holy days

which ones aren't?

but I couldn't enjoy any more than I do days of special focus, remembrance, dedication to celebration and awe,

days to stop and let the holiness of them fill our hearts and minds.

y'know, Halloween, not so much. it's debra's birthday, and I'm way more into celebrating that than dealing with death and horror by looking into their images and laughing. it's like I would run out into an empty street like a child, sticking my tongue out in what seemed at the time bold defiance, than running fast I could back to the curb when an actual car came.

there are people, hardened soldiers and enlightened monks, who claim not to fear death. I think to do that, you have to feel life ain't such a big deal.

I don't feel that.

but I am making My own holiday this year.

one Christmas as a child, I remember I was so sick. I opened my presents sitting on the john.

I didn't want to relive that this year, with Christmas week being the first week of the third round of chemotherapy.

so I am delaying Christmas at 708 Arapahoe to coincide with New Year's, Christmas Eve to coincide with New Year's Eve.

as indicated, I pick and choose among holidays anyway...and I have many of my own. did you know that many days of the year hold secret positive messages?

oh, yes! I celebrate the spur to action every "March Forth!" and I find October fourth...10-4...

very affirmational. Fans of Celtic music, especially the jig, should play all day on June 8th...6/8...and devotees of the slip jig should enjoy a day of 9/8 in September. (of course, we remember December 8 for non-metre related musical reasons)

Time Change day...Jerry Lewis Day...yeah, I have a rich calendar.

light, at the moment of deepest darkness.

what observance could mean more to me now?

I just can't find contradiction in any of the solstice/Santa Clause/ Jesus celebrations this time of year. I don't see why "Here Comes The Sun" should not be the theme carol of all three. as well, I don't see much conflict in the miraculous Menorah of Hanukkah. miracle light, when only darkness was predicted...break me off a piece of that anytime!

Kwanzaa, I was delighted to read, was invented in the US in 1966 for African-Americans in the US.

that relieved me. because in Africa, the parts south of the equator, a festival this time of year would need to celebrate the longest day of the year. along the equator...it's just light, light, light til' you're sick of it. a miracle story there would be, like finding shade where there was no tree growing, or sticking your head in an ice cream truck freezer.

Dr. Maulanga Karenga, founder of Kwanzaa (see! I can too invent holidays! people do it all the time!) originally preached that Jesus was "psychotic", and wanted to create an alternative to Christmas, as Christianity was a white religion to be avoided at all costs by blacks.

they light seven candles, not 8. works better with the calendar, don't you know.

I can't imagine the pressures put on you when you invent a holiday picked up throughout the world. Nelson Mandela probably calls you up and says, mellow out, dude. The Pope might send a message saying, take it easy, you're ruffling my coat. and don't even get Bono started.

anyway, by 1997, Dr. Karenga was saying, Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday.

so it's cool for the many black people who celebrate Christmas and Kwanzaa too, now.

other than the seven candles, I don't see any light-in -the-darkness symbolism in Kwanzaa observance at all. maybe it's the barely remembered effects of the geography of old.

but Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the light...at least, he was quoted as saying it. and Tom Bodet wasn't around when Joseph and Mary were looking for lodging...it was a pretty dark night, presumably a pretty dark world.

they often call Christmas a season of hope...but I'll go farther. Christmas is an act of will...I am going to make a light, at this dark time, I am going to establish an outpost of all of the warmth and good things I believe in, I'm going to give gifts at the time when we all need light the most, and be cheerful at the longest coldest time. (it is better to light one candle than to curse the fucking darkness. owww! my toe!! dammit)

because I don't hope the light will come again. I believe.

and every year I have always been right, to follow the light in my heart instead of the dark outside. this year I believe it is the right course as well, and I'm going all out to demonstrate it.

so, Christmas. but...New Year's?

New Year's Eve...or Old Year's Night...is thought to be the oldest celebration, dating back thousands of years.

you'd need some kind of calendar to celebrate it, I suppose.

but celebration seems kind of intuitive, as we celebrate at odometer-turning landmarks. out with the old! in with the new! here ...no, here...no, here! is where the past becomes the future, here is where the tracked up mess that is yesteryear's calendar is traded in for the New Year's, clean as a field of fresh fallen snow. Father Time, leaning on a staff and sporting a long white beard, old like the old year is old, holds the baby 2011, new like the future is new. we wait -last year, janice and I waited seven hours in a New York street- we count down, we make noise, we kiss.

Father Christmas has a long white beard, but despite the passage of time and the mileage of 800 Christmases (not to mention chronic obesity), he still has a remarkable amount of energy, an incredible sense of organization, and anything but flat affect...some even would say he is jolly still.

even the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade planner goes home that Thursday, rests his feet for a minute, pats himself on the back, and starts planning for the next year...same with the Christmas window dressers of New York on the 25th.

Father Christmas must as well. I doubt he works teachers' months, pretty much goofing off til' March. he's probably right back at it...and shows no signs of just plain being over it all.

