Kathy Riordan's Open Salon Blog

The Good Year

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:12:10 -0500

"What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

~ from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

It was universally acknowledged that it had been a good year. Standing at the podium, overlooking a sea of humanity, it was easy to think one could slip into serene and permanent slumber, content in the knowledge that there was a general increase in the things that mattered most and decrease in the things that didn't.

If being rich and thin were the marking points, then bank balances were up and weight was down.

It's possible those weren't the markers, that there were other factors, like general peace and harmony and good karma, that material things mattered little if at all, that those who loved us loved us and those who didn't had nicely turned ankles.

But this was not the good year.

This was a year best forgotten; when one was writing the story of their life near its close it was the chapter omitted. When midnight was striking on the last day of the year it was slipping out the back door without so much as a gracious taking of leave. It was gone, gone, and best forgotten.

Nothing remarkable happened in this year. No babies were born whose lives were celebrated. No triumphs occurred in the corners of one's home or on distant shores. Love did not multiply. Everything stood still, or spun in circles, but nothing moved in ways that were memorable. The best lacked all conviction.

It was universally acknowledged that it had been a good year. There was a glow over that sea of humanity, something that radiated beyond the individual to the collective, something that vibrated past the horizon. People looked beyond themselves, and to the greater good, lives were spared and celebrated and cherished, and love bore fruit. There wasn't just a season of giving; it was a way of life. Doors and arms were open. Children laughed. Fear was banished.

Everything remarkable happened in this year. Babies were born, lives celebrated, triumphs at home, triumphs abroad.

Love was unconditional, and took wing.

Christmas, Party of One

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:12:24 -0500

It's hard to say when my husband stopped liking Christmas. It isn't that he hated it, exactly. On a certain level he loved it, the 'O Holy Night' part of it, but like my father he was at an uncertain peace with it, a private war, reclined in a chair declaring, "To hall with Hallmark."

That my husband was born on Christmas Eve is likely not to have helped. His birthday was always lost in a celebration of a bigger birthday, a babe in a manger. Even his mother, who'd gone to the hospital to deliver each of her other children, stayed home that Chicago night she went into labor with him, her lastborn, because she refused to leave her home and family on Christmas Eve, wanting to be with children and husband and lights and tree and sense of magic and wonder.

It will surprise many people that Himself felt this way, with generous external indications to the contrary. Whether in spite of it or because of it, the nearly 8,000 square foot home he shared with his former wife and family was amply decked at the holidays by local florists and often hosted seasonal parties that bulged the home at the seams, glasses lifted, ornaments aplenty.

It wasn't the simple he craved.

Even after our marriage he was known to don gay apparel and play host, raise a glass and join in chorus. But he humbuged at most of the glitter of the holiday and was never the one to be out buying, wrapping or giving gifts, addressing or sending cards. He was happiest listening to the silent night, in the comfort of the quiet, even within the walls of a local church finding the space a lit candle would occupy. He stopped wanting to go north to the cold and family years before he left us, feeling displaced and melancholy, a birthday overlooked, eclipsed by uncertainty, indifference and occasional drama, never the gifts he really wanted. Generous to a fault, the gifts he'd given seemed never to be properly appreciated or reciprocated.

And so he withdrew to that place I'd seen my father occupy in the corners of childhood, feet up in a recliner complaining about extravagance and misplaced principles, wanting to listen to Johnny Mathis or Bing Crosby or the Vienna Boys Choir and get lost staring at the star atop a tree, hypnotized by the sparkle of newfallen snow.

So it was that Christmas was celebrated in subdued fashion the last many years of our time together, perhaps a single gift exchanged, something generally with meaning attached, decorations meant to comfort and inspire but not reach an extreme. Our attempts to move his birthday to June 24th not successful, he knew it was doomed to be forever lost to anything other than our traditional dinner out after church on Christmas Eve, and perhaps a small gift from family, a pair of scissors, a new shirt, a book, a box of fish.

