But there are two songs I make an exception for, and by a weird coincidence, both are by bands that originated in Akron, Ohio. Maybe I’ll get to the second later this month (and I bet you’ve already guessed which it is) but the first is The Waitresses, “Christmas Wrapping.” It has been running through my head all month, perhaps because this is the first Christmas I have spent with no family other than my son.

So deck those halls, trim those trees
Raise up cups of Christmas cheer,
I just need to catch my breath,
Christmas by myself this year.

Then I pay more attention to the words: “Had his number but never the time. Most of ’81 passed along those lines.” ’81? ’81?! This song is thirty years old! Am I even thirty years old? Clearly I must be. Oh dear, when did that happen?

There seems to be no video of it (we are almost pre-video for this song) so I present you with the synchronized Christmas lights version:

Christmas Wrapping — The Waitresses

In a quiet way, unwind
Doing Christmas right this time.

Anyway, I was reminded of a passage from one of my favourite books, A Big Storm Knocked it Over, by one of my favourite authors, Laurie Colwin, taken from us much to soon. And taken from her own small daughter much too soon too, as I recall more often than one might expect. Jane Louise has just left her baby, Miranda, alone with her husband for the first time and is returning from spending time with a friend:

It was nearing the end of the academic year. Everywhere she looked students were lugging boxes of books, clothes, and standing lamps out of their dorms. She stood on the sidewalk and watched a serious young boy load two duffel bags into the trunk of his father’s car and dash into a building. His father, a gray-haired man with a wide chest and a linen sports jacket, was loading the trunk. Jane Louise stood perfectly still, blinded by the sunny glare. Hazy light poured down around her.
Some day Miranda would grow up and go to college. day would follow day: She would lose her baby teeth. Her adult teeth would come in. She would go to school, learn to read, go to high school, have boyfriends, leave home. To her amazement, jane Louise found herself in tears. Her throat got hot, and tears poured down her cheeks. She felt powerless to brush them away.
The gray-haired man walked past her, carrying a pair of suitcases. When he saw her, he stopped and set the cases down.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I was just thinking about my child going to college,” Jane Louise said.
“How old is your child?” the man asked gently.
“Just five months old,” said Jane Louise, and she began to sob. “You must think I’m a nut.”
The man looked at her thoughtfully. “When my kid went to sleep-away camp for the first time, I wanted to lie down in the driveway and eat dirt,” he said.
Jane Louise looked up at him. He filled her vision entirely. The hazy sunshine swirled around them. She grabbed his wrist, and kissed his hand. He was wearing a beautiful gold watch.
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh thank you.”
Then she collected herself. The man picked up the suitcases.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “You’ll grow into it.”

Snow.  Pizza.  Murray Hill Diner.  NYU.  Broadway.  John’s Pizzeria. 5th Avenue.  School Products. Deedee!  Korean barbecue.  Doughnuts.  Habu Textiles. 6th Avenue.  Soho.  Nolita.  Lower East Side.  Chinatown.  Live frogs in a bucket.  Balaboosta.  Subway.  GAP.  American Idiot.  Stage door.  More pizza.  Sarge’s Deli.  Blintzes and lox and pastrami.  New York Public Library.  Rockefeller Center.  Central Park.  New shoes.  Chocolate of many lands.

O’Hare.

This is one of the easiest dishes we make and it is easily multiplied for a bigger crowd, or shrunk just for one or two.  You will need:

• 4 hardboiled eggs, peeled halved lengthwise
• 1 1/2 c cooked peeled baby shrimp, the kind you get frozen in a big bag
• 1 boston lettuce

Line a plate with lettuce leaves.  Spread the hardboiled eggs on it in one layer.  Layer the thawed shrimp evenly over the eggs.  Then top with the following dressing, made of  all these ingredients, mixed together:

• 1/4 c whipped cream
• 1/4 c good mayonnaise.  I was not much of a “brand” person until I bought some Whole Foods mayonnaise. *Shudders at the memory*  I suggest Hellman’s.  You can also replace some of the cream and mayonnaise with good yoghurt.
• 1 tbs. chopped dill.  If you don’t like dill, this whole Swedish Christmas Eve thing may not be for you.  Just saying.
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• dash white pepper

Here’s what it looks like before you add the dressing.  You can see the dressing to one side, and also some cheese on a wooden board.  God Jul!

