The Goose, The Tree & The Family Neurosis

When I asked Will for some ideas about what to cook for Christmas Eve dinner, he suggested "a game bird." Being the sort of mother who is thrilled when able to please at least one of my offspring, I quickly ordered an organic goose, raised by Truan from Someday Farm. Our particular goose, I was told when I picked it up post-processing, (an hour's plucking by three sets of hands) had also weeded the raspberry patch.


"We're having goose?" Katherine said. "I can't even stand the thought of poultry. It's my pregnancy aversion."


"We'll have plenty of other things for you," I said.


"And you're supposed to be a vegetarian," she scolded.


"I am a vegetarian; I'll eat veggies."


"Will there at least be Lemon Lulu?" 


Lemon Lulu is a local bakery-made lemon cake sprinkled with powdered sugar that is so sublime people sneak around with knives secreted about their persons cutting surreptitious slices after patting their tummies and proclaiming in loud voices, "Oh, no thank you, I couldn't possibly eat another bite."


"There will be Lulu."


This was a week before Christmas/Cheerful Children's Day, before I had braved waist-high snow drifts and howling winds, bareheaded, clutching the rapier sharp saw in my bare hand, to claim our mighty Frasier Fir from the forests of Vermont.


"Mom, you went to the tree farm, and someone probably cut it for you,"Will said.


"That's not true! I had to lie on my side in the snow and ice to hack through the trunk with a rusty blade, my fingers black with frost bite, shivering uncontrollably with ague - "


"Yeah, right. Ague?"


"Why won't you believe me?"


Once home, I had dumped our mighty Frasier into the red enamel tree stand, slit the netting, propped the trunk against my head for balance and, while on hands and knees had tightened all three screws with a wrench, which, as anyone knows who has done this without any help, takes enormous reserves of patience and self-congratulatory grunts.


Next, I had strung the lights and decorated the boughs with all our favorite handmade ornaments: the precious, lustre-less green glass ball with its faded, crinkled red ribbon, embossed with Will 1990; the section of green cardboard egg carton, sprinkled with silver glitter, the white clay snow goose with its beady black eye, the papier mache beer mug, the papier mache Santa with its good and bad sides; Katherine's tiny red wooden sled, purchased the year of her birth and placed in its accustomed central location. I filled in with all our other locally made and hand-crafted ornaments, adding the new one: a sweet, white wooly lamb.


"Nice bush, Mom," Katherine commented when she saw the tree. 


"It's a TREE!" I said, "I had to drag it - "


"It's a pregnant bush," Katherine laughed. "Where's the top?"


"I cut the top, " I admitted. "I got a bit carried away with the clippers. But, we don't need a top, there's no star, it's not religious. It's just a tree to put presents under."


"It's nice," she allowed.


About this time Juan the Gardener commented that our family neurosis involved my children taking shots at me. 


"Thanks," I said.


"All kids do it," he said. "Well, not all kids."


"We're a lot better," I said.


"I see the new ornament," Will announced when he came home. "It's this dumb lamb." 


Somewhere between food shopping, wrapping presents, and making currant stuffing for the "game bird," a virulent illness, which symptoms included the inability to breathe, mental fog, and annihilating exhaustion stopped me in my tracks. 


"I can't do this," I said.


And that's when they came through. Katherine made roast asparagus.

Katherine

Quincy

My son-in-law,Ty, played quietly with Quincy the cocker spaniel.Will lugged wood and tended the fire, and Juan the Gardener cooked the wild rice and finished the goose. He even strained the gravy three times, so there wouldn't be any lumps. We lit candles and pulled apart our holiday crackers and put on paper hats and raised our glasses.

Ty

Juan

Will

"To fam-bly," I toasted. Then we fell upon the Lulu.

The Lulu

Stranger in the Manger

"What, another pageant?" my daughter Katherine moaned. This would be our second of three. In those days I was church hopping. Like Goldilocks sampling bowls of porridge, I was trying to find one that was just right.

