Observation

I just finished Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd, a collection of essays. Rachel Kushner is a novelist, and I have not yet read any of her fiction. I will remedy that very soon. 

Kushner is a few years younger than me, and had similar experiences as a young woman in the 90s, although she was much much much wilder. She shoplifted and rode motorcycles and worked in dodgy bars in the Tenderloin. I didn’t do any of that. But I did live in student apartments in West Philly and rode the subway and took the train to New York on the weekends and worked in a series of dumb jobs that paid just enough to cover the rent and nightlife and books and subway fare. Like Kushner, I hung around with bohemians and punks and a few scary people and a few plain old weirdos. Like Kushner, I knew what it was like being the soft one in a hard crowd.

*****

Kushner is a polymath. She writes about Italian (Nanni Balestrini) and Brazilian (Clarice Lispector) writers whom I had never previously heard of, and is obviously familiar with Brazilian and Italian life and politics during these writers' lifetimes. Italian cinema, history and politics of the Middle East, Marguerite Duras, the American prison abolition movement, motorcycles and trucks, the bar and underground music scene of San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the 1990s - all of this is part of Kushner’s experience and so she writes about it. 

When I read other essayists who write about music and movies and books, I often want to run right out and become familiar with whatever they’re writing about. I’ve often mentioned, for example, that I read or watch or listen to whatever Zadie Smith tells me to read, watch, or listen to. This is how I ended up reading Middlemarch and Howards End and Goodbye, Columbus; and how I ended up revisiting Joni Mitchell, too. Nora Ephron is usually spot-on with reading recommendations, too - that’s how I ended up reading The Woman in White. And if I ever go to a Hungarian bakery that sells cabbage strudel, I’m going to buy one. Nora wrote a whole essay about her pursuit of cabbage strudel, and it’s a page-turner. 

At first, I didn’t feel the same immediate compulsion to read the same books and listen to the same music as Rachel Kushner. This is not a criticism. She writes about her own very particular intellectual and artistic experience and if the rest of us want to come along for the ride, we can; but if not, that’s fine too. The more I think about it, though, the more I want to read Lispector and Balestrini. This is what I love best about reading great essayists. The pleasure of reading the actual essays is only part of the equation - the introduction to something entirely new is even better. I don’t know a thing about labor disputes and protests and general upheaval in 1970s Italy but now I’m going to read all about it, beginning with Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything.

I do want everything. I just don’t know what everything is. 

*****

I marked several passages in this book; things that I want to remember or parts that I want to revisit. Here’s one: “To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home." 

If it’s night time, especially a weeknight, I’m getting home pretty early by anyone’s clock. But of course, that’s not what Rachel Kushner means. And just as I understand what it’s like to be the soft one in a hard crowd, I also know what it’s like to be part of something and to participate fully, but then to exit early and then quietly observe. But observing is not just watching others live. Observing is a way of living. 

The week that was

I swore I wouldn’t look at even one second - not one second, I tell you - of Trump inauguration coverage, but of course I got up and turned on CNN as soon as I had coffee in hand. After five minutes, I switched to C-SPAN and then I remembered that C-SPAN 2 does unfiltered coverage of major events, so I watched a few minutes of blissfully silent video of the clear cold Washington DC streets between Blair House and the White House and the Capitol. 

And I do mean clear. It’s a small consolation, and Trumpity Trumpsters will never admit that the sparseness of the crowds is a result of anything but cold weather, but I’ve lived here for a long time, and it’s always cold on Inauguration Day, and I’ve never seen anything like this. People are lined up no more than one deep along the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue. There were actually gaps in between spectators - if you wanted to go watch the motorcade, you could pretty much stand anywhere you wanted. 

It’s 10:35 AM. Trump will be President again in less than an hour and a half. 

*****

Well. 

