“What’s the deal with airplane peanuts?”~ Jerry Seinfeld

I’ve been alone, more or less, for five days, and I’m starting to talk to myself.

What’s left of my head is swirling with ideas for word-scratching, and I’ve been feeding on good, solid food (Peter Kreeft recordings, a book by G.K. Chesterton, a writing conference, an odd combination of Yo Yo Ma and Andrew Peterson music) and have had miles and miles to think long thoughts. But I don’t have it in me right now to write anything provoking or even decent. But my fingers need to move on the keyboard, and I just need to talk.

I missed a flight today. There was no real reason, really, other than I underestimated the time it would take for MARTA to make its way from Dunwoody to the airport. Hum de dum was my mode while I peered fascinated out the train window at neighborhoods I’d never visited. I was shocked when the ticketing agent said I couldn’t make the plane, not with the big old bag I’d brought to check.

“That has to go with you—for security reasons,” he said, each word carrying condemnation for my vanity. (I’ve never managed to fit my way-too-worldly goods into a carry-on.) Pleading looks and a soft voice got me nowhere. Blast. No, scratch that (I’m in an airport after all). Darn. Why couldn’t my embarrassingly large luggage and I meet up later? I thought today’s terrorists don’t care about getting blown up—why would they smuggle explosives into a suitcase for a flight they weren’t on?

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When I’m grown up and married I’m going to have two horses, a white one and a dappled grey, and three dogs and a garden with only pink flowers and maybe purple, and I’ll have three curly girls named Nora and Faye and Nellie and they’ll wear white, and I will too…

So go the ramblings of my thirteen-year-old daughters, the stuff of their dreams spilling out with the joy of beauty and the lives they hope to lead. Anyone who can remember thirteen knows this: they are dead serious.

I know I was. I was determined to live loveliness and poetry, and hang everyone else. What was this adult pragmatism, this worry over bills and mortgages and disease and all the rest? All that was spoken in Charlie Brown’s teacher-talk.

My girl-dreams were woven with books and old houses and walks in the woods and songs about love and magazine pictures and, I think, TV. There were the Bradys and then the Cosbys and Keatons with houses always tidy—all those kids didn’t even bring in backpacks from school and dump them on the floor. Their hair was forever brushed, and they were snappy dressers with no problems that 22 minutes couldn’t neatly solve.

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I’m out of the swing of things, having been buried in book-writing and now revising since February 1. But I knew I’d come back to the on-line journal. Are you still out there?

This weekend my heart is swollen with gratitude over one of God’s greatest gifts, that of friendship. Little moments have gotten me to thinking, two of them in particular.

First, our friend and neighbor (what a happy combination) popped in Saturday evening, dressed in a tuxedo and almost ready for a fancy party downtown. Bowtie in hand, he needed Luke’s help with tying it, despite a lesson the night before. Bowties are troublesome things. Luke found he had to stand behind our visitor to tie it, not having ever done so from the front. I was in the bedroom getting ready for our own night out—I wondered what all the hilarity from the front hall was about.

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 It’s Day 15 of The Challenge, and I’ve got 14,549 words down and miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep…

And so I bring you the shortest post to date.

Two things I hate:

blank screens and blinking cursors.

The end.

We do it every year.

It’s always there, the unspoken expectation that this Christmas will be bigger and shinier and sweeter than the one before.

By the end of the Christmas Day, when the shreds of paper and ribbon are picked up off the floor and we can’t possibly eat another morsel, if the topics of politics and religion have been successfully dodged and no one got sick and everyone is feeling fat and happy, we might look at each other in triumph and breathe, We did it. We had the best Christmas ever. Again.

But every Christmas has its cares. Sometimes the pain is acute, and we feel cheated. Other years we find we can’t conjure up feelings of good will toward men, not when we’re in line at Wal-mart, at least. There’s always somebody or something missing, even if we can’t put our finger on it. What do you think about when the church lights are dimmed and you’re holding the little candle you’ve been issued and you’re trying not to get wax on your Christmas Eve finest as you sing ‘Silent Night’? Why the lump in the throat?

After my grandfather died one December, I shared a hymnal with my Nana during service and heard her voice crack with fresh grief. A few years later, when she was gone too, my sad ‘Silent Night’ was for her. Or was it? Maybe it was relief, in some strange way, to have a reason to be melancholy. I’m not talking about being moved by the symbol of the Light in the darkness. I’m talking poor me, a sense that all is not right with the world at a moment when it should at least seem to be.

