Just before Christmas

These are some wonderful boys: tall, strong, resiliant. I say resiliant because just tonight I threw Eli on the bed (the most fun they have is being thrown), and overshot: BAM! His head made a deep dent in the lathe and plaster walls. We took a black felt-tip ink pen and wrote in really small letters: Eli's head was here. Ouch! 12/20/04. Now, no mystery.

What a good day. I have been feeling pretty scattered, busy and confused, but today I was able to get the right medicine: getting presents for people. I was tricky: when we went last week, I asked Joe and Eli what to get for Jackson and Drew. Joe grabbed a set of model cars and pleaded to get it for him (or them, but they were pretty much forgotten). Eli swooned over a soap-making kit. And so my list was complete. Hee hee.

I wrapped them on the living room floor and loved it, my eyes buring from the cold air I'd been out in periodically all day, papers smouldering upstairs awaiting a grade, and got them all wrapped and under the tree before the boys came over. It was pretty wonderful to watch them sort through them: they figured out who had more (Eli) but decided that was ok because Joe had the largest present.

I heard today that unconditional love is loving someone with no expectations or requirements that they act in any particular way to earn your love. Your respect, maybe, but your love, no.

Good day, good day, good night.

Christmas tree, 2004

After some negotiation, Faith and I worked out a way for the boys to help me get a Christmas tree while it's still light out. I rushed home from work to buy a Christmas tree stand and some Walmartish things, and got the boys and got gas and got money and got us to the tree farm just in time, as the sun was setting. It was 4:00. Eli said "Dad, look!" as we were trudging up the hill, and we all turned, Joe and I, and saw the sun slide brightness under the huge cap of clouds that had covered the region all day. It was a pinkish wash against blue-gray. And we turned and walked in the snow up the hill, Joe talking excitedly: "Dad, do you think we will find a good tree?" and "Are those the Scotch pines up there on the hill? How can you tell? Are you sure?" We found them, and saw why they were only $10.00: there was hardly one that stood straight or was not brown with age. But we were tireless. Finally, with great excitement, we cut the top off of one tree. Now, I have dragged trees before; usually, it's not a problem. This tree, however, old and gnarled and generally wizened, was heavy as lead. I realized with relief that the path back was all downhill, but it was still maybe a quarter of a mile, and the snow was deep. So I pulled, with some vigor at first, but Dad got REAL TIRED near the end, switching hands and answering questions and hearing the boys wonder aloud. But we made it! The men tied the tree into our trunk and (among inevitable questions about whether the tree would fall out and how I knew it wouldn't), we made it home and now had a new chore: cleaning up the living room, which Henry had asked me to clean out months before. Now it was either my junk or a tree, and the tree was going to win. So we carried boxes up the attic, many, and Joe helped manfully. Finally clean, we tried to get the tree in the door, but NO: the tree we chose was too fat to even fit in the doorway. I pulled and pulled and finally it scratched its way in.

The boys were wonderful: excited, helpful, interested. They helped me twist the little anchor bolts that hold the tree in and we found to our dismay that the new Walmart stand was not made for trees like ours; ours was too thin and too crooked. So finally we just leaned it up in the corner, an accidental-seeming necklace of blue lights wrapped twice around its huge waist.

It is rather lovely, I think.

Drawing

Today winter has arrived. Snow fills the backyard of Henry's house, and Eli and I are sitting here after breakfast. Henry is rustling up breakfast before a busy day teaching at SU. It's very bright outside, cold, and Eli is drawing faces and faces and faces from a sketchbook by Ed Emberley. Eli says "He is my favorite writer of all the drawing books." His favority author is Mary Pope Osborne. Eli was concerned that I might misspell her name, so he came over here and helped me re-type her name. His sweatshirt smells clean and good and his bulky, muscular body wiggles as he searches patiently for the letters "r" and "n" and "e." Eli draws for hours, literally, drawing in a slow straight sequence, face by face, all through the book.

I helped out in Eli's class the other day, helping the kids ...

These are some of the things we talk about when we're together:

I caught a butterfly right here, Eli says, when we walk past a certain spot on the sidewalk..
Fairly Odd Parents [a TV show] and what the kid said...
If there were only 2 months per season, then it wouldn't add up to twelve
Oz and lb: I used to think that these were pronounced "OZ" and "LB", but now I know they are short for "ounce" and "pound."
Blackberries in their garden are really good.
Eli got English Ivy; his is growing but most kids' died; his is in the bathroom, which is maybe why it survived.
How do you spell Halloween?
Ask Henry about getting a cat--go on, ask him. Ask him!