I was texting back and forth with my cousin and sister yesterday. We’ve had an ongoing “Can you believe this shit” group chat since November 5. Finally, my cousin, a Philadelphia police officer, had to leave to get ready for work. She texted “I’ll talk to you guys later. I gotta go. Jesus Christ.” And with that, she provided my closing line for pretty much every conversation for the next four years.

*****

I don’t even know where to begin, honestly, except to say that I can’t get George Orwell out of my head. We’ve been a nascent oligarchy for 20 years now, but it became official yesterday, with a bunch of smug centibillionaires sitting front and center at the indoor swearing-in ceremony yesterday. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

And we all saw what we saw on the stage at my beloved Capital One Arena. I’ve seen every possible gaslight rationalization for what was clearly and obviously a Nazi salute, including my very favorite, which was that Elon Musk is neurodivergent and didn’t know what he was doing. I know a lot of neurodivergent people, and they all know a sieg heil when they see one. “The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

*****

It's Wednesday now and I'm back in the office, where the network is down for the second straight day. Weird, right? Probably just a coincidence. Meanwhile, I see that the President pardoned an international drug trafficker - a handsome well-educated white conservative Eagle Scout international drug trafficker, but an international drug trafficker nonetheless. It's fine, though. I'm sure that if Kamala Harris had won the election and pardoned Luigi Mangione on her second day in office, it would have been fine with everyone. I also read that we're apparently going to invest $500b in AI infrastructure. Let's not worry about actual infrastructure in a country in which a ship collides with a bridge, which then collapses. And where's the executive order on grocery prices? Will no one think about the eggs? Well, at least the broligarchs are getting their money's worth. 

*****

We had tickets for the Capitals game on January 18, a Saturday night, against the Penguins, and we sold those tickets. Let me tell you that we don't skip a Saturday night game, and we don't skip a Pittsburgh game. But based on videos of MAGAs partying in Chinatown and Penn Quarter that I saw later, we made the absolutely correct call. Instead, we hung around a bar in Arlington with Saints parents and swimmers, celebrating senior day and a win in the pool. Absolutely the right call. And the Capitals beat Pittsburgh, so they didn't need us there anyway.

*****

Last Saturday reminds me a lot of the last Saturday before the pandemic really hit. On Saturday, March 7, 2020, I went to my son’s very first high school baseball game, a JV scrimmage against a much better team in Frederick County. I don’t remember the score, but I do remember that it was a chilly but clear and sunny early spring day here in Montgomery County, and that it was at least 15 degrees colder at Thomas Johnson High School, and the other mothers and I sat together, cheering on our freshman boys and kicking ourselves for not wearing warmer coats. Fortunately, we were all experienced baseball parents and we all had blankets in our cars. We needed those blankets. We knew, at that point, that the nascent pandemic was soon going to affect our daily lives, but we didn’t know how and we certainly didn’t know how long it was going to last. None of us had any idea that we were sitting at the last high school athletic event for the next year. 

*****

For the foreseeable future, I will be doing Sarah Sherman’s Nosferatu hand gesture every time I make a stupid joke. 

*****

It's Friday now. It was a week. No adjective will really cover it so I'll just call it a week. 

I'm at Catholic University now, in the Raymond DuFour Athletic Center, watching Marymount vs. Catholic University. Marymount barely lost this meet last year in large part because their top fly swimmer had COVID and so the medley relay came in second. A relay is worth a lot of points. I got here just in time to see the relay win. The rest of the meet will be back and forth. These are pretty well matched teams. Meanwhile I need to run out of here as soon as my son's last event ends. A lot going on at work. A lot going on everywhere.

*****

Marymount lost to Catholic, although the men’s meet was very close. Spring sports will have to step up if we’re going to take back the Pope’s Cup. IYKYK. I was only there for about 90 minutes - I arrived just in time for the medley relay, and left just after the men’s 100 breaststroke, which my son won by .02. It was his second best time and at the end of this season, he will occupy 3 of the top ten 100 breast spots in the program record book.