The previous Saturday, we had dressed my son Will up as a shepherd for a non-speaking role in the pageant at the Peru Church, a town next to our village of Landgrove. Attired in a raggedy, much-worn striped bathrobe with a white towel over his head tied with a bit of rope, he mostly stood at the front of the tiny church holding a homemade sign that read No Room at the Inn. Children who took regular piano lessons accompanied the chorus. One year, two sons of a friend played a duet. When the younger one missed his cue, his older brother shoved him off the bench. We grownups teared at the lilting voices, the earnest faces, the poignancy marked by the occasional scuffle; afterwards everyone shared cocoa and treats.

Will uncharacteristically kept mum about his role in the second pageant at the Londonderry Methodist Church. When I picked him up from rehearsal, I asked him what he needed for his costume.

"Nothing," he muttered.

"They provide the costume?" I asked.

"Yes."

"What are you this time, sweetie?" I asked.

"Not telling," he said, and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Are you a shepherd again?" I persisted.

"No."

"Joseph?"

"No!"

"You're really not going to tell me?"

"No!"

"Okay."

He kept silent, despite bribes of candy and the opportunity to open an early present.

A bit before the pageant was to begin, Will told me and his sister that he didn't mind if we didn't come.

"What?" we exclaimed. "Of course we're coming; we wouldn't miss it."

"Oh, all right," he sighed.

After dropping him at the side door, we sat inside among other families.

"Hi," the mother of one of Will's school chums smiled, leaning over. "Will is such a good sport," she said.

"He is?" I said. "I mean, yes, he is."

Katherine poked me. "What do you think she meant?"

"I'm not sure," I answered. "I guess we'll find out."

"Maybe he's Mary." Katherine giggled.

"Of course he's not Mary," I said.

After some rustling, a troop of shepherds entered from the wings, carrying crooks and leading two tiny lambs on leashes. 

"He's not a shepherd," Katherine said.

"No."

Next came the wise men, bearing frankincense, incense and myrrh. One of the wise men tripped over his beard and titters broke out among the congregation. There were a few angels with tinseled halos,   followed by Joseph, a beleaguered six-year-old.

"Nope, not him," we said as each player entered the scene and took his or her position front and center around the wooden cradle in which nestled the baby Jesus.

"Maybe he is Mary," Katherine whispered.

There was a slight delay before Mary entered, followed by an apparently reluctant donkey. The front half of the donkey clumped along obediently behind Mary, but the rear portion dug in its hoofs. 

Katherine and I gripped each other.

"You don't think," she said.

Our shoulders shook.

"I do," I replied.

Twenty-Four Days of Temptation

On a very long ago December first, I was summoned to my mother's room and shown a needlepoint Advent calendar with tiny wrapped presents tied to little plastic rings that denoted each day until Christmas Eve. I was allowed to clip off the first day's present with a small pair of brass scissors. It was a Santa pen with a little window along the shaft, through which I could see Santa's sleigh and reindeer. Snow fluttered when I tilted it up and down.


"You can open one each day," my mother explained. I knew she was leaving for Florida with my grandmother for a few weeks, and the promise of a present a day would help lessen the sting of her impending departure. I loved presents.


After she left, I busied myself making gifts for my parents under the firm hand of my "nurse," Arnie, who drank tea of an afternoon, and let me come into her room on Sunday evenings to watch Bonanza and part of the Ed Sullivan Show.  I made a multi-colored potholder from loops stretched across a loom for my mother and a faux leather comb case for my father, who was mostly bald. We decorated my bedroom with paper chains and crafted a Christmas tree from pipe cleaners with miniature Christmas balls stuck on the ends of the pipe cleaner boughs. A sign proclaiming "Merry Christmas" stretched across my mirror.


But, the allure of the Advent calendar with its many gifties in varying shapes and sizes trailing from the wall outside my mother's bedroom was too much to resist.


By Day 3, I was feeling each package. By Day 4, I was gently peeling aside the scotch tape and peeking inside. By Day 5, I had unwrapped Days 6, 7, and 8 and was searching for glue to paste them back together. By Day 9, Days 10, 11 and 12 dangled unadorned, the wrapping paper secreted in my closet.


On Day 13, a postcard arrived from Florida.


