New Year, Same old me

In one cozy moment, quiet had settled over the house.



Christmas had come and gone.

There was nothing to do but throw another log on the fire and relax.



Each child had retreated to their bunkers with their Santa loot and were happily engaged introducing the new to the old, and rearranging pecking orders.



Time enough to breathe and loosen my white-knuckled grip on this manufactured reality.



A carpet of canines had just settled in for a short winter’s nap while the cats that had lain doggo were finally stirring.



The Bumpass Christmas, as this year’s carnival of excess, would become known, at its most festive featured ten humans, six dogs, one ginormous roast and at least three subsequent meals made entirely from leftovers.



And despite some minor disagreements, some involving sharp words others involving sharp teeth, somehow we had survived mostly unscathed.



Of course, it wasn’t all happiness and fancy Christmas lights shot out of a cannon in the direction of the house, although the lazy light show did its part to lessen our grief the night “Luna,” still lustrous of fur though elderly in hamster years, finally trundled off to the giant cardboard tube in the sky.



Her departure serves as a tiny reminder of the humans we were missing this year, too.



All those shiny packages containing even the smallest of treasures helped to redirect our thoughts. Not that we will ever admit such selfish soothing.

What is Next if not a distraction from Last?



Life is good. Good. Not perfect, but that’s what keeps it interesting.



Tomorrow we will try to build us better selves.

We will strive to be more organized. We will seek to exhibit fewer vices.

 We will be our thinner, healthier, happier selves, though we will still be recognizable. It’s just that our finances will be in better order and our hearts will be at peace.

But the process in our house is also external, born of the unhappiness of others in us.

We squint our eyes and see where our lives would be better with less of someone else's life spilling over.

My husband wants less clutter and more peace and quiet.

My daughter wants to eliminate all the dog hair that seeks to cling to her formal-hued fashions.

My son would like his time on the internet uninterrupted.

I would like everyone just to get along.

We won't all get what we want. And that's as it should be. Even my most pessimistic self should know the process of resolve is incremental. Small starts are starts all the same.

And not all failures are regressive. Most of our missteps still send us forward, just in a different direction.

It will still be noisy and chaotic. But there will be joy.

Dogs will still leave a trace, but you will learn to use a lint brush.

Sometimes the internet goes out “unexpectedly,” and the world doesn't end.

Even when we argue, we're still talking it out.

Getting along sounds loud and angry sometimes, too.

So it is with some hope that I step off into a new year and another beginning. Next year may not be better, but it will always bring something for which we can be thankful.










Learning the ropes

“In four miles take a left onto Route Nine.”

For fifty minutes I’d been following Siri’s every instruction, starting with an easterly turn out of our driveway.

“In one mile you will reach your destination.”

I was worried.

“Did you hear her mention of our destination was on the right or the left?”

My co-pilot for this leg of the adventure was an eighth-grade friend of my daughter’s who’d apparently drawn the short straw.

The four other girls on this journey had already pretzeled themselves into the second- and third-row seats, and were nervously chirping away, twittering about what to expect, but trusting I would get us there.

We were going rock climbing.

Or, more precisely, wall scaling inside a two-story metal warehouse made to look like rocks.

It was my girl’s 14th trip around The Sun, and she had a dream.

Or rather, her father had a dream:

“Hey, kiddo,” he said one morning over eggs and toast. “I had the strangest dream last night. You and your friends went rock climbing on your birthday.”

She tilted her head and laughed the kind of laugh that threatens to either choke a person or propel orange juice from their nose.

“Oh that’s hilarious, dad,” she said with an overly dramatic flair. “I can’t see any of my friends agreeing to climb rocks.”

Somehow, between a second helping of bacon and me as the designated driver squinting off into nothingness as my Australian-accented navigational assistant insisted we had arrived, my daughter (having been fed a few web pages of details about a local rock gym) had managed to make his dream a reality.

And she had talked a handful of friends into accepting the challenge.

I’m not sure what I was going through my mind when I floated the idea that a rock climbing dream wasn't out of the question.

Because as I stood at the gym counter with five girls and no experience, the look on the guy’s face momentarily told me I had made a mistake.

There were too many of them. And I wasn't enough.

“How old are they?”

“14ish?”

His face relaxed.

“Oh, great! They can belay for each other. No problem.”

Before anyone could have third thoughts, he’d taken the group to get equipment: shoes and harnesses and a little device that would help them return to safety after reaching unimaginable heights.

It looked like a candle flame snuffer.

In 20 minutes he’s talked all five girls through the process of literally “learning the ropes.”