I had planned to take the day off but I was needed at work and I didn’t mind changing my plans. It’s nice to be needed. On Friday morning, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get away at all, but my bosses and colleagues were willing to cover for me, and I was available by phone, and so I was able to get to the meet and see that amazing race. It was the highlight of this very very dodgy week. It’s Saturday now, and we have one more regular season meet today, against a very strong Mary Washington team. Just for a few hours today, I will pay attention to nothing else except what’s happening at Goolrick Pool at the University of Mary Washington. Go Saints. 

Dulce et decorum est

Just as I predicted, World War I: A Complete History has taken me into the third week of January. I’m not finished yet, but I’m getting there. The US has entered the war, and the Central Powers’ alliance is beginning to break down. Austria is looking for a separate peace, and desertions are rampant among both the Central and Allied armies. Russia has already overthrown the Tsar and while the Provisional Government wants to continue fighting, the Bolshevik opposition is resolutely opposed. We all know how that turned out. 

*****

“A Complete History” is a bit of a misnomer as a subtitle for this book. It’s a pretty complete military history (as far as I know but I won’t be fact checking) but except for broad scene-setting of social and political events in the various combatant countries, and sketchy biographical detail on most of the war’s major figures and a few less well-known people (mostly men in both cases natch), it’s almost exclusively concerned with military action - taking and retaking of trenches and villages and redoubts, weaponry and materiel, and especially conditions on the front lines, which were absolutely dreadful. 

*****

I love to read and I love to write. I have a degree in English, summa cum laude no less (full disclosure - I started college at 18 and finished at 48, but a 4.0 is a 4.0). You might expect that someone like me would love poetry, but I do not and I never have. I have never even pretended to love poetry, not as a college girl who pretended to like a lot of things that she didn’t actually like, and not as a young person with literary aspirations, and not as the mother of high school students complaining about having to read poetry who should have been telling them that poetry is wonderful but instead commiserated and agreed with them that poetry sucks. Poems are not my thing. I’m a prose girl. 

The war poets of WWI are the exception to this rule. I love Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves and Vera Brittain and especially Wilfred Owen. Throughout the book, Gilbert quotes from the letters and reminiscences and poetry of all of these writers as well as lesser-known war poets, to great effect. I think I might have to reread some of these poets. The TBR list gets longer by the day. 

*****

Gilbert also shares excerpts of letters and telegrams from soldiers and officers (mostly the latter). In one letter, a young officer writes to an invalided friend that it is impossible for soldiers to convey the filth and horror of the trenches to family and friends at home. He is sympathetic, acknowledging that he himself could never have imagined the things that he’s seen. "They shudder, and it is forgotten,” he writes resignedly. Some things never change. 

*****

1917 and 1918 were shit-show years. We think 2020 was bad? Add a world war and violent revolutions to the pandemic and then imagine how much worse it could have been. At least they didn’t have social media, so they were ahead of us on that count. 

The Russian revolution would have happened with or without World War I, though possibly not in the same way or at the same time. But the revolution in Germany that led to the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty (good riddance) was almost completely a result of the war. Gilbert acknowledges contributing factors to the revolutions - economic inequality, inhumane treatment of military conscripts, social and political injustice - without really acknowledging (or even understanding) that the entire monarchical system was (is) corrupt. He seems to believe that monarchy is basically good, and that revolution is an unfortunate aberration made necessary only when the monarchy doesn’t work as intended. But the whole point of monarchy (or oligarchy) is for a tiny group of all-powerful people to control all of a country’s wealth, leaving most of its citizens impoverished and powerless. The poverty and misery of peasants and workers is a feature, not a bug, of monarchy. 

Anyway, we’re all about to understand this a lot better than we want to. 