We clung to the things that mattered most to us at the holiday and there was joy and love and warmth inside, peppered by eggnog and treats, the glow of candles advancing in the December half-light.

That he left us on the doorstep of the holidays seemed both comforting and cruel, but that first Christmas a year ago was still wrapped in the anesthesia of new loss and distracted by my attempt to stay north and deck all halls, bring the Byers Choice carolers out of hibernation, carry home a tree a foot taller than the ceiling, and pretend in the magic of lights and snow that a death had not occurred.

This year was different. I returned to the southern home where we'd marked Christmas these last many years, making the journey late, and finding myself alone in a way never experienced before at the December holidays. Even in the 'hall with Hallmark' years there was a simple truth that illuminated our joy at Christmas. We were together. Like the saints in Whoville, it didn't matter if it came with ribbons or tags.

There was no fixing it this year, no way to reclaim even the most brooding of husbands, committed to the earth, no way to animate a suit hanging in a closet and take it to dinner, no way to offer it even the simplest of gifts or cuddle in front of a fire.

"They don't get more dead," as my mother is fond of saying.

It isn't that my husband didn't love Christmas. He did. He loved seeing the life sized Fontanini nativity displayed at the shrine in Orlando, loved singing the familiar carols of childhood on Christmas Eve, loved the candles, loved being loved and giving it.

All now is silent.

In this quietest of Christmases, quite alone for the first time ever, I discovered a truth, a truth about the December holidays that we all celebrate communally in our way, when dawn and dusk seem almost to touch and the magic is found best in the hours when the sunlight is only hinted and remembered. The importance of the holiday is the light, the lights on a tree, the lights of a star, the light of a candle burning in the dark against the night. Soon the sun will reappear. The importance of the holiday is the lightness of spirit, the lightness of heart, the lifting of a burden once shared.

The familiar song implores us to have a merry little Christmas.

Let your hearts be filled with light and light of spirit.

Let your hearts be light.

Christmas Greetings

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:12:52 -0500

To friends and loved ones near and far, good friends on Open Salon, all the best at the holidays and always.

The photo is one taken of us on the beach at 505 Front Street, Lahaina, Maui, a few years ago at the Feast at Lele. It seemed to be right for this card.

Below is the letter I enclosed this year.

May your holidays be joyous, filled with love and laughter, and may the new year bring you peace and prosperity.

To those of you who've extended friendship and supported my writing here, my many thanks. I look forward to your continued participation and contributions here.

May you be blessed,

Kathy

What's In a (First) Name?

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:12:34 -0500

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure I want a president whose first name is 'Newt.'

For that matter, I'm not sure I want a president whose name is 'Mitt' or 'Rick.'

Conjuring up images of small amphibious creatures aside, I'd be ever so much more comfortable if the candidates running were 'Newton,' 'Richard' or 'Milton.'

Newt is actually Newton Leroy McPherson, born to a teenage mother, Rick is James Richard, born to tenant farmers, and Mitt is Willard Mitt, born to one CEO and named for another one.

Mitt at least comes by his name honestly (no Milton in sight), and has been known to say that Mitt is his "real first name," which we can only assume was a slip for "real name." The Willard is for J. Willard Marriott, a friend of his father's, and the Mitt for his father's cousin, a quarterback for the Chicago Bears. Still, it brings to mind WASP-y East Coast names straight out of Mame, like 'Biff' and 'Bunny,' and doesn't have the gravitas that leaders of his faith have carried, like 'Spencer,' 'Marion,' 'Harold' and 'Heber.' Doubtless none of them would have gone by Spence or Hal and carried the weight.

