Silas’ First Christmas

 Patrick and Sarah left this morning headed home to Nashville. Jon, Kaitlin and Silas will stay for a couple more days before heading back to Columbia. But, Christmas is over for this year. While the memories are fresh, a few observations…

The entire experience is different with a baby in the house, more hectic, more moving parts to deal with. But aside from the more strenuous logistics, having a six month old in the house brings back the magic. It helps that Silas is such a happy, contented and flexible child. He takes very short naps during the day which isn’t optimal…but sleeps 11 hours straight at night which amounts to a godsend for his parents. In the five days he has been here he has endured one 18 person gathering, another 25 person gathering, plus an evening with a babysitter (Bernadette). In each case the little boy was as good as gold. At Aunt Linda’s house we discovered that Silas loves trains! Uncle Bill’s annual train display was the subject of endless fascination.

Watching your grown children parenting like seasoned veterans is an amazing experience. Knowing that this child will always be surrounded by scores of uncles, aunts, and cousins who love him is an invaluable gift he has been given, one that we will never take for granted.

The six of us went to see A Christmas Carol at the Virginia Repertory theater. That timeless story was brought to life beautifully by that company and worth the trip. 

Ready for Christmas

 The week of Christmas is finally here and we are pretty much exhausted. Actually, a more accurate way of expressing this would be…I am tired…Pam is exhausted. 

Over the past two weeks our house has been transformed from one thing to entirely another. The Christmas decorations have gone up, for one thing, and for us that means seven Christmas trees, several garlands, twenty-five snow village houses/stores with all the people and animals who live there, plus scores of wrapped presents under three of the aforementioned seven Christmas trees. But that’s not the half of it…

This will be our grandson’s first Christmas at Lolli and Pops’ house. Accordingly, Pam decided that he would need one of the rooms upstairs converted to an exclusive nursery for him. In addition, his parents would need to be relocated to the bedroom next to this new nursery. In order to accommodate this, Patrick and Sarah’s old room would need to be moved to where my old den used to be, while my den would be relocated to where Kaitlin and Jon’s old room used to be. Somehow Pam had this whole thing pictured in her mind so there was no point in me objecting to any of it. 

The first thing to go was what used to be Pam’s craft room/office. In one afternoon we managed to move all the furniture from all these rooms, reshuffling the decks of what they have all been for the past 28 years. It should be mentioned here that we are both in our 60’s. We still haven’t fully recovered. But when my wife gets a vision in her head, it’s my job to make it happen. The finished product was well worth the effort. We think that everyone will be happy with their new digs. But there is one problem…

Lucy is not amused.

Like all dogs, Miss Lucy is a creature of entrenched habits. One of them is her preferred sleeping spot/hangout spot during the day—what was my old den, and her favorite sofa. Well…when she took the tour after all the changes and discovered that her old spot had been moved she absolutely refused to get on that sofa! She looked at me as if I was guilty of some grave betrayal.

Four days…yes, it took her four full days of sniffing it and lots of heavy sighing before she finally hopped up on her own initiative. Even then, her facial expression was, “Ok…but I’m ready to make a break for the rug at the slightest provocation!!”

RIP, Meathead

 Rob Reiner and his wife had their throats slashed by their son yesterday, at least that’s what the news report said when I saw it last night. To hear news like this fifty years ago would have been shocking—Desi Arnaz and wife Lucille Ball were found bludgeoned to death by their son, little Ricky. That headline would have stopped all of America in its tracks. Now we hardly raise our eyebrows. Now it’s just another dysfunctional Hollywood couple with a disturbed son who snapped in the most violent nation on the face of the earth, the United States of America.

For people of a certain age, Rob Reiner will forever be Meathead, the radical hippy son-in-law of Archie Bunker in All in the Family. But he was much more than that. He gave us A Few Good Men, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride. For these three films alone he has left a terrific legacy. But now he’s dead and will most likely be remembered more for how he died than how he lived.