Dear Amy,
Remember that Santa knows if you've been naughty.
Try to be good.
See you soon!
Love, Mummy

Magic in the Mountains

I was not the sort of mother who enforced mandatory Sunday school when my children were young. I drew from my own childhood experience of endless Sundays clouded by pre-church-going arguments with my mother, which I inevitably lost - although not without a fight - followed by mind numbing boredom stuffed in a pew with my quarter for the collection plate tucked inside my white gloved hand. I never thought it fair that my father was exempt, because he "worked all week in the city." I knew he was happiest outdoors, beyond religion, and so was I.


Thus, I was determined not to foist this suffering upon my own offspring. But, around Christmas time, I would begin to feel that my children ought to participate in a little something. A few weeks into December, we moms and our kiddos would gather at Fay's house in our small southern Vermont town to assign readings for the annual Christmas Eve service. Fay served hot chocolate with artfully decorated cookies and handed out candy canes; if a child was old enough to speak, he or she was assigned a part. The eldest children received the weightier speeches. 


Just after dark on Christmas Eve, we would gather at the Landgrove Church, drop off our food items for  families less fortunate, and receive our re-cycled candles. The tiny church was unlit and unheated, so we bunched together for warmth, arms entwined. Someone would be playing the old organ in the soft glow of a flashlight as we trooped in. The children sat together in a side pew in their parkas and boots, and colorful woolen hats and mittens, red-cheeked, their breath frosting the air. We sang all the familiar carols, interspersed with readings that had been rehearsed once or twice before - sometimes in the car on the way over.


When the singing paused, you could hear discussions from the side pew.


"Henry, Henry, wake up! It's your turn."


"No, Sam goes first."


"No, Christina goes."


"I don't want to!"


"Someone just go!"


My baby son fell asleep in my arms his first year. Another year, my daughter Katherine, towering at age 16 above the younger ones was assigned a plum role, several pages long. She was studying acting in high school and gave her lines special emphasis, until she came to the part about Jesus being a just man.


"And Jesus," she emoted, "being just a man..." Giggles erupted and continued throughout the service.


My favorite part came at the end, when the first child's candle was lit and he or she lit the candle of the next child and so on, until the tiny church was filled with flickering candlelight and smiling faces and whispered voices wishing each other PEACE.


It wasn't about religion, then, at all, but magic.

A Different Kind of Holiday Card

When I was a little girl, back before I was a Jew or even a Buddhist, I created hand-made Christmas cards out of green and red construction paper with tiny pasted on snow flakes cut from my mother's paper doilies. Merry Christmas was spelled out in silver and gold glitter stuck to unevenly drawn letters in Elmer's glue. Occasionally, there was a personalized illustration of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with 100 legs in varying colors, or Santa squashing the roof of a house. Smoke issued from the chimney in circular coils, and a happy family stood by the front door waving.

But, yesterday, I became enmeshed in the cyber world of holiday cards on a website called Tiny Prints, which featured a tiny blue elephant logo extolling "big impressions." I scrolled through billions of design possibilities - everything from vintage to modern to artiste. Flat? Folded? Accordion? Able to be used as an ornament? Eventually, the enormity of choice caused me to bellow in anguish for Juan the Gardener.

After I showed him the multiple number of possible options I had saved, he waved his arms above his head and began to pace back and forth across our stone kitchen floor. We narrowed it down to "Jubilant Joy:bright green,"which allowed room for a photo in the middle of the O in JOY.

"So, which picture should we use?" I fretted.


"Any one, I don't care. I'm not really into this whole card thing, but I want you to be happy."


"In that case, let's use the meditating gorilla."


"Perfect."


As he backed toward the door, I said, "Hold on, we're not done."


"We're not?"


"There's the inside of the card."


"Oh, right."


We scrolled through roughly 2,000 pictures until we came upon the batch from our first excursion together out west to Yosemite and the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park. I remembered how it had felt coming upon my first magnificent seqouiadendron giganteum named General Sherman, the largest known non-clonal tree by volume: 274.9 feet high, 36.5 feet in diameter at it's base. It had completely boggled my mind. I had gazed up its length, dazzled by the sun above, bent backward until my neck ached. It was surreal, orange-hued, the trunk's base like a gigantic mastodon's toe, almost as if it had been constructed by a Star Wars movie crew. 


