Author: fifteenkey (Page 52 of 95)

I’m sure it all goes back to the story of an infant born in a manger after his parents were shut out at the local Bed and Breakfast. Didn’t they know how tough it is to get a room during the holidays? I think anyone raised with the traditions of Christmas just naturally chills out, even if the temperature doesn’t fall below 60… This year’s Christmas is being spent with Dad, but I can’t say I remember another. As each page turns, the ghosts of Christmas past dim, like old monochrome Polaroids.

I do remember many Christmas highlights with Mom, and some presents… The fire engine set… Lincoln Logs… A wood burning kit… “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “The Beach Boys Greatest Hits” on vinyl… A tabletop hockey game*… 1995 was a quiet but dark year and I ended up on the naughty list and collected the traditional lump of coal. That was funny and would actually come in handy now given the price of home heating oil…

It’s quiet here in “The Villages.” For one thing, there aren’t many young children in a retirement community. Last night as we walked around the town square before and after dinner, Kyle sang Christmas carols. I joined in and Dad left us just Megan short of a barbershop quartet. That’s what Christmas is about for me. When the silent night is broken only by songs from the heart.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

* By Isaiah12:2 on Flickr

While Kyle charmed the cute Southwest Flight Attendant into food that nobody else on the plane got, I read a Men’s Journal interview of Jack Nicholson. I thought there would be more, but three gems are better than none:

• Live in the Now.
• Don’t waste hate time on anything you don’t love.
• Live the way you want to live.

This morning was only the third time Madison’s R&D; into crying woke me up. 4:46 emitted against morning darkness and the daily ritual began. Baby girl must know Big Papi still has presents to shroud before our early Christmas morning unfolds in a couple hours.

My dawn routine consists of filling my head gradually with caffeine and data. It’s actually much more pleasant that that made it sound and it is elevated by the aroma of Green Mountain Fair Trade Organic Breakfast Blend. Yeah, it’s a mouthful. Once the caffeine drip commences, my narrow attention span turns to Bloglines for vast consumption of bits and bytes. This morning a post in the Creative Generalist blog on Neuroscience and psychology reminded me how music can “get you.” Think about the songs sleeping in your ipod. Some are “nice,” but they’re just a little above a dentist’s office background of acoustics. Then there are those that reach into your soul, pick you up off your feet and shake you. One of the great things about music is the freedom of it. OK, DRM aside, one person’s dental diversion is a “stop you in your tracks” heartbreaker to another. What song(s) have that emotional pull for you? This (lyrics) is one that does for me…

I’m like a second grader on the path to understanding the calculus of my new Nikon D40, but in spite of my inexperience, the new toy grabs some cool stills. Last night “Tanta” Claus visited in the form of Barb to share a few presents with the kids and me. “You should take some profile shots of that baby.” Uh, OK.

Then there’s this optical illusion taken from Kyle’s world of all things Potter. I had the camera on “Program” mode and 800ISO (for low light). The shutter stayed open just long enough to catch a shot of Kyle’s mind being sucked out by Dementors. Of course he loves it…

Sometimes you just fall right into the shit… The good shit. Like “happy as a pig in shit” shit. Tonight I wrote a quick email to one of Kyle’s doctor’s reminding her I needed “the letter” from her so I can carry all his medications on the plane to Orlando on Sunday. Then I did a Yahoo search (sorry man) on “the Letter” and the #1 result was this gem:

Shit…

“In my day, they put kids like him away.”

– He who shall not be named.

This morning as I struggled to figure out what the heck Kyle wants for Christmas, Megan, who for some reason just appeared around 6am, said, “You should get him the Charlotte’s Web soundtrack. Yesterday when you were trying to get him ready and he wouldn’t get off the couch is because he wanted to hear that song at the end of the movie.” The song is “Ordinary Miracle” sung by Sarah McLachlan. She’s got a hauntingly beautiful voice that’s had a home in my head for quite some time.

Kyle loves (It’s not a coincidence I use that term so often. Kyle loves.) Charlotte, but I know somewhere in that place between his heart and head, he identifies with Wilbur. And just as Wilbur inspired the love of all near Zuckerman’s barn, Kyle does the same for nearly all who know him. The “miracle” that’s happening right now is that Kyle’s physical problems are fading and I know he’s sensing other changes he can’t quite articulate. “The winds changed,” is his recurring phrase. Speaking of wind, yesterday Kyle walked over a mile from the Wang Center to a restaurant on Temple Place off of Tremont Street! He and I had lucked out to see “White Christmas” with Barb after her out of town guests canceled due to this week’s snow. It was a fantastic show and Kyle couldn’t stop talking about it.

As for soundtracks, I’m all set. I mean, I’m not sure how many more times I can hear “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” before someone will have to put me away. I downloaded the song from iTunes…

It’s pretty much all been said in the news about the performance enhancing drug scandal in major league baseball. I thought Roger Clemens was a selfish bore way back in 1990 when he was tossed from game 3 of the ALCS after just 1 1/3 innings for profanity. Oh, and he was a member of the Red Sox then…

As always, it’s the fans that pay. Coming out of the 1994 strike, the owners looked the other way while many of their “stars” shot themselves in the ass to create an illusion of greatness and we fans paid for it. We bought the phony home run chase of cheaters Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa and invited the widow of Roger Maris to help celebrate a lie. Warning track outs became dingers and fans flocked to see them, allowing greedy owners to raise prices to the point where most families cannot afford to attend a game.

This is yet another example of the unraveling of this country. We are so fatigued by scandals and phoniness that apathy is growing and we’re losing the basic expectation of personal integrity in our society.

In “Field of Dreams,” James Earl Jones as Terrance Mann spoke a beautiful and nostalgic soliloquy about the game:

“The one constant through all the years, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

Not anymore.

Hey, there’s no sense ending this post on such a downer. The forecasters are calling for another foot here in the snow belt. I can only hope they’re telling little white lies.

As I steered the orange snow eater through slippery slopes and drifts exceeding a foot, sounds in my head competed with the engine drone. For some reason, as I cleared plow remains from the driveway front, the dead Jim Morrison was screaming:

I don’t know about that one, but it’s a great song. On two stunning occasions, the ice underfoot eliminated all traction and I soon heard Howard Cosell, another dead guy…

One cool thing about my new growed-up Nikon D40 camera is that I can snap off 2.5 frames per second. That feature allows me to annoy the crap out of Madison with face flashes while I struggle to attain the perfect still moment. One of the benefits of digital photography is the hoards of crappy images are erased with a keystroke and no “film” is wasted. As I sift through the blurs, the eye closers, and the otherwise bad, a golden glint occasionally appears:

There are gifts and then there are those times when a giant shark shows up on your front porch. This is one of those times…