merry giftsmas and happy chanustuff

It’s 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. The sky is still dark, and my dogs are snoring at my feet. My husband and daughter are away until afternoon. The last sip of the coffee I made at 5:45 is still hot in my lidded Thermos mug. The tree is twinkling, and the crows are barking hello to me as they fly over the house.

The room where I write is full of stuff—books, wrapped presents, framed photographs, guitars, a collection of cake plates, crow-themed items. The eight leather chairs are new.

Every year, without fail, I amass new stuff (alas, without purging much of the old). Because we’re not in hock, with credit card debt and a mortgage that’s higher than our home’s value, we can usually take care of the little emergencies—and even some luxuries, like a concierge doctor or a guitar.

For the last few years, I had a tough time getting jingly wit’ Christmas. Sure, I’m always up for eggnog and cookies, a couple of favorite holiday songs, festive lights (the gaudier the better). But the frantic buying of stuff has bugged me.

I guess that’s ironic, given that I am a material girl.

The other day, a friend was torn about lamenting. Her favorite ornament—a one-of-a-kind, personalized item given to her by her sister—had broken, and she wondered how to come to terms with the loss when she generally takes a Buddhist approach to attachments.

Well, cross that religion off my list! I love things! I mean, I love things.

Lording over the living room is a taxidermy crow. On the sofa is a crow hand puppet so soft and fluffy that I put my hand inside it regularly. On Halloween, I gave it a clown nose, and it cheers me. On the bookshelf, I have a glass vase filled with hundreds of paper cranes. Those cake plates? I have seven of them.

Some of the things I have can be replaced, but so much of what I love most is a reminder of whom I love most: my thoughtful husband and daughter, who brought me a frozen crow in the dead of winter; my sister, who always gives the best gifts and helps to talk me down from the ledge; Grace, a young artist, who is already a star in my book but who is destined for others’ books; friends who helped me celebrate the release of my own book.

The woman who’d lost her ornament quoted someone named Peter Walsh. “The memento is not the memory,” she reminded me. True! But for me—menopausal, forgetful, busy, over-stimulated—that memento is the trigger for that memory. It reminds me to think of those people and their goodness every day, not just when they pop randomly into my head.

For the past few years, I’ve been a Christmas curmudgeon. This year, though, I’ve made some new material attachments. And to temper all this getting—paintings, earrings, magnets that say “Fuck” and “Shit”—I gave. I supported half a dozen Kickstarters. I donated to public radio and poetry and Wikipedia! Now they are my things, too.

I still hate that stuff-buying is a holiday. I want giving and receiving to be more special than that. People should display their affection with material items when they come across something that is you, something that would always remind you of their love, like the way they share a link on your Facebook wall. It shouldn’t be dictated by the calendar. Or maybe it should be on your own birthday, rather than someone else's.

How do you fight that, especially when you have children, even though that's when it seems most important to try?

The Christmas card I made for the year (yes, it’s a Christmas card; Rudolph is on the front) says, “May your joys outnumber your toys.” I do mean it. And if your toys bring you joy, too—well, you do the math.

Steven Wright said, “You can’t have everything; where would you put it?” He’s right, of course. But I still have some room.


* * * *

I miss you, Mark Harp. This will forever be your day.

RIP, Cleopatra.

verklempt

photo by Steven Parke


My daughter became a bat mitzvah a little over a week ago, and I can't find the words to describe how I feel about it: about our weekly meetings with the rabbi, about our growth individually and as a family, about our incredible daughter (who tie-dyed her own tallit and braided its fringes and who still managed to pull straight As despite adding Hebrew lessons and rabbi visits to her busy music schedule and her creature maintenance), and about the party my mother threw to celebrate this simcha with mishpucha.

I'm not sure why all my revelations emerge as sentimentality rather than wisdom, as cliché rather than poetry. I seem to be mourning. Our Wednesdays with the rabbi were some of the most sacred and treasured hours I've had in years, and putting together 120 hand-made programs kept me focused on something other than my ailments and my dying dog and my lack of employment. When it's all over, I find my bullies have been quietly building up arms and ammo against me. I am perched between kvelling and yelling, and my reflexes are sharp, despite my physical decrepitude.

