The Family Christmas Letter

We all get them, and some of us write them. And now that many of us are on Facebook, I wonder if anyone really needs them. I’m referring to the annual one page diary stuffed into Christmas cards, perhaps with a photo or two.

These missives are generally a single page document, though I have one example of a family that has so much news to share that it has occasionally spilled over onto a third or fourth page. But from there, the format and content vary widely.

I feel that human attention spans being what they are, especially at this busy time of year, anything that requires devotion of time should be limited to one side of one page, preferably double-spaced and using a minimum of a 12 point font. If you’re more interesting than that, you’re probably on the local news.

Technology has begun to impact this tradition as well. Why use ink, paper, envelope and a postage stamp when the document can be sent as an email attachment in the blink of an eye? Perhaps the fear is that it’s too easy for the receiver to say, “Oh, it’s one of those” and unceremoniously hit delete. Paper really gets in your face, takes its place on the kitchen counter, and gives you an extra reason to take out the recycling.

We sometimes set all of our letters aside and read them well after the holidays. Or at least we did in Chicago, when a snowy day was conducive to staying in your pajamas until noon, sipping endless coffee and reading a stack of pages that was rushed to the post office before Christmas.

Rather than a point by point detailing of every time you left the house during the year, related chronologically and with accompanying photographs, I feel that “This Is Us” publications should be loaded with humor, hopefully self-deprecating, succinct and categorized by person, with perhaps 2-3 sentences each.

It’s demoralizing to get to the bottom of page one and realize that it’s still March, your cousin’s neighbor’s wife is thinking about planting petunias this spring, and shopping for Easter bonnets has begun in earnest. No, newsworthy items should be limited to nuclear family unless your cousin won the Nobel Prize (though that would be on the news, so never mind.)

Which of the following two paragraphs would you more enjoy reading?

We spent Spring break in Tucson this year. The temperature was in the mid 70s and the humidity was quite low. Each day we arose shortly after sunrise and had breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and toast on the patio, which is delightfully constructed of bluestone shapes that resemble a puzzle pieced together. After breakfast we went for a walk.

Or

So, there I am grilling dinner in near darkness on the patio, when I turned to go into the house for a plate. As I stepped on a misplaced bungee cord, thinking it was a rattlesnake, I suffered a full body clench that caused me to lose my balance and tumble into the screen door. Being somewhat more massive than the door, I proceeded to tear it from it’s track, buckle the aluminum frame and collapse its entirety around my body like a toga, which I wore while laying sprawled out on the dining room floor.

Now, both of these actually happened many years ago. I never included either in the Christmas letter, but I think I should have. The second is a continued source of laughter for my now adult children, who witnessed the event and have shared it with friends in several countries.

We rarely do anything worth bragging about. We can be proud of degrees earned, children born, marriages and really interesting vacations. But I have noticed on occasion a not so subtle spinning of facts, or omission of glaring truths in some people’s recounting of the year that was.

For instance, getting a job at Denny’s is hardly “Bentley endeavored to secure a management position in the food service industry.”

And

Hey, where did that baby come from?!

So, this is not my annual Christmas letter. It’s a bonus. The other one is on the computer. We need to buy printer ink, paper and stop at the post office to get stamps. With any luck it will go out mid January.

Merry Christmas! I am so looking forward to reading your letters. No, really!

Half Time

Little Midge Wilkins sat on a folding chair in the intense late morning Manahatchee sun. Or whatever tourists called this place now. The street was quietly busy, and her hopes grew for a successful sale.

Momma glanced upward from the clothesline, shading her eyes. Not a cloud, nor a bird. Not like remembered con-trails crisscrossing a dreamlike periwinkle sky, silently heading to exotic destinations. She suddenly flinched and self-corrected, provided silent inward chastisement and dropped her head in shame from her useless thoughts.

“Days is all mixed up, they are,” she said, and returned to her wet sheets and undergarments. Light that reflected from swaying clothing shimmered in the blistering breeze, played across her face and arms, mocking her attempt to dry the laundry before the middle time. It would take the second morn as well, and she knew it.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

To Science

Paneling and bookcases muffle all sound except a ticking clock. I stare upward and wait. A stain on the ceiling looks like my Uncle Otto.

“I know I’m not crazy,” I say finally.

The couch is comfortable, but lying down feels awkward, like most picnics.

