My Tiny Tim Fantasy

“Do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence.”

(John Steinbeck, from a 1959 letter to Adlai Stevenson)

Christmas is to most a time for celebrating good fortune, spending money, feasting, and giving gifts. I don’t think the message of Christmas is really lost in this; in my observation most seem to remember and appreciate Christmas as a time of genuine goodwill even in spite of rampant consumerism. I don’t see any problem in consumerism if it’s done for unselfish reasons. If there were ever a time to be a rampant consumer, Christmas is it.

This year, my parents began their transition to the “big” city of Lansing. No, they don’t have empty-nest-syndrome or postpartum-depression from losing their precious baby son. They didn’t move to follow me, they moved to be closer to their wild-and-crazy interracial church, and probably in an attempt to cure that special strain of cabin fever that can only be brought on by 15 years in Coldwater, MI.

Nevertheless we kept Christmas in Coldwater this year. The floors were stripped, the cupboards were bare, the fridge was empty, and the air was cold and dry. A tiny Christmas tree was perched atop an old end-table. The heirloom mahogany dining table was replaced by a rickety fold-up card table covered with a poinsettia table cloth and surrounded by lawn chairs and old office swivel-chairs. There remained only the sofa in the living room, and a single small ottoman on which to rest our feet. The family dog was absent, having died months ago (remnants of her hair and dandruff still to be kicked up and inhaled, inciting sneezes of remembrance).

Our traditions remained the same, but tapered down to fit a more meager situation. Christmas eve dinner was at a local restaurant, and was mediocre at best (what all-star chefs work on Christmas eve?). Without a piano or hymnal, we sang Christmas carols a cappella and from memory. We passed around my mother’s Bible and read the Christmas story from Matthew and Luke. We opened our gifts. The DVD player was broken, so we piled on the couch drinking wine and gorging ourselves on Christmas cookies, and watched a strange movie on TV about nuns. On Christmas day, we had leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, went to the movie theater, and watched Jeopardy.

This all could have been really depressing, but instead there was a special joy in the whole thing. I’ve never seen my father laugh until he cried. We decorated cookies and didn’t care if sprinkles got on the floor. We made hot water for hot cocoa and coffee in old pots that had been packed away. We laughed a lot. We reminisced every unique ornament on that tiny tree. We hobbled around boxes piled high, and we laughed some more. We drank more wine, piled on that single couch, falling half asleep watching old episodes of Star Trek, and laughed. All the while, snowflakes were gently falling outside, illuminated by a single strand of Christmas lights on that tiny tree purchased from Goodwill. And what a source of goodwill it was! It was probably the best Christmas ever.

Bells at Christmastide

DO:
crescendoing (no faster
than snow can slip)
your quiet limbs
sang into silent
fir trees
down

SOL:
growing soft green
foliage of truth,
leaves of my open eyes
hanging from heartstems:
ornaments of deepest
Gabriels shining
up-up-up the loudest
heaven——

LA:
then—oh my
suddenly God—He
appeared, the Son
of all green
flowers, of all
stars

MI:
of all that is
quietly singing
out of my
silent

Strange

There is something horribly, horribly strange about Sufjan Stevens's latest album. I literally cannot listen to his last album (Age of Adz) for this reason... it shreds my heart, and not in a good way, really; in a mystical, terrifying, relentless, strange.

It makes me feel the way I remember feeling when, as a child, I found myself fixated on strange and bizarre images while lying awake in my bed (a mangled tree stump, a spindle of glowing silver thread, a sarcophagus that bridged a river), and would come sheepishly downstairs to sit with my parents half panicked, half consumed with melancholy, half afraid the universe would swallow us up without warning or mercy (yes, that's three halves).

After I sobbed for three hours one night last year while listening to "Futile Devices" on repeat, I knew it had to stop. This music is not right. It is strange.

This new 58-track album of "Christmas" music is everything that terrifies me about this universe. I cannot endorse its consumption. I think it is the songs of terrible angels, or of ancients, or of aliens.

the lea(f

You and I are not suns

You and I are
not suns, aeons apart, vibrating
slow churning cello-strings of space;
we are not trees who staring unforgetting
at the sky thousands of days at a time
find that they understand stars
much more clearly than you or I.

No we are not very old yet,
our rings will be fewer than our
backyard tree and still fewer than
Saturn's long strands of ancient hair
(fed by the very stones of eternity)
no, we will never be that far apart—
two thousand miles at the most,
maybe just chairs away at the least.

Still, I hear your voice as clear
as emptiness when I am wandering
down the short trails of your handwriting
on an old scrap of paper, also when I am
praying myself into galaxies so distant
even God himself should sleep
half the journey.

Century Egg

Well, everyone, I finally did it. I've been clamoring for a century egg for some time now, and I finally found some at an Asian grocery store in my new home of East Lansing. My roommate pointed them out to me, only to realize in slow-motion horror that I hadn't been kidding all these years.

These were duck eggs preserved in the traditional style with salt and lye. They were not refrigerated, and were not shelled. What follows is an illustrated account of my solitary quest to discover the mysterious flavors and textures of the century egg.

Each egg was individually wrapped with loose plastic:

The membrane directly under the shell was speckled:

Peeling back the membrane, the egg itself appeared to be black and glossy (I later discovered it was a very dark, translucent amber, as expected).

The fully peeled egg:

I will say that at this point, the smell of the egg was quite strong. Difficult to describe, but if I had to characterize it, it was something like a combination of urine and rotting potatoes.

Having sliced it apart, I did take a small bite, despite the foul odor. In truth, it was quite bland... the white was close to the consistency of a gummy bear, but a little firmer, and had almost no flavor whatsoever. The yolk, apart from its coloration, tasted very much like the yolk from a regular fresh hard-boiled egg. On a scale of 1-10, (1 being foul and inedible, and 10 being scrumtrulescent) I would give it a 3. I certainly wouldn't eat one if I were looking for a snack, but if I were starving, I'd have few qualms.

Bonus! Characteristic "pine-branch" patterns, which I observed upon holding the white against the light of the open window!

Pausing in the West

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 

(William Wordsworth, from Intimations of Immortality)

Driving along the scenic backways of Utah, through the Dixie National Forest, light is quickly scampering on the feet of sheep and deer, running deeper into the Western hills and valleys. We wind along and around, chasing the light until we reach a fork in the road. One road leads North, up and out of the forest; the other South, deeper into the mountains and away back to the city. But it is neither North nor South that has captured us; it is the Western heavenly—no, celestial, perhaps cosmic—light that is calling us into the deadly devastating canyons bathed in hundreds of colors of radiant, crepuscular beams. Strong, sculpted bodies of clouds at the edge of the earth seem to be struggling to hold up the firmament itself.

Speechlessly we approach the edge of this great open mouth of earth and stone agape before us. Delicate purple flowers brush against our feet, and in awe we stand breathlessly searching for comfort and reconciliation from the crushing sublimity. I surrender to this moment of virgin solitude, accepting that even filled to the deepest, untouched corners of my soul, my heart is full of this thing. I cannot accommodate the deluge; it is spilling over into my mind, which opens its floodgates as I desperately search for understanding. Although it seems as steadfast as the monolithic, eternal stone that frames it, I know that it is in motion, hurtling toward the ends of the world: it is nothing more than an apparition, a glint of gold in a rapid, cold river that will never be recovered to reveal its source to greedy hands.

In this infinitesimal instant I am reconciled to a kind of strange stillness—an acceptance that there are no words, no feelings, not even thoughts that can atone for the tragedy and joy that mingles before me in the sky. Even tears are beyond it, for I know it is the music of the universe itself—it is the poetry of God.