Date night was sacrificed to the fickle New England weather
last night. A fairly persistent freezing
rain started to fall right around movie time which precluded any optional
driving. My wife used the newly available
time to continue her work on the Christmas tree while I assisted by watching an
action flick. Now that all the hard
labor of erecting the tree was complete I was deemed too artistically
challenged to assist in decorating.
Something I cannot argue with given the abundance of supporting evidence.
 |
| Tree Progress |
She had a lot of energy because she spent the entire day out
Christmas shopping with a neighbor. Shopping
seems to have some regenerative properties for her. Luckily the freezing rain turned over to real
rain sometime after midnight and we really dodged a bullet this morning. The temperature was at 33 degrees or one
degree clear of freezing otherwise there would have been some serious skating
coming in to work today. New England
giveth as well as taketh.
The Christmas thang is seriously helping with my separation
anxiety for the departure of certain important people for the West Coast. The Cantankerous One checked in on Facebook
to offer his customary level of emotional support; basically calling me a wimp. This must come from his vast experience as a
parent.
My old friend Travis McGee helped in the morale department
as well as I finished the next in John D MacDonald’s iconic series with The
Scarlet Ruse. This is the first book
in the series that I struggled with a little.
MacDonald spends a good amount of time in the beginning exploring the
fascinating world of stamp collecting. I
can only guess this was a phase he was going through at the time because it was
as exciting as dental work.
Meyer has McGee helping a friend who was swindled out of a
valuable stamp collection and McGee is soon swimming in murder, mafia, and six
foot women; so it did get much better.
This was also the first book where I started to remember some of the
plot twists from first reading it back in the 1970s so I now know the shelf life
of my long term memory. The climatic
confrontation took part upon McGee’s trusty houseboat the Busted Flush which is
truly like another character in the series.
Some words from The Scarlet Ruse with McGee
philosophizing with Meyer about his place in the world: “I am apart.
Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have
always envied the players and the marchers.
I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the
big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling
people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing
old songs and laugh into each other’s faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far
to feel the heat of the fire. Everything
seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot
describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone
and fears, just as they? Yet when most
deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page
in my immense catalog of remorses. I
seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has
never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there
is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a
little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there,
what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.”
No comments:
Post a Comment