Silent Night, Bloody Night

"48 shot, 11 killed over the Christmas weekend in Chicago."

"Fights break out at malls across United States."

"Massive brawls, food-court fights played out at over a dozen malls from New Jersey to Colorado."

It would appear that there isn't much Peace on Earth, and very little Good Will Toward Men out there this year. This isn't Trump. This has nothing to do with Obama or Clinton. This isn't politics. This is a people who have lost our way. To read these stories, to watch the jumpy videos, to hear the unhinged madness is to be profoundly embarrassed for my country. It's as if the emptiness that follows materialism produces the very worst in us. After the presents, after the pile of gifts has been opened, there's a giant "is this all there is?" moment released throughout the land. And this is the result. . .violence, rage, and ultimately. . .death. Silent Night, bloody night. 

ZICAM, baby!!

Yesterday morning about this time I felt as if I had swallowed a box of razor blades. I drank coffee, and popped three Advil and hoped for the best. After a full house cleaning, I started feeling the first wave of achiness that usually accompanies the worst colds. At that point I was resigned to my fate. . .  a Christmas cold.

But then, just like in all of those horrible Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, I received my Christmas miracle! No, I did not suddenly meet and fall in love with a beautiful single mother and her adorably precocious child just in time to rescue her from being evicted by her evil Scrooge of an absentee landlord who actually turned out to be her long lost father. Nope. On the advice of my wife and sister, I went to the store and bought some ZICAM.  Beginning at noon, I placed a dissolvable cherry flavored pill on my tongue every three hours until bedtime. Actually, although the bottle assured me that the pills were cherry flavored, in reality this could be true only if the cherries in question had first been soaked in sour milk and three week old cabbage in a giant pot with the old dirty sneakers of the Harlem Globetrotters. . . but that's not important now. . . what's important is the fact that my throat feels perfectly normal, I no longer ache, and I am ready for Christmas!!

On a completely unrelated note, my blog just set an all time record for page views in a single month (7291), even though there are eight more days left. Vive la France!!

Car Trouble. Merry Christmas to me!

Nothing quite gets you in the mood to celebrate the birth of our Lord like car trouble. Pam walks in the door yesterday after a trip out to see her mother with news of a whining noise coming from her car, the volume of which increased with the speed of the vehicle. Driving around Short Pump it was hardly noticeable, she explained, but when she got up to cruising speed on 295 the offending noise became loud and troubling. Maybe I should look into it, she suggested. So today, I'll be driving it into Axselle's and hoping for the best.

Her car is a 2006(?) Chrysler Pacifica with a mere 122,000 miles on the odometer. It's been a great ride and has given us very little trouble. We aren't big car people. I drive a 2008 Cadillac CTS with 85,000 miles on it. Before that, I drove a Chrysler Sebring convertible until it literally blew up in the parking lot of my office after 190,000 miles of service. I only bought Pam her Pacifica after her previous car bit the dust on a trip to Nashville eight years ago. Yeah, we kinda drive 'em till they drop around here. Hopefully the Pacifica will survive whatever is wrong with her. I really hate to buy cars. Worst. Investment. Ever.

On a side note, my wife put up a beautiful Christmas tree in my library. She decorated it in gold and silver, with ornaments that accent the room. It's gorgeous and I love it. But, there's a problem. She's got the thing hooked up to one of those automatic timer things. It cuts on at exactly 7 am, and shuts down at midnight or something. The thing is. . . every single time the thing switches itself on it scares the crap out of me. I'm sitting at my desk reading and all of a sudden I hear a buzzy snap and light jumps out of the corner. It startles me every time!! You'de think I would get used to it by now. I'm not sure what this has to do with car trouble, but, it's my blog and I can write about anything I choose.

They held the Electoral College vote yesterday and Hillary lost AGAIN!!!! That poor woman. This is getting embarrassing.

See what I mean? My blog. Any topic I want!

