GUY NOIR – St. Louis

HM (SING): The winter solstice is one week away
And here he sits in Jimmy’s bar,
Wondering where he should spend Christmas Day,
It’s him……Guy Noir.

Father Time advises a brown-eyed girl

I had a good conversation Saturday with a college student named Emily, a rare pleasure for an old man like me, most of my social life is spent with geriatrics eager to talk about their most recent hip replacement, but Emily talked about her ambition to go to law school and to devote herself to the issue of prison reform.

A bright articulate idealist from a good family who entertains noble ambitions that nobody in my age group would consider for two minutes; we’re done with nobility ¬¬¬— when we were her age we sang that deep in our hearts we believed that we would overcome, but instead we got good jobs and hung out with cool people and were overcome by piles of stuff we couldn’t bear to part with and now we just hope not to fall down in the street and bang our noggin against a curb and lie there gaga and be hauled away by EMTs who’ll never realize what an illustrious person we used to be and not this gibbering mess on the gurney. And we’re hoping to get a decent obit even though our illustriousness ended when most obit writers were in the third grade. The surest way to get a great obit is to be in the arts and die before 40 and it’s too late for that.

A pleasant night with nice people in L.A.

I left the snowy paradise of Minnesota Saturday and flew to sodden L.A. where heavy rains are making hillsides slide into the canyons and arroyos, which is not a problem on the prairie thanks to our canyonlessness. The land does not slide on the plains unless you are very very drunk and then you go to a Unitarian church basement every Tuesday night and talk with your fellow AA members about your emotionally distant father who drove you to drink.

Most Minnesota fathers are distant emotionally and many others are physically distant, those who divorced your mom and married Bambi the cocktail waitress based on an emotion that took him and her to the mobile home park near Miami where he now sits and drinks. I am emotionally distant except sometimes in church or when I eat a toasted sesame bagel or when my sweetie walks into the room and sits on my lap. She is not emotionally distant at all. She married into my family of crusty evangelicals and when they reach for her hand to shake it she throws her arms around them, and as a result their puritan principles are sliding like a hillside. Which brings me back to L.A.

A trip to Minnesota last Tuesday

I flew back to Minnesota in the midst of Tuesday’s snowfall and was proud of my people dealing calmly with snow. The media tries to make a crisis of weather and newscasters speak in emergency tones and verbs such as “struck” and “slammed” are used. Falling snow never “struck” anybody. An icicle may have or a snowball or someone might slip on ice and strike their head, but snowflakes descending have no more impact than falling leaves in autumn.

The blizzard that fell on Buffalo was entirely different, four feet of snow, high winds, twelve-foot drifts, icy roads, deadly temperatures, combined to create a refugee situation and Buffalonians responded with mass heroism, people taking strangers into their homes and feeding them for days until order was restored.

Merry Christmas

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves….

A hike to Times Square and back

The enemy is clutter and I am late to the battle, not wanting to be prim and proper, but I have bags and boxes stuffed with stuff, drawers, shelves, closets, and this must be addressed, otherwise you’ll be reading about me in the paper, Elderly Author Starves in Home, Unable to Climb Over Piles to Reach Kitchen. I exaggerate but the trend is clear and trends that are not interrupted become landslides. Meaningless memorabilia, clothes we’ve outgrown, mysterious tools, ugly art. So I start tossing and then I come across a note from my daughter: “I love you, Show Boy” and of course I can’t throw that away, and so it goes to a pile of saves, along with a sheet of paper with one-liners ( “She was only a stableman’s
daughter but all the horsemen knew her.”). And a picture of my classmates standing on my lawn for our 60th reunion, which prompted me to call up Billy Pedersen who’s in the picture, and because my wife was asleep, I slipped out of the apartment and so there I was, walking down Columbus Avenue and reminiscing about our friend Corinne and the toboggan hill behind her house and thus housekeeping was put off for another day.

Working my way toward a philosophy

I had a dream last night in which I was a stand-up comic and I trained a dog to move his lips as if saying words and I stood in the wings and told jokes lip-synched by him, jokes about dogs (in the first person) and the audience loved it so much, to see a dog tell jokes, that when I came out on stage they were disappointed and wanted the dog to come back and even booed me. There is a lesson here: there is such a thing as Excessive Success, which only leads to high expectations that cannot be met.

This surely was true of Sir Walter Raleigh, a poet, soldier, Queen Elizabeth’s boyfriend, who sailed up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado and failed and came back to London to be accused of treason and thrown in prison and have his head chopped off, a warning to the rest of us: don’t rise too high too fast.

A perfect Christmas, a man among woman

I got an orange, a book, four bags of jelly beans, and 12 pairs of bright red socks for Christmas, which warmed the cockles of my heart, plus which I was a lone male with three fine women companions so I didn’t need to say a word, just an occasional murmur to indicate I was paying attention. Had there been another male present, I would’ve had to talk learned talk about the economy or other topics about which I’m ignorant, which I did enough of in college and now it feels good to put a lid on it and listen to the music of contrapuntal contralto conversation.

We have no need for big gifts, being in the deaccessioning stage of life when we sit down at our big round clunky table and wonder how to divest ourselves of the thing, which was imposed on us by an interior decorator whose enthusiasm for massive ugly expensive furniture ground us into submission, we Midwesterners unable to self-advocate, so we feel we’re living in his apartment, not our own. If anyone wants the table, we’ll pay you to take it away. (It’s big so bring a chainsaw.)

A miraculous evening on Sixth Avenue

I’ve been reading Christmas letters this week and — I don’t know how to say this politely — back where I come from, Minnesota, it is considered shameful to be shameless and write a promotional brochure about your over-achieving children — “Tara was top scorer on her soccer team and won the lead role in ‘Antigone,’ and her essay on chaos theory will be in the next issue of American Scholar. She and her partner Maria whom she met in Trigonometry and who is Phi Beta Kappa from Pakistan are engaged to marry in June and plan to start a family when they move to Cambridge to start grad school.”

Probably I am all wrong about this. Probably I am simply defensive about my own slovenly habits. Probably I am envious, having never excelled in anything other than humility. I hit a brick wall in lower algebra and never got to trig. And now I’ve brought home a pitiful misshapen Christmas tree for which I paid $90. I was sent out to purchase a tree and I brought home a cripple. I had to go out and buy a special orthopedic tree stand with lead weights so it won’t fall over.

Waiting for Christmas, wishing for snow

I flew from St. Louis to New York City last Friday, had a cup of black coffee before takeoff, which put me right to sleep, and awoke on the descent through heavy overcast, no visible lights below even as our wheels were lowered, and down, down, down we came as the ride got bumpy and then sort of turbulent, lights appearing a few hundred feet below, a river of headlights on a freeway, the plane shaking as the ground came up to meet us, red lights on the tarmac, and the wheels hit and the nose came down and he reversed the engines and braked hard and brought us around to the terminal at LaGuardia.

It was thrilling. For all the times I’ve ridden a plane descending through zero visibility, it still is a pleasure, to contemplate the end of my life and then life continues, I text my love (“Landed”), take my briefcase, thank the captain standing in the cockpit door and walk up the Jetway and past Starbucks and the ATMs and the candy stand and out the door into the dark and drizzle and stand in the taxi line and hop in a cab and into Manhattan we go, down dark streets of brownstones, a few hardy souls walking their dogs, and across the Park to the West Side where my love waits for me to come through the door and puts her arms around me.