*****

Gilbert was a product of his time and place - England and what was left of the British Empire in the mid and late 20th centuries. Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne when he was a teenager, and she was still Queen when Gilbert died in 2015. He was too young to have fought in World War II but he was old enough to remember it and he would have grown up with parents and grandparents who remembered the first war and were adults during the second one. His childhood and youth were dominated by war, and he writes from the perspective of a person who  believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire and its rulers and its “civilizing” influence on the rest of the world. He writes about the League of Nations’ post-war “mandates” over territories in Africa, the former Ottoman Empire, and Asia as though it should be understood that non-white lands had to be ruled by white Europeans - the only question would be which white Europeans should rule which mandate. The word “colonialist” was not a pejorative in Martin Gilbert’s England.  

*****

Despite way too much detail on the minute-by-minute action in various trenches in France and Belgium and despite the casual racism and colonialism and despite the fact that you’d think that women were 5 percent of the population of the world and not 50 based on the number of times women are considered or even mentioned in this book, it’s still a great work of history and literature. And I’m very glad that I’m finished with it because it made me absolutely furious. 

*****

The Armistice that officially ended World War I took effect at 11 AM on November 11, 1918: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Soldiers on both sides of the barricades died that morning as both sides were ordered to continue fighting until exactly 11 AM. Of all of the senseless and stupid and infuriating waste of life chronicled in this book, this was the thing that made me angriest. 

“At any cost,” “at any price,” “whatever is necessary” - just words until you understand that when warmakers say those words, they mean them literally. The cost, the price, the whatever - that means as many human lives that must be wasted to take a bridge or a hilltop or a few yards of territory - they’re willing to waste them. 

*****

By the way, I am not a pacifist. War is necessary sometimes and humanity being what it is, the strong will always attack those they perceive as weak. Victims of aggression have every right to fight back and America should absolutely defend its allies. There is such a thing as a just war. 

*****

Wilfred Owen’s most famous war poem was “Dulce est decorum est.” The title is taken from the words of the poet Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. In English: It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Owen blames that ethos - that it is somehow beautiful and glamorous to die in battle - for the senseless militarism and imperialism that consumed an entire generation of young men in England (and France and Turkey and Germany). Having lived the destruction and violence of the trenches, he criticizes the romantic view of war in a poem that ends with the words: 

“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

The old lie: Dulce est decorum est...”

Wilfred Owen knew that it is sometimes necessary, but never sweet, to die for one’s country. He was killed in action in France on November 4, 1918, one week before the Armistice. He was 25. Neither sweet nor fitting. 

Wintering: A Week in January

It's 1:30 in the morning, and I can't sleep and I'm tired of reading about WWI so I'm going to write for a few minutes. I don't think writing will make me sleepy but I write every day, and this will count as Sunday’s daily writing, because it is Sunday now. If I can’t sleep, I might as well check something off my to-do list. 

Today was a very cold day, but clear and bright. I ran around doing Saturday things and came home at about 3:30 when the sky was pink and gold mixed with blue and you could see for miles through the bare winter trees. We had a fire during the evening and I was as content as a cat. I might be turning into a winter person. I might actually like January. 

Among other Saturday errands, I stopped at the mall.  The mall feels wistful on the weekend after New Year's. Teenagers wandered around, some with parents making returns and some with friends, all of them not quite believing that their long-awaited Christmas vacation was over. I remember that feeling, and I felt a little sorry for them. Stores were a jumble of leftover Christmas merchandise with a few early spring “resort” items here and there - expensive bathing suits next to picked-over piles of cashmere sweaters and scarves. I was looking for one particular thing, which I didn’t find, and I left the mall empty-handed, which was fine. When it comes to shopping, if it’s not a book, a handbag, or a jacket, it’s pretty much dead to me. 

*****

Yesterday was Monday, which turned out to be a snow day, so the Christmas vacation wasn’t quite over yet, at least for the private school kids. Public school kids in Maryland returned to class last Thursday, and now after a two-day return to the normal routine, they’re now enjoying a second straight snow day. And they should. Children need snow days as much as they need school. 

