About the Holidays

"I'll Be Home for Christmas" is my favorite Christmas song. In December 1965, the astronauts requested to have it piped up as they came home aboard the Gemini 7.

Sweet potatoes should always be served with honey-baked ham.

If you open a very expensive bottle of 1993 Parisian wine, you will have to decant it several times before it becomes drinkable. It will improve the flavor if you continue to down lots of cheaper wine while the decanting takes place.

We are never too old for toy trains. Or sea monkeys. Or stuffed bears.

DC becomes emptier over the holidays, New York more crowded; one small way in which I prefer my hometown.

LED lights just aren't the same.

The strange things you find online: The January 1, 1942 edition of the Kinmundy Express reported that Carl Pruett, "a medical student home on his Christmas vacation," saved the life of Mrs. E. W. Rowlin after she accidentally set her house on fire while trying to heat the house with kerosene. He administered first aid and accompanied her all the way to the hospital in Vandalia, another small Illinois town. Carl Pruett was my grandfather. As far as I know, he never mentioned that night to my grandmother or anyone else in the family.

Those oversized inflatable lawn ornaments are monstrous, but it is still a little sad when fog or cold causes them to all deflate into brightly-colored holiday puddles.

Someone gave me a hot air balloon ride for Christmas.

If I could fast forward to March 2008 right now, I would.

Looking for a Reviewer

Are you interested in writing book reviews? A New York-based online journal is looking for someone to review Katherine E. Young's chapbook, Gentling the Bones. I'm a fan of her work--if I weren't her neighbor and therefore a bit biased, I'd review it myself. So if you're interested in getting some good new poetry in the mail and adding to your clip portfolio, backchannel me. Here's a sample poem:

CENTRALIZED HEATING
Moscow, Russia

When the heat resumes its liquid journey
through iron casings bent like whalebone stays
to fit a waist of air, I read the death
notices: “Died from burns suffered when ice
gave way above a ruptured heating pipe.”
And still they lay uninsulated pipe
because that is what they have always done.
Strange to imagine whole neighborhoods, whole

cities being bound by iron girdles
of heating lines and water mains; each year
a few unlucky souls tumble into
their ancient workings, dead of a theory
that was never quite perfected. Outside
it’s March, pale-gray, snowing. First I blow on
my cold-white fingers, seamed and broken like
the earth of some forgotten riverbed;

then I press them to the radiator,
as yet only lukewarm. Across the way,
a woman uses the new-warm water
for her wash; wet bras, girdles, lingerie
stretch rigid and plain across her window.
I hear the groan of water coursing through
pipe, the murmuring plaint of thousands of
taps turning in unison, the scream of

a child being scalded to death inside
a manhole (though that happened long ago,
in America). All that we share, I
and the washerwoman across the way,
are these heating veins, these leafless birch trees
in the yard; but I wonder if she knows
the feel of heat on my dead hands, or in
the shriveled-up place that once held my heart.


--Katherine E. Young

(This poem first appeared on BELTWAY, in the "Evolving City" issue.)

Snippets and Snow Globes

There's a snow globe I keep on my desk at the office, made entirely of one unseamed surface of clear glass: a sculpted mountain peak and, in one tiny crevice, the Swiss flag painted in red. I tend to pick it up in the mornings, as I'm waiting for my coffee to cool, and tip it two or three times. Once the snow settles, I try to get some work done.

When I was flying home from Switzerland (completely unaware that I'd already won a book prize), I panicked that they would confiscate the snow globe from my carry-on bag bag. And as it turns out, the TSA has a rule dictating that they should have done just that. The TSA also has a rule that their employees "are trained not to communicate, distract, interact, play, feed, or pet service monkeys." Monkeys? Is there a substantial service monkey contingent I had missed?

This is a quiet ending to a noisy year.

I've been laying low on the poetry front, working on a prose project that--while unlikely to come to fruition, I keep sternly reminding myself--would be a dream opportunity if it did. There's a musculature to the short essay (under 1,000 words) that is really winning me over. "Just enough time to open a subject, expand it, and close it again," said my friend Richard. Just enough space that you can illustrate a story with a few quotes and moments genuinely remembered; not so much space that you're tempted to add filler that may or may not be true. That, to me, was the ethical intricacy (and ultimately, discouraging factor) of creative non-fiction.

If you're looking for a distraction over the holidays: Reading Life, with Sven Birkerts. As someone who usually detests "books about books," I was utterly captivated.

Also: hot cider, spiced with rum. Mmmmmmm.