Graphic Firing Table

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

 So it is "that time of year", and - unchurched as I am - I can't dodge hard enough to avoid the reason for the season.

Presents!

In my younger days I labored like a galley slave over the worktable making hand-drawn Christmas cards even though I cared little enough for the day itself. 

Well...I'm like anyone else and like the pretty lights and music and the overall feeling of happy anticipation that surrounds the commercial Western Christmastime we've invented since breaking out of the old winter-solstice/dead-of-winter religious holiday binds.

But I'm barely tolerant of religion in general, and Christmas the holiday has become such a grotesque parody of the notions put forward in the Christian literature as to be almost hypocritical.

So I realized at some point that it was ridiculous to put that much work into something stanning a thing I barely cared about. So, I just stopped.

The one thing I kept on with was doing hand-drawn wrapping paper.

That was quick and fun, and was more entertaining than trying to come up with a single card idea. I could knock out a dozen of these little cartoons and they'd actually be of some use for the real reason for the season - loot!

Being retired has given me time to return to this old December tradition.

 Drachma the Cat always takes a licking on these. Well, all the pets do; they're cute and easy to work into a vaguely holiday-esque sort of image.

Here's the little fuzzy nutling again:

I'm a huge Gojira fanboi, so of course the Big Green had to make an appearance:

In case it's too small to read, the off-stage voice is saying: "You'll never fit down that (the chimney). You know that, right?" to which Gojira politely disagrees ("Shut the fuck up").

Of course My Bride has to make a cameo as Miss Debra The School Secretary:

She's also thinking about a trip to Scotland this coming summer, where she hopes to take a short course on dry-stone walling, so here she is meeting one of the locals:

Of course there are kiddos, so the Girl showed up having grown up quite a bit:

The Boy...mmmm, maybe not so much:

My Bride's comment was: "A bit too on-point, hmmm?"

Yeah. Well, he is what he is.

Well, that's the first hint of KrisKringlism for 2022. Tomorrow I am due back up in Goble to freeze my ass off testing fucking trench backfill. It'll be bloody awful fucking freezing, and I hope that'll be it for the year, but we'll see.

Hope you and yours are looking forward to a peaceful and happy Christmas season.

Whatever you may believe in.

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

~ T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

There was a time when I would struggle out of sleep on Christmas morning, desperate for caffeine amid jittering children impatient for loot.

Today? Nah. Just me and Little Cat, coffee and tuna pate' and soccer re-runs in the silent morning house. Why the hell was Qatar playing in the CONCACAF Cup semifinal? Fucker was in Eurasia last I checked. Fucking FIFA cash-grab, I suspect.

Finally the crew staggered in and the presents were distributed and everyone got down to the hard business of Christmas Day - napping (parents), gaming (The Boy), and something artistic (The Girl). The cats begged for food, prowled randomly, or napped, although Drachma did have a moment with his new catnip toy:

.

He had to sleep it off under the tree...

Late in the afternoon my Bride concluded that we needed a brisk walk, so we headed out into the gray, rainy, high-thirties evening, down to the little woodlot waste ground along the fringes of St. Johns to walk off excess Christmas Spirit.

And proceeded to immediately come across a dump of cut-up commercial weed.

"Oh Christmas weed, oh Christmas weed, how lovely are your branches..!"

Frankly it was miserable; cold, wet, with a nasty east wind that was just enough to chill any part of you that wasn't covered.

The Girl and I turned back just past the treeline in the distance of the photo above. The Bride kept on going just long enough to show us what weenies we were being, and I'm totally okay with that. That was a rotten ramble.

But we got home to the warmth and the glow of the lights, and the promise of the quiet evening to come.

 

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

---”Holly”, from "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney.

 (h/t to Lance Mannion, who has been posting these evocative Heaney poems...)

"behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"
—Luke 2:48

How do you approach a miracle? She forgets her son
has sky spilling out of his mouth, so she doesn’t look
in the temple, where he’s practicing a prayer
that sounds like the only rose-colored feather
on the wing of a desert finch. She searches the road,
with the revellers, the travellers, returning home,
but the miracle is a beak that snaps the pinyon pine
shell apart like a lever, releasing its heart from its case.
The miracle is a set of questions made by the river
that clips its blue leash to the sea. The miracle is
only partly a boy, only partly a bird or a beach.
She forgets the part that is made of fire and wind,
the part that opens what’s closed or finds what’s lost.
She is sad and worried in her unremembering.
What do you say to the miracle you’re missing
when the miracle tells you it is already home?

~ Linda Dove

This evening we celebrated Christmas Eve with all the traditions of our family; lazy idleness, videogames (for the Boy), desultory exercise (for Mojo and myself), and a meal of honey ham (because honeybaked ham...), scratch mac n' cheese with sharp Tillamook cheddar because the Boy - whose diet generally consists of whatever is on the "prohibited" list published by the American Diabetic Association - specially requested it, and a garden salad because it symbolizes the rebirth of Sol Invictus or Christ, whichever comes first, or who takes two out of three thumbwrestling.

