Christmas Letter 2013

Figure I'd send this out through the blog, though the cards themselves are still finding their way through the United States Postal Service. This is our 2013 Christmas letter, because yes, we're white:

2013-12-19

Dear Everyone,

There's this kid that lives somewhere in the neighborhood. Down the hill from us, I think, though I probably think that because I only see him ever in the park down there.

Early teens, lanky. Body of a runner, or maybe a basketball player. All puppy arms and ears.

I only ever see him by himself at the swings. Third swing from the left, back to the street and facing the tennis court. White earbuds. The only sound he makes is the fwee...hee-hahhh call-and-response of the swing's squeaking as he pumps it as high as it will go without throwing him.

I've seen him there at different hours of the day. Weekend afternoons, Tuesday nights after everyone's gone home. Once I went out for a run in the rain, long after dark, and he was there, kicking away.

Fwee...hee-hahhh.

Fwee...hee-hahhh.

Seeing him there, under the orange haze of the streetlights and with the rain coming down, it looked like the beginning of a horror movie, Playgrounds of the Possessed or some damn thing. It didn't occur to me until I was back home and warm and dry that maybe the kid didn't have it so great at home, maybe that's why he was out there swinging in the rain. Or maybe he was the right kind of eccentric, indifferent to the storm or even wanting it to fall on him while he listened to his music and cut graceful knife-fight arcs through the air. I hope his iPod survived it.

There's a thing about rhythm and repetition that pulls you out of your own head, if you let it go on long enough. You drop your cares on the floor and disappear into that dark, quiet spot at the center of you. People find it in meditation, in dance, in the methodical plod of running, in that space on the edge of sleep where your mind gets just a touch unlaced and your inner censor shuts the hell up for a few minutes before you go dark.

You return to the ground. You remember what's real by turning the hypotheticals loose. There's only the next beat.

Fwee...hee-hahhh.

Last year I introduced Jack to Star Wars. I'd even found and downloaded a de-specialized edition of the movie, the way it was before George Lucas screwed it all up. Eat your crackers, boy. We are doing this.

I try like hell not to inflict my childhood on my kids. I know it's not about me. But Star Wars is basic cultural competency stuff, and I expected that he'd like it.

What I didn't expect was that I'd get to be five years old again. But then he cheered. Then he needed me to hold him and reassure him that nobody was getting smooshed by the garbage smasher near the cell block (because let's face it, you need properly smashed garbage before you shoot it into space, and also a prison is where you'd put that, but only if you populate it with aquatic monsters). And then, when he literally jumped up and down and clapped and yelled AWE! SOME! when the Death Star exploded...

Well. There I was, in my jammies. There was no job to hate or money to worry about or ear hair to trim. For right around an hour, it was 1979 and the worst thing in the world was that Chewbacca didn't get a medal at the end because, I dunno, racism.

His selfless enthusiasm dragged me to the center, and there I found a weird kid with a big head in Mork suspenders. I'm learning such things are possible.

The other night Georgia and I were engaged in pre-bed snuggle time, which is our euphemism for five minutes of tickling and poop jokes. This round was mostly focused on her shoving her rear in my face again and again and shouting "Watch out for my butt!" (Jack would fart on my head later that same evening.) She stopped mid-whumph as if shocked to silence, froze for two seconds, and latched onto me as tightly as if I were one of those dads in Lifetime movies who go out for cigarettes and never come back.

I didn't dare move, of course. I just closed my eyes and we slipped into that dark place between the beats. Later she would reassure me that she is indeed my Pea Pod and forbid me to eat her hair. But for that interminable moment it was just fwee...hee-hahhh.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." But if you're in the moment, I don't know if you're capable of such a thought until it's gone and you're left with fresh nostalgia. Reflecting on the beat isn't dancing or running or pumping your legs higher and higher. It's getting tangled up in your stupid conscious brain, which I urge you to do as little of as possible.

Mine mostly grumbles about stuff, then dreams about other stuff and hopes there won't be too much work. Jennifer's tolerance of it is Herculean, as is her entirely metaphorical grace. For a woman who falls down and drops stuff as much as she does, Jennifer is a ballerina of a mother, every day enduring the pain of turning on her toes so that the show can continue.

