Stupid is as stupid does

OK, so I did buy another handbag. I know, it's ridiculous, but I really did need it, believe it or not. Crazily enough, I didn’t actually have a black handbag, unless you count my tiny Coach camera bag, which is really lovely but far too small to use as anything except an evening bag; or the very nice Coach leather bag that my husband bought me for Christmas last year, which is very large and very fancy-looking, and it was perfect for work, back in the long-ago days when I left the house to go to work. I like that bag very much, actually--not only is it really pretty, but it also holds two computers and notebooks and pens and a water bottle and a charger and a wireless mouse--but it’s too big and heavy to carry for everyday use. 

So now I have my favorite Longchamps Le Pliage nylon tote in black, and I really have no reason to ever buy another handbag, ever again. Really. 

*****

Well, never say never. When it comes to doing stupid things, I never say never. 

Psych. It’s not always about a handbag. Sometimes it’s about something even stupider, if that is even possible. And I assure you that it is. 

The stupidity started with Facebook, as it so often does. I deactivated my account this summer because it was all a little bit too much--the politics, and the rancor, and the us vs. them. It was enough. 

And I didn’t miss it, not for a while. But then I started to wonder how people were doing; the people I see only online, that is (which is most people, these days). I felt bad that I was missing people’s birthdays. Two high school friends celebrated their 30th wedding anniversaries, and I forgot all about them. If I’d been on Facebook, I’d have had a reminder. So I started thinking about returning to Facebook. 

But then I posted something stupid on another social media platform. And I felt bad about it. And although there weren’t any recriminations, there was a deafening silence that made clear that I’d offended people. So I took it down. I’m not a big enough fish that anyone would have screenshotted my stupid post with my stupid funny funny comment, so that’s the end of that, I suppose. Except that I do wish that I had better sense. I wish that I could consistently remember that not every funny funny joke that pops into my head is hilarious enough to share. I guess I also wish that I could stop buying handbags, but that’s just crazy talk. One self-improvement at a time is enough. A person needs a few quirks and flaws and failings. And a few bags, to carry stuff around in. 

Christmas vacation

Did you know that there's such a thing as a wine sippy cup? Well, there is, and I got a set of them for Christmas. I opened the box, and thought "is that what I think it is?" and it was, and it seemed like the silliest manufactured item ever offered for sale. And then I poured a glass of wine and I ended up ordering two more wine sippy cups, with pretty enameled designs. Welcome to 2020. Call me Karen. 

It's 6:45 pm on Christmas night. We have dinner very early on holidays, so the kitchen is clean now, and we're settling into a lazy evening in a very cozy room. It is quite cold outside but the fire is crackling away and it's almost too warm in our family room. Luckily, my sippy cup keeps the wine cold. 

It was a nice Christmas. I got to see two small children enjoy cookies and presents, and I received a brand new Capitals jersey in the new reverse retro screaming eagle design. I'm wearing it now. We went to Mass last night, and it was joyful, though a little sad to hear the cantor sing alone. 

*****

It’s December 26 now. Boxing Day if you're in the UK. They have the right idea, because the day after Christmas should be an official holiday. We usually do a family thing on December 26--a museum visit, and a walk around downtown DC to see the Capitol and White House Christmas trees, and then a late lunch at an Irish pub around the corner from the Capital One Center. We could still walk around outside, of course, but the museums and restaurants are all closed, and it’s very cold today, anyway. It’s too bad. I like seeing the inauguration stands under construction at the Capitol. But maybe they’re not even building them this time. Maybe they’re doing the whole damn thing on Zoom. 

Anyway, my younger son is busy today, and it wouldn’t have been the same without the whole family. Coronavirus or no coronavirus, the City of Rockville is holding lifeguard certification classes, the first that have been available since March. So not everything is cancelled. 

*****

December 27, Sunday. It’s 9:30 and I’ve been up for hours. My son had lifeguarding class this morning and so I woke up early to make breakfast and lunch for him. He’s 16 and could easily do both of those things for himself; but you find, paradoxically, that as soon as your children are old enough to do things for themselves, you want to do those things for them, because you won’t have the chance for much longer. It’s true what they say. They do grow up fast. 