I won't pretend that this winter solstice doesn't feel dark and dim, and not merely because we're into the Dark Ages here in the Pacific Northwest, the rainy months when we see the sun only randomly from week to week. To me it feels like the December of 1860 must have; a tense, louring time vibrating like a tightening string, turbulent with anger and danger. The election of 2016 has made evident what has been true since 1980; that We the People are a house divided against itself, that we are in a cold civil war, and the the only thing left to question is whether we will continue in this tortuous state or break out into open struggle to become all one or all the other. I can neither effectively fight that struggle or win it; all I can do is try and turn it from me and mine.

So I hope you and yours are together, and safely ensconced in love and light. The night is long and dark, and we are our own candles, flickering bravely against the cold outside the glass.

May all of us find our way home safe tonight.

For the second time in three years we had snow on Christmas Eve. It says something about how old the kiddos are that they were stolidly unthrilled about that.
The other family member who was less than excited was Drachma the Merkitty, who seemed to take the whole snow business as a personal insult.
The day before Missy and I went for tea at the Lan Su Chinese garden downtown. I seldom visit the garden in the winter; I should. It was serene, an enclosure of stillness within the cold, busy city around us. The garden teahouse was a retreat from the noisy holiday season, as well, the only turmoil the steam rising from the dark oolong in the stoneware cup.
For Christmas Eve dinner I made a huge cauldron of the Hungarian mushroom soup that was once a gift to the city from the funky Old Wives' Tales restaurant. It's rich and thick, full of sour cream and dill and paprika, the perfect winter soup to go with a crusty bread and dark beer; my brew of choice was a Deschutes Brewing stout called The Abyss. It hit like a barleywine and was ideal for some Christmas cheering.
I hope you are with your beloveds tonight. Certainly the history of faiths, like that of nations, suggests that the old grinning ape within all of us can and will use them for our own malicious ends. But beyond those histories faith, like the best hopes of nations, promise a better world than the one we have created. The promise of tomorrow is the promise of the birth of Hope, the promise of a peace that passeth all understanding. That we cannot seem to find a place in our hearts for that peace is the fault of our hearts, not of that promise.

So I wish all of you hope on this cold, silent night. Hope for love, and peace, and happiness, for you and yours.

And...

May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me.
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel!

~ Hilaire Belloc

It was a practice in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne) (Light) 187th Infantry Regiment - stationed in the tropical paradise of Fort Kobbe, Panama - for the unmarried sergeants to volunteer to take holiday duty for the wedded guys. So that's why I found myself standing on the landing outside the dayroom of the HHC barracks Christmas Eve day dressed tastefully in holiday-green tropical fatigues and a santa-red beret being violently abused by a Panamanian taxi driver.

It seems that one of our American heroes had, in an excess of Christmas cheer, commandeered the driver's services to motor all around Panama Viejo attempting to find a shapely little elf who would supply a Christmas stocking that he could fill.

Not surprisingly, given his slobberingly drunk condition, the only attentions he could find came from ladies who expected to receive green, folding presents in return, which struck our young hero as more than a little Grinchy.

This seeker of the true Spirit of Christmas imbibed some Chistmas spirits and then resolved to return to his only REAL family, his buddies at HHC 2/187, only to find on arrival that one of Santa's little ho-ho-hoes had lifted his wallet during his importunations. Or he had left it on the bar. Or whatever.

The upshot was, anyway, that he now had nothing to give the infuriated driver whose worn taxi now reeked of cheap perfume and drunken G.I. Worse yet, he turned out to be nimble as a monkey - even drunk - and had shinnied up the mango tree in front of the barracks and was hiding in the branches lobbing the occasional overripe fruit at both the driver and the taxi windshield.

The street in front of the barrack reeked of mango juice and the combined noise of a furious taxi driver and an intoxicated arboreal G.I. This, in turn, drew a small crowd of pre-Christmas revelers, who took turns abusing both parties and shying additional fruit at the taxi when the driver wasn't watching.

I managed to pay off the driver, scatter the crowd and talk the monkey-boy out of the tree just as one of my other single friends came sauntering down from his post as battalion staff duty NCO.

"I see life in the slums is still exotic and vigorous, even on Christmas Eve" he sneered.

SGT Chief: "Little you know about it, lolling about up there at Battalion as you do. It's like a freakin' Jerry Springer show down here, you know. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to you, too, jackass."

BN SDNCO: "Yeah, well, lucky for us that the first Christmas happened in Bethehem, not Fort Kobbe, eh?"

SGT Chief: "Why's that?"