I teleworked yesterday and today.  Monday is normally an office day for me. I telework on Tuesdays and Fridays. But the federal government closed offices in the DMV, meaning total telework for those whose jobs are telework-capable. Between vacation and holidays and snow days, I haven’t been in the office in two weeks. I’ll be back tomorrow and then out again on Thursday for the Carter holiday and Friday to travel to a swim meet. At some point, I’m going to have to work for a full week. It’s probably going to kill me.

Yesterday was also January 6. The House certified the election of TFG, and Vice President Harris presided over the session and announced the results. The whole thing took less than an hour. No one stormed the capital. No one tried to overturn the results or introduce new slates of electors. The transfer of power was peaceful, even if the criminal to whom the power was transferred is not. My social media feeds were full of Democrats calling on VP Harris to “do something,” to “fight.” She did do something. She did her job, with more grace and courage and dignity than her critics could ever fathom. She is fighting, just not the way that some people think she should fight. Standing in front of the House chamber and fulfilling her Constitutional duty with a smile on her face is fighting. Addressing the press immediately afterward and pointing out the contrast between 2021 and 2025 is fighting. And maintaining her poise and grace in the face of an unforgivable snub from a racist moron Senate spouse is fighting. Kamala Harris did everything a human can be expected to do and more, and the country got it wrong. She doesn’t owe us any more than she’s already given. 

*****

It’s still Tuesday. I’m watching the arrival of Jimmy Carter’s casket at the Capitol building, and I’m wondering why on earth Ted Cruz and John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and Mike Johnson feel that they need to be there. Not one of them is worthy to occupy the same space with President Carter, even when he’s dead. And as for Mike Johnson standing in front of a podium and spouting a bunch of stupid platitudes so that he can look like a statesman on TV - well, let’s just say that if contempt of Congress is a crime then I’m going to jail because contempt doesn’t even begin to cover it. 

Anyway. 

The bitter cold continued today, Wednesday, my first day back in the office in over two weeks. I learn stuff about myself all the time and one of the things that I learned today is that while I’m pretty good at driving in bad conditions, I shouldn’t be doing so in the dark, so the next time I have an 0730 meeting on an icy day in January, I’ll attend remotely, and then drive to the office afterward when the sun is up. 

*****

The sun is brilliant on very cold January days, especially when there's snow on the ground. We're in the car now on our way to Randolph Macon University for the first meet of the second half of the season. It's very cold and very windy and - I can't emphasize this enough - very very bright. I am not driving, thankfully, because the glare is intense, even with my sunglasses. 

It's a holiday for me because of the state funeral for President Carter. I worked a little bit and watched funeral coverage, switching channels when necessary to avoid annoying commentary. Several broadcasters seemed impressed with Karen Pence’s refusal to greet the Trumps when they arrived. I was not impressed. I was amused, of course, but not impressed. Karen Pence had no problem with Donald Trump’s lying and bigotry and hatefulness until the hatred was directed toward her family. I don't bear any ill will toward her but she also doesn't get the you go girl fist bump either. 

*****

This post keeps going off the rails, doesn't it? It's not the only thing. The rails are slippery. There was a snowstorm, you know?

*****

It was so nice to be back at the pool last night. Randolph Macon is a nice little college, with a beautiful campus; and the recreation building where the pool is located is very modern but the pool itself is less than impressive. Portable bleachers that looked very unsturdy and felt even more unsturdy were the only accommodation for spectators and when we stood for the national anthem, I expected the whole thing to tumble to the floor leaving a pile of banged-up parents. The structure held up, though, and we walked out of the place in one piece. My son came away with a relay win and two second place individual finishes, and the boys won by five points, a very narrow margin of victory in a swim meet. 

I think I've adjusted to the cold, too, at least temporarily. We had a short walk from the car to the pool last night and I didn't feel like I was going to freeze to death so that was nice. The pool was extremely warm, too warm even for me, and I love a warm natatorium in January. It was almost a relief to get back outside after the meet. What is even happening to me?

