Family Christmas in San Antonio

At the airport--meeting the Learys arriving from Virginia

Kissing the Penguin at Market Square with Jackson and Marcus

Market Square: December 28th, 2013


And now, here I am in Georgia, at Carlene's house, having flown here yesterday.  We're heading into the mountains of North Georgia this afternoon to see the new year's arrival.  Happy New Year, Everyone!

No, Virginia, Not really....

Remember that letter that got passed around everywhere when we were kids?

An 8-year-old girl wrote a letter in 1897 to the editor of The New York Sun newspaper.  "Is there a Santa Claus?  Papa said to write to you and you'd tell me the truth."

But he doesn't.   He says, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus...."  Without Santa, the world, he said, would be a "very dreary place."  Without Santa Claus, there would be no childlike faith, no poetry, he claims. ("Why you might as well not believe in fairies!")

As one who does not believe in fairies, I think that when a child is old enough to ask, it's time to tell the truth--that her presents came, after all, from the people who love her, not from a man in a red suit and beard.  So "childlike faith" takes a hit.  Is it not worth it if she knows--along with the winking adults who know--that there's no man watching her every move and tallying up her naughties and nices?

Since I stopped believing, the world has not been dreary--quite the contrary.   Mr. Editor cautions Virginia not to listen to the skeptics.  Our teachers reinforced that when they kept reading Mr. Editor's letter to us long after we knew the source of Christmas-morning gifts. What if, instead, they had encouraged us to give credit where credit is due, to our parents?  What if they had acknowledged that not all children were so fortunate, that those who didn't receive dolls and trains and cowboy suits from Santa were not naughty?

Do we really need an imaginary benefactor to give us "childlike faith"? Isn't the mystery of life enough its own self, not to mention the good fortune of having parents and grandparents and friends whose gifts add to our happiness?

Janet and I on the Riverwalk

Sometimes we take for granted what a beautiful city San Antonio is!

Janet and I enjoyed Boudrou's tonight--delicious seafood and chunky guacamole--then walked down the River Walk and asked a stranger to take our picture.

While we wished that the city had never swapped out the incandescent lights for LED lights, there's still a real magic to the sparkly lights at Christmas.

What a fun night this was!  Janet always asks good questions.  She asked tonight: "What was the best thing that happened to you this year?  What was the hardest?"

What were yours?

Nellie's Bird

Artist and Friend, Nellie Brannan, sent this Christmas card in the mail--a handmade, hand-painted Nellie-Bird!  

I'm framing it!

Going All The Way

After making sporadic stabs at food celibacy, I went all the way tonight.  I drove, solo, to Cappy's-- my favorite restaurant in San Antonio--and didn't hold back.

While I love dining out with other people, tonight I just wanted to just sit in that candlelit room, phone off, and savor the flavors of crab cake, field green salad with pecans and Gorgonzola and a creamy dressing.  And a basket of my favorite bread, full of gluten and smeared with soft butter.  But I didn't stop there. I had creme brulle with raspberries and another glass of iced tea, caffeine and limes included free of charge.

Sometimes you just have to go for pleasure--and Cappy's, alone or with others, is a place of palette pleasure.

I'm a lot happier indulging in forbidden pleasures than following rules.  Coming home from Cappy's and having a smoke, American Spirit Menthol Light, is a smorgasbord of pleasure.  I heard someone on my trial Sirius Radio saying: "We need to accept ourselves for who we are--even ourselves when we had a hell of a good time doing something we had no business doing." I'd drink to that--if I drank.

Yesterday Sandy and I--in her  colorful downtown apartment--watched six episodes of Masters of Sex on her Showtime channel.  It tells the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, sex researchers in the Sixties, the decade in which Sandy and I came of age.  What fascinated us both were the attitudes toward sex and marriage in the era that grew us up: we didn't even talk about sex with the people we were having it with, for one thing.

The only words I ever heard spoken about sex, per se, were words from my groom's uncle at our wedding:  "If you put a penny in the jar every time you do it your first year, then take a penny out every time you do it from then on, you'll never empty the jar."  Like all curious girls of the mid-Sixties, I found out about "it" from books and movies, and in college we all passed around Masters and Johnson's book in the dorm.

"Going all the way" was our Sixties euphemism for sex.  Only after promising "til death do us part" could we know if the plum was worth the decades we were signing up for.

Thinking that sex was "going all the way" (with so far yet to go that we'd not even imagined) was a bit like claiming that the candied pecans on the salad made the whole meal at Cappy's.  They were great candied pecans, worthy of praise.

But still, I'm glad I didn't have to sign up for a lifetime of meals at any restaurant based on a handful of nuts.