Normally, I take off for the holiday week. This year, I thought I’d just save the PTO and work through most of the week, because so many things are closed or cancelled and because I’d be home anyway, so what’s the difference. But there is a difference. There’s a big difference between working at home and being at home, just because you like to be at home, and I do like to be at home. So aside from a few hours tomorrow and a few random calls and emails, I am going to take the week off. I have books to read and a fireplace to sit in front of and movies to watch and walks to take. Not to mention one last week of eating all of the things that I normally don’t eat. I made the cookies and now I get to eat them, with some nice pinot grigio in an enameled sippy cup. 

Candles in the window, carols at the spinet

Have you ever seen “Auntie Mame”? It’s not really a Christmas movie, but there’s a great Christmas scene at the beginning. Flamboyant, free-spirited Mame Dennis loses her shirt in the 1929 stock market crash, but she bounces back and gets a job in a department store. Coming home one night to her Manhattan apartment, where her orphaned nephew Patrick waits for her, she throws together a Christmas celebration out of practically nothing, singing “We Need a Little Christmas.” I just tried to find the clip on YouTube, and I think there’s some kind of Mame conspiracy. I can find various random 1958 “Mame” clips, and tons of “Need a LIttle Christmas” videos, including performances by Angela Lansbury (OK), Johnny Mathis (better), Pentatonix (no no no no no); and multiple copies of a clip from the 1974 movie that starred Lucille Ball. I yield to no one in my love for Lucille Ball, but I’m sorry to say that her cinematic Mame is trash. 

That’s right. You heard me. I said what I said. 

One day last week, I was on my third Teams call of the day, when I heard my son playing “Up on the Housetop” on his trumpet. Virtual band class is a real thing, I assure you, and it was nice to hear a little bit of what would have been part of the high school holiday band concert, taken away from us this year just like so many other things. I was grocery shopping later that night, grouchy and out of sorts, tired of the mask and tired of waiting in lines and just tired. “Need a Little Christmas,” a choral recording that I didn’t recognize, began to play on the store’s sound system. It was well-timed, because I happened to need a little Christmas at that moment. 

*****

I just searched again, and found my so-far favorite “Need a Little Christmas,” a recording by The New Christy Minstrels. Can I just tell you, as a meandering side note (you have all day, don’t you?) that my mother had a copy of “The New Christy Minstrels: Live at the Troubadour.” I was probably five years old when I learned how to use the record player so that I could play that record over and over again. That seems young to be obsessed with The New Christy Minstrels, but I distinctly remember the record player sitting on a table in our house in Connecticut, and we moved away from there when I was six. So maybe I was six. I think I wore that record out. I can still smell it. Records had--still have, I suppose--a distinctive smell. I’m listening now to “The Preacher and the Bear.” I’m going to find recordings of “This Train,” and “Fire Down Below,” and “I Walk the Line.” And that might be the end of this post for now, as I'm likely to fall down a rabbit hole of early childhood memories. 

*****

Would you think that four batches of cookies would produce ten times as much mess as one batch of cookies? I wouldn’t have thought so but that’s how it works. I discovered this in reverse today. I seldom ever make only one batch of cookies. I usually make a ton of cookies all at once and then freeze them, but maybe that’s the wrong approach. Because making one batch of cookies is so much easier and cleaner than making four batches. 

It’s Christmas Even now, 2:45 PM, quiet and still. I’ve always loved this time of day on Christmas Eve, when everything winds down and the peace of Christmas settles over everything for 36 hours or so. I made the cookies this morning after a last-minute grocery run. I forgot something, but we’ll live without it. No more errands and no more planning and no more preparation. It’s December 24, and we need a little Christmas, right this very minute. 

Planning ahead

It's Thursday night and I’ve been on Teams, WebEx, and Zoom calls all day long. ALL DAY LONG. And so now, I’m on another call, hosted on a no-name crap service that no one has ever heard of, which will not allow me to join from a browser, but the application download is stuck at 90 percent. So I’m predisposed to be hostile to the presenter.

