Yes, And

How was your Christmas season?  a friend texted today.

I considered my reply a moment before typing, Christmas was good. I think being retired really allowed me to slow down and enjoy the season.

Later, I was still thinking about the exchange. "I really had a good Christmas this year," I told Heidi.

She raised an eyebrow. "You mean you're choosing to ignore all the bad parts?" she asked skeptically.

I knew what she was saying. The holiday was not perfect: we missed my sister's family, and Heidi's mom and brother are going through some tough times, too. 

"They were impossible to ignore," I answered, "but there was so much more."

Burning Up

"I only want to do 500-piece puzzles!" Heidi told me after we finished one in just a couple of hours. 

"They are fast and fun," I agreed and went to the bookshelf. "How about this one?" I held up a puzzle of Christmas cats.

"Where did that come from?" Heidi asked.

"We've had it over here for years," I shrugged. "I probably bought it on clearance or something."

As we emptied the bag and started turning over the pieces, Heidi sighed in dismay. "They are all the same!" she pointed to the box. 

I'd never noticed, but the puzzle had identical images of five different cats randomly scattered across it. Plus, there was a lot of white space. 

"I don't think I'm going to like this one," Heidi shook her head.

Even so, we persisted. It was a little challenging, but we put the second-to-last piece in just after midnight on the first day of the new year. "Where's the last piece?" I wondered out loud. 

We had somehow lost a piece of the puzzle in the eight hours it had been on the table, and despite searching thoroughly, it has not turned up. Added to that irritation is the fact that this is the second puzzle of the last three we have completed, where one of the pieces has gone inexplicably missing. The first was our advent puzzle, which we burned in the fireplace once we came to terms with the reality that it would NEVER be complete.

I'm afraid those cute cats may meet a similar fate because, as we are unfortunately well aware,  no one wants to do a puzzle with missing pieces. In fact, I'm kind of skeptical about doing any puzzles at all for a while.

Take that, Universe.

Pre-recorded from New York It's

We had just finished an episode of something or other when a promo for Saturday Night Live popped up. "Oh! This is the Christmas show for this year," I told Heidi. "Martin Short is the host, and he gets his Five Time Jacket, so they have a bunch of extra people." I paused. "Wanna watch it?"

There was a time when I rarely missed Saturday Night Live. Starting in 1979, when I returned to the States for college, the show was must-see TV for a long time. Back then, there was no recording it for watching later, but it didn't matter because who wasn't up til at least 1 on the weekend?

But now, it's been many years since I've watched an entire episode of SNL and many more since I stayed up to see it live from New York. These days, I mostly skim the recap in the NYTimes and watch any segment that captures my attention on YouTube. Even though Lorne Michaels is still the driving force behind the show after fifty years on the air, I often sense that the target audience is considerably younger than I am, mostly because I find the humor raunchy or dumb. (Okay, I'll also cop to not getting some of the jokes, but not too many, because, see my post a few days ago about how plugged in I am to pop culture, despite my advanced age! Teaching so long has to have a few benefits.)

But last night, the clock was only at 9:30, so I hit play on the December 21, 2024, episode of Saturday Night Live. And we laughed the next hour and a half away. Tom Hanks, Paul Rudd, Melissa McCarthy, Kristin Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, Scarlett Johansen, Alec Baldwin, and Dana Carvey appeared. The regular cast was hilarious, too, and we recognized a couple of those crazy kids from Shrinking and Wicked. As often happens when a former cast member hosts, the show was full of self-referential bits, and they were old enough that we felt in on the joke. Martin Short is still as ridiculous as ever, and? 

There was spitting.

We enjoyed the show so much that I remembered that old sad feeling I used to get when the musical guest performed their second number. It meant that there was only one sketch left, and it probably wasn't funny, and then we would have to wait a whole week, or two, or all summer until Saturday Night was live again.

In Memory

"I just finished The Women by Kristin Hannah," my friend Amy mentioned at dinner a few weeks ago when she was visiting from Arizona. "It was amazing."

It just so happened that I was looking for an audiobook for our road trip to Mountain Lake that weekend, and the premise of the novel, the story of a young woman who enlists as an Army nurse in Vietnam and her experiences there and upon her return to the States, seemed like something Heidi and I would like. The fact that it was narrated by Jill Whelan was a plus-- I have enjoyed her work on several other recordings.