If you've ever been to a garage sale, you've seen tables filled with unwanted gifts; battery-operated thingies still in their original wrappers, scented candles in jars with lids  stored in garages for so long that the wax is gooey, blank journals still blank.

If you've ever had a garage sale of your own, you know that there's always a twinge of bad feeling, letting go of something someone bought for you once upon a time, a thing that doesn't go with your decor or doesn't fit.

And yet, someone usually chooses it.  I have chosen such things from tables in neighbors' yards, and taken them home as treasures.  It's a good way to recycle, after all, selling what we no longer want or need for pennies on the original dollar.

There's a certain poetry to garage sales:  tables  with odd objects and books, unused workout tapes and machines,  baby clothes, toys, crutches and silverware.  Looking through someone else's stuff tells a  story of the life of the sellers. When I walk through yards and garages, and even more so in estate sales after the dweller has died, I feel like I'm peeping into the most personal spaces of a life.  It feels somehow too private, yet I can't help myself.

I read the words written in crumbling high school yearbooks and look at the smiling faces on the pages, knowing  that few of those athletes and scholars and musicians are even alive anymore.  I see the yarn never knitted, the antique Christmas wrapping paper and ornaments, the postcards from Disneyland, the dusty toppers on long-gone wedding cakes, and my mind weaves stories.

Antique dealers are usually the first to arrive, having an eye for potential re-sale value of things.  Then the neighbors come, then the bargain-hunters who wait for the late afternoon mark-downs.  By the end of the day, the festive tables of stuff are emptied, and their contents now in the homes of other people.  If anything remains, it goes to the curb.

The three-gifts-from-home activity we did in salon on Wednesday night (that I wrote about earlier) made me think a great deal about the meaning of gifts.  Take any one thing, however disliked, and wrap it up and put a bow on it, and it has a whole different meaning than it may have had in its first or second or third incarnation.  Pass it around and everyone looks at it in a new light--because now it's not just a thing, it's a present, one-of-a-kind.

While it may have once been just one more of a whole rack of similar models, lost in the crowd of merchandise, now it's all alone, unique, and worthy of a second look.  Often, it's dated.  Sometimes, it's faded.  Parts of it may be missing.  But it now has its fifteen seconds of fame, shining in a new way, a thing with potential.  At the very least, it's a memory jogger.

Think: fondue pot.
In the sixties they were all the rage.  You had to have a fondue pot with all those skinny little forks of different colors.  And yet--I can recall only one time when a hostess actually used the fondue pot for a party and we all sat around dipping chunks of bread in a strong-flavored cheese warm in the blue pot. How many times have I reached for a fondue pot at a garage sale or thrift shop, thinking: maybe I'd actually do it, then remember how messy and slow it is to fondue?  "It's fun to fondue with you" was the phrase that sold all those now-discarded pots, some still in their original boxes.

At salon, someone opened a gift that was an odd-shaped wooden bowl--not exactly ugly, but not the kind of bowl most of us would choose to buy today.  It looked like a 1970s  wedding present.  I loved what she said when she opened it: "This bowl is not me now, but it's the me I was about fifteen years ago."

I was tempted once to buy a set of the dishes I had once upon a time had.  They were on the gift registry of my wedding: a set called Vineyard, with yellow and blue and green grapes around the border of every plate and cup and sugar bowl.  These plates are not at all my taste any more, but once upon a time they were.  I decided against them.  I decided that I could live happily ever afterward without them.  Once upon a time is too long ago to try to revive.

A sparrow and a parrot, two deer, a big dog and a squirrel

Yesterday Will invited me to meet him and Elena for lunch.  We went to Sarika's on Huebner Road for delicious Thai food.

The owner's husband was the manager.  He came over to our table to talk and the talk soon turned to animals.  Turns out this man has a sparrow and a parrot as pets!

He has trained the sparrow! and the parrot--so that they fly freely and return home to him, sleep on his pillow, and go with him to take the trash to the curb on a red wagon.  I wouldn't have believed it but he showed us a notebook filled with pictures of him and all his pets.

The birds were shown perched on the back of his great big dog--as the man was feeding deer out of his hands.  On top of the trash bags in the red wagon perched a sparrow beside a beautiful exotic parrot.  And in the middle of all that was a squirrel sitting peacefully beside his large dog.  I've never seen anything like it!

If you ever get a yen for Thai food, and if you want to try the delicious curry at Sarika's, be sure to ask the owner to show you his pet pictures.  It's incredible.

GIving and Receiving Gifts

I am a member of a conversation salon, led by someone who has a real talent for engaging conversations in unique ways.