Could we be the last remnants of some impossibly old and forgotten folk tradition…?

Logotherapy, the therapeutic method developed by Frankl, teaches that human beings are primarily motivated by, not power or pleasure, but the desire to find meaning in their lives, and that we achieve peace when we find this meaning. We find meaning by doing a deed (work?), experiencing a value (truth, beauty, love; of nature, art, or a person), or, when all that is positive fails, through suffering.

If you have read my “About me” page, you will recognize that these are the views I share. Anyone who writes history is searching for meaning and is actively constructing it out of the chaos of data left by passing humans. Writing stories is a construction of meaning within the fiction/not fiction of the beginning, middle, and end of a tale. I don’t know if I believe that it is our primary impulse, but I believe it should be, that it is the only way to deal with the turmoil caused by all our other primary impulses.

I read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in high school, I believe in religion class at he Convent of the Sacred Heart. I was interested in anything to do with the Holocaust at the time, and I remember appreciating it, though not drawing any especially lasting lessons from it. At the time I did not know that my grandfather’s sister died at Theriesienstadt, where Frankl spent so much time or that, like him, my great-grandparents and my grandfather’s sister were transported to Auchwitz, though with worse fate. What I wonder now is how much Frankl’s book might have stuck inside me without me knowing it all these years. It seems that reading an account of the Holocaust is a rite of passage for high schoolers these days (rightly so). I also believe we are made up of all the books we have read, as well as the experiences we have had and the people we know. I wonder if I would have been different if we had read Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel or Anne Frank instead of Viktor Frankl at the Sacred Heart all those years ago?

Home.

I remember visiting Gumper and Granny in Florida a month before he died.

I remember him using my visit to go to an all-you-can eat buffet, which Granny deplored as much as she hated the early bird special.  I ate my first (and last) oyster there.

I remember working on my term paper on the stories of Franz Kafka while I was in Florida.  I remember reading “The Judgement” for the first time earlier in the semester and physically shaking at the end, so much I felt it described the relationship of Dad with his father.  I was never able to get the exact feeling back on subsequent rereadings.

I remember making Gumper potato pancakes out of a box because he asked me to.  Shortly after his death, I learned how to make proper latkes from scratch and I never make them but I think of making the ones for Gumper, and wishing I had known then how to make proper ones (but some people, esp. from Poland and maybe northern Bohemia like those pureed kind more than the grated kind, so maybe he would have still preferred the boxed ones).

I remember him talking to me about how bored he was.  When he died, I felt he had been ready because of that conversation.

I remember asking Dad if he wanted me to leave school and come stay with him when Mum and Deed were in the Caribbean.  He told me there was no point; he was at work all day.

I remember Gumper’s funeral, the Czech anthem, Dad asking us to wave and shout goodbye to Gumper as we walked home.  I remember Dad telling us that he had learned something, that there was some secret, but he wasn’t going to tell us yet.  Of course, we never learned what it was.  I remember raspberry squares.  I remember dying easter eggs with Alison and Emily.

Alison Pick’s THURSDAY’S CHILD, a story about love, hope and betrayal within an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, to Lynn Henry of House of Anansi, in a pre-empt, by Anne McDermid Associates.

That’s my cousin! Check out her website in my links. I’ve read this novel and it is wonderful. There are many novels about the war and the Holocaust, but this one is very different, about a place and a moment that is seldom described. To me, she gets the feel of Czechoslovakia as it fell to Hitler absolutely perfectly and the story is gripping and beautifully written. Her publisher is going to be very happy they picked up this book.

Maybe I’ll do a blog interview of Alison when her book is released. Hmm. *plots*