I Listened to Vinyl as I Wrote My Cards

I walked somewhere yesterday.

A mere week before Christmas and I walked rather than drove somewhere I needed to go, the countdown of holiday deadlines notwithstanding.

There is a post office a fifteen-minute walk from my new apartment, and around 9:30 on Saturday morning I set out on foot with the twelve Christmas cards I had written and stamped Friday evening. I had been playing Nat King Cole on vinyl as I wrote them.

I have never actually walked to this post office before; there is always on-street parking nearby and I usually tack on post-office visits to other errands with the car. I looked at the keys on the kitchen table as I put on my jacket and cap. I recalled a colleague’s exasperation midday Friday recounting the traffic frenzy she had encountered on her lunch break. I opted to avoid the possibility of frenzy.

I took what started out as an errand and made it work for me as a journey that I wanted. No one else was walking my street, and that solitary status let my imagination play a bit. The suburban neighbors along whose quiet sidewalks I made my way Saturday morning were already out, I presumed.

It was good to feel the cold air and know that house after house, I was passing story after story of people who did not need to think important any of the things that were preoccupying me – this year still again – a week before December 25.

What was the story behind that second-floor window, for example?

And then I stopped.

Could the story be any more unpredictable than the one that I have lived the past eight months behind my own second-floor windows several houses back – the story, in fact, that I was telling in the twelve cards in my hands?

Will twelve people behind their own windows in various parts of the country later this week read with the curiosity and intentness that I strove to inspire as I sat at my writing Friday evening?


And the people whose cards I addressed upon my return – will they sense the sun of my easy Saturday afternoon?

In Search of New England Holiday Reading

Sea gulls and a lobster roll in the middle of December.

I’d prefer a novel with these elements but – to be honest – I’ll settle for a cable movie. And I’d prefer an older novel off a library shelf but I’ll settle for a paperback from an aisle in a giant food store.

I know the flavor of the narrative to which I am ready to respond in these weeks approaching Christmas. Somewhere other than poetry and scripture and homily reflections, I am willing to be gently tricked into reflection. With the aid of character and plot and setting, I can ease myself into a consideration of life’s changes and time’s passing and unexpected disappointment and nagging hope.

Let the reader of the first page follow a car through late afternoon village roads.

Let the camera pan and tilt up to a background of gray waves off a New England coast.

There should be a simple house on a side street, a family home. The headlights of the car briefly illuminate a realtor’s sign in the front yard, and then they go dark. Sound cues: the click of a key in the front door, the cry of sea gulls suddenly muffled as the door is pulled closed.

A man in his forties stands alone in a hallway. He lifts his face and catches the familiar smells that intrude on him from the darkened rooms. At the moment he turns on a floor lamp, you see him from afar, paper bag in hand, framed by a kitchen doorway.

Do you know where the story is going? Can’t you almost tell?

Maybe this novel, this film won’t use flashback – visual or auditory – although that would be an easy way to suggest what used to be the life of this home, a Christmas in this family, the feel of growing up as a tow-headed boy of eight. Maybe you won’t see or hear anything about the funeral of this man’s father within the past year.

I prefer to catch our hero at chapter’s end seated at the kitchen table, half-finished lobster roll in a nest of crumpled deli paper, when the door bell chimes. Or the text message arrives. Or the wall phone rings.

I want to think I know what he would say next.

I want to think there are holiday messages I know almost by heart.

Staying Green

Will I learn anything from the people who took these pictures of Christmas trees long years ago?

What must have seemed crisp magic to them proved elusive.

I think I know why people take pictures of their Christmas trees, and I think I understand why such photographs disappoint. Without the equipment or expertise of magazine and catalog photographers, some trees look a muddle in the picture on which you or I click. Our trees with their lights and ornaments appear the earnest efforts that they are when they promised instead to be something mystical.

The truth is, I fear, that photos of Christmas trees rarely appeal to anyone other than those who decorated them.

I salute – somewhat wistfully – these three photographers and the earnest hopes at the heart of their Christmases.

I am safe for a few more days from the temptation to preserve a memory of any tree this year.

Might Christmas trees stay best and greenest forgotten?

Greening of the Home

The Courage to Shake and the Courage to Be Still

Who needs Christmas?

Who needs the ruthless lesson of darkening days, winter tides, stone surfaces cold to the touch, winds moving through bare branches?

I surprised myself this past Sunday morning thinking about Christmas, and I surprised myself thinking about it at the Cape Cod National Seashore. I leaned against the weathered fences and railings beyond which, signs warned me, loomed the danger of sliding cliffs. I watched what the wind did even that sunny morning to the low undergrowth covering the cliffs. I thought of the nights ahead when the shivering of the undergrowth would not lessen or stop.

No one would call it courage to shake when there is no alternative, no defense, no energy or even way to stop.

No one would call it courage to shake unless nature had long ago decreed this capacity as vocation – unless nature had decreed it as identity.

Ten years ago I visited a Romanesque abbey church in the Loire valley. In the remote village of St-Benoît-sur-Loire in the 1930s, French poet Max Jacob had made his home in the shadow of Abbaye Fleury. In flight from a Montmartre that no longer sustained his hopes for authentic identity, Max Jacob had taken quiet refuge near the ancient abbey even though there was no monastic community in residence there.

I remember standing outside the church ten years ago and staring up at the rough-hewn capitals topping the twelve columns in the church porch. In my mind’s eye I pictured the same stone columns in late December, icy in the early darkness of the afternoon before Christmas, festooned with wreaths of evergreen. It seemed that something about Christmas would be comprehensible only in that remote winter stillness of stone.

