Christmas 2023

Welp. Content update is beyond sporadic. But I'd be remiss if I didn't post the Christmas letter here. So here goes!

Christmas 2023

Dear Everyone:

We just got our twentieth Christmas ornament last month. Not in total -- we have a lot more than twenty, including the Big Bird that hung on my childhood tree and the probably haunted jingle elf that hung on Jennifer's. I mean that it's our twentieth art glass Christmas ornament, hand-blown (mouth-blown?) by Terry Bloodworth and Springfield Hot Glass Studio.

Many of you know Terry. The rest of you are impoverished, and while I pity you poor jerks, you're going to have to settle for the basics for now. He is, for those of you who are bereft, a glassblower, an artist, and was the elder statesman of the downtown Springfield, Missouri independent arts scene for many years.

Then he decided he had done his time running a shop, closed it up, and spent the next few years making things and selling them in shops and art shows here and there. This was sad, because it meant an end to visiting his shop during the holidays, walking from a near-freezing street into a place warmed by furnaces that were running at what I'd estimate to be 46% of the operating temperature of a fusion reactor. You'd walk in bundled under three layers and leave with a rare case of holiday swampass. It was lovely.

Not as lovely as his work, of course. I said that Terry's an artist, and I meant it. We have quite a few pieces of his around the house: vases, drinking glasses, even the shade for the pendant light fixture over the kitchen sink. His work has increased our home's Aesthetic Charm Numerical Estimate (ACNE) by at least 24%.

And then there's Christmas. Jennifer and I decided, not long after we married, that we'd buy one ornament from him every Thanksgiving to put on our tree to commemorate another year of marriage. We bought more than that, of course, candy canes and penguins and gnomes (gnomes are elf-adjacent) and gifts for family and friends. But the one thing we looked forward to the most was picking out that year's Terry Ornament. Even after the shop closed, we continued to make arrangements to buy them.

We've got 'em in all shapes and sizes. Glass balls, of course, and teardrop shapes, one that's over a foot long and somewhat horn-shaped, and another equally long, twisted affair that came from a gorgeous, chaotic chandelier that he deconstructed and sold the pieces from when he closed the shop.

We used to hang them on the main tree, but then came the Great Gravity Kerfuffle of 2011: too many ornaments on the front side, a tree stand that was too anemic for the job, and...boom.

Two things came out of that: First, we bought an absurdly expensive tree stand that was worth every penny, because it's built like a Sherman tank and an absolute dream to put a tree in. Second, we bought a separate tree-shaped metal table-top stand to showcase the Terry Ornaments, which I backlit with LED strips. When it filled up, we bought a second, less amazing stand. I've seriously considered learning TIG welding just to make a new one that would hold everything and look like something a wizard would use to air-dry his underwear. Terry's work deserves no less.

We got ornament number twenty just a few weeks ago. Twenty-one, I guess, technically. We had to replace one that broke in the fall. But this last one was free. He sent it to us with his love and good wishes, because it's the last ornament of his that we'll ever get.

His retirement is complete, now, you see. He's done. He's earned it. But I haven't forgiven him. That he would cut us off like this is selfish bordering on cruel, mitigated only somewhat by his coincidental decision to end on a nice, round number.

Twenty years. God, when you say it like that.

Twenty years of kids and dogs, neighbors we'd kill for and others we'd choke the life out of. Twenty years of hiking trails and fording creeks, of fights and holding hands, of funerals, weddings, hospitalizations and bedtime farts. Twenty years.

Our son's driving cars and picking out universities. Our daughter's starting to learn how to traverse the minefield of womanhood. I am still bald. Outside of some musculoskeletal issues, Jennifer's holding up well, and we're starting to look toward new adventures for the next 20 years. But we commemorated the ending of each of the last twenty with melted sand that was colored and forged and inflated and spun and twisted and drawn into something that brings us light every dark winter.

Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my favorite teachers, used to make a point of emphasizing that everything is made out of things that aren't it. Take you, for example. You are made entirely out of non-you elements, he would say. You are made out of your parents, and their parents, and on back past the beginning of our species. You are made of dinners and hasty breakfasts and naps and coffee and other people's exhalations. Hell, it's almost a statistical certainty that every time you breathe in, you are inhaling at least one molecule of Julius Caesar's dying breath. You're partly made of Julius Caesar, or at least his bloody, dying coughs. Merry Christmas!

And I think of that when I look at these ornaments. Some probably have his (arguably cooked) skin or hair cells folded into the glass. They contain his literal breath, preserved for us like a mosquito in amber. But more than that, they're made out of his eagerness, his frustrations, his worry, his sleep, his need to forget whatever was whirring around inside his brain that day and focus on the work. They're made out of his wife and children, some of the finest people we have ever had the good fortune to love. So every year, for twenty years, we'd pick out a piece of Bloodworth to display in our dining room and say goodbye to another year of that terrifying lifeline we call Family.