This last call of the day is a demonstration for pool membership management software, because I’m now a neighborhood association board member, which means that I have three volunteer jobs, again. And this is because I am an idiot. I'm not so much of an idiot, though, that I’d use a shady cut-rate meetings platform to demonstrate a technical product. If you’re a tech company, you need to get the tech part right.

But there’s always a bright side, and the bright side is that I’m almost finished with work for the year, and that means no more Zoom, Teams, WebEx, GoToMeeting, or NoNameCrapVideoCall meetings until 2021. And the other bright side is 2021, because whatever it will be, it will not be 2021.

*****

I never take a day off just to take a day off, but I did today. Well, half a day, but it still feels like a day off because I started a bit late and knocked off early and now it’s 2:45 and I’m going walking on a ridiculously cold day. Cold enough, in fact, that I thought quite seriously about not leaving the house at all. But then I looked out my kitchen window and saw Running Lady, who is about 75 years old, running down my street, and I was ashamed of having even considered slacking off exercise because of a little chill.

The thing is that Running Lady runs very slowly. I can probably walk faster than she runs. And even though she runs slowly, it always appears to be a tremendous effort for her. That makes it even more impressive. She does it despite how hard it obviously is. She maybe does it because it’s hard; because, like Jimmy Dugan, she knows that it’s the hard that makes it great. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway, as I pile on the layers and zip up my puffy jacket and wrap myself up with a scarf and steel myself to the cold and ice.

*****

So I did go walking and it wasn't even that cold. It was lovely, in fact. Running Lady still has my everlasting respect, because she would have been out there no matter what, because that's what she does.

And now it's less than a week until Christmas. We are breaking all the rules by traveling across a state line to see family in Philadelphia. It will be a small and socially distant gathering and we're staying for only one night. The Maryland travel advisory excludes Pennsylvania and other bordering states and I've heard, though I haven't verified, that the reverse is true. We're on 95 North now, about to pass through Baltimore, and traffic is lighter than normal for the Saturday before Christmas, but the roads are not deserted by any means. The blacktop is still chalky gray with salt residue and the median grass is still frosted with the remnants of Wednesday's snow. It's cold again. The stop the spread and stay home for the holidays messages flashing on the electronic signs are making me feel a little bit guilty, but not that much.

*****

And just that fast, the weekend is over and we're on our way back home. It's 4:30 Sunday afternoon and we just drove through the snow covered battlefields of Valley Forge National Park, dotted with pre Christmas sledders and cross-country skiers rather than bedraggled Revolutionary soldiers suffering through the winter in miserable log huts. It was pretty. We're driving through the waning minutes of daylight on one of the shortest days of the year. The sky is pale gray tinged with pink and gold. We just drove past a farm house bedecked in wreaths and Christmas lights, its snowy field hosting a huge gaggle of geese. It will be dark in 15 minutes.

We had a fire pit in my sister's front yard last night. She wanted a snow fire, which turned out to be a pretty good idea. We bundled up in our puffy jackets and boots and held cold beer bottles with gloved hands, and then we came inside and ate like there was no tomorrow. This morning, I woke up early and went back out in the cold to walk off yesterday's cookies and hot roast beef sandwiches, accompanied by the world's gassiest dog. It was a long walk, in more ways than one.

*****

It’s Monday now, December 21, and I’m back to work, but not for long. I wasn’t going to take much time off next week because blah blah blah COVID blah blah, but I’m going to take most of the week off, the last week of this stinky stinky year that ends in just ten days. 

It's the same one I had in 2015.
And in 2013 and 2012. It's a good planner. 

In fact, I’m considering this year over already. My new day planner starts today, and since I’m using a 2021 day planner, it’s officially 2021. I set up my 2021 book list gages, and marked my calendar with important dates and events, and transferred necessary information from my 2020 planner, all the while enjoying the clean new unmarked pages and the gilt edging and the uncreased silky ribbon marker. It feels fresh, like a new start. There’s always a bright side and sometimes the bright side is a fuchsia leather notebook that will document the events of 2021; which whatever it will be, will not be 2020.