She's the one who insisted on the custom superhero mask station and molding white chocolate stars for the birthday party. She invented the living room dance party. She videos the kids doing Tom Waits impressions. She toils. Gleefully, she toils. And she holds it all together. I wish she'd sleep more.

And that's pretty much where we are. Holding it together, trying to slough off the other crap and just listen for the next beat. It's hard to do, particularly this time of year when everything goes nutso until the new year, but still we look for it.

I hope you find yours. I hope you find the quiet, if only for a moment. That's where the deathless part of you abides.

Happy Holidays to all.

[Update: Two days ago I was running errands. It had been raining for hours. I drove by the park and there he was, soaked to the bone and kicking away. I was wrong, though. It's the second swing from the left.]

The Cost

Love a thing, carry a thing, that thing has power. I don't think talismans get much more complicated than that.

Got a couple recently. My parents came down to visit, which they only get to do once or twice a year. Brought magic stuff. Gifts. History.

First was this:

New workbench

New workbench

The top's made from a door my dad salvaged out of my grandmother's neighbor's house. Solid doors, if you do not know, make good workbench tops. The corners are square, the surfaces level and true. So he took that door, filled the voids in it, built a finished edge around it, added a tool tray and a vise, and made a replaceable work surface out of hardboard. Boom, new bench top.

My parents and I spent the weekend building the legs and shelf together. We made a hinged contraption that allows the bench to roll on wheels if you want to move it. We added adjustable feet to level the thing out. And then they went home, leaving this piece of themselves behind.

I love it almost too much to use it. Silly, I know, but I dread marking it up. Worst thing you can do with your tools is revere them.

Then there was this:

Pocket watch

Pocket watch

There was a woman named Molly McGee. Molly wasn't her real name, but everyone called her Molly and her husband Fibber. Molly took care of me during those times when my parents couldn't. She was an octogenarian babysitter, and she kept up.

I have only the faintest memories. Her helping me color. Playing hide-and-seek. In those last days, me begging her to come tuck me in at nap time and her telling me that no, I'm sorry, my legs (knees? feet?) just can't take that staircase.

It's curious how the love grows in inverse proportion to the memories, that she can loom so large in me despite my inability to conjure her face. I remember that goddamn staircase, though. How unfair it was that she couldn't come up to pull the blankets over me and kiss me. That part's Technicolor.

And so she died and so her watch came into my father's care and one day I mentioned wanting a pocket watch and he handed me hers and I just...stopped. And turned the thing over and over. The way you would a dinosaur bone or a moon rock.

He took pains to restore it. He wanted me to rely on it as I once relied on her. And now I have it, this small gold heartbeat in my pocket. And I get to take it out and wind it. And I get to think of her. That's a talisman. It keeps her alive. That's its power.

So it is with the workbench. I look at it and that thing that lives at the center of me shudders. It knows that one day I will no longer have a father. It knows that when that day comes I'll go out to the garage to grab my drill or pullsaw or a box of screws, and I'll see that bench. And I'll have to scrape myself off the floor.

That's the cost, though. Anyone who writes stories in which magic doesn't have a cost is a hack and a liar. Keeping my dad alive after he's dead will demand payment. As does time traveling to 1980 every time I reach into my pocket to see when I can go home. As did Molly's love.

As for the bench, I gotta mark that bastard up. It's not a tombstone. It's not an altar. It is a place for becoming. A place for the future, not the past. The future requires that you make a mess. That's its cost.

Alternate Name Could Be Skele-Dad O'Brian

Got my face did for Halloween. Wanted to be Dr. Manhattan, but I'm too muscley and I'm only allowed to have a blue dong on the high holidays. Part of the pre-nup.

That left a skullhead, which decision was timed pretty neatly with the release of Pretty Deadly. So, stroke of genius: I'm Ginny, by way of Rule 63. Call me...Jimmy? I guess?

Pretty sure I'm the only guy in my state who did this.

iphone-20131031202513-0.jpg
iphone-20131031202513-1.jpg

Freak Yo Mind, Yo Ass Will Follow

In the spirit of Halloween, I offer you this video of me getting freaked the eff out on a ghost-hunting trip at the abandoned Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanitorium. Courtesy of my friend David Koon.

(One note: This was filmed using infrared cameras and IR lights, so everything looks nice and bright. In reality, it was pitch black in there. You could hardly see anything.)