Then he cut us off, the selfish bastard. But no, it's fine, we're fine, it's all fine.

FINE.

It's another reminder from my teacher. Nothing is permanent, but nothing ever dies either. It just transforms into something else. The leaf on the tree becomes the leaf on the ground becomes nutrients in the soil that make new leaves. And in the same way, because Terry is now dead to us--

I'm kidding. Seriously, though, it means that we will find a new way to mark another fall's end. I have no idea what that will be, but I do know that it will be anchored in our lives and in the people we love, the people who change us, the people we are made from, because we are made from the Bloodworths, as we are made from all of you, and you from us. With a little patience, we'll find what pieces of you we want to hang from our tree.

But not in a weird way.

Happy Holidays. And, as always, we are here.

Christmas 2022

Dear Everyone,

The quiet spaces become more precious the older I get. Which feels backwards, because the house has been getting quieter and quieter. In fact, the Child Per Capita Noise Production Rate (CPCNPR) in our household dropped precipitously after the kids hit double-digit ages and has continued a steady downward trajectory ever since. Long gone are the running and shrieking toddlers, the battery-powered bears with no volume controls, the ninja warrior play. Now they're teens (!), which means they're getting their first taste of feeling tired when bedtime is not at hand. Now they start processing things quietly. Now they learn solitude.

Even the dead sprint pace of life that comes with kids is showing signs of letting up. It's not exactly slow yet, but it feels like the world's foot eased up on the gas pedal some. Just a bit. Last Saturday I woke up not knowing what I was going to do that day, and reflected that it had been 1.5 decades since I'd last seen a day begin that way.

Everything feels noisier, though. Though the pace and the literal decibel levels in our home are lower than they were 10 years ago, somehow life itself is straight louder to me. And I think it's the emotions. The stakes.

My son just finished up working his first seasonal job. He'll have his driver's license in 7 months. The weekend after Thanksgiving, I took my daughter to her first death metal concert (which was literally loud, so very literally loud). Both of them are discovering that they have emotions they don't consciously grasp, needs they can't quite put a name to. We're getting promotional mailers from colleges. It's getting easier, but it's also getting so much harder.

I think back on that period when Jack was three and Georgia was fresh baked. I was home most of the time, in the process of being very, very slowly laid off from my first software development job. I was awash in the chaos and racket and mess of being a more or less stay at home dad while confronting the anxiety of losing my first professional job. All this happening in the midst of a contracting job market that had just been flooded with dozens of programmers. There was plenty of free-floating anxiety, resentment, and with a toddler and a baby in the house, noise. It was really something.

But when I think about those times now, they seem magical to me. Not easier, because you can't call a house full of tiny people spraying tears and Cheerios and poop everywhere easy. Sleep was hard. Stress and exhaustion levels were off the charts. But it was simpler. The difficulty had a laser focus to it. It wasn't complex. And that difficulty was the cost I paid to get to stay home all day and bond with my children in a way dads almost never do. Turns out the idiot who destroyed my company did me one of the biggest favors of my life.

But once high school and college are on the horizon, their needs get simultaneously fewer and harder. That feeds the darker corners of my parental fear. What if we're putting too much on him? What if we aren't pushing enough? Is she really okay, or is she just saying that while she quietly goes to hell behind our backs? I started out with grand dreams of them becoming interesting and successful adults, and I've no doubt that will happen, but honestly I'll consider the job done if they can just make it to adulthood relatively happy and without taking on significant damage.

It's hard to be a whole person. It's exponentially harder to make one.

All that fear creates its own background noise, and it follows you everywhere, a sort of minor-key thrumming of your brainstem, accompanied by a mild but pervasive muscular tension. And the only way to treat it is to turn and face it every single day. Quietly, mindfully, lovingly. Acknowledging that it's there. Embracing it. Allowing it to soften you, rather than using it as justification to become brittle and hard. And you can only do that in the quiet moments.

I take them where I can get them. In the lopsided office chair outside my son's piano lesson. Carrying my 45-pound rescued pit bull baby to bed so I can snuggle with his much older, much smaller brother. Sending Slack messages to a dear friend who's spent the last couple of years trying very hard not to die of cancer. Meditating while first my daughter and then the pit bull cropdusts me. Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I vow never to breathe in again.

It's a practice of finding the hidden reading nooks in your day, in your mind. You won't be able to spend hours in them, but even a few minutes can set you to rights again, if you follow the simple rules they used to teach us about train tracks: Stop, look, and listen.