No one would call it courage to be so still unless nature had long ago decreed that capacity as vocation – unless nature had decreed that patient stillness as identity.

In a shop attached to the rebuilt monastery guesthouse, I purchased a greeting card. Into the white card stock had been embossed an impression of one of the Romanesque capitals in the church porch. The scene comes from the Gospel story of the Flight into Egypt. I had the image framed when I returned home to New England.

It is in my new home – a place to be still with the slow approach of Christmas, a place to shake as well at times with the danger of sliding cliffs. No Christmas worth the name will come if I consider myself exempt from either vocation.

A Month of Birthday Treats

The modest but loyal Provincetown Bookshop carries a ready supply of signed works by hometown poet Mary Oliver.

One of my treats to myself this birthday month was a trip to the Cape to purchase Swan, Mary Oliver’s latest volume of poems. I knew last May to expect the book in September; Amazon had offered to let me pre-order it. I determined that I would wait.


I got to the Provincetown bookstore Saturday afternoon within a half hour of its four o’clock closing. If I had splurged on an overnight stay at one of the local inns, I might have taken my new purchase there and begun my reading by a window in the common room. Instead of an armchair, I found a nearby restaurant overlooking the bay and perched on a stool at their bar, ordered a half dozen Wellfleet oysters with a martini, and began reading.

It was not a crowded place in late afternoon on a Saturday. It was not noisy. It was not likely that anyone would elbow too close to a man with a book of poetry open on the bar. And I refused to hurry the pleasures before me.

An hour later, however, I felt reluctant to order a second martini with the evening’s drive back to my niece’s house in Eastham before me. I paid my bill, returned my new book to its bag, and headed down Commercial Street.

It was darker than when I had first arrived, and only a few shop windows were lit. I walked almost alone down the street, in a direction no one else appeared headed, and that seemed just fine.

The next morning I took the Mary Oliver volume with me on my morning drive to get coffee. Within an hour of waking, I was sitting in my car overlooking the Cape Cod National Seashore with coffee and poems in hand. The wind coming off the water shook the car from time to time, but I cracked my window open. The cry of gulls was loud, and the moment was perfect.

I did not need to be anywhere or anyone else. There was nowhere to hurry to, nothing to hurry from.

Experience tells me that the only thing that can deepen a satisfaction like that is to hear someone ask at that very moment, “What are you thinking now, John?”

Experience tells me it can happen.

Saving Daylight

All Souls Day 2010

“I am sorry. It actually seems to be a problem with the hard drive.”

I knew to sit quietly. I took in the information with a look of courage to match the sympathy in the eyes of my colleague from IT. She had broken the news like an exhausted surgeon.

I closed my laptop and put it aside, opening my conference binder on the table in front of me. I had taken the laptop to New York last week for a workshop my supervisor had been sure a number of colleagues would enjoy. A laptop was not essential to that enjoyment. Toting the laptop on the subway had been a bother; I could leave it in my hotel room the next day.

I knew that nothing irreplaceable had been lost or jeopardized. I knew that with a practical, no-nonsense assurance.

Two mornings later, my inert laptop packed away, I was ready for the four-hour trek home to New England. I decided to take advantage of the early hour and walk over to Fifth Avenue and St Patrick’s Cathedral for a moment of quiet and reflection. I took a seat in one of the pews off the far aisle where the fewest visitors were strolling with guide books.


I claim no special devotion to Our Lady of Czestochowa but my pew was across from the side altar with her traditional image. My gaze wandered to the lofty ceilings and arches of the cathedral. I let myself imagine all the people who had sat here in other times, with God knows what cares and hopes, with what hard news or unexpected possibilities. I began to understand this (or any) church as a place people go when their personal hard drive goes – or threatens to go – or seems not at all the familiar, dependable thing on which they were counting for the life they wanted.

What wild, mysterious hope is needed then!

Serious Buds

I try not to stare.

It is early to exercise the imagination about these small cactus buds. Enough that they are already there, apparent for the first time just recently when I was attending to something else.

I know what these flowers will look like when the weeks ahead are over. I recall the process of daily irresistible burgeoning into silly flounces of color. When the blossoms flair and fly up, I will be hard pressed to understand what could have gotten me writing today about these seriously round buds.




Maybe I am getting better at letting the present be, lowly and gently promising. Maybe I know that the aftermath of any blossoming will require an adjustment of perspective, a heart permission for the universe to do its customary and cyclical fading.

There will surely be distractions to make the smudging of that beauty and that intense color hurt less.

Maybe buds of another sort, soft white sift across a January window, early movement in the air that sets explorers' thoughts racing.

Simple Monday

An eight-month-old sat on my lap last night. He watched his mother and his father on their chairs across my dining room table, heard their voices speak his name and mine, raised his hands and touched his hair.

It wasn’t clear how long he would let someone hold him when beyond the plates and glasses of our simple Monday meal my niece and her husband were within sight but out of reach. Their attention stayed focused on Paul as they cooed their approval at his ease in a stranger’s arms.

Could I manage it? Could I maintain a comfortable position for him and distract him with bounces and sway him to left and to right and back again and feel him willing to be held?

And suddenly he looked up and saw my face.

And I looked down and instinctively rubbed my beard against his forehead. Gently I joined my coo to the easy movement of my chin against his small head.

And then we started – now touching, now not, now touching, now not. A playful rhythm that made a stranger less a stranger to Paul.

A baby in my arms, an infant in my home, a grandnephew joining the memories that will collect around this quiet table.