Where O Where's my Camera when I Need It?

Good morning! Here sit I, at seven a.m., having read my mail. And the paper.

I got up in the middle of the night to turn the furnace control up or down (it's never in the Right Place) and had a childhood sense of pleasure to see the little Christmas tree with its new LED lights or whatever they are, shining colorfully out into the darkness, and the little false tea-candle shining in the creche on the mantelpiece.  There is something about the beauty of colored light, even non-incandescent light, that is super pleasurable to me.

It made me remember the night--well about seventy seven years ago--that I got up and went into the living room, probably about four a.m. The Christmas tree was lit up and lights were shining on presents sitting below the tree. The bear I'd requested--well, not quite the very one, but the bear I got--was sitting up in the shining fairy light, and I knew that the world was in its place and Santa Claus had come and that all was well.

I touched nothing and went back to bed.

Old as we now are,  I often need the remembrance of such moments to spur me into the days we share.W're both aware of ever increasing inability to deal with our limitations in many things, and this knowledge leads us sometimes to squabble and quarrel when we are really not quarreling with each other, but with circumstance. A circumstance that everyone who lives long enough must encounter, but it isn't easy to be graceful about it.

Yesterday it was an afternoon appointment with the car people to have a check-up before arrival of guests Benjamin and then Miranda.  We got out of there to the tune of a thousand dollars, which was not good for us at this time; but we also had to rent a car from the dealer to get home. I think we should have just postponed the job,  brakes or no brakes, but we went through with it. Then I wanted to stop at Trader Joe's-Ralphs, a dazzling combination of 2 markets right together in Hillcrest. What can't be had at the one will surely be available at the other, the height of convenience. So Theo had the frustrating experience of trying to find a parking place in an unfamiliar car whose rear view mirror was not placed right and that he could not control. After a while I said, Let's just go home. So we did. We came home and had vegetable beef soup, crackers, and squares of cheese, but nerves and endurance had been strained by then.

Men think that food appears on the table by magic, I think. Even though Theo is present at every food-purchasing activity, he still doesn't grasp that food must be bought, transported, stored, prepared, cooked, served by me --or he doesn't get any.  He thinks he doesn't care about food, and to a large extent that's true. But he'd miss it if it didn't appear before him magically twice a day. (He has to scrounge for his own lunch.)

This doesn't appear to have much to do with the magic of Christmas, but let me tell you that it was very gratifying to me to realize in the middle of the night that I still had it in me to be four years old and looking at the lighted Christmas tree in a silent living room.

And where's my camera when I need it??? It is LOST. YAZZYBEL