Listen:

You are, right this very moment, sitting in a chair, or possibly standing. You are reading a letter written by a bald man in a place with the unlikely name of "Arkansas". That letter is sparking thoughts and feelings in your head that may be pleasant or unpleasant. You are inhabiting a body that has volume and weight. It is constantly telling you things about temperature and pressure and light and odor and sound, and it is occasionally a mutinous bastard, but it is yours and you are in it now. In the back of your mind is the subtle clamoring of plans, future worries, past resentments and regrets. You might be remembering an errand you need to run or someone you need to call. Those thoughts never shut up, even when you think they have. They are with you now.

Now you be with them, with all of it. With this letter, your body, your worries and regrets, the dog farts wafting up from the area rug, the sounds of play from children and hovering worry from their mothers, the snores of their fathers. The cool sensation of the in-breath in your nostrils, the warmth of your exhalation. Be with it, savor it like you've never experienced any of it before, or perhaps like you might never again. All of this, this current moment. This is your only possession. It might well be your liberation. And it tells you a very simple story that goes down to the core of the earth:

You are here. You are home.

Happy holidays from all of us.

Christmas Letter 2021

Dear Everyone,

Man, it just kept going, huh.

It's not hard to understand the roaring '20s now. A whole lot of lockdown and fear finally lets up, and that energy’s gotta go somewhere. So let's all invent jazz music and make out with each other and write books about sad rich people!!

It's been a lot, is what I'm getting at. Nearly two years, and it's all still going.

On the other hand, look how far we've come.

We've traveled over bumpy and uneven ground, to be sure. But it's a hike, and I know how to hike. Here are the basics: Keep your base weight light, take care of your feet, stay hydrated, and don't poop too close to water. Embrace the whole thing, whether it's downhill or up, when you're sleeping and when it sucks. The trail is sometimes boring and sometimes almost too hard to take, but it eventually leads somewhere with a view. Just embrace it all and keep going.

And we have, through ER visits and interminable doctor follow-ups and work crises and children struggling to deal with new challenges and changes. We've held hands and kept going no matter the terrain. And there's no one I'd rather do this hike with. Jennifer's the best trekking partner I ever had, bar none. The kids struggle a bit, but then they haven't spent that much time on the trail. Part of it is getting to teach them how to do more than survive it, to love it for what it is, gorgeous views and exhaustion, all of it. They're pushing back some, as any sane newcomer would, but they're getting the hang of it day by day. Seeing that gives me some peace.

As I write this, what I'm remembering most from this year is a literal hike, a "short" 8-mile out-and-back that was my first time setting foot on the Appalachian Trail. It was part of a 50th birthday trip for Jennifer (what the hell happened there, I ask you), and when we got to the lookout at the turnaround point, the hikers there all sang "Happy Birthday to You" like we were all having cake in someone's kitchen.

Total strangers all, but travelers like us through a time of exhaustion and confusion and fear and death and loss, hunkered down on a big rock in the sun and singing to my wife. If that isn't fuel to keep going, I don't know what is.

Because if all this is going to keep going, then I'll be damned if I'm not going to keep going too. Not to spite it, not even to survive it, but to truly live through it.

We hope your holidays are likewise full of life. And opportunities to reach out. And, when reaching out gets to be a lot, to rest.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Letter 2020

Dear Everyone,

Well. It's certainly been a weird one.

There is a popular hypothesis that you and I are part of a simulation, that we are not "living" in the strictest biological sense, but are artificial intelligences running in some kind of software. This idea has a lot of adherents and a fair number of compelling arguments behind it, but the whole thing sounded kind of goofy to me for a long time. Then I lived through 2020.

This past year was like a staggering, drunken distant relative that battered its way through the front door, slopped Four Loko all over the rug, shouted some things about UFO conspiracies and the gold standard, and now appears to be mercifully passing out in the carport after weeing itself. It's upended everything. It's caused a lot of collateral damage. And it has, it bears repeating, been weird as hell.

I've heard people say things like "you can't make this stuff up" a lot this year, but the thing is, not only can you, I almost feel like you'd have to. Nothing as insane and farcical and interminable as this year, nothing with the sheer body count, nothing that includes not one but two stories involving Philadelphia-area landscaping companies just happens, surely.

At this point a plague of hamsters would surprise no one, so giving the simulation hypothesis serious consideration doesn’t seem like that much of a leap. So I started thinking about it. Imagine that you and I are someone else's program code, and that the utter lunacy of the past several months was someone's design. Imagine that whoever booted up this application watched me type these words and is now watching you read them. Are they smirking? Wincing? Watching with a sympathetic but knowing smile?