We had taken pictures, each of us dwarfed by the tree trunk that rose behind us like a gargantuan muscled leg.


"Let's use these," we agreed.


Next, we needed captions beneath the pictures. 


"How about a Holiday Haiku?" I suggested.


"Great idea!" Juan paced and recited aloud, counting syllables on his fingers, while I scribed.


"Ho-ping you survive
with your san-it-y intact
sense of hu-mor too."


"I'm not sure that captures the spirit of the season," I said doubtfully.


"I like it. It's playful," he said.


"Okay." We had been at this for over an hour. "But, we still have a few more caption boxes to fill."


"How about 'hug a tree'?" Juan offered.


"Hug a tree?"


"Why not?"


"Let's recap," I said. "We have a meditating gorilla, then the two of us in front of a Giant Sequoia, a questionable Holiday Haiku, and a random caption about hugging a tree."


"Yeah. I like it."


"Maybe we could write a poem about winter or something and leave out the hug a tree part," I ventured.


Juan went to the bookcase and returned with a book of poems by the 15th century Zen Master Ikkyu, the "fox-crazy" monk, who had scandalized the Buddhist community by falling in love with a blind singer forty years his junior. Ikkyu had enjoyed the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters and interspersed his erotic love poems with traditional Zen themes.


"His poems are brilliant," Juan said excitedly. "Listen to this: I try to be a good man but all that comes / of trying is I feel more guilty."


I put my head down.


"Or how about this one: I'm up here in the hills starving myself / but I'll come down for you."


I groaned.


"Okay, here! This one: pine needles inches deep hug the ground / no one lives here. We could change it a bit to snow inches deep hugs the ground."


"And make it we still live here," I suggested. "We'd have to give credit to Ikkyu, though."


"We could say 'after Ikkyu,'" Juan said.


"I think 'with apologies to Ikkyu' is more like it," I said.


"Perfect."


"Should we add 'Blessings' or something?" I asked.


"No, we don't want it to sound religious."


"Absolutely not," I said.

So, here it is:
With love.

(In the long run, we may be better off with crayons, safety scissors, and construction paper.)

A Shiksa's First Hannukah

On the eve of Hannukah, I called out the door to my son, who was practicing flips and twists on the trampoline as part of his preseason snowboarding routine. He bounced, twirled his skateboard under his feet and landed it.

"Cool!" I shouted. "Could you come inside now, it's almost sundown."

"So?" he yelled back, executing a back flip, "Watch this!"

"I just need you to come in now!"

"Why?"

"It's time to light the menorah."

"Oh, man!"

We sat on the chintz covered couch in front of the fire while I read aloud from A Home Celebration of Chanuka. I read about Mattathias, a fearless priest, who in 170BCE had stood his ground against the Syrian-Greek ruler, Anthiochus. Will lay face down, but I was permitted to stroke the bristly buzz that passed in those days for a haircut.

"So, why is the menorah such an important symbol?"

"What is this, a test?"

I gave him his first ever Hannukah present: a small parcel of foil-wrapped chocolate coins.

"This is called gelt," I explained.

"Is this dark chocolate?"

"I think so."

"You know I don't like dark chocolate."

Next, we stood in front of our brand new wrought iron menorah, a somewhat modern design topped with a glass mosaic Star of David. There were slender multi-colored candles as well. I handed my son a long fireplace match, and gave him precise instructions in candle lighting.

"You light the tallest one in the middle first," I said. "That's the helper candle, the King or shammash. It represents Antiochus - "

"Can't we just light it?" he interrupted.

"Then you light the candle on the furthest right. We leave both candles burning as a symbol of hope in the darkness," I continued. "Ba-ruch a-ta A-do-nai," I chanted, waving my hands over the candles like Mama in Fiddler on the Roof.

"What are you doing?" Will demanded.

"Hush! E-lo-hei-nu me-lech ha-o-lam...Now, let's have a moment of silence for those no longer with us."

"What?"

"Just close your eyes and think some nice thoughts!" I closed my eyes and mused about Fred. I imagined if he were watching, he would be grinning ear to ear.

