty terrible. I could be wrong, and I thought I saw some potential in there, but just based on the preview, it will not be a date-night movie. It will not be seen at the drive-in. And we probably won't rent it. If we hear good things, we might bring ourselves around to watching it on Netflix some day in the far-off future. No promises, though. Pompeii? If you were to say to me "You know nothing, John Sherck," I would have to agree--I have no idea if this movie is going to be rotten or righteous, but I'll bet I would like it better if it was based on the Robert Harris novel Pompeii, which I'm pretty sure it's not.

You down with OCD?

A colleague and I were talking about how she can tell when our students have used the vacuum, because they don't wind the cord up the same way, and this got us talking about things around the house that have to be done a certain way.

In her house, it's towels and shirts. Towels have to be folded--and shelved--a very particular way (which her young adult son still doesn't seem to get), and shirt are always hung up so that they are facing the same way.

I suppose it's similar in our house: when we got married, Lauren let me know that there were certain laundry-related tasks that I was doing wrong--folding towels and folding shirts. I think I used to fold towels over once, then fold the other way, and then the other way (so it was basically folded in eighths). Now I am to fold it over once, then fold it into thirds, and I do. And, all right, it does look nicer. I don't even remember the old way of folding shirts, though I'm also pretty sure that Lauren is not entirely satisfied with my version of her way of folding shirts. It's unlikely to lead to divorce, so we both let it slide.

I remember growing up, my father was very particular about the way the lawn was to be mowed: diagonally across the main body of the front yard, alternating which diagonal from week to week.

For me, I'm particular about where my folded laundry gets put away, because I have a system so that I can find what I want in the near-pitch-black of our bedroom in the morning. But the time that I really turn OCD--although I've gotten better--is in the weight room.

It annoys me when I see that the dumbbells have not been racked in order from smallest to largest. I twitch a little when I see someone actually putting them out of order. Likewise, every power rack, every bench rack, has a particular peg on which particular weights go. They're even labeled. And it can't take that much more effort to put things back on the right one as it does to put them on the wrong one, but people still do it. Probably just to drive me nuts.

Ideally, if a fellow denizen of the weight room wanted to keep me happy, he or she would not only put the weights where they belong, but this theoretical happiness-provider would also make sure the racks are balanced: if there are four 45-lb plates, they'd better be two and two, not three and one. For that matter, if somehow there are only three plates for a given size... go get another one!

Unfortunately, not everyone shares my sense of weight room feng shui, so I've had to learn how to cope. Then again, a little rage in the weight room just might be a good thing....

One of those nights (and days)

I'm a parent of two children (almost 4 years old and 20 months), and if you, too, are a parent, you can probably guess what kind of night I'm talking about. I'm sure I cursed myself by writing about sleep the other day, because now I'm running into problems with their sleep everywhere I turn.

Yesterday, I was coming home late from work and the plan was to load the kiddos in the car, turn right back around, and take them to our school's holiday dinner. So, for the first time in weeks, my older daughter takes a nap, and for the first time this week, the younger was napping a bit later in the day. So our wonderful nanny rousted them unhappily from their sleeping so that I could pack crying children into the car--and my oldest promptly stopped crying and got back to her nap for another 15 minutes.

Then last night, our sleeping arrangements with the girls got all jumbled up, as did their sleeping patterns. Our younger daughter has been either sleeping all night or waking once in the middle of the night and going back to sleep. Last night, she was waking up every couple hours and crying--she seemed to be saying that her feet and/or knees hurt, and rubbing one or the other did soothe her (eventually) each time. I checked for a fever and found none. There's a good chance that the actual problem had something to do with the fact that she only ate a little dinner, all of it cookies.

At one point, I got her back to sleep and then I couldn't. There was an owl hooting somewhere outside. I had Tim Minchin's "White Wine in the Sun" going through my head. I had other things on my mind. Maybe an hour later, I got back to sleep for another hour before it was time to get up.

Our older daughter was also restless last night, waking up a couple times and eventually getting some children's Advil/Tylenol/whatever from her mom. It was just one of those nights. 

People who made the season bright

Probably because the experience of the holidays can be so vivid, they bring with them memories, which as we get older and older tend more and more to be of people who are no longer with us. I think particularly of my father and my grandmother ("Grandma Mom") during the holidays. But there are also people outside my family who are part of my holiday-season memories, and who were important throughout the year as well.

Mr. Behm was a bit older than my father, and I always remember him as silver-haired, an elder statesman of our church. He was a Deacon and a Trustee at different times, and probably one of the most respected men in our church, at least in my mind. He was a leader and a central member of the church choir, anchoring the bass section. Outside of church he taught the sex ed class for the boys when we were in late elementary school (maybe it’s fairer to say that he taught the puberty class), and I think he did our typing class then too, but I may have just edited out some other teacher in his favor. At that same age, too, he taught what basically amounted to the "say no to drugs" unit, which included the actual lungs of a pig, to show us how smoking affects our lungs (yes, it must have been a smoked ham).

He was my seventh grade science teacher, and of all the things we learned in seventh grade science, I remember being struck by his assertion to our class that he didn’t see any contradiction between science and evolution, though he must have at least implied that a literalist interpretation of the Bible was, therefore, untenable. The thing was, I don't ever remember anyone else saying that they were  incompatible, or even that we had a very clear picture of what evolution involved. Still, to have someone in my church make that statement, I’m sure that helped make science seem trustworthy, and perhaps it inoculated me against later exposure to creationism, so I wouldn't reject the scientific worldview out of hand. Who knows what small moments in a life can make a difference?

 And then he was also the announcer for the football games when I was in high school, and I always remembered the way that he proudly sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” his voice carrying over the loudspeakers. The proud patriotism that he and my father and other men of their generation showed also certainly had an influence on me, so that later cynicism with my country--its people, its government--could never quite take over.

Mrs. Behm was, in her own way, no less impressive or influential. She was a cheerful, upbeat woman. She was my choir director in our church choir, I’m pretty sure she taught Sunday School at some point when I was growing up—though I don’t have any specific memories there—and during my earliest experiences in 4-H, she was the leader of our 4-H program.

And this time of year, though, the memory that's so clear is of the annual church Christmas party, when she would play the piano and he would lead the singing of carols that heralded the arrival of Santa Claus at the party. I can still remember the look and feel of the song sheets that we reused year after year, the position of the folding chairs and tables in the church basement, the food laid out. And then we would circle the chairs up and sing Christmas carols. It was there I learned to love "Silver Bells" but most clearly etched in memory was the way he sang “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the performance of which really centered around "five golden rings." Sometimes he would draw it out--“five golden ring-ing-ing-ing-ings!”--or draw it out to absurd lengths. And sometimeshe would cut right off—he knew how to get a laugh from us--at least us kids, I don't know whether the adults got as big of a kick out of it as we did. And then “Jingle Bells” would bring in Santa Claus, and Mr. Behm would leave the stage.

Both of them were a big part of my annual experience of the lead-up to Christmas, but they were also very influential adults in my life, who cared about me and surely influenced how I grew up and who I became.