We recall an election not so very long ago when William Jefferson Clinton challenged George Herbert Walker Bush. Of course it was 'Bill' going up against 'George,' but neither name made us giggle. The current occupant of the White House, however, probably wouldn't have been elected as 'Barry.' 'Barack,' for its risks, carried a sense of purpose and global ethnicity; Barry would have been seen as a schoolboy.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy suffered no loss as 'Jack,' or 'JFK,' a monogram that had its own special weight. It had to be 'Bill' and 'George' and not their distinguished complete names. 'Reagan' said it all, even though at home we knew he was 'Ronnie.'

My sense tells me that Trump would probably find more political success if he wasn't a 'Donald,' which has the same liability as the moniker 'Mickey.' Michael Trump has a ring of truth to it. Donald just sounds Goofy.

We expect crime bosses to have names like 'Sal' and 'Vinnie,' and can give compelling support for popes choosing new names like 'John,' 'Gregory' or 'Leo,' thereby abandoning birth names like 'Albino' and 'Giuseppe.'

Presidents, it seems, need something more than a four-letter handle of increasing informality. We long for another Thomas or Andrew, yearn for a Harrison or Benjamin.

We have instead a Baptist who became a Catholic, a Democrat who became a Republican, and a Mitt. I blame bumper stickers. And Jimmy Carter. But the wave of shortened informality in politics has got to come to an end.

Otherwise, we'll have a small slippery critter in the White House, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

The Gun

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:11:00 -0500

Jo Anne Worley of Laugh-In once said that she dreamt about the secrets of the universe, and quickly scribbled them onto a piece of paper at her bedside.

The next morning, she awoke and read the paper. "Cottage cheese."

My dad with his brother, fishing. Wyoming, 1954.

I wonder if it was that gun. I wonder what happened to it.

That gun saw a lot of action when I was a child. We'd be out in the sagebrush near the oil leases, where rabbits would occasionally be target practice. I didn't like the noise. I didn't like the violence. I didn't understand the point.

I knew he kept it under the seat of his pick-up truck. You had to do that sort of thing in Wyoming, never sure what you'd run into, and where. I assumed then it made more sense for an unexpected grizzly bear or a wolf than an errant security breach of unsecured oil fields. Wyoming didn't really stop being rough and tumble, long after the Hole-in-the-Wall gang.

I leaned into the long rifle range at 4-H camp in Alpine and squinted at the target down my lane. It wasn't a comfortable posture for me. It wasn't something I was comfortable holding. I squeezed the trigger, and closed my eyes.

Hunting was a way of life. Most men knew how to handle a gun, and many women. Aside from 4-H camp, I never touched one. Even years later when a friend's husband who collected guns pulled them out one by one from his cabinet where they were proudly displayed, I pulled back, not wanting my fingerprints on any of them, not trusting what they could do.

I had been hunting, accompanied my dad on hunting trips, deer and elk, hated the sound of the shot echoing in the frost, the loud release. I knew the gun had taken down a grizz. I always hoped whoever was handling the gun knew what they were doing.

Close encounter with a grizz. Wyoming, 1955.

I wonder about the kids handed the guns. My husband wasn't much more than nineteen when he was given a plane to fly into war in Europe. Knowing how to use a gun was essential to his survival, but I didn't give it much thought during our marriage, always knowing that in our home somewhere lurked two of them, a German Luger that had been a souvenir of war, and an antique rifle that his lost son had used in Crack Squad at Shattuck. I'd ask him repeatedly if they were loaded.

"Always assume a gun is loaded," he'd reply.

Something in the back of memory nagged me about children stumbling onto guns in homes, horrible tragic accidents ensuing. From the outset of our marriage I resisted letting anyone have even pretend guns in our house, something a young nephew might have been too small to appreciate, something his parents might not have fully understood. I hoped that when the time came those who needed to use guns would be well trained in using them. I just didn't want them to be children.

That gun was for a time in my dad's closet, high on a shelf with silver dollars and handwritten notes. When he died, his father and brother took the guns. So nothing bad would happen with them.

My mother was daydreaming in a meeting last night, a strange reverie about my grandfather's house, my uncle and his sons, and a gun lying across the bed. She set it aside.