According to Uncle Gerry, Fred had played the saxophone in the tiny Moss family apartment in the Bronx, producing fiendish noises that had provoked the neighbors on one occasion to call the cops. When Officer Brian Kelly had arrived at the Moss home, he asked young Fred to play his horn. Fred, an ersatz Charlie Barnett, attempted his favorite piece, Tappin' at the Tappa. After the first series of squawks, Officer Kelly suggested that Fred put a sock in it. "Or better yet, a towel."

Somewhere in the place beyond religion and dogma and mumbo jumbo on that first night of Hannukah, Fred was playing Tappin' at the Tappa for his shiksa daughter and his young grandson, whom he would never meet. His sound was as bold and as brave and as startling as the blast from the shofar, sounding the advent of The New Year. He played a riff or two for us. He played his heart out.

My son and I stood together in the kitchen and grated potatoes onto a cutting board to use for making latkes. There would be bagels and cream cheese, a platter of salmon garnished with lemon wedges, some Manischewitz thin matzos and kosher grape juice.

"Isn't this fun?" I asked.

"Not really."

"Oh, stop your kvetching," I said. "Chop some onions."

When I Was Jewish

"We're going to be celebrating Hannukah this year," I announced to my son nine years ago. He raised his right eyebrow, scowled, and glared at me suspiciously.

"We are?"

"Yes," I said, "in honor of our Jewish heritage."

He rolled his eyes and slunk from the room. "Psycho," I heard him mutter. He had watched with some alarm as I had begun to embrace my Jewish roots, bestowed upon me by my birthfather, Fred, whom I had found and lost to cancer the previous August. I had fasted on Yom Kippur in Fred's honor, although he had not been, from most accounts, what one might describe as orthodox. According to my Uncle Gerry, Fred's brother, there was no genetic predisposition to explain my sudden all encompassing preoccupation.

"Neither Fred nor I had any particular religious leanings," Gerry told me. "At best we could be considered agnostic."

Nevertheless, I was somewhat frantic to learn if we were descended from the Cohens, the officiators at important rituals, or the singing Levites who also performed janitorial work in the Temple, or Israelites - everyone else.


"I don't have a clue as to whether we fall into a designation of Cohen, Levite or Israelite," Gerry responded. "I believe we do have some distant relationship to Cain and Abel, unconfirmed of course."

"It was just not something he believed in," my half-sister Rebecca told me when we shopped together at Zabar's http://www.zabars.com/ in Manhattan. "He was impatient with all the mumbo jumbo."

"Where do you get this stuff?" My daughter demanded. "You can only be Jewish through the mother. Everyone knows that."

"What do you know?" I countered.

"Apparently, a lot more than you."

Upon discovering my incipient Jewess-ness, I had begun to study Judaism with Rabbi Bob every third Tuesday. I read A Jew Today by Elie Wiesel. I studied the Torah. I began to pray standing up. I had gone to Shabbat services at the Temple and had come home with vivid descriptions of candles and music and Hebraic verse. I sang V'shamru v'ney Yisra-el with off-key confidence. I wished my fellow Jews shabbat shalom, and partook of challah and mushroom blintzes.


During philosophical discussions upon the nature of God, I bent forward in the hard brown chair in Rabbi Bob's office. Although I was impatient for a metaphysical experience that defied description, my eyes would drift to the pert green and black yarmulke affixed to the Rabbi's hair with a matching green hair clip.

"Tell me what you think." the Rabbi prompted.

I wondered about Moses, and how, trembling with doubt, he had asked God for a sign. God told Moses that to look upon His face would mean obliteration, madness. God's visage was beyond mortal ken: radiant flash and fire, sacred, holy. I pictured Oz. The best Moses could expect was to know God by where God had been. I imagined a smooth brown back just turning the corner.

*

A Paradox or Two

"Do you want to hear a paradox?" Juan the Gardener asked me as I opened my eyes yesterday morning. It was late for us, near 7am, and I was still luxuriating in warm, preconscious bliss beneath the quilts.


"Sure," I said, even though I hate a paradox first thing in the morning, especially before coffee.


"Let's say you have an infinite string of numbers 1, 2, 3 ,4, 5, etc., paired off with another infinite string of even numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10."