Battle Stations, Everybody!

Ok ladies and gentlemen, the week of Christmas is finally here. It's time to brace yourself, brew some strong coffee and gird those loins. There's some major work left to do at the Dunnevant house and only a few days left to do it. A short list:

1. Wrap presents. Our dining room looks like an Amazon warehouse after a conveyor belt malfunction. Boxes strewn about everywhere with piles of large plastic shopping bags littering the floor. Pam assures me that the piles are not haphazard. There is a plan, a method to the chaos. I will not question my wife on this matter. It is December the 19th and I only look like an idiot.

2. Christmas baking. I'm not talking about the romanticized Hollywood version where grandma makes sugar cookies while the grandkids look on with enraptured fascination. No, no. . .at the Dunnevant house its more like a shift change at the Little Debbie plant where management has just announced a production contest whereby whichever crew pumps out 50,000 Christmas Tree Cakes in the next hour gets to keep their jobs. Pumpkin bread and molasses crinkles have to made people and woe be unto anyone who gets in my wife's way. My job? Grab dirty pots and pans and wash them without being asked for once!

3. Set up the Christmas village. Ok, what's wrong with this picture?



I'll tell you what's wrong. Everything. That's what! Three houses have no one home since the lights are out. There's no snow, no Christmas lights, no kids frolicking in the front yards having a snowball fight. There are even Fall leaves in the trees for crying out loud!! If I didn't know better, I would swear this was a Jewish neighborhood where everyone had left town to winter in Miami! This will not do. The Christmasification of the fireplace insert community must begin at once! This will involve several trips to the garage and attic to fetch the winter improvements from their hiding places, and my wife standing on a kitchen chair assembling it all with a perfectionist architect's eye for detail. Her suburban renewal project will be complete roughly 8 hours later.

4. Jackson-proofing the house. In a couple of days my daughter, her husband and their awesome dog, Jackson will arrive. This means that the kid wing of our house must be properly prepared. Every square inch must be cleaned, vacuumed, and fluffed. Barricades must be erected throughout the house to better accommodate pet traffic flow. All dog feces must be gathered from the back yard to make room for the deluge to come. All knickknackery at swinging tail level must be raised to higher ground. Then, and only then then will our house be ready for this guy.





5. Social calendar event planning schedule syncing. It's not easy getting everyone in our large and rambling family on the same page during the Christmas season. But Pam will get it done. All of us will get Google-doc invitations to the various engagements for the week. There's the Christmas Eve-Eve service at Hope, the Christmas Eve service at Grove, the dinner reservation at a restaurant to be named later at some time between 7:15 and 9:00 on one of those nights. We have to pick up Patrick at the airport at noon on Christmas Day and be at Linda's by 2:00 for lunch and presents, then at Russ and VI's by 7:00 in the evening for dessert and more presents.

Feliz Navidad.

How Many Frenchmen Does It Take To. . ?

The Tempest has been overrun by...the French. 

About a month ago I started noticing an odd spike in visitor traffic from France. This happens from time to time, for reasons that escape me, suddenly I'll get 25 pageviews from Norway or someplace. Sometimes it can be traced back to some crack I made in a past blog about, oh, I don't know. . .how ugly the Norwegian Olympic uniforms look and some defensive guy in Oslo does a Google search and bam!! But this French thing is different. For the past week I've had more pageviews from France than any country including the United States. So, I have started going back through recent posts trying to figure out what has attracted all of this Gallic attention.

As my kids will tell you, I'm not above throwing shade on other countries by rolling out the occasional xenophobic joke. Of course, the French are a target rich environment for such humor what with their perfumes, cheeses, and taste for. . . how shall I say. . .the effeminate. Maybe I had used that great old joke about the advertisement which appeared in a NRA magazine describing a French infantry rifle from WWII for sale.."In mint condition. Never been fired. Only thrown down twice!" Or maybe I had made some crack about their lack of athletic prowess..."What do you call a Frenchman in the knockout stages of the World Cup? A referee." Or maybe I had cast aspirations on the French character with that old classic, "Why wasn't Jesus born in France? Couldn't find three wise men or a virgin" But no, I have searched my recent blogs in vain for anti-French references. So, why in the name of Joan of Ark has my blog been viewed over 3000 times by Frenchmen in the last month?