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These are the golden sessions—when our slippers are on, our feet spread out toward the blaze, and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world and something beyond the world opens itself to our minds as we talk… Life (natural life) has no better gift to give than friendship.~ C.S. Lewis

Yesterday I leapt before I looked and shared a little bit more of Helen—and thus my soul—than is my custom. I went against policy, shall we say.

I was suddenly inspired while slipping on my red suede shoes. There I was, getting dolled up for book club on a day when the roads were messy and school was closed. The phone in the kitchen kept ringing, but never did it cross my mind that our little gathering would be cancelled. I knew better—it would take much more than an ice storm to call off our monthly meeting, which has gone on despite kids with the flu, power outages, broken heaters and all kinds of weather extremes. I wasn’t even deviating from vulnerable footwear for the occasion. This reminded me of something in a book, my book.

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So serious am I about this business of keeping Christmas, I can’t help but count these December days’ little victories—and defeats.

I am determined not to huff and puff my way through this cherished season, but each year I end up spending at least a day or two doing just that. Sunday was the low. I woke up with a nasty cold, the second in just a few weeks. There was much to do to get ready for some friends coming to coffee on Tuesday, so I pressed on with preparations, telling myself I’d sit myself by the fire by three o’clock and rest. But afternoon turned into evening, and by dinnertime a meatloaf stood on the counter, a forbidding frozen block, and the mess of decking these halls with holly and cedar and pine was all over the floor, berries smashed into rugs and all. Weary in body and spirit, I treated myself to a tantrum of tears, which The Spouse had the misfortune to witness. The good man brought me Kleenex and babysat the slowly baking meatloaf for an hour and a half and made it all better.

My friend and Christmas comrade, L., has a prince of a husband, too. This year, he has coined a term at his house: the Battle for Christmas.

It’s a battle indeed. I don’t want to be Martha every minute of each day (neither the busy one in the Bible nor Ms. Stewart). I want to sit at His feet.

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“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.” ~ Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark (sent to me by L, who also said ”Let it commence, dearest!”)

So much was this day deliciously anticipated, I had a nightmare about all the ways it could go wrong. My dear friend and Christmas comrade, L, was making an hour-long drive in the rain for our annual Advent breakfast.

I scampered around in my housecoat early this morning, setting a fireside table for two. Every time the phone rang I cringed: what if she can’t come? I laid the silverware and sensed something moving outside the window—an enormous buck was reigning over the yard, looking stately and perfectly in place in the heavy fog. It was a sign: all is well.

True, we were missing one, a friend who will be keeping Christmas in a little village in England this year. We blew kisses eastward and forged bravely ahead with our four-hour tet-a-tet.

It didn’t take long for us to get to the matter at hand: how will we savor this cherished season? How will we let the holiness and pathos and beauty and mystery of it wash over us without undoing it all by our tendencies to overdo?

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This Veteran’s Day, Maggie, a seventh-grader, wrote a poem in honor of our soldiers.

Freedom’s Challenge

A long drive to the airport,
A kiss and a goodbye.
Silent tears roll down
as he steps onto the plane.

The next day he is surrounded by bodies,
Some alive, others dead.
Bombs explode and bullets whiz by.
These men and women
have given up their ways of life and families.

They carry the weight of freedom
across their backs.
They trudge along with guns—
and little hope.

However, a glimmer of light reaches their dark
atmosphere when a letter arrives from home.
The soldiers write back if possible to their loved ones,
but will they be home for Christmas?

The days are long, hot and reckless,
Some nights are, too.
Soldiers are falling to the ground.
And still the war rages.

And then, once it is finally done,
Some are injured, some are missing, others dead.
The ones that appear unhurt often are,
In the head and heart from the battle.

When the soldiers come back home they receive medals,
But do they get our gratitude or the title ‘hero’?
So today let’s thank them—for fighting for freedom.

Across the street a little distance through the woods from us, a neighbor’s house burned to the ground yesterday.

I went to get the mail at five o’clock and was surprised to find a dozen parked cars outside our house and a news helicopter overhead. I spotted a neighbor who said there was a fire and no one was hurt and didn’t I hear all the sirens?

Well, no, I was busy sending still more query letters to literary agents while Sadie watched Elmo. I was wrapped up in my world and hadn’t noticed what was unfolding right outside the windows.

An hour later, Sadie, The Spouse and I tromped through the woods to a friend’s house who lives closer to the terrible scene. Sadie was delighted with the sound of the helicopter and the flashing lights of what seemed like every emergency vehicle in Milton. I was feeling guilty for enjoying stretching my legs and breathing the crisp fall air.

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