Resolutions?

Personally, I’m glad to see 2008 on its way out. Beyond the politics, Hurricane Ike, the financial meltdown and all war-related issues, we were diminished by the loss of two close associates and friends, Drew MacWilliam and Marjorie Arsht. Over the past several years, I’d spent more time with them than with anyone else I know, except my husband, so their loss created a considerable void at the center of my life.

In fact, looking forward to 2009, I find myself a little intimidated. We have no idea of the new challenges we will encounter and I feel a little panicky, just thinking about them.

So, instead, I try to focus on small things—like finding a way to make sweat pants attractive. Or getting my business and personal files in order. Maybe this will be the year those things happen.

And exercise! That’s a verb, not a noun—a distinction I keep fudging.

I hope to make more time for creative work. Short stories. Try to complete 10, maybe, that I’m not ashamed to show people. Is that too small a goal?

Of course, in a serious vein, I pray for my husband’s continued good health, and my own, and that of all our family and close associates and friends, including those who blog. And I hope to attain for myself an outlook that embraces optimism and serenity, and allows me to discover both of these in the midst of whatever else may be going on.

That latter goal is why, right now--on New Year’s Eve--I’m trying to look past the artificial marks of the calendar. Instead, I’m thinking of today, as just that—today, a sunlit Wednesday. Tomorrow is tomorrow, Thursday. And after that comes Friday and the weekend. (I love weekends.) Night falls, day blooms once more, winter offers its mild interludes, prophesying spring, and so on. These are the measures the earth provides, as it moves around the sun. Like the world, itself, they carry no lines or numbers or man-made demarcations.

See? Already, I’m feeling better.

Some road shots

Driving back from Round Top this afternoon, I decided to go have a look at the new cell phone tower. We know folks on Kneipp Road who can probably see the thing from their front porch. I hope I'm wrong. It's just a cell tower, but still...

The following are two scenes that caught my eye as I drove--the first because it is what it is, a chimney and fireplace that have survived when the house around them has disappeared.






The second one interested me because of the geometric shapes.

Friends

The bovines here seem emblematic of a kind of friendship, looking out as one upon the moving world beyond the fence. Or perhaps they are mother and daughter.

In any event, following a visit from an old dear friend this weekend, I’ve been thinking about friendship, the kind we have in a world where families are fragmented and people dispersed thousands of miles from where they were born. This circumstance has been more the rule than the exception for my generation, and those born even a decade or so before me.

One result, of course, is that it has become difficult to stay involved in the lives of friends, particularly the friends of one’s youth.

Maybe it was inevitable that the internet would spring up to collapse those distances with an ease not dreamed of by my immigrant grandmother, who did her connecting with pen and paper. She wrote letters every day, to siblings and cousins in France and Germany, to best friends from school even though one of them lived in Hong Kong, and the other had become a nun in Tennessee. She wrote letters to her four daughters, wherever they were, and the circulation of these letters provides for her descendants a window into the world they inhabited.

We today use email, and we blog. We find new friends, blogging, and the connection does a great deal to fill the holes left by the distances we have moved across the planet in our diaspora of prosperity and commerce.

So when the chance arrives to spend time with a childhood friend, it’s both rare and extraordinarily special.

My friend Donna lived two streets away from me in high school. We played basketball, tennis, and other sports together; we carpooled; together in my car, we snuck into Rice University to visit her boyfriend; I was there the morning after her dad—brandishing his shotgun—ran off a carload of boys intent on wrapping her trees with toilet paper. He’d grown tired of removing this emblem of adolescent popularity. Later, I lent her the first SLR she’d used, and she quickly surpassed me in her photographic skill. We married very different men, and for a long time we lived quite different lives less than two blocks apart on the eastern side of the neighborhood where we grew up. She moved away, finally.

Then, when LH and I began to live parttime in Santa Fe, there she was, with her second husband, Walt. After half a lifetime, two marriages and one divorce each, we reconnected. We see each other now in bursts, when grandchildren bring her and Walt to Texas. And at those times, we find ourselves moving forward in conversations deepened by references both of us—and few others—understand. There is considerable comfort to this, and to the way we can see the other shining through the changes time has wrought upon our exteriors. She remains each incarnation of the self she has been over time, and I can only hope I am the same for her.

Howdy and Co.