“Who said you’re crazy?” replies David. He insists that I call him David. Maybe so I’ll feel more relaxed.

“No one, actually, it’s just that things aren’t making sense. Or making too much sense.”

“And how does that make you feel?” he says, glancing at his note pad, ready to write.

“Please don’t say that. It’s so dumb”

“Then how do you suggest I find out how you’re feeling?”

After a brief pause I say, “I feel like an observer of my own life. Like I’m acting out a script. Or like I’m making everything up as I go along. Like it’s not real. Like I’m dreaming. How’s that?”

“Well, that would be classic depersonalization disorder, but let’s explore a bit further, ok?”

“Sure. Let me ask you this. How many coincidences does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

David looks up, puzzled.

“You know, before the little cartoon idea bulb appears over your head.”

I tilt my head to the right and look directly at David. “Metaphorically of course. Remember, I’m not crazy.”

“Go on,” he says, and smiles.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Intrusion

She was drifting off to sleep, thoughts of the day swirling into dizzying random images like chocolate into cake batter, when she sensed a presence. Through closed eyes, one or more red digits on the bedside clock flicked the silent passage of one minute, and then the next. The subtle change in brightness was magnified through her eyelids by the contrasting blackness of the room. She dared not look for fear of what she might or might not see. A specter, a watcher was in the room, lurking in the darkness, and there was a childlike safety behind her tightly shut eyes akin to pulling the covers over her head. She was paralyzed.

Her heart pounded as she considered her options. The iPhone on the nightstand was within reach, but may as well have been miles from her grasp. The red glow from the clock’s display would betray her as her arm crossed the gulf between the mattress and the wooden surface. She heard breathing.

Tiny incremental movements, too small to be detected, could bring her closer to the edge of the bed over a period of time. But then what? The unseen enemy had the high ground. Even a sudden lunge would put her at a clumsy disadvantage.

A scream would be of no use, just a trigger for attack and a pathetic surrender of her last breath. Frank slept like a stone beside her. Waking him would be difficult judging by the depth of his slumber. He was more helpless than she was. And how would she reveal the threat without movement or sound?

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Uptown 8

Denny pulled on a heavy fiber rope that dangled from the ceiling. He pulled again, more forcefully this time, but still without the expected result.

“Back up a little,” he said to Aaron.

The eight year old sprang to the far end of the hallway in an exaggerated leap from danger.

“Where does the secret door go?” he asked his Dad.

“It’s just the attic buddy,” said Denny.

One additional forceful pull broke the seal on at least two coats of paint. The attic had not been used within Aaron’s lifetime at least. Another tug and the folded up stairway opened like a jaw with the screeching noise of an expanding set of rusted springs and a cascade of dust. Denny unfolded the stairs and pressed against them with his boot to secure the bottom edge against the hallway carpet.

“Ready?” he asked.

Aaron nodded and smiled.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

No Limits

Tommi believed she could do anything, and had set out at age eighteen to prove it. As her mother taught her, “Life is short and the world is large.” And with this in mind, she found herself on a mountain road in Japan headed for the secluded Hotel Omodaka. It was the next thing on her list. Not a bucket list. She hated that term. It was so…finite. A beginning that ended with kicking the bucket. Not her. She simply kept a “life list” and grew it daily. “She who dies with the longest list wins,” she told friends. “Do as many as possible. No limits”

“Visit a hot spring in Japan” was her current undertaking. The logical next item was “Learn Japanese.” But being reasonable with her goals, Tommi did not set out to master the Japanese language. Any amount would do.

“Kon'nichiwa,” she said many times since arriving in Tokyo, but quickly realized that English would not be an impediment on her journey. Still, it was fun practicing the language, and the smiles it evoked among new friends along the way suggested that her American accent was both amusing and welcome. Arigatō was polite in any tongue.

The timing of her current endeavor left something to be desired, but it was too late to change her plans now. Winter in Japan was not unlike winter in Michigan, the place she originally called home. Moving to Key West had slowly changed her. Acclimating to a different climate was not something that happened quickly.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

It's Your Mother

Estelle, if that was really her name, fell asleep facing the window in her darkened bedroom in Minooka, Illinois. Flashes of light and distant thunder comforted her as it had when camping as a child. Nylon tent walls protected her then from the wind, rain and falling branches of an approaching storm with the illusion of safety. How different really were glass and vinyl siding to a limb with bad intentions? The lightning was intense and strangely colored, hypnotic and terrifying. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

She awoke to footsteps and the sound of a clearing throat.