Roman a clef

They say that you should write what you know. I don’t know who they are, but that’s what they say. So last month, as I mentioned, I started writing a novel. I wrote just over 50,000 words, and it’ll be at least 50,000 more before it’s finished, if it’s ever finished. I don’t know. 

The novel isn’t about me (that's what they all say, right?) But of course, I used details and memories from my own life. What else do I have? What else does anyone have? Including one scene in which a character is making cookies; or rather, her children are making cookies, and all she can think of is how fast they can get the cookies in the oven so that she can clean the flour off the black countertops, and wash the bowls and the baking pans and throw away all the eggshells and the chocolate chip packages and put away the cookies and restore order. 

Most of the other real-life details that I used were just that--details, scene-setting, atmosphere. But the cookie part is one hundred percent me. I have a very hard time with disorder, and cookie-baking is inherently disorderly. 

Today is cookie-baking day, but yesterday was cookie-dough-making day, and cookie dough making is the hard part, the crusty countertops and dirty dishes part. Today, all I have to do is take a melon baller and form 300 or so little balls of cookie dough, laying them out in neat parallel rows and baking them until they turn into cookies, which I will freeze for a week until it’s time to deliver them to neighbors. And eat them, of course. 

*****

So if the worst part of cookie baking is the mess (it is) then the best part of cookie baking, even better than the eating of cookie dough, is the moment when you finish cleaning up and all is once again right with the world. I don’t have to bake cookies again for another year. I know that there are many people who love to bake, and who do it just for fun. Sometimes, I wish that I was one of those people. But I am not. I never will be. I’m just too neat. 

In fact, I’m too neat to even sleep. When I wake  up too early, sometimes I get up because I can’t go back to sleep. But sometimes, I get up because my need to restore order is greater than my need to sleep. My socks are on the floor where I kicked them off, and my half-finished water is on the nightstand with my jewelry and my weighted blanket needs to be folded up and my bed needs to be made. So I get up and I put everything back in order, and I make my half of the bed, leaving undisturbed the sleeping form of my husband. 

Yes, I know. But at least I don't wake my husband up to make his side of the bed. 

*****

I have a new day planner for 2021. So now I have another reason to look forward to the end of 2020, which can go fuck itself as far as I’m concerned, because my 2020 day planner is really messy, and I’m running out of room for lists. Without lists, the whole operation will fall to pieces. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough. Plus, the pages are fraying a bit, and there’s a mark on the cover, and I just need to start fresh, with clean white pages that I will write on ever so carefully.

*****

Today, a person at work asked me to fix a tiny error in a presentation. I had pasted a screenshot into a slide, and I hadn’t noticed the little indicator marks that still remained at its edges. There was a time when such a glaring and obvious blemish would have jumped right out at me and demanded that I address it immediately, but my eyesight is not what it once was. The person pointed it out in an apologetic manner, suggesting that it might be “too anal” a detail to worry about. I responded immediately that there’s no such thing as “too anal,” and realized too late that this could be interpreted very wrongly, very wrongly indeed. But I think that they know what I meant. I certainly know what I meant. My baking skills are so-so, my handwriting is terrible, and my eyesight is going from bad to worse,  but my commitment to neatness is everlasting.

Twilight

I didn’t sleep much last night. This isn’t unusual. What is unusual is that I slept, long and hard, on both of the previous two nights. The year is winding down and the days are almost as short as they can be, and we have many hours of darkness every day and I slept through most of those hours on two consecutive nights. Last night, I returned to my normal non-sleeping self. But the sleeping was nice while it lasted. 

My son just asked what that sound was. It’s your mother’s lightning fast fingers flying across the keyboard, that’s what that sound is. 

I’ve been dreaming, too. Three mornings in a row, I’ve awakened to remembered dreams. I don’t remember now what the first two nights’ dreams were about, but last night’s was about bad driving. That one is probably premonitory. 

