Month: December 2024

Christmas 2024

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I opened this page to write about my thoughts and feelings this Christmas Day this year this 2024 this time without Cheryl. How do I feel?

Rested for one. I had an enjoyable dinner with my son and his wife and their two sons. I left their house in time for Rudolph and the team to get started without me watching. Here at home I read for a short time and went to my bed with visions of sugar plums, etc. You get it.

I feel a definite lack of enthusiasm in me. I suppose that is normal.

The apparent traverse in the sky of the sun has changed but the morning light is gray. It is overcast and still dark. Thank the lord for Rudolph’s nose.

It will take an extra effort on my part to get my mood out of the doldrums.

I am not feeling it yet but when I think of the saying framed on my granddaughter’s apartment wall in Chicago “Carpe the Damn Diem”, it makes me smile.

I have wrapped all the presents that I have to deliver today and stopped to think of each of them while I was cutting and folding and taping. They are very special to me.

I miss Cheryl today. That is normal. I do not feel bad or sad or anxious or down. I miss her and her holiday enthusiasm.

(“Sometimes love does not look like what you had in mind.” – Anne Lamott)

Perhaps this is one of those days. Perhaps love will surprise me if I look for it in those around me. Perhaps it will wash over me if I let it. Perhaps.

Carpe the damn Diem!

This Christmas

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Christmas is Harder than I thought it would Be

It just is harder. Several times over the past few days I have been blindsided by my own emotions. A hymn in church, a song on the radio, a picture on the Frameo, a note in a Christmas card, any of these and all of these bring to mind memories of glad tidings gone by. If I am completely honest with myself, I started it.

A good friend asked what my favorite song/hymn was and I responded “Hallelujah” and could not immediately remember Leonard Cohen wrote it so many years ago. It was often used in the closing scenes of the show “Criminal Minds.” It is a haunting tune, at least it is to me. I think the rendition that is used on the show is the one by John Bon Jovi. I am unsure of that fact but it haunts me and reminds me of Cheryl and our younger times together.

When that happens I just let it roll over me. It is disappointing that Cheryl is no longer with me but we had a great life together. More than fifty years of love, children, busy, travel, learning, excitement, anguish, grace, parties, dinners, Christmases, Easters, egg hunts, summers and summer vacations, it was a wonderful time. We argued too but we never took that to bed with us. She supported me and I supported her.

Today as I put my last stamps on my Christmas messages I set Spotify to play “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. After that it wandered off to play a not so random collection of songs from various albums. Yusaf (Cat Stevens) started playing and suddenly I was 25 again. It is interesting to me how that happens. Cheryl has long hair and the kids are little. Yusaf is gray these days, as am I.

And though you want to last forever; You know you never will; (You know you never will); And the goodbye makes the journey harder still – Cat Stevens “Oh Very Young”

It is good to remember those times we had.

Time only moves forward. The Christmas greetings are in the mail.

Tomorrow is Christmas eve.

Carpe Diem!

Tug-of-War

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There is always a tug-of-war between what needs to happen and what I want to do.

The first of the Christmas messages is folded and noted and almost sent. It will need a sticker from the government before I can put it in the mailbox. Cheryl sent a hundred or so Christmas cards out to family and friends. During the past few years it became my job to do so. I automated that process by ordering the cards preprinted with a message and a picture. Envelopes were printed with a return address. I knew how to do a mail merge on the Avery labels. Last year I did not. It was simply way to hard.

This year I am sending notes of my own design. Not so much of a Christmas greeting card, that sentiment seems very commercial to me. My notes are more of a generic thanks for your interest and I am doing okay note. Looking at my 75 year old handwriting sends me to the laptop to type. And my hand does not ache when I am done.

I plan to stick with this theme for years to come. We have abandoned personal letters in favor of SMS messages and email. Handwritten notes are more rare. I started writing those to my granddaughter, typed of course, when she started into college last year and she replies by hand in various colored pens and tells me about her experiences there.

I will change my message from year to year. Perhaps I will start a folder on this laptop and fill it with stories and commentary so that all I will do next December is edit and print. Doesn’t that sound organized? Sometimes I amaze myself.

