Merry Christmas

Fox News is again awash with outrage over the “War on Christmas.”  The latest installment has Megyn Kelly proclaiming that Santa Claus and Jesus are indisputably white.  While I am hard pressed to have sympathy for anything broadcast on Fox, I must admit to a sadness that “Merry Christmas” has morphed into “Happy Holidays.”

I’m Jewish and as a kid I loved Christmas.  I believed in Santa with all my might and when told he was fictional, my little heart broke.   I was in a choir and year after year I experienced great joy in singing those lovely carols about the silent night and three kings of orient.  Christmas was a time of joy all around me.  There was honest good will and magic was in the air.  It wasn’t a solstice celebration or the big holiday at the end of the year (that coincided with Hannukah).  It was Christmas.   Christmas is  the holiday of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s  character transformation and the vindication of the goodness of James Stewart’s George Bailey.  Of all the holidays in the calendar, Christmas  is the only one that celebrates man’s essential kindness, charity and warmth.  It is the holiday which honors the birth of the Prince of Peace, and, indeed,  peace permeates our homes and spirits.  So I am inclined to say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays.”  ( And while we are at it, how about Bill O’Reilly and his comrades shower those of us who secularize the holiday with a little “peace and good will toward men.”)

All Things Shall Pass

It has been quite a time since the last post. Spring and Summer have been a rich and transitional time. Today I read with sadness the word of Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. I’m not a techie by any stretch. But I’ve admired this man’s innovation and impact on our culture. I love my iPhone.  I have joked for the last couple of years that if I had to give up my family or my iPhone……well, I’d be weighing the options.   Such cleverness.  Such usefullness.  The drive behind that creativity is falling to his physical limitations.  We are all dust, after all.  I, as we all, embrace the fiction that we…. WE…. are special in some way.   We will live long and healthy.  If we have not achieved our dream, we have time yet for that.  If we have achieved our desires at the various stages of our lives, we feel blessed.  Somehow God touches us.  We don’t know why or how but it is our abiding knowledge.  

Who among us would be more blessed than Steve Jobs?  But today, he succumbs to illness of the body.  Steve Jobs, whose mind is so beautiful as a creative engine, which touches us all – whose body is so mortal.

When I was a kid, I loved the giants of Folk Music.  I’m going to date myself here, but I loved The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary.  The power and DRIVE of their music inspired and empowered me.  In the last few years, Nick Reynolds of TKT and Mary Travers of PP&M died.  Here are pictures of each at the height of their power and in age and infermity.

Mary:   Here’s Nick: r’

The people whose passion and life force energy can inspire and touch us are gifts.  Be they Steve , or Mary or Nick (as they do me) or Barack Obama,  Rick Perry, Bruce Springsteen,  Lady Gaga, or any writer, singer, innovator, crier, screamer, tickler, we all pass through these stages.  Our task is to love ourselves and one another as we pass through this universal course.  None of us gets out of this alive, but we can strive, always, to find the love and passion that makes us alive.

Buddy

We said good-bye to our sweet golden retriever, Buddy, three nights ago. He was 10 1/2 years old. He had cancer all throughout his body. As he lay on the floor, with the three of us sitting around him, stroking him and holding him, the drug was administered and he quietly left us. From the time our, then,  7-year old daughter picked him out from an array of  six-week old puppies sleeping in our backyard (a young 4-H fellow was breeding retrievers and brought a dozen little fellows to frolic in our back before, one-by-one, they plopped off to sleep) to this week, our Buddy had been the sweetest, most loving of companions. Happy (happy?…..In heaven) to have his ears massaged – never more content than to be under our dinner table while we ate, my daughter’s toes tucked under his belly or resting on top of his body – loving to shimmy on his back on top of a new scent in the grass.  Oh lord, the open, complete love that he gave.  He’d stay with a good friend when we’d be away and she told us she loved his company, he was so mellow.  She joked that he just needed an easy chair and a smoking jacket to fill out the image.  I loved taking him for walks off leash – he never, but for a couple of times in all those years, roamed and always stayed near as we approached an intersection in our neighborhood, would sit until it was time to be released to run across the street.  He was our happy, loving boy and the warmth he brought to our home will be sorely, sadly missed.    I wish I’d walked him more, given him a few extra goodies, somehow prolonged his time on this plane – but that’s over.  We lit a memorial candle inside his collar placed beside his picture and we’ll keep that for another few days.  So here’s to the love in our lives, wherever its source.  We often don’t know how it fills our hearts until it’s gone.