It's probably some robo-phishing scammy sort of thing. The Tempest was quite popular with the Russians a while back, but after a few months it faded. Nothing like this French thing though. It's kinda creepy and I'm not sure why. I mean, I've got nothing against the French. They loaned us Lafayette, after all. . . and there's the whole Statue of Liberty thing. And, who doesn't like French Fries? Still, when I see all of these French pageviews of any blog I write that has anything to do with Trump, it gives me pause.

Ok, ok...one more. What happens when a Frenchmen jumps off a bridge in Paris? He is declared in Seine.

My 2016 Photograph

Here's an interesting challenge for this frigid Friday morning. What one photograph would you pick to summarize the year 2016?

Now that virtually everyone carries smart phones around, we all take a million pictures. I'm old enough to remember being very judicious about picture taking. You would only take pictures of the really important stuff of life. Then you would take the rolls to the drug store to have them developed. Several days later and at considerable expense you would get them back only to discover that half of them were either out of focus or over exposed. It was always a crapshoot. Now, it's all a digital miracle where each picture is instant and photoshopped to make you look ten years younger. But. . . if you had to pick one, just one from your 2016 pile to immortalized your year, which would it be? For me it's easy. . .

No pictures of Trump or Clinton. No photographs of stuff. This is the one for me. It's the moment that I will remember thirty years from now if I am still living. It's the feeling, really. I'm at peace with my world. The day was sunny bright. It was mid-morning. I was fishing. Lucy was fascinated by it all. Up the hill behind me, Pam was probably sitting on the porch drinking her coffee, reading a book, when she glanced up and saw us down on the dock. The fact that she thought to take this picture tells you everything you need to know about her. She knows me, knows what makes me happy, understands the power of the quiet moment and appreciates those moments and the eternal power they possess. So, she took a second to snap this picture, to capture it all.

I didn't see it until much later, after we had returned home. It was an incredible moment. The adjustment back to our real life had not been going well when I first saw it and for one glorious minute, I was transported back to that magical moment from that magical month in Maine. I smiled. I smile every time I look at it. This is the thing I will recall about 2016 when I have grown too old to walk around outside without a shirt. . . the beautiful feeling of peace and contentment in the warm sun on that dock in July, 2016.

What about you? What's your picture? Share it with me. I'd love to see.

How About You?

 I'm holding my loved ones a bit closer this Christmas. How about you?

- I flip through a slideshow of photographs of the victims of Sandy Hook on the fourth anniversary of their murders, see the precious, shining faces upturned and full of mischief and try to imagine the pain and emptiness felt by their parents.

- I watch a video and read the story of the people in Aleppo, the barbaric, wholesale slaughter being inflicted on that ancient city. I try to imagine what the suffering is like. I ponder the despair and simply cannot fathom it from the comfort and ease of my fine library.

- I hear the story from a colleague about one of his clients, 62 years old, suddenly stricken with cancer, dead in six months. The loss changes my friend, rearranges his priorities. Why kill yourself working and saving for some distant retirement when all of this can be taken from us in an instant?

- I think about my friend, about my age, whose beautiful and spirited wife fell ill after their return from a Greek vacation. A doctor's visit revealed cancer, tumors everywhere. I see the pictures of the radiation treatments beginning, with chemo to follow, their lives turned upside down in the blink of an eye. I try to imagine what must be going through my friend's mind and I simply cannot because thus far in life I have not had to endure such a thing.

So, I plan on holding my loved ones a bit closer this Christmas. How about you?