BN SDNCO: "'Cause where the hell'd you find three wise men and a virgin around here..?"

It was an old joke but I was still chuckling as I ran back up the stairs to the dayroom to share warm Coke with the three guys watching football.

This year, as they have for the past fourteen years now, American soldiers are preparing for a holiday in faraway places much less entertaining and far more hazardous than my Panamanian Christmas Eve nearly three decades ago.

I'm sure that they share many of the same feelings I did then: loneliness, regret, some pride in a hard job well done in demanding circumstances, but mixed with others I didn't; fear of death or wounding, anger and grief at lost friends, hope that their own homecoming will be soon and safe.

As do I.
And to you all; Merry Christmas, Joyous Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa...whatever, where-ever, and however you celebrate, may the light of love and laughter be with you though these long nights and on into the sunlight of tomorrow.

Odd...this occurred to me today on the way in to work. I haven't thought of this time, and place, and the people connected with both for years. But it's Christmas time, and this is a Christmas story.

(Optional musical accompanyment to this story, The Wexford Carol with Yo-yo Ma and Alison Krauss)



More than fifteen years ago - it must have been at least that long, since I had left the company by 1999 and the company itself fell apart within another couple of years after that - the company I then worked for had its annual Christmas party. That year it was lunch at a local restaurant down along the Willamette River.

Unlike most "company parties" this really was a genuine party. We were a pretty friendly group then - this must have been some time in the early-mid-90s, before the outfit fell apart and the desertions and bickering started in earnest - we liked each other and our work, and so when the whole mob adjourned in the middle of a workday a couple of days before the holiday it was to enjoy a good meal and a pleasant time in one anothers' company. I remember it as being a very convivial afternoon.

We were sitting around after the meal, probably having drinks and inventing reasons not to go back to work, when the hydrogeologist, a woman named Nancy Speaker, began to softly sing The Coventry Carol.

I love and know that carol, and so I dropped in and sang the harmony along with her. Our voices blended well; her clear contralto and my bass-baritone dark and deep underneath, and - although we had never sang together and, indeed, didn't know each other could sing - had a fortunate ability to support each other's passage from melody to harmony and back.

We finished together. Sat, and smiled at each other, and I began Silent Night.

We proceeded to sing perhaps another half dozen or so carols. Nobody else joined in...but no one protested, either. Our co-workers quietly sat and listened, smiling pleasantly. By the time we were done the whole corner of the restaurant was watching and listening to this strange little spontaneous concert.

Try and imagine how odd that must have seemed if you'd have wandered into the midst of it; there, in that public place, with the broad river flowing winter-dark with soil outside the great window-wall below the unrelenting gray sky of the Dark Months, all those tables full of perfect strangers, gathered only through random chance - through their own seperate reasons and their own seperate lives converging there and then - sitting together listening to the voices of two other strangers rising though the silent room with the old songs of mystic birth and redemption.

When we finished there was no fuss or applause but just a long thoughtful quiet; it was as if we had not performed but had sung out loud what everyone else was feeling and thinking at that time of the year. We smiled and they smiled back and we had our last drinks and gathered our coats and left.

The oddest part was that it was that if you'd have scripted this as a scene in a Hallmark Channel Christmas film I'd have laughed it out of sight as completely, ridiculously, unreal. If you'd have suggested it to me earlier I'd have been too embarassed to have even considered doing it. But it happened, and I did, and at the time it seemed right; not just right but perfect.

And for all that it has been years and miles since that time, and place, and those people, have vanished...it is one of my most beloved Christmas moments. And for no reason other than my own sentimental remembrance of that time I wanted to share it with you.

May you all have a peaceful and joyous season.

It was a practice in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne) (Light) 187th Infantry Regiment for the unmarried sergeants to volunteer to take holiday duty for the wedded guys. So that's why I found myself standing on the landing outside the dayroom of the HHC barracks Christmas Eve day dressed tastefully in holiday-green tropical fatigues and a santa-red beret being violently abused by a Panamanian taxi driver.
It seems that one of our American heroes had, in an excess of Christmas cheer, commandeered the driver's services to motor all around Panama Viejo attempting to find a shapely little elf who would supply a Christmas stocking that he could fill.

Not surprisingly, given his slobberingly drunk condition, the only attentions he could find came from ladies who expected to receive green, folding presents in return, which struck our young hero as more than a little Grinchy.

This seeker of the true Spirit of Christmas imbibed some Chistmas spirits and then resolved to return to his only REAL family, his buddies at HHC 2/187, only to find on arrival that one of Santa's little ho-ho-hoes had lifted his wallet during his importunations. Or he had left it on the bar. Or whatever.