The first note is still laying on the table by itself, lonely with no companions, while I write about writing notes.

Carpe Diem.

At the End of the Day

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“No matter what happens between now and then, tomorrow is another day” said the news anchor on “The Day.” I think, “Absolutely and thank you mister obvious.” I suppose it was his intent to sound profound. Walter Cronkite used to end with, “And that’s the way it is…”

I started using Carpe Diem a few years ago at the end of my commentary as a way to remind myself of the potential available to us to use each day. And yet, at the end of the day I spend little time reporting to myself the high points of the day. I also do not focus on the low points.

There are many things to think about at the end of the day. Am I brave enough to love again? Am I too open with others? What great things happened today? What did I learn today? What should I think about avoiding if I can next time? At the very end, I push all those and others away by reading a novel. It is a habit I developed over the last few years. About half of the time it worked. I was tired and Cheryl was asleep or mostly so when I came to bed. These days it always works. I have also become a critic of some fiction that I have selected to entertain myself.

Before reading some novel or ones that are not novel at all to me, however, other actions take over my interest. I am in charge of myself and what I watch and what is entertainment and what is not. I was disappointed in the movie version of “Wicked” for example. I think there was a rush to get a snippet of a story onto the big screen that is in many ways incomplete. Money people for movie producers need a return of money to keep going. I think I was greatly disappointed. The singing was great but the story line went nowhere. I have some of these projects.

Quite often but not when I was working I did not finish some project. I have many of these little abandoned projects (mostly little electronic things) scattered on my work surface in my office. I have a pleasantly cluttered office and once in a while I straighten things for a bit in order to find a place for another soon to be abandoned gizmo. And yet through it all I am able to keep track of important actions that I need to do to take care of myself – pay bills, cook, shop for food, laundry – the mundane tasks of life. It may be that I am not so disorganized as I perceive myself to be.

Sometimes my blog is a stream of conscience construct. This may be one of those times.

Many people I have known were, or seemed so, very organized. I am not – at least in my mind I am not. Is it okay to be un-dis-mis-organized? (Cheryl was so good at organization.) The answer is yes. Mis-organization, as I like to call it, indicates to me that I am often not satisfied with the path I have taken to somewhere. Something does not feel quite right. I look at it as taking the next fork in the road. How many forks are there in my road? Where is this trip around the sun taking me?

It may be that I am merely constantly learning about myself and this new life without Cheryl.

Carpe Iter!

Some Men have not Eaten Quiche

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Real Men don’t Eat Quiche

Yesterday my nephew, Jeff, and his family came to visit. It was a spontaneous phone message in the dark of the movie theater. “I’m in town for a few days on business. Can we get together for breakfast or lunch?” He lives in California and I have not talked to him face to face since his wedding three years ago. I invited him to my little condo and spread the word to my kids. It was a wonderful spontaneous family gathering.

When I mentioned it to my neighbor Jane later she remarked, “Serendipitous!” Yes, it was.

I made a quiche out of some random components that I had in the refrigerator. Quiche and frittata are in the same category of use what you have, I think. And of the two I think quiche is better. It could be the pastry crust that is required for an excellent quiche. One can make a crustless quiche but that is just lazy and in that other country it is called frittata, so, go over the mountain and call your crustless quiche by the correct name.

Jeff told me that no one had ever made him a quiche before. (It made me feel good inside. I was proud of myself.) The title for this essay jumped into my head after they were all gone yesterday. It is from a satirical little book that I recently found was written in the 80s. (Wow, I am getting old. I thought it was written just a couple years ago.) I had almost said it to him when he said, this is pretty good.

This quiche was bacon, Italian sausage, broccoli and onions with sharp cheddar and mozzarella, eggs scrambled with a little sugar and buttermilk over a pie dough made with flour and butter and a little salt. It was good.

Sometimes us real men eat quiche and pronounce it to be good. The accompanying picture is AI’s version of real men eating quiche. You can tell they are real people because they are washing down their quiche and other green substances with lager. (Never mind the fact that they all have the same mother and they were all born within 15 seconds of each other.)

Beer and quiche, Could be the breakfast of champions.

Carpe the serendipitous Diem.