Fifteen days until Christmas. It doesn’t seem right. I haven’t stood on the deck at a high school swim meet yet. I haven’t been to a school band concert or a holiday party. At least we have a Christmas tree and lights. We’re going to watch “Elf” on Friday, and I’m going to start making cookies this weekend. I hate making cookies, as you probably know, but it’s a Christmas-y thing to do, and I’ll take it. 

*****

It’s the next day now, the next day being Thursday, the fourth day of what feels like an unusually long work week. That word doesn’t look right. “Unusually.” But it’s right. I can spell, even if I can’t sleep. 

It’s 4:37 PM. This is in some ways my favorite time of a December day, especially a clear and sunny December day, especially when I get to sit on the couch in my family room watching the almost-winter daylight fade, and feeling the darkness collect. I don’t like how early in the day it happens, but I do like seeing the transition from daylight to twilight. The sky outside my window is pale gray now; almost white. And the bare trees are dark, dark brown, almost black. It will soon be completely dark, and this screen and the Christmas tree will be the only light. 

I could sit here for some time, but I have a virtual committee meeting tonight at 7, so I have to make dinner a bit earlier than usual. Five more minutes of quiet Christmas tree-lit twilight, and then it’s back to work. 

*****

Sometimes I see someone out walking and I wish I was out walking, too; but I’m on my way to or from some errand or I’m on my way home from work (back when I worked somewhere other than in my house) and I’m just too busy to be outside. But then sometimes when I’m outside walking, especially on an unseasonably nice day, and people drive past me, I wonder if they envy me for being free and out in the world. 

I didn’t have time to walk on Wednesday or Thursday, but I finished work at 4:15 today, just early enough to take a quick walk before dark. People are wearing masks outside now, even when they’re by themselves. But not me. I breathed the fresh air and I smelled candles as I walked past a neighbor’s house. It made me want to light candles at my house. 

So I did. I lit some Christmas-y scented candles, and I poured a glass of wine because it’s Friday night and I can, and now I’m writing this. It’s two weeks until Christmas. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now. I'm in my pajamas, streaming a British police drama. I’ve watched more television in the last nine months than in the previous five years. I like to watch scenes of regular workaday pre-corona life, when people just lived and worked and went about their days without thought of social distance; when you could just look at people and see their faces. I’m nostalgic for the ordinary. 

Someday, there will be a spate of books and movies and TV shows about this very peculiar and God willing temporary episode of isolated, limited, curtailed life. And maybe with enough time gone by, when we’re all back to our pre-corona routine of rushing to and fro from morning to night, without time to think or reflect or breathe, then we’ll all be ready to visit this time again. Maybe we’ll even be nostalgic. We’ll talk about how we were once so tired of quarantines, and now we’d pay money for just a one-week lockdown. 

But not today, or for a long time. I miss life, even the long and exhausting days of too much to do and too many places to go. Especially those days. 

It’s 13 days until Christmas. I’m going to make some cookies. 

For sale

Have you ever been to an estate sale? Not a fancy-schmancy Sotheby’s type of estate sale, but an estate sale at a regular, middle-class house filled with well-worn furniture and everyday dishes and decorative items both lovely and hideous and all of the evidence and remnants of a particular life lived in a particular place. 

Well, the first thing to know about that kind of estate sale is that everything is for sale. The furniture and the artwork and collectibles and the dishes and silver, of course; but also the towels and the stained plastic containers and the half-used spray bottles of cleaning fluid and even still-wrapped rolls of toilet paper. Everything is for sale. 

*****

Not long ago, I went to just such an estate sale. I hadn’t been to one in a long time, but it was in my neighborhood and I didn’t have much else to do that Saturday morning, and you never know--you might find something amazing. Or you might not. But there’s only one way to find out. 

We passed the house earlyish in the morning; around 9, just when the sale opened, and thanks to the damn ‘rona, there was a line maybe 30 people long waiting to get in. So we decided to come back later. By 1 PM, the line was gone, and we were able to walk right in. 