I’m one of those people who basically can’t stand Hollywood and Hollywood people. The way I see it, Hollywood is populated by self-obsessed narcissistic weirdos. The only thing worse than a room full of actors and directors is being in a room full of the children produced by these people. These people have basically nothing in common with everybody outside of Hollywood, ie…their customers. In fact, they despise us. See, they are the only people on earth who believe the “right” things, and every time one of them wins an award (at one of their 63 different award shows they throw for themselves) they simply can’t resist lecturing us rubes in the heartland about all of our shortcomings. As far as Rob Reiner goes, much has been made of his politics in the last 24 hours. I simply take it as a fact that any lifelong show business dude will have the political views of a leftist. Who cares? When I think of Rob Reiner I think of those three movies I mentioned and…Meathead. I have nothing against the man. At this moment, after his violent and tragic death at the hands of his own son, the man’s politics is about as irrelevant as it gets.

Of course, because this is 2025 and Donald Trump is in the White House and simply can’t resist inserting his thoughts into everything, the President of the United States offered up this nugget:

I just can’t process what could possibly have been running through his mind when he not only wrote this…but pressed “send”. Can anyone reading this imagine any other President saying anything like this…ever? I mean…even if he truly loathed the guy, why in the name of everything that is holy would he try to make this tragedy all about him?

But, I ask questions that I already know the answers to. At the end of the day there isn’t a thing I can do about it besides being patient waiting for the day when there’s someone in the White House that has enough self awareness to know that not every thought that enters your mind needs a public airing.

Looking for Opportunities

 Last night Pam and I decorated our family Christmas tree. Like always it was a nostalgic journey. There are ornaments from every trip we’ve ever taken together, many from Maine, others that marked accomplishments of one kind or another. We still hang the occasional ornament that the kids made when they were little. Then there are the ones given to us by dear friends. It’s quite the magical experience and brings with it a profound thankfulness for the blessings of life.

Then I wake up this morning and read of a mass killing in Australia and another at Brown University in Rhode Island. The juxtaposition of the two is life as we know it in the 21st century. Honestly life has always been shot through with contradiction from the beginning, where good fortune is mixed with tragedy. It’s just that in 2025 we know about every horrible thing that takes place anywhere on earth minutes after it happens. For me, reading of some horror somewhere makes me at once more thankful for my life and more burdened for others.

At Christmas this burden seems deeper. It’s hard for me to stay in the moment of happiness and gratitude when I imagine what other families are enduring at this hour. Imagine receiving a phone call telling you that your son has been shot dead walking across campus, the pain and anguish you would be thrust into for the rest of your life.

But, that’s someone else’s burden this morning. Today as the snow falls around me I will go to church, enjoy lunch with friends, take a nap and start wrapping presents. But everywhere I go over these next couple of weeks I will pay close attention to those around me. I will look for opportunities to be a blessing to someone. I hope everyone who reads this will do the same.

My Annual Christmas Letter

 Several years ago I wrote a blog about how annoying I found that lively perennial the Family Christmas Letter. You know the one I’m talking about because by now you’ve probably already gotten a half dozen of them thru the mail and you’re planning on writing yours any day now. Well, ever since then, as a protest to this lowest form of written communication, I’ve been writing my own Christmas letter, only mine doesn’t seek to paint a Pinterest/Hallmark picture of the previous year but an honest one. It includes noteworthy events from each month of 2025, the good, the bad, and the ugly. My year went something like this:

January: My first month of retirement was uneventful. The weather was lousy. I continued my 12 year boycott of the Inauguration show. I wrote a short story that maybe 175 people read. I established a new weekday morning routine of going to the Hope Cafe for coffee and a bagel.

February: I wrote a couple more short stories that even fewer people read. I was briefly scandalized when some scumbag murdered two Va. Beach police officers during a routine traffic stop. But that was ten months ago and it hasn’t crossed my mind since. My hunch is you’ve forgotten about it too.

March: Wrote two more short stories…The Reaping and Terrible Swift Sword which several hundred of you read. Started killing my daily walking/exercising commitment for 2025–not that I had neglected it for the first two months, but with the warmer weather I really amped it up.

April: This month was consumed with a complete overhaul of our kitchen. Thousands of dollars fled the safety and comfort of my checking account to give Pam the kitchen of her dreams and me a massive source of frustration. Wrote a fourth short story called High Tide. Visited my son and his wife in Nashville. 

May: Started getting geeked up about the impending summer trip to Maine. Set all time record of being pissed off at contractors for 46 consecutive days. Started work on a new story that kept growing more complex every time I started writing. Spoiler alert: It ends up being novel #6 and I don't finish it until December 9th.