Ropes, it turns out, is more involved than climbing, which had only one hard and fast rule: “if the belayer tells you to slow down ... slow down.”

And then... just like that ... one girl after another scaled to the top of a wall and repelled back down to the floor. Each girl putting their trust in another girl who was keeping their rope from going slack.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

It was almost as if they had been doing such a things in their sleep their whole lives.

Return to sender

My mailbox is over its quota.

Now, in the real world, this might mean that the nice folks at the Post Office are drowning in letters and parcels and cards that I’d been remiss in retrieving.

Which, let’s face it, at this time of year is perfectly plausible and a mostly accurate portrayal. I haven’t been able to walk to the Post Office in weeks without having to return home to get a vehicle to truck back that day’s haul.

However, I’m not talking about the real world, where mail takes up cubic space and costs many dollars and cents to transport from place to place.

I’m talking about an email box on a server somewhere in the ethosphere, overflowing with news of cyber sales and enormous opportunities I will undoubtedly miss since I just can’t seem to connect with that wealthy but unloved Nigerian prince who has money to give away to perfect strangers.

How do I know this? Well, my internet-service-provider-slash-old-email-purveyor forwarded a copy of the email they couldn’t fit into my mailbox.

... to another mailbox?

Don’t ask me to explain it. I still don't know how the Fax machine works all these years after it has become mostly obsolete. All I know is that the thing I might not have seen if they didn’t insist I couldn’t see it was an important message from Etsy. 

Apparently when some twee hipster has crocheted something “amazing,” that is now on sale just in time for holiday shopping, the entire World Wide Web could come to a crashing end.

Of course, this shouldn’t bother me. Thousands of unread emails taking up space at an address I rarely visit and only give out to the shifty types who will sell my information to other shift types, all of whom are trying to sell me something, should be low on my priorities list.

And yet, I am curious enough to spend a few minutes figuring out how to log on.

“You. Have. Fifty-thousand-four-hundred-twelve emails ...”

“And you can't delete them from your server by deleting them from your phone.”

But it turns out if you don't delete them from the server, you will hear from a tinny, robotic voice every hour on the hour, and on the half hour … forevvvvvvvvvver!!!

I’m not kidding. Even as I write this, I have been trying to pitch hundreds of these old pitches out of an open browser window. It's not as simple as crumpling paper and practicing your hook shot. I have to check each email individually and jetison them in groups that are no larger than 25.

Each batch takes at least 25 seconds to spin their way into the trash. Did I mention I have to go into the trash and repeat the process? (Trash mail counts and that just mega bytes).

Twenty minutes later and only three hundred and seventy-five emails have spun out. And of course, my available space still hasn’t budged.

Oh, wait ...

There’s been a development ...

“You have 1 percent of your usable space remaining.”

Why am I doing this? Honestly, I have Christmas cards to address, and laundry to wash and fold. I could empty the dishwasher and fill it up again. The dog is holding her leash in her mouth and looking at me plaintively.

Gosh, I could be learning about how net neutrality will make all of this worse, or why I should specifically hate bitcoin instead of just feeling generally opposed to its existence.

Seriously? Why?

If only I could mark them return to sender.

Grab tidings

I’m happy to be able to wish you a “Merry Christmas” again.

Of course, my glad tidings are true and genuine reflections of the profit and loss tally that will result in this year’s Christmas spirit.

A full accounting of which I've requested from the Congressional Budget Office.

I anxiously await their reply.

In the meantime, and in the service of this secular Christmas, which we celebrate as a nation by arming ourselves against any and all disappointments with plastic cards that accordion out of our wallets like all those pictures of babies and grandbabies no one at the office really want to gaze upon (but “oohed” and “ahhed” over politely anyway) I would like to formally surrender.

That's right: I give up.

I will not find the perfect gift.

Or select the right color.

I will likely get the size wrong.

I just want you to understand that I’m at peace with my failures in this battle.

I’d hold up a white flag, but I can’t manage to separate colors in this dimly lit laundromat of an economy. If I’m lucky the banner I pull from the front loader will be a healthy (if unwanted) shade of pink. My guess is, however, the object of my surrender will make its way into the Downey Soft scented air either a dull grey in hue or a distasteful brown.

I don’t think the kids will be too disappointed. They have their own money, saved by working odd jobs at the home front, not the least of which involves vacuuming the furnishings, and removing from them the inches of sediment comprised almost entirely of pulverized after-school snacks.