“It’s your mother, Estelle,” said the man whose name was Greg. He handed her a cell phone.

Her first instinct was to scream, but the scene seemed so surreal as to be dreamlike. Instead, Estelle lay terrified, frozen as she had been as a twelve year old with night terrors, paralyzed. But now she was a single adult whose mother had been dead for years. She played along, assuming she would wake from a lucid dream and make sense of everything.

A man was in her room, at her bed, handing her a phone as if it was the most natural act in the world. Her dead mother was calling. Perhaps she had lapsed into a coma, or died, been reincarnated, or suffered a brain-scrambling stroke. But everything she sensed told her otherwise. It was reminiscent of her college philosophy course when the challenge was issued to prove that life was not a dream.

She reached for the phone, staring silently at the man.

“Are you ok?” he frowned, concerned.

Estelle nodded and took the phone.

“Momma?” She whispered into the phone.

“Oh, sweetie, you haven’t called me that in years. How are you?”

Estelle, whose name was Cindy, wanted to cry, sitting up and swinging her legs off the side of the bed, dropping her feet to the floor. The voice was not her mother’s.

“I’m. I’m. How’s Dad?” she probed as casually as she could.

“Oh, I think he’s out mowing the lawn, last I checked.”

Cindy’s father died five years before her mother. Who were these people, and why did they think she was Estelle?

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

The Green Flash

I spent a month studying dolphins in Hawaii during 1983. This is an experience I partially documented in a blog titled, The Dolphin is Also a Fish part one and part two.

There is nothing quite like Hawaii. The weather is consistently wonderful, a tropical mix of rainbows and sunsets, fragrant flowers and ocean views like nowhere else, certainly not in the United States. In preparation for my trip I purchased a decent 35mm Canon camera with a couple of lenses, one of which had a nice zoom. This was back in the days of film, a medium that resulted in cost-conscious photography, a conservative philosophy practiced by amateurs who were not provided unlimited film by kindly managers. (this is a tribute to myself given one member of my Facebook audience.)

In those days you shot a roll of 36 exposures and then headed to a photo lab and forgot about it for a while. Perhaps the next day you stopped by to pick up your prints. Longer if you were busy building sand castles or scrubbing the inside of a dolphin tank with those green scrubby pads many of us use in kitchen sinks. Disgusting.

Anyway, my camera was mostly manual. F-stop, exposure, all that good stuff. And with those settings pre-determined, I set out to take a picture of something I had heard about prior to my trip. The green flash.

The green flash is a phenomenon you can look up on the internet if you’re really curious. There is even a restaurant named in its honor. Suffice it to say, when the sun dips below the horizon on an evening when atmospheric conditions are favorable, precisely when the edge of the solar disc appears to become extinguished by the ocean, a tiny green luminous blip of green light appears for about one second. It is understandably hard to capture without perfect timing.

So I patiently watched the sun drop slowly toward the water’s edge against an orange tapestry of a sky. Waiters traversed the beach with trays of tropical drinks as music wafted out of waterside restaurants toward my position on the beach. As the time grew close, I raised my camera and tweaked the focus just a bit. My right index finger rested on the shutter release. My left hand supported the long zoom lens. Down the sun went, in an arc that we know as time, relentlessly ticking off seconds, and then…click, whir, snap. I took the shot.

I thought I saw a green dot on top of the sun, but it was anyone’s guess as to whether my timing was correct or if my camera was up to the task. I simply said, “Hmmm” and walked away.

I dropped the film off at the lab and went about my business, then returned the next day. When I approached the counter and told the tech my name, he turned and pulled the envelope containing my prints out of a bin at the back of the lab, paused in his stride back to the counter, looked straight into my eyes and said, “You got the green flash!”

Now, I hadn’t mentioned this when I dropped off the film, so I was completely surprised by my accomplishment, and also by his intimate familiarity with my photos. I guess processing film all day left one wanting for entertainment.

So, next time you’re fortunate enough to watch the sun go down against a distant horizon, see if you can spot this subtle but fascinating effect. It’s no erupting volcano or spectacular lightning flash, but it’s pretty cool to say you've seen it. I put it on my bucket list and immediately checked it off.