Yeah!

 

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

 

Making plans to greet the new decade at a secret rendezvous.  Preparing all sorts of party snacks in advance, some my own in-demand specialties.

Selecting my own mix of sentimental favorite tunes to play as well as limbering up my fingers in case there is any call for a live performance at the keyboard.

Preparing drinks and mixers, too, although I shall imbibe discreetly lest I end up dancing on a table then projectile-barfing chunks.  Downer, man!

Wanna come?  Sure, you're invited!  The only thing you need to bring is good humor.  Masks are optional, as is clothing.  Haha!  Kidding about one of those.  Guess which.

On a serious note, 2020 will not be a year I will be sad to see go. Of course, there is all the at-large public crap that I wish hadn't happened but which I couldn't do anything about, but far beyond those things were the events of my own life and the lives of those dear to me -- the things that are really important.

A full moon tonight rising over an icy horizon into clear, cold skies.  How many full moons does a person see in a lifetime? Eight-hundred and forty or so for the biblical three score and ten.  That's not a lot.  And you notice a lot fewer than that.  So take a look at this one, the last of the year, the last of the decade.  Really look at it.  It's one less that you will ever see no matter how long you may live.

Maybe all our passion about politics and society, culture and morality is merely to distract us from the passage of time, our individual time, and how each year we have less of it until it finally runs out.  The world careens on.  But we do not.

Remember that this New Year's Eve and pay especial attention to those you love and care about.  Their time is running out, too -- perhaps faster than you know.  Be of good cheer and make the evening happily memorable.

Christmas

 

And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

    John 1:5

Christmas Party!

Well, back in the good old days such things existed.  Ah, speak, memory!

Home-made gingerbread cookies, candy canes, fruitcake and pumpkin pies, candied apples and popcorn, egg nog and fruit punch, chocolate and peanut butter fudge. 

Sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, feeding the fire a log now and again, roasting chestnuts in a wire holder, marshmallows on a stick.

Christmas tree lights flashing on and off, casting shadows and reflecting a jumble of colors, familiar carols that everyone knows the lyrics to.  Piles of presents all gold and green and red, covered in Santas and reindeer, ribbons and bows.

Looking out the window to see snow swirling around the porch lights, firs swaying in the wind that croons around the eaves, little curls of cold air puffing in around the windows. 

And don't forget the mistletoe!

 

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Merry Christmas!

Mother and Son

Just each other for Christmas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;
A kiss, a sigh, and so away.

Good-bye, dear F, good-bye.  I loved you so much. I thought you could make it until Christmas.... 

You never made me cry until now, and now I cry every day.

This is still our song and always will be.  Always.  No matter what.

My family and Pearl Harbor

The only member of my family who I know was at Pearl Harbor  when the Japanese attacked was a great uncle who was serving with the coast artillery at Fort Armstrong.  I have only the vaguest memories of him, one of him showing me a scar on his calf  that he said was from  a bullet fired by a strafing Japanese plane. We have a photo in which he is standing with other soldiers beside what look like water-cooled .50 cal. machine guns mounted in the backs of trucks on carriages that allowed them to swing up to a very high angle, so I suppose they were anti-aircraft guns.  I don't know what he did in the war.

 Another great uncle,  whom I never met because he didn't survive the war, was a flyer in the Army Air Corps.  He had been stationed in the Philippine Islands before the Japanese attack.  He flew P-26s and P-35s.  

Yet another great uncle also did not survive the war.  He was a naval aviator who won the Navy Cross posthumously during the invasion of Saipan.  He flew an FM-2.  While reading his squadron's history, I was astonished to learn that out of a total complement of 96 air crew, 31 were killed in action before the carrier was sunk by kamikazes during the Battle off Samar.

One of my grandfathers was a pilot with a pursuit group training in the states when the Japanese attacked.  His unit sailed for Australia at the beginning of 1942 and he served there and in New Guinea flying P-39s and P-40s before returning to the States. In 1944 he was sent to Europe and flew P-51s till the war ended.  He was a fun guy and always telling hilarious stories about high jinx on leave or some snafu or other when the subject of the war came up.  I just remember he was always making my grandmother either blush or laugh and she cried and cried when he died.
During the war she worked in defense plants.  I remember she said she assembled radios.  At  the time I thought she meant regular civilian radios but I suppose she must have meant some sort of military radio equipment. 

My other grandfather was a naval aviator and at sea on an aircraft carrier when the war started.  He participated in three of the five big carrier-to-carrier battles of the Pacific war, flying F4Fs and F6Fs.  He never said much about the war or flying F9Fs in Korea War or his later service.  He did write about some of his experiences and seems at one time to have planned to write a memoir of the war.  But he never did.  He was kind of a stern guy and I was a little bit afraid of him,  but his wife--my grandmother--said that the war had changed him and made him withdrawn and cautious around people.  He was good to us,  though, and always had dogs.  He taught me how to train dogs, how to track wild animals and understand  nature. He once told me when I said I was scared to sleep in a tent in the high mountains that the farther you are from people the safer you are, and you are never more safe than alone in the wilderness, as long as you are not careless and know what you are doing.  So he taught me to know what I was doing and not be careless.

My other grandmother was a Navy nurse during the war, and served on board a hospital ship in the Pacific. The only thing I can recall about that that she mentioned was that they used to sail alone, unescorted, with searchlights illuminating the red cross painted on the side of their ship until a kamikaze dove into one of their sister hospital ships and almost sank it.  After that their ship sailed with a destroyer escort and lights off.
For each of them, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed their lives forever.  It was the anchor point of all that happened after and how they remembered what happened before.  I think the only comparable episode as far as changing the lives of so many ordinary Americans in our history might be Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.  I guess 9/11 has in very many ways changed us, but that seems to have been more a gradual increase in travel inconveniences and some random terrorist attacks.
Most people haven't served or had family members serve in the armed forces, and even if they have, let's face it, not all that many have been killed or wounded compared to World War II.  Those of us who have served, and have had the war touch us personally, are a tiny minority of Americans.   My direct experiences happened years after 9/11 and hardly seem related to it at all, while my grandmother dodging kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945 was very much aware of the connection to Pearl Harbor.

December, December

Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Above the marge of night a star still shines,
And on the frosty hills the sombre pines
Harbor an eerie wind that crooneth low
Over the glimmering wastes of virgin snow. 
~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

On this bleary white afternoon,
are there fires lit up in heaven
against such fading of quickness
and light, such windy discoursing?
~ Edwin Honig 

 It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.
~ Wallace Stevens

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere."
~ William Cullen Bryant

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That we would lose our way along the paths
Made new by walls of moving mist receding
The more we follow.
~ Sara Teasdale 

White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.
Now he lies here, his wild blood scalding the snow.
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing--a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow--
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay 

 

Ancient times