In other words, they buy what their hearts-desire year-round with the change they gather from under the cushions and the loot the Tooth Fairy brings.

It took several years to explain to my offspring the value of only parts of dollars. And it wasn’t until my rap on wrapping coins (complete with practicum and a share of the proceeds) that small money started to matter to them in a big way.

This is not to say that I was an early adopter of the penny-wise practices of my Depression-era forebears. There was a time (not long ago) that I deposited the nickel-backs into the recycling right along with the cardboard and tin foil.

I dumped handfuls of change into an old coffee can every laundry day for years, never really considering depositing the contents anywhere else.

Of course, my fear now is that small money will be the only income left for our children to earn. A life of shopping carts filled with deposit bottles to buy half-slices of avocado toast.

They’ve already reached the age where they listen to media reports and swear worse than an entire team of Bad News Bears.

They would make Walter Matthau blush, rest his soul.

I can’t worry about that. Just like I can’t worry about which of their “friends” is most likely to snap and bring a semi-automatic weapon to school one day.

I will pray the manufacturer turns out to be Nerf.

We parents aren’t supposed to think about that. We have already planned for the worst. Our district (and no doubt yours) has already installed a buzz-in entry point with bullet-proof glass. Protectionism is now 9/10s of the law.

And when I think of protection, I, of course, think walls.

Walls so tall it would keep all these passportless red-coated idealists out of our hair.

I will build mine out of the gazillion and four throw pillows I have acquired since the last holiday season, and line the top with thousands upon thousands of slightly over-cooked toffee shards I will make each night until the New Year.

You're such a good kid, Nellie Oleson

Life was simple once.

I’m not pining for Neanderthal simple or Little House on the Prairie simple, I’m just wishing life’s simple things could be like they were before Thanksgiving.

At 7:30 Post Meridian, on the day we gather with family and roasted turkey and five kinds of potatoes to give thanks for everything we have in our lives that we take for granted during the rest of the year, my children marched up to me with some rumpled papers in their hands.

"Can you send this to Santa?" my 10-year-old asked as he thrust in my direction a torn sheet of notebook paper with a seemingly meager list. 

My eyes got all misty as I smoothed the food-stained page and the realization that this is perhaps the very last time in his wonder-believing life he will perform this ritual took full effect.

His sister, in solidarity, produced a letter of her own and presented it with a wink. "And mine, too?"

Her missive was typed and doubled spaced, and contained a host of things that could only fit onto gift cards. Ostensibly, the slabs of plastic cash would be used for year-round shopping ... randomly spaced in the foreseeable future ... with friends... as I chauffeur silently ... and dotter along behind ... at an acceptable distance.

As I try to decipher the boy's misaligned letters scribbled after three consecutive numerical notations, I realize Santa is doomed.

Number one: There is no way The Big Guy is going to finance this kid's heart desire for “a super-fast gaming system with impressive video capture for streamlined YouTube uploading.”

Not when there’s at least three perfectly good gaming systems collecting dust under the television.

Number two: “A Cyclecar?” I had to Google this contraption, only to find out it is pretty much a lightweight bullet-shaped go kart that tools around on bicycle wheels propelled by the equivalent of a motorcycle engine. More than “some assembly required.”

The 1918s called. It wants its fad back.

Maybe Santa could spring for the leather aviator goggles that should accompany such a vehicle, but the kid would have to drive around in the box they come it, making realistic vroom, vroom sounds on his own. Alas, he’s outgrown that stage.

Now it’s all about Snapchat, interactive video gaming, YouTube channels and ... hair gel?

Number three: “Enough hair gel to fill the swimming pool. Jell-O could be substituted.”

Poor Santa.

The internet and social media has certainly changed his job.

If I were him, I’d want to shift my kids onto the Naughty List and call it a day.

But I know he’s looking past my kids.I can feel his scowl. It sends icicles through my veins.

I can hear his normally jovial voice turn melancholy. “Now, who was it, I notice, who PAID their children to model for the family Christmas card?”

Guilty as charged.

In my defense, I felt the sum of a sawbuck worth the efforts of two camera-shy kids if only to lessen my own efforts in getting them to stand still and pose. I opened my mouth to speak.

No words came out.

I couldn’t bring myself to voice such logic. No matter how much I wish my children were the altruistic angels Hollywood has taught me children can be, realistically I’d rather employ than implode.

Appearances matter, especially as my daughter overhears me wrestling with my inner demons.

“You do realize we would have posed for photos without you paying us, right? We’re not complete brats.”

“I know. I know. You’re such a good kid, Nellie Oleson.”