My guess, from the furnishings and carpet, was that the owners were people in their late 70s or early 80s who had last redecorated in the late 1980s. The living room furniture was upholstered in the pale peach and dark green color combination that was particular to that time and no other. Although the sale had obviously been very well attended, the house was still full of items for sale--furniture, books and the bookshelves that housed them, framed art, collectibles, area rugs. 

Unless you’re shopping for furniture, though (and I wasn’t), then that’s not the interesting part of an estate sale. The interesting part is in the kitchen and the family room and the bedrooms and even the bathrooms. This is where the “everything is for sale” rule is proven, and this is where you get to see how other people lived, and maybe understand a little bit about who they were. 

We didn’t know who the homeowners were, of course. As I mentioned, I guessed that they were a couple in their late 70s or early 80s. But I didn’t know the circumstances surrounding the estate sale. Had the home’s residents died? Was there maybe just one surviving member of the couple who now required care and was moving into assisted living? Or maybe they were a hale and hearty pair of retirees who were just moving to Florida and selling all of their stuff so they didn’t have to carry it with them.

Most of the downstairs, except the kitchen, was covered with thick, surprisingly clean carpet. People had tracked in some dirt and bits and shreds of dead leaves, and I could imagine the person who once lived there just itching for everyone to leave so that she could get out the vacuum cleaner and restore her home to its customary cleanliness and order. The wooden staircase was not carpeted, and I felt like an intruder as I clomp-clomp-clomped up the stairs in my hard-soled shoes to the private part of the house, the part where even people who knew the residents well enough to visit their home might not have set foot. 

The second floor had four bedrooms arranged around a small carpeted hallway, with the bathroom right in the middle at the top of the stairs. One of the bedrooms was filled with craft supplies, gift wrap, and Christmas decorations. I don’t craft, and I have plenty of wrapping paper, but I like to get one or two new Christmas ornaments every year; and I was delighted to find a tiny Peanuts Christmas snow globe still in its original packaging, for the very reasonable price of four dollars. Sold. Finding nothing else of interest in that room, I went into the master bedroom, which still had a bed and a dresser and nightstands (for sale, of course) and racks of clothing, including a few vintage designer pieces. I suppose I could have bought the Halston dress and the Oscar de la Renta jacket and then resold them on Ebay, but I didn’t feel like it. Maybe someone who genuinely loves 1970s fashion bought the pieces and will wear them and care for them. Or maybe some more enterprising person bought them to resell on Ebay. 

In the last of the four bedrooms, there was a dresser and a single bed, and then boxes of vinyl records and piles of board games. The vinyl records were mostly classical and jazz recordings, and I don’t know enough about either type of music to know if they were good recordings or not. And if a board game isn’t Scrabble, it’s dead to me.

When I say that everything is for sale, I mean everything, and that includes the contents of the bathroom. And when I say the contents of the bathroom, I mean everything except the tile and the attached fixtures, including toilet paper rolls, wrapped bars of soap and half-empty bottles of shampoo, toothbrushes in their unopened blister packets, towels, bath rugs, and a vintage hair dryer and set of hot rollers. I hadn’t seen hot rollers in years. My mother used to use hot rollers. I always loved the way they could make a whole room smell like warm, freshly washed hair. I can’t imagine taking 30 minutes or more every day to patiently roll and pin sections of my hair and then wait for the whole thing to set, but more power to anyone who does. Do what you want. It’s your hair. 

*****

So that was it. A nostalgic house tour and a Peanuts snow globe, for the low, low price of $4. Not a bad day’s work. I wasn’t sure why, but I liked the people who lived in that house, whoever they were. I felt sorry that perhaps they had died, but I didn’t feel sad about death in general, or about my own eventual demise. In fact, I told my sons later that when I die, they should promptly contact an estate sale broker to liquidate the contents of our house. And I imagined the day (decades from now, one hopes) when strangers would troop through my house, looking at our books and pictures and art and Washington Capitals memorabilia, and picking up a treasure for a few dollars. Maybe they’ll imagine who we were. And maybe they’ll like us. But if they’re looking for hairstyling equipment, they’re out of luck..