Thinking about all of this reminds me of the single best book dedication I have ever read, one that I discovered somewhere around, oh, maybe the fourth year of 2020. It reads: ”Dedicated to my fictional characters: I'm so, so sorry."

Because that's how you write a story, whether the fiction is printed or interactive. You create people who you love, and then you do bad (and sometimes crazy) things to them to make them grow. You throw a divorce at them, or an evil space wizard, or a plague of hamsters, and you watch how they change. It's how stories work because it's how life works. We don't grow from contentment. We invent coats because it's cold out.

And that's where we come to the only thing about this year that seemed to go according to expectations. No matter what unexpected twist the news brought, and it brought plenty, absolutely no one's reactions to those twists surprised me.

This year amplified a lot of questionable character, it’s true. The vicious dug deeper into their vice and declared it virtue. The corrupt found ways to profit. The loud got even louder. But the rest?

Those who could, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work. The industrious fired up sewing machines and 3D printers like their grandparents once fired up victory gardens and war bond drives. The kind cast their kindness out into the darkness like a searchlight. The honest hollered for reform. And I don't want to get started on the sacrifices of healthcare workers, service workers, and teachers, because we don't have enough printer ink on hand to send out a six page letter this year. Suffice it to say that we owe them all big. I continue to draw my hope and strength from them. They, and you, are my handle on the world, the one thing I can nearly always count on. By your fruits, I know you.

Don’t get me wrong, whether this is a simulation or not, I still have a long list of questions for its designer. But either way, for better or worse, it’s my home, and I’m grateful you’ll be here with me when floofy rodents start raining from the sky.

Here’s hoping for a more restful 2021.

Christmas Letter 2019

Dear Everyone,

I've struggled to figure out what to tell you this year. And I think the main reason is that I don't want to tell you anything.

There's a temptation to put a tidy little bow on the year. To write something charming or witty or Hallmark. There's nothing wrong with those things, but I don't want to be in that business. Not with you.

We've been through some things, yes? We've been through hirings and firings and babies and graves. There have been trick elbows and coffee stains and pontifications around a fire. Sunrises over the pines and long nights making faces out of the bumps on the ceiling. That isn't a tidy package. It's a beautiful, glorious, sometimes heartbreaking mess. As it should be. As are we all.

That heap of contradictions is reality, and reality is what lies beyond the reach of our concepts. It's what persists in the face of belief or a lack thereof. And it, this reality, this life, does not exist to be understood. It exists to be lived.

2019 gave our family and our world countless examples of that truth. Beauty in tragedy, oneness in disconnection, impermanence while nearly nothing seems to change. You can't put that under a microscope, though lord knows I have tried. I have to remind myself that my job is to sing to it. To sing to those to whom it has brought joy, and especially to those it has broken and burned.

The more I experience this life, the less I know about it, except maybe for one growing certainty: it is dead set on mocking my understanding. It doesn't want me to take the water's temperature. It doesn't even want me to dive in and swim. It wants me to know that I am already one of its waves. When I really know that, then I will be free to dance along its surface, to allow myself to get mixed up in its waters.

So I'll leave you with an offering along those lines, one that I wrote last fall while sitting on an actual beach, watching my children toiling joyfully to stand amid the tide.

To you I give the ocean
To you I give the waves
And how their churning stills my mind
And my boy.

To you I give my daughter's fear of it
And its overcoming.
To you I give her leaping, yelling
"I am God, parting the sea."

You can also have my son's retort
"Actually,
that was Moses."
Enjoy.

My offering, pleasing to you:
The beer drinkers at Bruno's,
The sand on the floor,
The panicked slantwise retreat of the crabs.

Also that second line in the Quarter
I know it was a rich white people second line, but still),
The sweat wrung down my back,
My three showers in a day.

My friends afar are yours, as is their meeting
The footsqueak of the beach
The worrying of jellyfish
And Jupiter, insisting over the sea.

I offer to you
My absurd toenail polish
The despair of seven months of tinnitus
That tick bite from camping.

I make a burnt offering of my fear
And my frailty
My impatience, my need
And evenings in a hammock.

To you I give my names
To you I give my faces and my hands
To you I give the story I call me
That I still pretend is real.

Please take it all.
Leave me empty
Leave me open
And leave the light on when you go.

Love to you all. Love to us all.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Christmas 2018

Dear Everyone,

My brother and I were each conceived in New York City, almost exactly two years apart. We happened during an annual diamond show my dad used to attend for the family business (well, more accurately after the show, not like in the middle of it, which, let's be real, would be impressive). Mom tagged along twice, got two boys out of it, then decided she wouldn’t go back.

