Christmas Cards. Pandora. Christ Church. Hudson. Red Dot. Nick Dier. Christmas Quiche. Democratic Debate. Syrian Refugees.
It is Saturday night and I am at home. Christmas carols are playing on Pandora and I am at the end of day in which I have been amazingly, perhaps disgustingly productive.
It is the pressure of the season. Waking early, I did some weeding of my email inbox while sipping morning coffee. I went to the gym then headed down to Christ Church to help serve coffee for the indoor Winter Market but there were enough people so I wasn’t needed.
Going to the Red Dot I had brunch, a wickedly delicious Eggs Benedict on potato latkes with a side of crisp American bacon. I felt like a depraved man but it was so good.
Coming home, I went over to Lionel and Pierre’s because Nick was there. I wanted to bawl him out. He had surgery two days ago and was working, which he shouldn’t have been doing. I was relieved to find his father with him, helping him.
Going home, I organized the making of quiches. It’s my tradition to give neighbors and close friends a “Christmas Quiche.” Today was the day to make them. After leaving Lionel’s, Nick arrived and helped within the limits of a young man in a sling.
We made fourteen quiches. I have wrapped my Christmas presents. I have done my Christmas cards.
Though has anyone noticed how few Christmas cards we actually get these days? I send back to everyone I get one from and this year that has been only seven cards. Last year it was thirty some. Paper cards are going out of fashion.
I remember the days of my youth in which my mother would spend what seemed like weeks getting out Christmas cards. She had a basket in which she kept every Christmas card that came in and held it until the following year when she answered them all.
Must have been hundreds every year.
I bagged my presents this year. Admit it, we all use bags now rather than the elaborate wrapping sessions of our youth. I remember them well. Intricate hours spent wrapping packages. After enough of us had left home, my mother had a room devoted to wrapping.
Now I bag! Don’t we all?
While I am writing this the Democrats are having a debate and I’m not watching.
I haven’t watched the Republican debates either. They have been train wrecks from what I can assess.
And the Democratic ones have been on Saturday nights which, as I recall from my media days, may be the lowest ones for households using television. Why are they doing them on Saturday nights?
I simply can’t believe all this is happening a year out from the election. Have we turned politics into a reality TV show?
I am sitting in my lovely little cottage, listening to jazz Christmas music and am wondering about the world in which I am living.
And I am recognizing how lucky I am not to be a Syrian refugee or a refugee from anywhere. There are sixty-million of them right now. I think it is about to be worse than the refugee problem at the end of WWII. And that is tragic.
I am wrapped in the coziness of my cottage. It is where I want to be tonight, separated from the trials of the world though I will probably always be cognizant of them, wondering what I can do.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 04 16 16 The way we once were…
April 17, 2016When I was kid — and perhaps when we were all kids — there was one house we all gravitated towards, to hang out, to be around. When I was a kid, it was the McCormick house. They were a large family, six kids, in a big house and every year the back yard became a skating rink. In the freezing Minnesota nights the whole neighborhood of kids was there. During the summers we played kick ball in their enormous driveway.
Still close to the McCormick family, I had lunch with Mary Clare McCormick Eros yesterday at Cafe du Soleil on New York’s Upper West Side. Sarah, whom I have known since before Kindergarten and I were planning yesterday when to get together when she is in New York next month. Her son, Kevin, thinks of me as his “Uncle Mat,” even now when he is 31.
Today, I went to Rhinebeck to return to Robert and Tanya Murray innumerable egg cartons as they had donated dozens of eggs from their chickens to my Easter Brunch Church adventures. When I arrived, two of his children and one of their friends were preparing to do a car wash and I was their first car. Robert and I sat on the steps and watched them, sipping deep, rich coffee with steamed milk while they soaped up my car.
I suspect Robert and Tanya have the house in the neighborhood to which everyone gravitates. Sitting there, it reminded me of John and Eileen and the parade that made its way through their home on Aldrich Avenue in Minneapolis. Robert got up from the stoop and swooped in and helped them. It took me back to a much simpler, it seemed, time.
It is very doubtful that time was all that much simpler but it seemed that way to us as kids. I am sure when Tanya and Robert’s five are grown, they will look back on now and think it was a simpler time.
In a gesture of simplicity and love, Pope Francis, sure to be a saint, went to the isle of Lesbos, the epicenter of the refugee crisis and made a speech on the exact spot where orders for deportation back to Turkey were given two weeks ago. In a stunning surprise, a dozen Syrians returned with him to the Vatican to be resettled in Italy with the help of a Catholic charity. All had lost their homes to bombs and six of them were children. It was an act to “prick the conscience of the king.”
Tuesday is the New York Primary. Bernie and Hillary slugged it out, in an increasingly strident fashion in a CNN debate in Brooklyn earlier this week. Both hoarse, both looking exhausted, both fighting tooth and nail, they harried each other and some wonder, no matter who the nominee, if the Democratic Party is suffering wounds as deep as the Republicans have been absorbing with their phantasmagorical season?
It is pitch black outside except for the floodlights on the creek and the lights on my house. It is quiet, except for the thumping of the dryer with a load of clothes.
In the early evening, I went to an event, “Prose and Prosecco,” a fund raising event for the little Claverack Library which is working to raise the money to finish moving into its new building.
Local writers read from their works, two good, one questionable, at least from my perspective. I chatted with a few people but was not in my aggressive meet people mode and left a bit early to come home, do a few things and write my blog.
I relished watching Robert and his children and Maya, the friend, work through their carwash. It was an hour filled with the squeals of delighted children, embracing the joy of being children. The way we once were.
Tags:Bernie Sanders, Claverack, Claverack Library, Hillary Clinton, John and Eileen McCormick, Kevin Malone, Lesbos, Mary Clare Eros, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pope Francis, Prose and Prosecco, Rhinebeck, Robert and Tanya Murray, Sarah Malone, Syrian refugees
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