The Perfect Song Blog

Mansfield University shuts down for 10 days over the holidays.  For many years I looked forward to this mini vacation as a time to get a lot of my projects done.

After many frustrating years, I now know that there is no free time leading up to Christmas.  Leigh is stressed out with cleaning the house, Christmas shopping, decorating, packing and wrapping, in addition to her business.

So I’m called in to help cook, play with the dogs, and wrap presents, a job I absolutely hate.  In my hands, scissors turn crooked and cut the paper in jagged lines.  I never cut it the right size.  The presents I wrap always look like they’ve been slept on by an overweight insomniac.

Christmas day is a physical and emotional rush. The post-Christmas recuperation time has lengthened into about three days.  I kid you not, I was up and around after surgery faster that I felt half alive after Christmas 2007.

One of the presents for Leigh was curtains for our living room which she’s needed for two years.   This year I gave her a note saying I’d buy them but she had to pick them out  Kim, our daughter was here.  Kim had to leave a few days after Christmas.

It worked.

What I hadn’t thought about was the unholy hassle of assembling rods and putting up the hangers.  I did one set the first night and found that the holes already in the wall  were not right for the new hangers.  I took everything apart, moved it over an inch and drilled a new hole.

There was, of course, no stud there.  I measured and re-measured,  screwed in the new hanger and found my level was no longer working correctly.

“I’ll just have eyeball it,” Leigh said.  I hate it when she eyeballs.  “Okay, just tap the bottom a litttttle to the left.  Nope!  No!  Too much.  Back just a tich.  No!  That was  more than a tich!

“What in the Hell’s name is a ‘tich’?”

“You know what a tich is.”

Obviously I don’t know if I just moved it more than a tich!”

“Don’t make such a big deal of things.  Just tap it –a tich.”  She did that just to anger me.  It worked.

I was now sweating and wanted a drink, something with significant  dose of alcohol in it.

“Ah! Ah! Close.   Now put it back to the right a tich.”

I found myself angry that the term tich was getting on my nerves.  I tapped it.  She stood and stared, studying it.  Time dragged on.

“Did your body freeze up?” I asked.  “Are you breathing?  Communicate, please!

“Over just a freckle of a hair,” she finally said.

I curse the carpenter who first came up with this non-existent universal measurement.  I curse all carpenters who keep it alive.  And, I realized, I was in a general, all-encompassing cursing mode.

I touched the hanger.

“It didn’t move,” she said.

I touched it harder, the old freckle-of-a-hair-touch.”

She nodded.  “Perfect.”

When shared projects like this are over, there’s a feeling of cautious relief.  Slowly, we speak to each other to make sure neither one was offended  too much.  She happily began hanging the first curtain.  I fixed a drink and went downstairs to watch The Family Guy.

The slate colored clouds lie like a rumpled blanket as the misty rain melts the snow. Everything is a texture of various shades of gray.
I don’t mind. I’m in the Jeep with three dogs headed to the transfer station to unload my garbage and recyclable cans and bottles.
We pass a hawk sitting on a post staring over the barren cornfield. He looks like he’s waiting for a 12 noon mouse rush. I park by the garbage bins where I contribute to an American landfill yet another week’s worth of trash, most of it made in China.
My horse-faced man who traveled the world to give advice to third world countries about his company sits in the trailer selling bags that we have to buy to put our garbage in.
“Kind of a gray day,” I say, knowing about a hundred people have already said the same thing.
He nods. “Yes it is. But it least it’s not snow.”
“True. I can’t believe Christmas is only three days away.”
He nods. He wears a baseball cap and has big, even white teeth. He’s in his 70s and smokes even though he’s had two pacemakers. “My wife passed away on this day three years ago,” he says quietly. “So Christmas don’t mean a whole lot to me anymore.”
I suppose anyone else would have said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Instead I asked: “How did she die?
He nodded. “We were havin’ breakfast. We have a little enclosed patio where we would go out and have breakfast and watch the birds. She loved birds. We had birdhouses, you know, scattered around. We were eating breakfast when she put her hand up to her chest and said something hurt bad. She fell off her chair. . . and that was all she wrote. . . . She was gone.”
“I’m sorry to hear that but if you’re going to go that’s the best way,” I say.
He nods in complete agreement. “Yes, it is. No pain, no suffering. She was a nurse. Never no problem at all. Just came on that quick.” He looked out past the airport into the sky. His pale blue eyes were far away. He shook his head slowly. “I sure do miss her.”
We talk a little more and I give him three dollars for a garbage bag. “I’ll see you next Saturday. It’ll be here before we know it.”
The phrase Merry Christmas is worn and hollow and I did not wish him one.
He had shared his story and that was enough.

Here’s some quick fun stuff, the 2008 Miller family Christmas tree in a few easy steps!

It’s a warm gray Sunday morning. Light rain is melting the 10 inches of snow. Hours are collecting into days that are quietly trudging toward the end of the year. Al Gore was one of the few bright spots in another year cluttered with drug-dumb entertainers, lawmakers who aren’t gay and never have been, baby battles and and Paris Hilton. (I have never seen her on TV, listened to her or watched her have sex.)

The final days of 2007 are a frenzy of Top 10 lists. I read them, recognizing or understanding maybe half of the listings. I always wonder: why 10? But it doesn’t matter. It’s an encapsulation of our collective year. I’m gong to search the Net and share as many top 10 lists as I can. It was a quick and frenzied year and I need to better understand it before time’s tide sucks me into 2008.
First top 10: Simon Dumenco’s Epic Media Meltdowns from the Dec. 17, Ad Age on Line.

Reality check: I’m reading Journey of Souls while the media is serving up Britney.Okay. I’m off to find more top 10s.

It’s now one week after surgery (more on that experience in another post).  So did I meet any of my sick-bed goals?  link

Well, I didn’t stay in bed a lot.  I created a nest in the lower living room with a direct shot at our large flat screen TV, my computers on the other side of the room, a pile of books and a stack of movies.

My mp3 player was on the stand behind me full of podcasts, spoken word stories and music.

The first night I didn’t feel like reading, so I watched the four episodes of Masters of Science Fiction that I had recorded.  Why ABC buried this series on a Saturday night and stopped with just a few episodes, I’ll never know.  It contains some of the best acting and thoughtful, intelligent writing on TV.

I finished Journey of Souls in a couple nights and  Deadline in three sittings (“lyings,” actually.  I couldn’t sit).  I have read  some Hemingway short stories and will read more, appreciating again the concise  and powerful writing.

I will get to Jim Harrison.

I went through several TV shows that I had recorded, including The Dog Whisperer, The Office, and in a sweeping bow to my 70s past, recorded WKRP in Cincinnati.

Though I’d seen Once Upon A Time In The West, I watched it again, totally intrigued with Sergio Leone’s  sense of composition, and those hypnotic, lingering close-ups on Charles Bronson,   Claudia Cardinale,
Jason Robards,  and of course, Henry Fonda, who shocked his fans by appearing as a murderous villain (yes, he even shoots a young boy, a scene censored from the TV versions).

I followed this up with watching the director’s commentary version of Pan’s Labyrinth.  Director Guillermo Del Toro goes from formal to very informal  -even colorful — in his description of how a masterpiece is constructed.

I went completely to the other side and recorded a few episodes of Family Guy.   It’s irreverent, written by joyously brilliant politically incorrect fiends.

More next post.