My favorite story she tells of those trips took place in the elevator in the very secure and very unmarked building that hosted the show. One time they got in and, right as the doors closed, a massive and hairy arm shot between them, and an honest-to-God Hell’s Angel stepped in, big as life and twice as unconcerned. Mom, new to the big city, naturally assumed that this would be the moment of her death. But he quietly rode up to the diamond show with them and was waved through security without so much as an ID check.

Turned out they were using Hell’s Angels as couriers. Because, really, who would think a large, leathery beardo who might have punched up a 1969 Rolling Stones concert would have $100,000 worth of diamonds in his saddle bags? Who on earth would try to look?

I heard the story decades ago, and it never left me. It was one of those early glimpses into my parents' history that made me start to wonder what else they'd been through, what they'd seen that I hadn't. You grow up thinking that your parents are boring…well, parents. You learn by fits and starts that there've been things going on when your back was turned. Or, indeed, when you were a steak dinner and two glasses of scotch away from existing.

There was the time Jennifer came home from college, where she’d gotten an earful of students discussing their heritage. This one was German-Irish, that one Ashkenazi Jewish, another whatever bare fraction of Native American. She’d had no idea of her own heritage, so she asked her dad, what am I?

He thought for a moment and said, “Well, I guess you’re half hillbilly and half swamp.” That opened up overlooks of identity and history she hadn’t explored before. She carries that with her now, as I carry the story of the bejeweled biker, little pieces of our parents that they broke off and slipped into our pockets for safekeeping.

We have bucketfuls of these pieces. My own dad used to wake my brother and me up by pretending to be a superhero named Underwear Man, barging into our bedroom with tighty-whities yanked down over his head. Mom once heard us listening to Cyndi Lauper LPs, charged into our room wearing every bracelet she owned, her hair frit up into some insane and hasty architecture, and proceeded to dance. Jennifer’s mom once watched me politely choke down her banana pudding, learning the hard way how much I hate bananas but love Nilla wafers and the approval of potential in-laws, and from that day on made me my own tiny banana-free pudding at family gatherings.

More trinkets: I have never been in the military but can report with the confidence of an expert that you can safely burn plastic explosives and use them as a makeshift campstove. Just don’t try to stamp out the fire. Dad taught me that. I know, because of mom, how to make giftwrapping ribbon curl up by running scissor blades down one side of it. I know how to set up a sewing machine because my mom showed me, and then I forgot, and then Jennifer showed me, which she could do because her mom showed her. Her dad taught me every contour of the yard my children now play in, including where the surveyor's pins are buried and the details of the deal he struck with a neighbor to not have to mow the far side of the creek.

So many fragments of them, bits of colored glass etched and rounded by grit and time. I stumble across them everywhere, in coat pockets with wrinkled bills, at the bottoms of desk drawers, in neglected storage boxes and scattered among the roots of the dogwood out back. They make a satisfying clack when I put them in my pocket, next to Molly McGee's old watch.

My mom and dad have moved nearby. I haven't been this close to them in over a decade and a half. It used to take a four-hour drive to go have coffee. Now I walk Mugsy to their new home on Saturday mornings, after I've got the kids situated with donuts and cartoons, and mom pours me a cup. I bump into them at the grocery store. I may have to build a shed to hold this new cascade of pieces, souvenirs of what might prove to be their last big adventure together.

So too with Jennifer's dad, though for different reasons. Time and circumstance have whittled away at the life he knew until only the pure shape of him is left, the love and humor and concern he used to steer himself and his family through the last eight decades. He needs us to care for him now, in much the same way he cared for the woman I love. He's wheelchair-bound and sometimes understandably frustrated at what he perceives as his lack of usefulness. I want him to know that his use is not gone but distilled. He doesn't see what we're collecting in the wake of his wheels.

There's pain and fear in all of this, of course. That's the price of admission. For my part, every now and then I'm struck by the weight of time, by the bone-deep awareness of how temporary this flood of fragments is. So I hoard them like a crow. I don't organize or catalog them, but I keep them close by, tucked hither and yon with no easily perceivable strategy or plan. God's own filing system.

Sometimes I cast them on the ground like chicken bones or yarrow stalks to tell my fortune, and it always comes up the same way: Quit screwing around with nostalgia and look around you. Let what you see change you. Go do something. Rilke put it better:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

I nod and gather the shards back up, and I know I'll go looking for more. Maybe it's because I wonder if the lesson will change. More likely it's because I know I'll forget it. But it's also because I want to show these pieces to you, the scratched and stained facets of the love that built us, because I want you to hold them up to the light and watch how they cast their colors down on you.

Christmas 2017

It’s that time again. Here’s my ramblings for another season. Delivered on time, for a change.