We were rolling through the Piedmont of Virginia as the novel started in 1967, Coronado Beach, CA, and we followed the saga of Frankie McGrath all the way to the southern Blue Ridge Mountains and home again, with more than half of the book to go. "This is brutal," I said after her first week in Vietnam. "She's gotta get a win soon." And she did, becoming an extremely competent OR nurse at an evac hospital, despite or maybe because of the brutal conditions she was thrown into. Over her time in the country, she made lifelong friends and lost some, too, and we were as relieved as she was when she headed back to California.

We continued listening a couple weeks later all the way to Buffalo as Frankie faced a rocky adjustment to life at home, her ups and downs propelling the trip forward. And we heard the end of the book a little more than an hour into our trip home, shaking our heads to emerge from the late 70s into present-day Pennsylvania. 

And, although I found the book flawed in many ways, heavy-handed, overwrought, and predictable in places, I was profoundly moved by the real-life experiences written there, particularly the invisibility and subsequent struggle of the over a quarter million women who served in Vietnam. So today, when we loaded Lucy in the car and headed downtown for a walk on the National Mall, we hadn't gone far when I suggested we visit the Vietnam Memorial, a place I usually pass by without a second glance as I round the reflecting pool.

We paused more than a moment at the Vietnam Women's Memorial, erected in 1993, more than 20 years after the war ended. Three women are shown in it, one holding a bandaged soldier, another shading her eyes looking skyward, and a third on her knees in perhaps grief, but more likely, exhaustion. Eight trees are planted around its cobblestone circle, one for each woman killed there. 

I don't think I'll ignore it again.

Weather Machine

Despite the news article I read yesterday predicting substantial snow for the mid-Atlantic region in early January, our late December weather has turned unseasonably mild today. We've had the sliding glass door open since noon, a light breeze wafting its way past the Christmas tree and freshening the house. 

Outside, the temperate weather reminded me of winter holidays spent nearly 50 years ago in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. There was something about the slant of the sun and the soft air on my bare arms that took me back to those December days spent on the salt flats along the shore of the Arabian Gulf. Our family collected driftwood for a beach fire and steamed the little neck clams we pulled from the sandy bottom of the shallow sea. We had the beach to ourselves, and my dad taught us how to drive in our '75 Plymouth Fury sedan.

Is it possible that this weather is that weather? I asked myself and consulted the weather app on my phone. In Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the temperature will be in the mid-60s tomorrow, just as it is here today. 

I doubt they'll get that January snow, though.

Holiday Twist

"How did the movie end?" Heidi asked me this morning. Last night, she simply couldn't keep her eyes open to see how our umpteenth Hallmark movie of the season turned out.

"Well," I reported, "there were some surprises."

She raised her eyebrows. "Do tell."

"It turned out her best friend was actually dead," I started.

"The one she texted?"

"Yes, and left voice messages for, and who sent her the Christmas Bingo game. The friend died earlier in the year, and she still wasn't over it."

Heidi nodded thoughtfully.

"They also didn't save the bookstore." I shook my head. "They sold it, and he took the money and left. So, they didn't end up together at Christmas."

"What?!" Heidi interjected.

"Right! She went back to her job in New York, and her boss congratulated her on taking time for self-care, and also for pushing the company to take a risk on an unknown writer, although the expectation was for her to return to the high profile books. But then he came to NY, and brought mistletoe, even though it was March, and told her that he could write anywhere, and then they kissed, and that was the last item on the Bingo card."

"So she didn't give up her stressful career to move to an idyllic small town to run a family business?" Heidi clarified.

"Just the opposite," I confirmed. "But? They still lived happily ever after. Of course."

Heaven Furbid

I couldn't resist the book called Crafting with Cat Hair when I was shopping for stocking stuffers. I thought my sister-in-law, the artist, would appreciate it, being both an artisan and a cat owner, and she did, although I don't think she'll be rushing to create the cute felted finger puppet on the cover. 

Even so, the family was indulgent last night as I spun my fantasy of not only collecting and crafting from our own pets' coats but also getting so proficient at processing animal hair that we would charge others for the service. 

"People could ship us their beloved pet's fur," I said, "and we could card it, spin it into yarn, or felt it and send it back to them ready to use. I'm sure there's a market for that!"

"You want to get boxes of dog and cat hair in the mail?" my brother scoffed. "You would definitely have a flea problem."

"Oh, no!" I answered. "We could just keep it in the shed."

Ba dump bump.