I have nothing but this poem I stumbled through, verklempt, the Sunday my daughter became responsible for her own goodness, her godliness.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

rock mitzvah
(for Serena, with a nod to Frank O'Hara)

it was a quick trade: umbilical for patch cord
my baby for bay-beh bay-beh bay-beh.
thirteen meticulous whirls past the sun
and she knows her way around a fret pattern
even before she’s fingering the tallit’s fringe.
the years are but a filmy dream that wakes up amid
ancient tongue (we have nothing if not endurance)
tremulous melody, pomp, and splendor
when all I’ve done to date is sigh. bark. write.
she must have flown here on the Puca’s back
reckless brown tresses whipping in wind
alighting at the bimah like a new angel.

I don’t see the crumbs of morning toast
on nervous lips she bit to crimson
don’t hear a skip in her smooth recitations.
so do I mourn this loss of little girl
or squash the selfish pangs and celebrate—
with a very real laughter she’d be proud of—
the way she wears her prayer shawl like wings?

amplitude

I would rather spend my life close to the birds than wishing I had wings.”

~House, episode 1, season 5, “Dying Changes Everything.”

While 2009 was preparing to be shoved out the back door by people with more energy, my husband and I were asleep. We didn’t watch it go. I awoke at a few seconds after midnight to the sounds of applause and thought: 2010 must be lookin’ good. Then I smiled and fell back to sleep. In the morning, my favorite sound woke me: crow rush hour.

I will not miss the old year, despite all the good it brought: the helpful friends, The Book, all the music—in clubs and at home. And I have no regrets about the time I spent wallowing, mired in misery, even beyond the worst of the pain; I needed it then. But I don’t want to forget it because I don’t want to repeat it.

So how do you change your penchant for negativity when life seems to knock you down? Why do some people get right back up again and others sit in a weeping heap first, sometimes for ages? I know which of these people I want to be, and I know who I am; they are different.

Don’t you find yourself wishing you could snap your fingers and snap out of it—your mood, your depression, your funk, your anxiety—even if it has roots in reason, like catching the flu or waking up to four slashed tires? Don’t you wish you could glide through it, that the wrinkle in your day doesn’t become a tear in your fabric? That you could just turn the dial on your brain and adjust your attitude, like you would a guitar amp, to get the mindset you want, so that all the stuff that goes in through that cool yellow patch cord connecting your ears to your mind gets processed and comes out with some ethereal reverb and some happy country twang? Sweet Peavey Alchemy!

You know me. I’m not one for bullshit or all that new-age hooey. (I still cringe at my shiatsu guy’s choice of music; while I’m getting painfully pulled and poked, it sounds like a Chinese restaurant. Just put on The Prodigy, I tell him; that’s what my body hears.) I don’t need any cross-stitch philosophy or self-help books or letters from the universe telling me how great I am. But it never hurts to remind yourself that thoughts become things. It’s those messages from water all over again.

Years ago, when I was suffering from insomnia, my therapist taught me an interesting trick. He said that we sometimes have bad dreams, but we can control their outcomes. Even with a subliminal knowledge that anything is possible in a dream, we can escape from whatever is chasing us.

I bet we can learn to do that a little while we’re awake, too. You don’t have to go around telling your glass of water that it’s beautiful before you drink it, but you do have to drink it. A lot of it. So depression is chemical; does that mean your only treatment ought to be chemical? It’s situational, too. It’s environmental. It’s medical. It’s not only that you’re born with or develop a deficiency in serotonin or norepinephrine or dopamine; it’s that the deficiency keeps you from getting the other things that make your brain healthy: good food, exercise, positive thoughts. If you don’t want to be around yourself, who is going to want to be around you?

An acquaintance sent me an email the other day. “We are now living in the future … hope to see you in it soon.” When he does, I am going to be smiling, if for no other reason than because it's what I’ve decided to do.

“Leslie F. Miller will write more, shoot more, sing more, play more, move more, smile more, do more, be more. And she'll whine less, bitch less, and eat less. The cussing's gonna stay the same. I can't fucking change everything.”

~facebook status message, 01/01/10