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Dear Everyone,

It was Josh who gave me my first Nalgene bottle. Part of a care package he gave me before leaving for upstate New York and the Night’s Watch about one point five decades ago. I covered it with stickers and drank water from it. Fifteen or so years went by. Then I went camping.

Jack's Webelos den leader had planned a cold weather camping trip up in the Boston Mountains in early December. Weather originally looked to dip slightly below freezing, which we'd done before with no trouble.

The trees had gone to the bone weeks before we made camp. The wind was a gossip. We were down in a hollow and out of the worst of the breeze, but the sun left us to heap on clothes and hug the fire. We watched the night scratch and rattle its way down toward 20°, well below what we’d camped in before.

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The boy and I'd planned to string ourselves up in fancy hammock tents, but insulation is always a concern when you're dangling above ground. He asked if maybe he could go sleep in Alex's tent instead? Yes, of course, buddy. If you can't find me in the morning, go check the bench by the showers in the bathroom, okay?

Later that night I got him down and eventually debated myself away from the fire and over to my tent. I had a bunch of blankets, a sub-freezing sleeping bag, a fire-engine-red union suit and a whole lot of worry. Then some random neuron fired and I recalled Josh's Nalgene.

He'd extolled its many features and benefits in the attached note. "Once I was camping in cold weather," he wrote. "Before bed, I boiled some water, poured it in my bottle, wrapped a shirt around it and stuffed it in the bottom of my sleeping bag."

Aha.

Friends, I am here to spread the good news. My toes warmed instantly. I lay there, cozy as could be, and recited a very long gratitude list as I listened to the coyotes summon the moon.

I am grateful for my mummy bag.

I am grateful for my blankets.

I am grateful for my hat.

I am grateful for the lee side of the mountain.

I am grateful for the woman I watched playing with wolves yesterday.

I am grateful for the pot of veggie chili I had for supper.

I am grateful that I am packed into this nylon tube and suspended amid nature's annual death rattle, Dutch-ovening myself because of the chili, with no cell service.

I am grateful for a plastic bottle. A plastic bottle that has warmed me three times: Once when it was given, once when I recalled the gift and its attached advice, once with my toes nestled up against it.

I woke not long after dawn to a well-frosted tent. I made coffee. I dried and packed my gear. I came home. I kissed my wife and daughter and dog. I showered and shaved my head and eased myself back into civilization clothing and civilization eating and civilization life.

Checking out like this is a sheer luxury, I know that. But it helped. It helped with my fear and worry and frustration. But it wasn’t checking out that did it. It was yet again being dragged into the world of others.

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Watching the kids pointedly not swearing while rassling tent poles. Letting my boy show me every natural shelter outcropping he'd scouted out (three of them in total). Gathering with four other men and our children around a fire and sharing our stories. We communed in the death that is December, we passed candy and cocoa and opinions, and our species again seemed possible. Certainly worth fighting for.

I am grateful for this boy. For these friends. For this life. This life in which I got so damn lucky that I almost feel ashamed.

It's been too long since we’ve gathered around you. We need to get together. We need to remind each other. Maybe we'll cast our stories out into the cold, see what thaws.

My coat still smells of fire. I haven't washed it. I know I have to. But not yet.

Christmas 2016

Dear Everyone,

We got a dog this year. Most of you know we got a dog this year, and half of you are expecting me to say "we got a dog", so guess what, I don't want to disappoint: We got a dog.

He is small, bearded, not-un-Morgan-Freemanish in appearance, if not demeanor. He does not have the bearing of a person who might narrate a jailbreak or try to keep Brad Pitt from opening a box. He prefers a bouncier insouciance and general love of eating poop, two things Morgan Freeman is not known for.

Mugsy has upended things in the best way possible. He forces me out for exercise at least once daily. He demands that we take time to play, that we remember to lay hands on each other as much as we can. And he's a walking object lesson in the fragility of our circumstances.

Let me explain. Yesterday, my son asked me if I thought he would make a difference in the world. "Sure", I said. "Any time you touch a life, you make a difference in the world." I knew what he meant, but I wanted to make him push toward his real question, which was this: Will I be important?

That's an echoing hallway of a question. So I pointed to Mugsy, and I told my son a story he already knew, the story of a bearded baby pup who wandered a graveyard looking for food. Covered in bug bites, gut full of parasites. Someone saw him there, a woman saw him. A woman who cared.

That woman took him home and cleaned him up and fed him and took pictures of him with a ball and a sombrero. She put those pictures on a rescue website. I found those pictures. I texted them to my wife with a photoshopped speech bubble that said "i love u jennifer" in tiny letters, knowing that this was the most reprehensible kind of manipulation. And only because all of those things happened, because that manipulation worked, we brought him home.