We meet once a month, not knowing until we arrive what we'll be talking about.  Tonight, we were asked to bring three wrapped gifts, but we weren't told ahead of time what we'd be doing with them. The stipulation was that we weren't allowed to buy anything; we were to choose something from our houses.

First, we talked about gifts and the five love languages: Did we prefer touching, material gifts, words, service, or quality time?  And what kind of messages did we get from our family of origin about gifts?  

Then, we each picked our first gift from under a sparkling white tree.  One by one, we opened our gifts, just as you'd do at a Christmas party.  My gift was a goddess statue. Through the package it felt like a corkscrew, just the right size and hardness.  Others got socks, perfume, jewelry, tea pots….

Then, we picked our second gift and were told to respond honestly.  This turned out to be hilarious!  If you didn't like the gift or if you couldn't imagine what you'd do with it, that's exactly what you said. (While strangely liberating, this round made me a bit nervous--touching on the universal fear that what we give or receive won't be acceptable.) 

Then, we were given a guide to responding to gifts: talk about all the things you like about it (and sometimes, for some, that was a stretch); talk about how you'd use or enjoy it; showcase it or pass it around, etc.  Some could genuinely say they liked Gift #3--but even if you didn't love it, you had to respond with enthusiastic gratitude.  

Some of the gifts were keepers; some were not.  But the process of giving and opening and responding was hilarious, breaking through the conventions of traditional gift giving.  For me, the real gift was the laughter of it all! 

On the first round, we noticed that we all picked the prettier packages, the ones wrapped with bows. Un-bowed packages and bags were the last to be chosen.  From that, we concluded that there's something special about knowing that the person took the time to think about presentation of the gift.

In the end, if we'd gotten something we didn't really want, we put it on a bench and anyone who wanted it could take it.

If you're looking for a way to enliven the Christmas traditions, I highly recommend this.

I'm thinking now of the gifts I want to give my grandchildren.  Do I go with the money option--since at a certain age most kids prefer to have money to choose what they want?  Do I give them things from my house?  Do I give them handcrafted special things or books that I love? 

Whatever I decide, I'm going to put it in a box and wrap it with pretty paper and put a bow on it--that's all I know right now.  Even socks are rather special if wrapped in shiny paper with a big sparkly bow on it. 

Curiosity and Asking Questions

Christmas was coming, and I thought I might knit a sweater for my boyfriend.  I'd never knitted a sweater before (and haven't attempted one since)  but I'd seen directions for one in Seventeen or somewhere--and such an enterprise was touted as an excellent one for a girl to endeavor for the man she loved.

"My favorite color is blue," I said.  "What's yours?"

"That's a ridiculous question," he responded.  "Do you like blue food?"

Point taken.  No, I didn't (and still don't) like blue food.  I actually couldn't think of any food that came in blue.

But the takeaway was that I--a mere high school girl talking to a graduate student, a supposed expert in art--was no good at asking questions.  We dropped the subject, then I proceeded to knit him a sweater, red I think.

The sweater turned out large enough for a giant and I never gave it to him, but I did marry him shortly thereafter, believing for many years that I had married a genius and that in time I'd be worthy of such a brilliant man.  If.  If I got a college education.  If I kept my stupid questions to myself.  If, if, if….

Our conversations continued along this pattern for years, and I was the eternal acolyte.  Until.  Until I went to graduate school and partook of my own question-asking outside the house.

"You ask great questions," a professor told me one day. At long last, I regained my passion for asking questions, little and big, smart and otherwise.  Curiosity, I think, is a motivator for the kind of travel you can do anywhere.

Staying in the moment

Remember when we were young and we walked through antique shops admiring the patina and beauty of old things?  The older a thing, the more soulful and beautiful.

For the past few years, I've begun to wonder what it means to be old.  I'm not ready to call myself old, just noticing that it's creeping up a bit.

Remember when we were young and heard that Beatles song: "Will you still love me/When I'm sixty four?" and  we smiled to ourselves, thinking probably "Sixty four is so far away I can't even project my imagination out that far."

Having recently passed that iconic Number Sixty Four, and being referred to at the chiropractor's office as a "Medicare patient," I can hardly believe that I'm here already.

Mimi, my grandmother, who lived a healthy life until she was 96 and who called herself "middle aged" in her eighties, never considered herself old. Neither does her daughter, Carlene, my mother.  When Carlene left Texas, she went home and made herself a "flouncy" skirt and texted me today on her iPad that she felt "prissy" in it when she dressed for church.  I'm lucky to have come from a lineage of women like Mildred and Carlene--and I hope to follow their lead!