*****

We're in the road again. It's quite early Saturday morning and we're heading to Scranton PA for another meet. It snowed again last night and it's very cold so the roads are a little dodgy but not terrible. It's still snowing a little bit. The sky is almost solid lead gray but there's a tiny patch of white gold. The sky should clear soon, and God willing and the creek don't rise, we should be in Scranton in time for the medley relay. 

*****

The sun is out now and it's a beautiful January morning. We just stopped for gas and coffee and we're driving through central Pennsylvania with about two more hours to go. The coffee is very good. 

And Scranton is a long drive from Silver Spring. We're on Route 81 N heading toward State College and Allentown and Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, the most 20th century of American towns. The commercial districts and industrial parks have given way to wintry woods and everything is gray and brown and white with a little bit of evergreen. 

*****

It's 9:35 on Sunday morning and we just checked out of the Scranton Hilton. It's a 4-hour drive home. It's cold and overcast with intermittent sun breaks, and the roads are clear. 

Scranton is the hometown of President Biden. You drive into the city from Route 81 right on to President Biden Expressway. From President Biden Expressway, you can turn on to Biden St., which we did. The American Century is everywhere in downtown Scranton. The old Lackawanna Railroad station, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is now a hotel that was featured in an episode of The Office. Downtown also boasts quite a few nicely restored early 20th century buildings, and while I wouldn't exactly call it lively, it's also not a ghost town. It's probably quite nice to hang out there on a Saturday night when it's not freezing cold and slushy. 

As you drive toward Marywood, downtown gives way to a residential district whose streets are lined with the kind of Victorian and Queen Anne houses that are usually described as stately. That neighborhood is in pretty good shape. During the early and mid 20th century, I'm sure that this was the home of Scranton's ruling class. Now I'm guessing that intrepid young professionals have purchased and renovated many of the houses. Despite the presence of a few properties here and there that have fallen into disrepair, it's a pretty charming neighborhood. 

***** 

We were two of the only three Marymount parents who made the long trip to Scranton, and almost all of my son's teammates stopped to thank us for coming and cheering for them before they got back on the bus for the long ride back to Virginia. And we thanked them too because it was a great meet. The boys and girls both won decisively, and the girls 200 breast, which my son's friend and teammate won by just out touching her closest competitor, was the race of the meet. My son came away with three first places (including a relay win) and an unexpected second in the freestyle sprint. It was a good week and a good weekend, even if it is January

Five years

• March 12, 2020: Corona Craziness
• November 7, 2020: President-Elect Biden
• January 6, 2021: Insurrection
• March 13, 2021: Day 365
• March 17, 2021: “Be careful ladies. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and everyone in Ireland is an asshole today.”
• April 19, 2022: First day at USU
• February 25, 2023: State Champions!
• November 6, 2024: That did not turn out as I had hoped. 

These are actual entries from my five-year one line a day journal, which I completed on December 31, 2024. The journal was a gift from my sister for Christmas 2019, and instead of just leaving it on my shelf to look pretty, which maybe a normal person would have done, I made it a point to write something in that journal every single day. And I did exactly that, every day for five years. Some of what I wrote in this journal no longer makes sense to me, and some of it is straight-up illegible because my handwriting is dreadful, but most of it is a truthful record of something that was happening in my life or in the world, or something that I was thinking about on that particular day, or something that made me laugh. 

*****

I used to have a really outstanding memory. I could recall with near perfect accuracy exactly what happened on a specific date a year ago or five years ago; and not just major occurrences but mundane trivial stuff like this was that day last year when we were all hyped up for sushi and then we showed up and found out that the restaurant was closed on Mondays, or this was the day in 2012 when I got that really terrible haircut. Even my husband - even my siblings! - acknowledged my superior memory. And I still remember most things pretty well but I'm not the failsafe memory machine that I once was. I need to keep records. I need to write stuff down. So if I didn't keep this five-year diary, I wouldn't have remembered the days when I recorded over 25,000 steps, or what day it was when when I got pulled over for driving on a Navy base in an unregistered car, or when it was that I dropped that jar of spaghetti sauce in the garage because I keep finding tiny little spots of sauce, years after I cleaned that mess up. 