June: Pam retired from 18 years of being vastly underpaid as a reading specialist at River’s Edge Elementary School joining her husband in a new life of joblessness. Then we drove down to Columbia, South Carolina to be there for the birth of our first grandchild, who turned out to be a boy. Everything that happened in 2025 prior to his birth is hardly even worth mentioning. We are in love with him and so unspeakably proud of his parents.

July: Went to Maine. The weather was sensational, probably the best six weeks of weather we have ever had in our summers there. Lucy once again was in her happy place.

August: We returned from Maine and literally two days later packed up and went to be with Silas for a week. Got to briefly walk through our new kitchen for about fifteen minutes before we left.

September: By September 1st I had really hit my stride with this retirement thing. I discovered that I LOVED it and still do. Then some kid shot and killed Charlie Kirk. Actually got to see it in stunning HD. I felt kinda sick for the rest of the month.

October: Started getting up leaves. At my house this is a two month ordeal. During one day devoted to bagging the first load up into 42 gallon trashbags I threw out my back for the 28th time or so, but who’s counting? This was after I had gotten Sciatica. Not a great month for the old guy.

November: Thanksgiving was great except for the fact that Silas and his parents got sick and couldn’t make the trip up. So of course Pam and I just had to pack up and spend a week taking care of them after Thanksgiving was over.

Since December is only a third of the way through at this point I’m just gonna assume that nothing terribly noteworthy will happen over the next three weeks. All in all, 2025 has been outstanding. Health has been acceptable. Loving retirement. Loving volunteering at my church. Really love being a grandparent. Once again (and I think this is three years in a row now) 2025 was vomit-free. I curated probably somewhere between 500 and a thousand dad jokes, largely because Sherri Matthews just can’t get enough of them. I finished that novel I told you about earlier which was great fun. So yeah, a good year.

Cottonwood

 Back on May the first of this year I started writing a story about a man who is found naked and unconscious in a ditch near Waynesboro, Virginia on August 14th 1939. He is taken to a hospital in Charlottesville where he remains unconscious for two weeks, finally waking up on September 1st, the day that German tanks are pouring into Poland marking the beginning of WWII. When he wakes up he has no memory of who he is, what year it is or where he is.

At the time I had no idea what would happen to this character. All I had on May the first was this setup. Two days ago I finished the story, 100,000 words later. It turned out to be my sixth novel. It is also the sixth time I have started telling a story on the slimmest pretext of an idea only to have the idea mutate into a novel. I have no idea how this happens. It is seldom planned—“I think I’ll begin writing a novel today”—they always take me 8-9 months to complete and they are always crazy fun to write. And…when I finish them I battle two competing emotions. Relief and sadness. I will miss these people.

Not to give anything away but, it turns out that the man in the ditch got there by way of a time travel mishap from the year 2078. Although he has no memory he is endowed with a variety of abilities that serve him well in his new environment and a few which baffle him. The story is basically the story of how he finds his way building a life for himself and the people he encounters along the way, some who he grows to love and others who have come to “take him back”.

Now I’ve started the process of going back to page one to proofread and make some changes that a few of my designated readers have suggested. Then sometime next year I will attempt to get it published. What’s the title, you ask? I’m not sure. Working title has been John Doe, but I’m thinking about calling it either Cottonwood or The Cottonwood Tree.

I’ll keep you posted.

Our Week With Silas

 Let me set the scene before I get into this particular post since it might provide context and give Pam and me at least the slimmest cover from accusations of being helicopter grandparents.

The week of Thanksgiving was to be a cozy event featuring all seven members of the family being together with Silas, and notably the little guy’s first Thanksgiving. As many of you know all of our plans were torpedoed by a raging stomach bug that ran roughshod through the Manchester household in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. To make matters worse, this was followed by colds that afflicted all three of them. In the midst of the angst felt by everyone on account of such a lost opportunity for memory making Pam made the off the cuff suggestion to Kaitlin that maybe we could come down the following week and look after Silas while they went back to work, keeping him out of the Petri dish convention that is the day care industry. Notice that Pam didn’t first run this idea by me to see if I was on board with the idea for the perfectly understandable reason that she knew that I would say “YES”.