But still:

Some doctors and their receptionists call me "Sweetheart" and "Sweetie."  Nobody called me that when I was forty, even fifty.  What's up with that?

Some clerks at the drive-through windows speak a bit too loud--as if I (ordering the senior drink) am hearing-impaired.

Some of the things that fascinated me at fifty no longer do--especially things in stores.

Some days there are aches and pains (my own and those reported by friends) that seem to have come out of nowhere, and descended into our bones and joints, unwelcome guests.

And I can't read the small print--even with glasses--on much of anything!

Hardly a day passes that I don't notice age.  I am amazed by those who seem to have kept it at bay; I am sad that some among us have left already, and I'm hoping for the courage to accept my own aging with something akin to grace.

Hardly a day passes that I don't catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and feel astonished: That's me?

Being old (or close to old) still feels new to me.  I remember how being a teenager once felt new--how self-consciously I walked about in my new blooming body.  I remember how being pregnant felt new at first, then began to feel natural, then was over.  There wasn't one single day when everything changed--just a cluster of days when I was aware of being in a new body and had to figure out how to move it along on the unfamiliar road without falling all over myself.

The mounds of leaves in my yard are slippery; I walk gingerly over them to avoid "falling and breaking my neck"--as my daddy used to say.  A jar is hard to open, and I ask a stranger to please open it for me.  I can't squat all the way the way I could for the first fifty years without even thinking about it.

But I'm not complaining; I'm staying right here, for as long as I can, doing all the things I love to do.
My teachers are Mimi and Nana.

And Elena, too.
At almost two, she has it all figured out.

After a full hour in the tub at my house, after pouring hundreds of cups of "tea" from the tea pot to the cups in her new tea set, she was totally absorbed in pouring.  Half of the hundreds of cups had landed on the floor.

"It's time to get out now," I said.

"No, Yenna," she said. "I staying."

"Okay," I always say.

What did I miss?

So I'm reading this novel, set in California, on a cold Sunday afternoon in Texas.  It's not my favorite novel, but it's interesting, primarily because it tells about a time and place I know little about: California from the late 1800s to just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Jane Smiley's representation of that time is brilliantly done.  

Since I was recently there, I feel that thrill of recognition when she writes about San Francisco, and I regret spending my only day in the city in such a touristy way: riding the cable car, walking around the now very commercialized fisherman's wharf.  I regret not going to Chinatown and I regret not doing more research before I went there.  As I read, however, I'm hovering around the parts of the city I did see, and Marin County, and the Bay Area.  The drive over the Golden Gate Bridge was glorious--as were the scenes of the city from the bay and bridges and overlooks in Marin.

I'm wondering today, as I always wonder after a trip: What did I miss? Where should I have lingered longer?

I've always liked this quotation from the Zen tradition: "The way you do anything is the way you do everything."  It may or may not be true, but it intrigues me.

The way I "do everything" is looking at particulars.  I have a scrappy grasp of history and geography.
The way I travel is looking for whatever my eyes are drawn to,  the way scenes are framed and lighted from a particular vantage point.  I take snapshots, actual and metaphorical.

Some travelers set out with a sense of the bigger picture, having done the research ahead of time.  These are good people to have as traveling companions.  Jane Smiley would be a great traveling companion, pointing out how the little things fit into the bigger picture, shedding light on how one thing affected other things.  Earthquakes and influenza and war.  Marriage and divorce.  Dislocations and immigration. Ferries, horse-drawn carriages and the inventions of automobiles.

In life and travel, however, I'm not one of those people.  Over-planning can diminish the magic of surprises, back roads, small forgotten towns in the middle of nowhere.

And yet: Next time, I'm going to try really hard to explore the maps and guidebooks--so I won't miss a single thing.

I would like to be a perpetual traveler, doing it one way one trip, another way the next time.  I'm going to need more than just this one lifetime!

Private Life by Jane Smiley

I bought a novel at the Steinbeck Center by Jane Smiley, though I wondered at the time why it was for sale there.  Most of the books were by and about Steinbeck.

As it turns out, the book (the section I'm reading today) is set in Vallejo, California--not far from where I stayed in El Cerrito, and only 31 miles from San Francisco.

It made me wish I had read the novel before my trip--as it's always a thrill to see a place you've read about, to see it through both my own eyes and the eyes of the writer.

I so often return to those days on the road, remembering the beautiful landscapes of the west coast, the ocean, the vineyards, the mountains.  The days had a magical quality to them, as I meandered roads in the Mini and stopped in little towns and shops and bakeries and book stores.

Happy holidays to all my new California friends who are--by all accounts--experiencing the same winter weather we're having here in San Antonio!