*****

Just after Christmas, I was hanging around in a Barnes and Noble, and I almost bought a new one line a day journal. Let's do this again, I thought. But I already keep a planner and I already write this silly thing and how much more can I document my already pretty well documented life? I’m glad I have this little record of the five-year period from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2024 but it was a bit of a chore. I stuck with it for five years, and that was the point. On to the next thing. 

1915 and 2025

I just finished Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, likely (pretty much certainly) the last book I will finish for 2024. I read her newsletter, Letters from an American, almost every day. She makes sense of everything; or rather, she clarifies everything because so much of what is happening and about to happen makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Democracy Awakening explains what Richardson calls the “liberal consensus,” the social welfare system that pulled us out of the Depression and made America free and prosperous in the post-war years; and then the gradual dismantling of that system beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing through the first Trump administration. This book was published just a few months ago; so recently, in fact, that Richardson mentions Joe Biden’s decision to step aside and support Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. I don’t think she expected, when she finally published the book, that Trump would be re-elected, but here we are. 

*****

It’s January 1, 2025. Democracy Awakening was as expected the last book that I finished in 2024, though I did start a new book right after Christmas, which will be my 2024 - 2025 overlap book. The book Martin Gilbert’s The First World War: A Complete History, which is going to take me well into the second week of January, if not the third week. I don’t know enough about WWI, and you can’t know anything about the 20th century and beyond without knowing a good bit about what used to be called the Great War. I’m going all in. I’m going to try to read several books about the first half of the 20th century this year, especially the early decades. 2025 is going to be a long year anyway. 

*****

My son goes back to school tomorrow and the feeling of cozy holiday contentment will go with him. He’s close by and we’ll all be fine but it’s always so lovely having him home and always so hard to see him go again. But winter swim meets will make up for this. I’m technically off from work tomorrow but I’ll probably do some work after he leaves, just so that I’m not overwhelmed on Friday. We have two more paid holidays this January, one next week (the day of mourning for President Carter) and one on January 20 (which is both MLK Day and inauguration day). 

The holiday week is like a wrinkle in time; a passageway between the old and new years. When I was young, I worked in retail and that week was very busy for me. We worked until 7 or so on Christmas Eve and then we were right back at work at 7 AM on the day after Christmas, and we worked long days every day until New Year’s Day. Luckily for us, Nordstrom closed on New Year’s Day, but not every retail worker had that good fortune - in fact, most of the other stores and restaurants were wide open. Despite the work craziness, though, the week still felt different - holiday-ish and even peaceful amid the chaos. There were other compensations, too. Any holiday party or family get-together that you dreaded could be easily avoided with work as the convenient excuse. And when everyone else was bracing for the post-holiday re-entry to daily life, we were breathing a collective sigh of relief. But I don’t miss working through the holidays, and thanks to my time working in a department store, I never take holidays for granted. 

It’s January 2 now. I was going to just work today but I’m glad I decided to take one more day. I’m lucky I can take one more day. Tomorrow, I’ll be back at work. I don’t mind. I like work, and I like ordinary life. But this was supposed to be about a book, wasn’t it? And it is, kind of, because I’m reading about history, about the extraordinary events that interrupt and alter ordinary life until what was ordinary before becomes a memory. Martin Gilbert takes us through World War I in roughly chronological order, and I’ve made my way through about 20 percent of the book, which lands me in early 1915, a consequential year. 90 years later, we’re probably about to live through another very consequential year. Stay tuned; I’m sure you’ll be reading all about it.