"That dog", I said to my son, "lives better than half the people in the world now. Because somebody cared." Then, because everyone loves dad lectures, I pushed on.

I reminded him of Mr. MIchael, his Cubmaster. Mr. Michael got into an argument with a friend on Facebook over Syrian refugees, an argument that led him to get on a plane and fly to Greece. There he met children who had seen their parents beheaded. He raised money to build them a school. Now he's trying to get their camp better sanitation.

People stand on the sidelines and lob lazy criticisms at him for doing this. They want him to stop, but he keeps at it. Because he cares.

That, I said to my son. That is what making a difference means. You pull a puppy out of a culvert. You feed a kid. You touch a life, and you change a life. You change a life, and you hope that that change will be fruitful and multiply. No one will erect a statue of you for this. But many will bear witness to you.

I've tried to tell my children that Important is a pretty coat and Useful is what we reach for when we need to be warm, but I know how well I would have listened to that at their age. Why should they listen to me? I barely do. So I touch their lives, and I hope. Sometimes we parents cling to that.

And then there's that dog. The bug bites are gone, the gut situation mostly rectified. He's gotten comfortable with leaving exuberant chaos in his wake like so many crayon-studded dog flops, as if his own usefulness is to remind us that the current moment is all we have in this world. That the only question worth worrying over is this: What can I do today?

We joke about how lucky that stupid dog is, how well he landed. I've called him Little Arfin' Annie. But I'll tell you a thing: that little dude pulled a third-act Grinch on our respective heart sizes, so he's earned his place. He's a living reminder that there are plenty of others out there, others on four legs and two who haven't had a kind lady happen across whatever cemetery they're foraging in. We can't give them all sombreros, but we can keep our eyes open for opportunities.

We can ask: What can I do today? When we find out, the answer transforms us.

There's a song I can't let my kids hear until they're a bit older. It's full of cussin', which I enjoy. I listen to it at least once a week, and it ends like this:

There is no chosen one
No destiny
No fate
There's no such thing as magic
There is no light at the end of this tunnel
So it's a good thing we brought matches

We got a lot of matches around our place. More than we need. If you need a few, or even just a word, I'll repeat what I told you last year.

We are here.

Tomb to Table →

Holiday recipes from the dead. Includes a recipe for my wife's grandmother's chocolate pie and a meditation on the tradition of learning through failure:

I wish I could say I learned how to make chocolate pie at my mom's side, but the truth is I learned the same way she did — by screwing it up the first time I tried to make it, calling her from my in-laws' house on my first married Thanksgiving so she could talk me through what I'd done wrong. (My problem: I always forget to add the butter and vanilla at the end. After hearing me dog-cuss myself at his parents' house for five straight Thanksgivings, my husband started leaving Post-Its on the piecrusts while I wasn't looking. "Add the $%#@ing vanilla," he'd stick on one crust, "And the $&#!ing butter, too" on the second. It's our own little holiday tradition now.)

The end of that story is as bittersweet as the pie.

My wife's pretty goddamn great.

Holiday Letter, 2015

Below is our annual Christmas/holiday letter. I notice that as the years pass these are getting to be less about me and mine and more about you. I guess I'm okay with that.

Onward:

Dear Everyone,

Friend of mine’s dad was a roofer. Roofers, like all contractors, got stories.

This was one of his: One job, he was doing a full rip-and-replace on a house. He was pulling up decking on the backside when he slipped, fell between the joists, and crashed through the ceiling below.

It was a bedroom he landed in, one covered in a good quarter inch of dust. Furnished, but undisturbed for months, maybe years.

He tried the door. It was walled in.

He pondered options as quick as he could, settled on the certainty that whoever would wall up a perfectly good furnished room probably didn’t want it found for reasons. So he built himself a Jacob’s Ladder to freedom out of the furniture, shimmied up through the hole, and put new decking on in a big damn hurry.

See, this is what gets me whirling. Things in treeholes. Hidden tunnels. I look at an unmown chigger farm at the bottom of a runoff ditch and I am certain there is a small city of something bustling in that brush. A place where the real stuff goes down.

I’ve chased those places most of my life. I percolated upon the notion that there would come the day when I’d find a key or accidentally switch identical bags with a stranger or crash through a ceiling, and down the rabbit hole I would go.

They were beautiful thoughts. Incomplete, but it’s what’s left out of those stories that matters most.

Someday, I’d think. Someday I’ll learn the secret. The world behind the world.

But there’s another thing. Look:

Years ago I introduced my boy to Star Wars. I sat him down and turned it on and watched him watch it. I watched him laugh and cry and grope for reassurance and jump up and down and clap and cheer.