Some old dear friends, passing through, stayed with us last night and gave our guest area, otherwise known as my office, a particularly good test. That's because they brought their dog, a Labradoodle named Howdy, and he spent the night up there with them, navigating our narrow steep staircase with aplomb.

Howdy is a Labrador crossed with a poodle, the offspring of which is crossed again with a poodle. The resulting pup bears a designation involving letters and numbers, but the reality is the most adorable big dog you'll ever want to see.

Really big, folks.

He has a Labrador-sized head, with curly fur on it, which makes a truly impressive spectacle. And he is fast. He had many opportunities to indulge his speed, as we have a considerable assortment of lethargic rabbits and squirrels who have grown lazy under the disinterested gaze of Bronte.

When he wasn't out chasing these creatures, he made sure to keep an eagle eye out for any interlopers who might dare to trespass. We thought he looked just like a boy in a dog suit. Click on the images to see why.

Turkey for hire

Companies I work with were generous this Christmas. Please note the amazing flower arrangement behind the less colorful, but surely more tasty, smoked turkey, above.

Problem is, LH is on a lowest sodium possible diet, so smoked turkey is OUT.

I'm trying to find a worthy home for this delicious hickory smoked item from New Braunfels Smokehouse. I tried a church in Brenham, no answer. Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Round Top suggested AMEN in LaGrange, but they're closed until Monday.

Anyone got any ideas???

Christmas Books

This year, for the second time, we decided to give only books to each other for the holiday. That's right. Books from Brazos Bookstore in Houston. Brazos is one of the last remaining independent bookstores, and at the holiday season, it is absolutely stuffed with wonderfulness. (I say that even though I have a small ownership interest in the store which might prejudice me somewhat.)

I thought some people might be interested in what books we actually gave and received.

Hale, for example, has been immersed all morning in National Geographic: The Photographs. I was in the store hoping for inspiration when the cover of this little book jumped out at me. It's the famous closeup photograph of the Afghan Girl, the one with the striking green eyes that was everywhere in the media a few years ago. On the back cover, there's a similarly posed photograph of the same person, a mother now, and seeing the change is quite moving.

We each gave the other Philip Roth's new book, Indignation. (Obviously, we don't coordinate.) I got Toni Morrison's A Mercy, along with the theory of light and matter, by Andrew Porter (an award-winning collection of short stories), Kathy Huber's book on Texas Flower Gardens, and a lovely book on home decor called Casa San Miguel.

I gave Hale John Le Carre's new one, A Most Wanted Man; also, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, the Untold History of English by John McWhorter and The Widows of Eastwick, by John Updike.

None of these choices are shots in the dark, of course, but rather books chosen out of a thousand references to subjects of interest over the year. How could one ask for a more personal gift than that, or one that will give more lasting pleasure?

Now to find space in our bookshelves...

The Day Before Christmas

(Please note that the day's installments are posted at the bottom of the earlier entry.)

Our day began with mud, glorious mud. We've been having rain showers. Rain at any time, even Christmas Eve, is so welcome, after the awful drought.

The homely Christmas tree is damp. The boughs for the wreath and garland are damp. So while I wait for them to dry a bit, I'm blogging. In installments. Blogging the day as the mess in our little house turns into Christmas, however small.

I hope.

It occurred to me to do this, since we're spending our first Christmas in the country, and it's just the two of us, my husband and I. Son and daughter-in-law are spending the holiday chained to the workplace in NYC, so I thought I'd give them a virtual day of Christmas prep down here. Just think of all they're missing!

So this is the first installment: the tree:















Installment #2, two p.m.

Presents are wrapped, and the wreath that goes on the fence by the gate is up. This is a storebought wreath with the only red ribbon they had left. It does not pay to decorate for Christmas this close to the day itself. The nursery in Brenham had discarded all their live trees and greenery on Monday. We arrived on Tuesday and got fakes. Real fakes, in any event. No pretense about that. (The yucca isn't fake, though.)
















Now Installment #3, at four p.m.--the wreath, clearly handmade, including handmade bow. Once I took a test in which one of the components was a measurement of digital dexterity. Out of a possible 100, I scored seven, and they counselled me to avoid clothes with buttons. Also, not to expect much when making things like wreaths and bows.
















Our final installment, at 8:30 p.m., is the little tree with little decorations, and not too many of them. Please note the necklace of cranberries! We are pooped, and so, a very Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night! (Did someone else say that somewhere? It sounds familiar...)