December 1997 Archives

7:26 PM, Tuesday evening. I have a smoothly constructed wooden box that holds two sets of tangrams -- a Christmas present from my parents. The tangrams are seven wooden pieces cut into basic geometric shapes. What you do is look at a card that bears a blocky silhouette of some natural figure (animals, fish, birds, trees etc.) and then you try to re-create that image with your bits of wood. The game is surprisingly difficult. It’s amazing how many shapes you can create with just seven simple pieces.

The first real snowfall of the year drifted down from the sky here last night. Behind the house, the woods are white-laced and still -- quiet beneath a softly glittering blanket that covers everything. The angularities of bare black branches, the dust gray of wintering lawns, all have been softened, subtly shifted into ghost pale after-images. I like it like this: familiar things renewed.

The ads in the newspapers and on TV are starting to prominently feature various exercise machines, health clubs, diets. Sales inspired by all those New Year’s resolutions, no doubt. A lot of people are shuffling their pieces around at this time of year, trying to improve old patterns, build nicer shapes.

As for me, I’ve been fiddling around with the tangrams. Let’s see, I’ve made a playful lion cub, the Maltese falcon, a running goose and, fittingly enough for this time of year, a phoenix. Like most people, I have a lot of things I want to change in the New Year. Better patterns, more healthy shapes. I hope that I can re-arrange my life in the ways I want -- sometimes that can be quite difficult, though. It is a tough game.

It’s night, now -- clear and utterly black. No more snow is falling, at least for the moment. Everything is quiet, cool, and frosted white. Familiar contours have been covered, re-shaped, made new to the eye.

Got seven simple pieces of wood, here.

I wonder what I can make of them?

--- JWR, 12/30/97

4:24 PM, Monday afternoon. On the tiny clock, in the miniature bake shop, that is part of the porcelain village that I just put beneath our Christmas tree, the hands have just crept past three o’clock. In the morning, I suppose, for all the little buildings are illuminated. Even so, the well-painted inhabitants of the village are out and about, making snow men, shopping, decorating their own small trees. It may be the wee hours of the morning for them, but they don’t seem to mind. Time, they know, is relative.

When I was a child, the length of time between my birthday (December 12) and Christmas was approximately two-and-a-half months long. The school year lasted anywhere from eighteen to twenty-four months and Summer vacation was a long glowing blur of sun, goofing off, and lush green nights. Sometimes a single day and evening of play could last for fifty hours or more. I once spent an eternity on the beach, pretending that a bunch of oddly-shaped sea shells that I’d found were alien spacecraft (and no, that wasn’t just last year, wiseguy).

I seem to be experiencing temporal compression as I age, however.

It feels like about 6 months of time (certainly not more than a year or two) have passed since I graduated college. Yet my calendar tells me that over a decade has slipped by. Things move so much quicker, now. Holidays sweep by in colored blurs, months dissolve into weekends, years become a handful of photographs slipped into dusty albums and forgotten. Time was a vast thing to me, when I was a child: a geography that stretched out forever with glacial slowness.

Now time is the tiny flittering heartbeat of a paint-dab mouse, in a porcelain house, that is part of a little village, that glows beneath my Christmas tree.

--- JWR, 12/15/97

12:07 AM, Friday morning. Hmm, I am now 34 years and seven minutes old. Whoops, make that eight minutes. Time flies...

I’d like to write something deeply philosophical about goals, aging, life in general...but, to tell you the truth, I’m a bit sleepy. So, instead of that, how about this?

Three Things That I Like:

I like Summer rainstorms, especially when they occur in the early evening. The slightly warm rain hissing through glistening emerald leaves, glimmering on soft grass. The misty, clean-smelling air. Sometimes, if the storm is brief, the clouds will part, letting in the last low rays of sunlight. Things can turn golden then, rain droplets shimmering like tiny gems.

I like a good cup of cinnamon tea, with cream. The cup warms your hands slowly, deeply. Steam curling up from the tea, carrying with it that smooth sweet aroma. And the taste: rich but not too heavy. Soothing. I like to drink it at night, letting the heat sink into me and spread outward.

I like the way snow crunches underfoot, late at night, when all is black and clear. And quiet. Snow at midnight rests less like a physical thing and more like a dream over the land. It re-shapes the familiar and softly illuminates the world in tones of black, white, and cool blue-gray. If you close your eyes (letting them adapt to the darkness) and stand perfectly still in that crisp silence, you can almost hear the snowflakes as they fall to ground.

And now it’s 12:46 AM, and time for bed.

--- JWR, 12/12/97