I awoke in his world, one I hadn’t inhabited myself for some time. I was, just for a moment, unbound. It was 1981 and I had more time than I could conceive of spending. He took my hand and said look, come and see. Pull out the blue book with the strange writing on the top shelf and stand back.

Right now one of you is feeling alone. One of you is suffering a loss.

One of you is sitting in your favorite chair, farting contentedly. One of you is thinking about how you’re in love right now and hoo-boy, you’re going to bust. One of you is grappling with a bad decision you’re going to make, even though you don’t want to.

One of you is just done for today.

And later you will need to go out, and maybe you will close those doors to the public, maybe wall them up for good.

Those are the secret cities I was looking for. I tried to find them by shutting out what I regarded as noise and turning inward, and it took me most of four decades to figure out that that was the exact wrong thing to do.

Look:

One of you is not so sure about what you just ate. One of you is afraid to open your mouth and let the bag of crazy tumble out. One of you is really happy with your socks right now, and no one could possibly see how much you needed that.

All of you are, in some way, afraid.

I learned this in stumbles and skips, usually by falling through someone’s ceiling, or seeing them fumble and fall through their own walled-up door.

I needed only to see you, to hear you. You were the hidden city. And I nearly missed you, because I was looking in a goddamn shrub. Because I am slow sometimes.

Still, I found you, and here we are. I have seen what you see. I have wondered why, just like you. And I will do what I can to help you figure it out too. I and my family are here.

And we are. We are here. We are harried and awash in mess and sleep-deprived and eating WAY too much refined flour just like you, and we are here. For you, and with you.

Look. Look: We are here.

We hope this unnervingly warm holiday is as good to you as it has been to us. Because frankly, it’s been so good to us that we’re feeling a little guilty and we need to spread some of that joy around so that we may sleep the sleep of the just.

So tell us. Tell us everything. About your secret place, if you’re comfortable. About your socks if not, but remember: We’ve seen weirder. We’ve been to Texas.

Christmas Letter 2014

Dear Everyone,

This year's letter has been a tough one to nail down.

We had a banner year. 2014 up and tattooed itself all over our lives. New jobs, new friends, new priorities. New possibilities revealing themselves. The year showed us what we could be, what we could do. Then it ended by reminding us of what we already had.

My maternal grandmother died early last month. The wake of her passing was enormous, even if the fact of her death was an overdue mercy. We gathered together in that wake, held each other and wept. And laughed. And ate. And then I wrote you a letter.

Just a few weeks later, my paternal grandfather died too. Just like my Nanaw, his death was a mercy, and just like my Nanaw, he left behind one hell of a wake. He left a hole in things. So again we gathered and held and wept and laughed and ate. And then I scrapped that letter and wrote you another one.

This morning I came to work to discover that a friend and coworker, a 33-year-old husband and father, was killed in a car wreck the night before. He left a hole in things too, one we weren't braced for. So I scrapped that second letter and am starting over again.

I'm unsure of what to say.

My temptation when I write these is to wrap a tidy little bow around things, to shoehorn the events of our lives into some kind of theme. But however comforting that may be to write or to read, those lives defy an effort that small and limiting. It feels dishonest even to try. Losing so many drove that point home.

But it's not just the barrage of loss and tragedy. It's everything, every mark on our lives, good and bad. Each one a single drop, some bigger than others, but none of which is easily contained.

I can't get my head around the sheer mass of all those drops, even just from this year: Loved ones lost, loved ones gained. Corners turned. Chance encounters that rearranged everything. They leave me with no neat little gift to give you. They leave me gobsmacked.

A single life is an inscrutable, baffling, insane thing. There is no order to it, no theme. There are only those drops, added one by one to a great, churning sea of longing and laughter and fear and all-too-brief satisfaction.

The chaos of all that churning is living, moving art. It seeks infinite rearrangement, and that means infinite possibility.

And therein lies our hope. Because as long as the chaos holds, as long as the sea churns, the possibilities don't run out. We can still do more. Be more. There is still time.

There is no map for this. All you can do is wade in, see where it takes you. Maybe keep an eye out for anyone who looks like their arms are getting tired. It can be terrifying as all hell, but it's also pretty damn thrilling, and I am discovering that even that terror is a gift. Even the heartbreak.

We hope your year has been a good one or, failing that, that it has laid the groundwork for good things to come. We couldn't stay afloat without you, and for that we thank you and love you and will be certain to sacrifice the small forest creature of your choosing to Zalgo, the Nezperdian Hive Mind of Chaos. Or maybe we'll make pie.

2015 looks to be at least as terrifyingly full of possibility as 2014. I propose we hold hands.