Today is the last day of Holidailies, but am I writing something deep and meaningful about the discipline of having to write every day, and being accountable to someone if you don’t? No. Am I writing a sweet post-project wrap-up about all the new blogs that I’ve added to my blogroll? No. Or at least not tonight.

Tonight I’m going to write about eBooks.
Continue reading →

He’s dressed in green denim overalls, with a straw hat on his head, and a rake or hoe in one hand. On his back is a sack, not of presents, but of soil, or maybe seeds. He has a snowy white beard, and the stereotypical portly figure, and there’s a bird perched on his shoulder. He’s not a person, though, he’s a candle I bought at Big Lots a couple years ago, while adding to my ever-growing collection of Christmas accoutrements, because he reminded me of my grandfather.

My grandfather had the same portly figure, for all the time I knew him, but I never saw him with any more than day-old whiskers that felt like sandpaper against my cheek when I hugged him. He had the softest hair, though, that he washed, for all his life, with whatever sort of bath soap happened to be in the shower. Bar soap. I think his favorite was ivory.

His hands were strong and square when I was young, but by the time I was twenty-one – the year he died – they were cracked and gnarled, their strength much diminished. Where once he was accustomed to kneading bread, puttering with small electronics, or even braiding little girls’ hair, he lost all his dexterity, in the end, and tried to hide his embarrassment at being clumsy.

He used Old Spice. He wore cotton button-down shirts, khaki pants, and suspenders, and work shoes, every day. Even at the beach. If he was doing manual labor, and it was hot, he might concede to the removal of his shirt, to reveal the plain white t-shirt ever-present beneath it. He carried cloth handkerchiefs, that were my job to fold, when I was visiting.

He’s close to me tonight, the night before Epiphany, because I spent time looking at the still-trimmed tree, this evening, planning tomorrow’s adventure in Un-Decorating. I collect Santa Claus ornaments, and am partial to Victorian Santas in heavy robes of fur and velvet, but until tonight, I never realized that I’m drawn to them because they remind me of my grandfather.

He’s close to me, also, as I write this, because he was a geek at heart, the first on the block to have color television, a microwave, cable, a cd player, but he never had a computer. He died before my love of All Things Technological manifested itself, and I miss him whenever I play with a new toy, because I know he’d have gotten a kick out of whatever it is that I have.

He wrote me carefully printed letters once a week, the whole time I was in elementary school.

He taught me how to make the perfect loaf of raisin bread, the most scrumptious Thanksgiving turkey, the most soothing hot toddy. He taught me how to hammer a nail, the difference between phillips and flathead screwdrivers, and how to kill and clean a freshly caught bluefish (though I never enjoyed the cleaning part).

He taught me how to make a telephone out of tin cans and string and how a lever works. He wouldn’t even blink when I asked him to play with me, easing himself onto the floor to direct my adventures with blocks, legos,tinker toys or erector sets (though he required me to lay out an orderly ‘lumberyard’ first).

As much as my mother is responsible for my love of art, crafts, folk music, literature, and political activism, my grandfather is responsible for my love of gardening, baking, tool kits, model trains, and deep-sea fishing.

He never met my husband, but I know they’d have liked each other. And I think he and my father-in-law would have totally bonded.

The “gardener Santa” candle looks nothing like my grandfather, but it stands for him, anyway, and when I see it tucked in a corner of my house each year (part of the family tradition of carrying Christmas throughout the house), I smile, and think that maybe he’s watching over me, after all.

I collect greeting cards. Not Hallmark cards, or American Greeting cards, but, the expensive wrapped-in-cellophane high-style cards that they sell in places like Papyrus and Barnes and Noble.

One of their lines from a few years back featured pithy quotations by famous authors. Among these was a card featuring a quotation from Mark Twain, “You say there is nothing to write about? Then write to me that there is nothing to write about.”

I’m feeling that way tonight – that I have nothing exciting to say, today, and that I need a night off, but that I can’t take one because I committed to doing a post a day til Epiphany, and I haven’t missed a day yet.

In Scrabble, there are these nifty blank tiles, which, once drawn, can represent ANY letter the player needs at the time. I need the journal-equivalent of a blank tile – a generic bit of text that I can paste into this box and call mine.

In my attempt to find something to write about, I even suggested that my husband be my guest-blogger tonight. When he vehemently declined my gracious offer (by shrieking NO! at the top of his lungs), I then tried to play word association with him, in a futile effort to generate blog-fodder. “What do you think of when I say ‘glitter’?” I asked. His response was to waggle his eyebrows, and kiss me, and offer a near-synonym. At least the kiss was nice.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the folks I’ve read through Holidailies are keeping digital Commonplace Books, and I’m drawn to the notion. I’ve done this with notebooks for as long as I can remember, without having a name for the habit (though the notebooks were generally titled ‘Melissa’s Magic Notebook’), and I think it would be useful to revert to this childhood habit, as it’s much neater than the vast array of post-its that I usually acquire when I start logging snippets for later expansion into entries.

But that’s for another time.
Right now, I’m going to go make tea, and fold clothes.

Because I have nothing to write about.

Today was the first fiscal day of the new year, the new work year, the month, and I was granted an auspicious beginning to all three. It came in the form of an email message responding to a virtual note in a bottle cast into the sea we know as the Net.

Specifically, I have an old, dear friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. Last night, in a fit of nostalgia, I googled his name and last known location, and found an email address. I shot of a message, expecting a server error.

Instead, I got a real message back. And not just “yes, this is me” but, actual sentences with real information. Groovous! Typical for me, I snapped off a reply, replete with long sentences and self-interruptions (and you thought I only wrote this way in my blog. Hah!).

The response to my reply was a phone call. Alas, I was chatting with a friend on the other side of the planet, at the time, and chose not to answer the call waiting. (I think call waiting is rude, but I get a cheaper phone bill for including it among the various options on our phone line, so I just ignore it.)

After that call was over, though, I called back, and we chatted for far too long than is really acceptable over the phone, but it was a nice conversation, full of laughter and catching up.

He mentioned that he’d read my 100 Things post, and went down the line mentally checking off the things he knew. And the scary thing is, he’s one of the few people who actually knew those things before I posted them. Even the bits about cello, and my penchant for micro-point pens.

It’d be wrong to say that he doesn’t know me as well as Fuzzy does, because in some ways he knows me better. It’s more accurate to say that he knows me differently.

While I admit that I once (in high school) had a pretty serious crush on him, in retrospect, I’m really glad our relationship never went in that direction, because ultimately, our personalties would have clashed violently, and too often. And truly, I value him as a friend more than he knows.

Our friendship hasn’t always been perfect. There’ve been gaps of months or years when we have completely lost touch, even before this most recent one. He missed my wedding, and I missed his. (I wanted to go, really, but it was a bad month money-wise, and then other stuff happened). I once blew up at him for treating me like a consolation prize, though I learned soon after that such behavior was unintentional and inadvertant.

And now?

Now we’re people in vastly different places in life, who’ve known each other twenty years. I have a husband whom I love and cherish, and who understands me better than anyone could hope to (and, more importantly, puts up with my moods, plans, schemes, and ideas). He has a fabulously funny, seriously sweet, beautiful and intelligent wife (someone I wish I knew better), and they’re expecting a baby very, very soon.

I’m adding a resolution, a specific one, to the vague list I cloaked in one of my posts last week: I will not lose touch with him again.