So, we piled in the car and went down to Columbia, South Carolina last Sunday morning and arrived back home Saturday afternoon. As soon as we pulled out of their driveway Pam looks at me and said, “Its December 6th and I have not bought one single Christmas present.” She thought that since she was retired this Christmas would be a leisurely frolic through Christmas websites as she did her shopping on her laptop in her pajamas while sipping hot cocoa, unencumbered by the pressure and constraints of the calendar. But those fanciful dreams were before the arrival of Silas Nathaniel Manchester. 

Our week with them was no picnic. Being in charge of a six month old baby experiencing sleep difficulties ie…when he should sleep he disagrees after the first 30 minutes…is not for the faint of heart. Moreover, listening to a baby crying for ten minutes while they attempt to fall asleep makes you feel like a monster, deliberately withholding love and comfort from the sweetest little human on Planet Earth. But, other than his aversion to taking naps—something I should point out he will love when he gets to be his Pops’ age—he was about as perfect a six month old as was ever born on God’s green earth.

The schedule was relentless. He wakes up in the morning. We get his parents out the door to work. We give him bottle #1. He destroys it like he hasn’t eaten in a week. We change his diaper. We play with him for 2 hours at a variety of very cool play-stations strewn throughout their home which before his arrival was already smallish, but now resembles an obstacle course designed by Willy Wonka. There’s a standing play circle, two activity centers that feature various dazzling attractions hanging just out of reach—a diabolical scheme which I don’t fully comprehend but the little guy is intrigued. Then there’s story time where Pam and I read him a selection of truly wonderful books for little ones, many of which feature animals making noises. These books never grow old for him or us. 

Then its time to pick out his outfit of the day since up to this point he is still in his adorable pajamas from last night that Pam can’t bring herself to remove since it was one that she bought for him. But, we finally find a stunning new Carter’s special that was all the rage on the Gerber catwalks last fall, one which my wife could not possibly resist buying back when he was two days old. He looks like a million bucks and I make a mental note to see if Carter’s is a publicly traded company. 

After the new outfit is in place its time for his first nap of the day. In this tricky exercise we are aided in no small way by modern technology. First there is this clever night light/noise machine which turns on and off with a mere wave of the hand. Then, of course, there’s the surveillance camera above the crib that sends live pictures and sound to our cell phones (and God knows where else). That way not only can we hear him crying, we get to have the fully immersive experience of watching him in agony. I am told that this represents progress.

Anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and 45 minutes later, he wakes up and gives us a ridiculously irresistible smile…and it starts all over again until mercifully between 5:00 and 6:00 in the evening his parents get home from work to find me trapped on the floor playing with little man since I have no choice because I can’t get up without assistance and Pam is busy making dinner! We had five days of this. Was it hard? Yes. Does it sound exhausting? Sure. But it was also quite surprisingly energizing. In five short days I wrote the last three entire chapters of the novel I’ve been working on since May the first. Somewhere between sleep training, diapers, and teaching Silas to throw left handed, I had enough creative energy to write the hardest 12,000 words of the story.

At this point I should say that Silas’ parents are killing it. Everything is brand new for them and they are rolling with the punches like seasoned vets. When they look at him you can see it in their eyes, this deep and abiding love. They overwhelm him with this love because it’s the only thing that feels equal to the moment.

Before we left I told my daughter that there was no place Pam and I could have been, nothing that we could have been doing this week that was more important than this. I meant every word.

Feels Like Christmas

 We got here around 5:15 yesterday afternoon. Pam had called Kaitlin over Thanksgiving suggesting that maybe all of them could stand a break from daycare for a week. Would she be ok with us coming down and keeping Silas for a week, cooking dinner for them and allowing him to fully recover from his cold before going back to daycare? It took her around five seconds to say, Yes please!

So, here we are. We hadn’t seen him in a month. He’s gotten so big and can do so many more things. At first his response to us was tentative, like maybe we looked familiar but he couldn’t quite place us. But it didn’t take long before he was smiling and being adorable. Last night I got to read him books right before he went to bed. I was sitting in the rocking chair in his room and Pam was kneeling down beside him. As I read he kept looking at Pam and then twisting his head around to look up at me as if to say, Lolli and Pops are both here reading to me! How great is this?

Kaitlin and Jon left for work around an hour ago. It’s just the three of us now. Pam is putting him down for his morning nap. Every time I look at him my heart feels like it’s going to burst. 

We will be here for a week. By the time we head home on Saturday we will both be worn out. But somehow having this whole week with him feels like Christmas.