The upshot was, anyway, that he now had nothing to give the infuriated driver whose worn taxi now reeked of cheap perfume and drunken G.I. Worse yet, he turned out to be nimble as a monkey - even drunk - and had shinnied up the mango tree in front of the barracks and was hiding in the branches lobbing the occasional overripe fruit at both the driver and the taxi windshield.

The street in front of the barrack reeked of mango juice and the combined noise of a furious taxi driver and an intoxicated arboreal G.I. This, in turn, drew a small crowd of pre-Christmas revelers, who took turns abusing both parties and shying additional fruit at the taxi when the driver wasn't watching.

I managed to pay off the driver, scatter the crowd and talk the monkey-boy out of the tree just as one of my other single friends came sauntering down from his post as battalion staff duty NCO.

"I see life in the slums is still exotic and vigorous, even on Christmas Eve" he sneered.

SGT Chief: "Little you know about it, lolling about up there at Battalion as you do. It's like a freakin' Jerry Springer show down here, you know. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to you, too, jackass."

BN SDNCO: "Yeah, well, lucky for us that the first Christmas happened in Bethehem, not Fort Kobbe, eh?"

SGT Chief: "Why's that?"

BN SDNCO: "'Cause where the hell'd you find three wise men and a virgin around here..?"

It was an old joke but I was still chuckling as I ran back up the stairs to the dayroom to share warm Coke with the three guys watching football.

This year, as they have for the past eleven years now, American soldiers are preparing for a holiday in faraway places much less entertaining and far more hazardous than my Panamanian Christmas Eve two and a half decades ago. I'm sure that they share many of the same feelings I did then: loneliness, regret, some pride in a hard job well done in demanding circumstances, but mixed with others I didn't; fear of death or wounding, anger and grief at lost friends, hope that their own homecoming will be soon and safe.

As do I.

So Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah...however you say it, however you celebrate it, all you young - and not so young - men and women in the hard places far from home; I hope you will all be home soon to enjoy this time with your families.


And to you, all my friends here, from near and far, let me say that although I have no more religion than I have hair on the top of my head and no more faith than I have illusions regarding nations, men, and women I'm touched on the heart a bit every year on this night of all the nights when we pretend that there really can be Peace on Earth to men and women of goodwill.

May you and yours find sleep this night at peace, surrounded by love and the loving of those you cherish. May you wake tomorrow to good cheer, and the promise of a better, brighter day.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; tonight let us put aside what we know of the world and our fellow men and simply live in hopes that there can, indeed, be a silent night made holy by the caring and loving of one for another, and of us all.

Goodnight.

So the morning was full of the most delightful greed; of the Kiddos for their prezzies and the parents for the the delight the Kiddos got from their prezzies.

The morning actually started before dawn; I had to get up to take more cold medicine (for a particularly nasty head cold that has been bugging me since last week...) and woke the Girl, who came out to dance an antic hay because Santa had arrived.

After the medicine began to kick in, though, we both went back to sleep for a couple of hours, until the late-waking half of our family arose and we could get down to the hard graft of piling into the loot.

As you can see, even the Little Cat waded in with frantic dreams of treasure.
New fry pans - sweet! Score.
Perhaps the most bizarre present we have ever received. WTF? I mean, I know that Oregon wine is supposed to be a big deal...but we don't really drink much wine and even if we did, the "extra work" of using a manual corkscrew? NOT a real issue...

So...ummmm...gee, thanks, guys. In this case it really IS the thought that counted.
Here's the Girl with one of the little stuffed friends she received as presents - in this case, Jordan/"Cammie" the Camel. Hard to tell which one is cuter.
Mojo is a delicious Holiday Treat; oooh, yes...
Nice little family picture, neh? UNwrapping prezzies is certainly more fun the wrapping the damn things.
The Girl and her mom jumping into a cutthroat game of "Go Fish"...
...whilst the Boy fired up his new XBOX360 and began to slay digital aliens, since, after all, nothing says "Peace on Earth Goodwill Towards Men" like an MA5B Individual Combat Weapons System.
Hope you and yours enjoyed a peaceful and pleasant Christmas Day...

Keeping

But Mary kept all these things,
and pondered them in her heart.
(Luke 2:19)

Silence in the night, no mate, no
skin touching skin. She is alone

and yet her heart sparks to learn
what she has learned. The truth

has wings. It arrives on a morning
when she is busy with morning

things. She is not expecting
to lose herself to the wind of what

is coming. It comes and she falls
to the ponderous weight of change,

which strikes her soul wide open,
which is how the light gets in.

~ Linda Dove

On the God's putative birthday from my godless heart to all of you, my friends, spread out across not just my country but the world; may this day that is supposed to be about the advent of love and peace find you at peace, with those you love around you. May you find at least one day of tranquility, of silence amid the noise and haste, of lovingkindness, of hope, of joy.

May you feel the vibration of the bells of Christmas Day passing though you like the motions of the spheres.