"I know what even numbers are," I said. For me, 1 discussion about numbers + severe, incapacitating life-long math anxiety - no coffee = extreme discomfort, if not rage.

"The question is," he continued, "Is the even numbered string of numbers as long as the first string.?"

"Yes," I said, "because they're both infinite."


"So, because they're both infinite, they're equally long? But, how could they be if one string only contains half as many numbers?"

"I don't know," I said. "I imagine that's what makes it a paradox. Tell me another." Even though the very notion of mathematics produces instantaneous fog in my mind, and leaves me bleary and vengeful, I do love a puzzle.

The next one involved an arrow traveling toward a target, but, before it got to point 1 (the target) it had to get half way there, or point 1/2, then it had to get half way between point 1/2 and point 1, and so on, ad infinitum. It had to do with a paradox concerning motion, called the Dichotomy, dating from an Ancient Greek philosopher named Zeno.

"So, basically the original argument was because you can't do an infinite number of things in finite time, it never actually gets there. You see?" Juan said.

I groaned.

"Not really, because I've seen an arrow hit a target. I've shot an arrow myself and watched it sink into a straw bulls eye, heard it make a thunk, so I have empirical proof that it does, in fact, get there."

"Exactly. It's obvious. You can do an infinite number of things in finite time, you just have to do them faster. There's an article about it in the NY Times by a philosopher named Graham Priest."

"I have a paradox for you," I said.

"Yes?"

"Say two people are lying in bed."

"Yes?"

"One of them desperately wants coffee..."

"Yes?"

"Which of them gets up and makes coffee? The one who voices the desire, or the one who wisely chooses to let the other one stay in bed and volunteers to make it himself?"

"I'll make the coffee," Juan said.

Won't You Please

Last evening I sat in the bleachers of my son's high school gym among 1000 other mourners at the funeral of a young man of twenty-four who had died in an accident Thanksgiving morning. While my family and I were preparing for our feast, sliding garlic beneath the skin of a stuffed 26-pound turkey, peeling potatoes and making cranberry sauce, another family opened the door to a policeman whose horrific news would forever change their lives and the lives of their community. My community.

I listened as young men and family members recounted tales of friendship, athletic prowess, of a short mighty life marked by exhuberance, stories of a big-hearted, tousled haired youth who played hard, had a way with a paint brush, charmed the ladies, had a penchant for country music, owned a big truck, loved fishin' - stories that made me smile while tears ran down my cheeks.

His bass fishin' boat rested next to the simple, unadorned wooden coffin that was shouldered in by his heartbroken friends. His snowboard and guitar were there too.

His varsity hockey coach told about a time when the young man and his teammates were at an away game, several hours from home, in northern Vermont. The coach was ready to rouse the team to victory in a fiery, pre-game pep talk, but as he looked around, he noticed that the young man, the captain of the team, was nowhere in sight. "Where in hell is J?" he wondered with some annoyance. Then J poked his head in the locker room and beckoned his buddies outside where a gentle snow was falling. These husky high school athletes opened their mouths and stuck out their tongues, catching snowflakes, as children do, while the coach paced nervously, imagining what the other team would think of his boys, should they catch them at play.

When it was the time for family tributes, a female cousin grabbed a microphone and fearlessly belted out Lee Ann Womack's rendition of I Hope You Dance:

And when you get the chance to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
I hope you dance

As she ended the song, the cousin reached out with one arm and the young man's sisters rose and folded into a sad, swaying slow dance of an embrace.

But, the moment that I will carry seared and stinging in my memory was when one of J's friends, a childhood friend of my own son's, a boy who built snow tunnels and grew his own pumpkins, who read the Narnia books in second grade, offered a tribute of his own: a rollicking, roaring, anguished, YAWP of an improvised country western tune, neither coarse, nor raucous, but a full-throated, belly-deep YAWP of mixed, powerful feelings: loss and outrage, despair and celebration. We 1000-plus howled as one.

I want to say to these surviving young men, to the enormous grieving circle of aquaintances, family, sweethearts and friends - for this is the second buddy my 23-year-old son has lost in a senseless tragedy: TAKE CARE.
Won't you, please, take care?