Father Time has an even longer white beard. thin and hollow faced, even in the most humorous of drawings, he's flat out tired. in his keeper-of-eternity persona- he's not jolly. he's seen some stuff. a lot of it, he doesn't like. and he's anything but heading for retirement. he's got job security. not likely to be outsourced.

it's worse for him in his lame duck 2010 persona. he's dying. and people all over the world are cheering it on. forget about how glad we were to see him come...maybe we hold him, not ourselves, accountable for all the promise of a new year that we didn't fully take advantage of.

I didn't even watch "2010...The Year We Make Contact", the sequel to "2001 A Space Odyssey", as I promised myself I would this year.

anyway, 2010 is so passe, so last year.

when we kiss on New Year's Eve, it is the kiss of death for 2010 Father Time.

so New Year's Eve, or as is it is hardly known at all, Old Year's Night, should be, I say- I say, should be the holiday to reflect on impermanence.

impermanence is one of the aspects of the Human Condition that is hardest to look at, and there are worse measures of a person's worth than how they deal with it.

we owe everything we are to impermanence, and everything in our world. every million years, every hundred years, how much had to change, how much had to die, for us to be who we are where we are? how much had to be dis-integrated and re-integrated for our world to be what it is?

if anything were permanent, we wouldn't be here.

what was torn down, to build the place we live? how many changes, even deaths, were necessary for this meal? how many thousands of events had to occur in an exactingly perfect way, for us to wake up in our beds today? continuances, yes...but also impermanence.

I've always been fascinated by shrink wraps, milk cartons...things designed to be strong enough to be integrated just long enough to serve, then torn apart when it suits our purpose.

because we are among them. built just strong enough to stay integrated until it's time, then to fall apart to be reused and recycled.

we do not acknowledge out debt to impermanence. and we resist its governance of our mortal lives. we build pyramids. have children. make art. tell stories we wish to have outlast us. lovers promise each other forever. it has to be forever...love is meaningless, we say, if subject to any impermanence.

some people for whom tattoos are just too ephemeral seek to be branded these days. now, for heavy duty body modifiers, branding uses thin heated strips of metal, applied several times to form the desired design...not exactly Rawhide, and only a little painful.

but I heard a woman who does such things say, everyone wants to have me do the name of their lover. I say...don't do it.

things change, she said.

I remember the story of Pam Anderson getting a tattoo to fit under her wedding ring, that said, Tommy. when she divorced and had a child, she changed it to read, Mommy.

New Year's Eve. I'm telling you. time to look straight at impermanence. how we depend on it. what we owe to it. how it's there when we like it and when we don't. and, if one has way more perspective than I can muster at the moment, to celebrate it as one of the abiding universal forces, even when it takes away something we like.

I remember walking with catherine around CU, two years after she had graduated. how much does Boulder change in two years?

well...that wasn't there...and this used to be where we...and what happened to that...it's all changing, I don't like it!

she apparently hadn't yet had that experience much.

there's a saying around our house...if Scott likes it too much, it goes away. we dream of an Island of Lost Treasures, where we will find all the Hain Thousand Island Dressing, Knudsen's Black Cherry drink, New Balance 2000's, new Ry Cooder (non-soundtrack) albums, Santa Fe soap, The Harvest restaurants, Gemini three berry shakes, etc., etc.,etc. we could ever want.

and right next door, R.E.C videos from Times Square- a bootleg video store, with VHS tapes of all the bands I never got to see - , Balducci's grocery stores in New York, FAO Schwartz when it was FAO Schwartz - and in Cherry Creek too!- the Disney Store and the Met store in Cherry Creek, Aaron's records in Hollywood -where DJ's would get the latest LP's a week before release, sell them to Aaron's two days later, and I would buy them for half price before they came out- the old non-Swarovski snowflake above 5th Ave. and 58th, the old Plaza Hotel...Alfalfa's...

an endless list.

but, then, the list of things that were even better that came along- and still doesn't erase the grasping for the past- the internet, which makes visiting other cities so much more relaxing, as there aren't many things you can go to a store and get that you can't find there...all the REC videos now on YouTube, for free download (with the right software, like Toast)...the shopping center that grew up in a Golden field I kind of liked the way it was, but then had an Alfalfa's within five miles on my house, which was a real godsend...and the current rumor that the original Alfalfa's store in Boulder will reopen as Alfalfa's in the next year...

I was so mad when the owner of the big house in Englewood and the little carriage house in back that I lived in sold to this guy I didn't like at all, who put wrought iron over all the windows and kicked me out...I spent weeks driving around Golden, where I'd really wanted to live, until I passed a beautiful brick house with a for rent sign on it and a guy inside painting.

it was 1989, and I said, even if they want six hundred a month to rent this house, I have to come up with it.

it was bank owned, and they weren't sure what to do with it yet. $400 a month. I wrote a check on the spot.

it was sooooooooooo much better.

I was so mad eight years later when the bank sold the house and the owner doubled the price. ssoooooooooo mad. I left, and had no fixed address for a bit, just out of anger.

it was in 1999 that catherine and I walked to a house for rent from my apartment. we submitted ourselves and our application, and cried for how much we wanted this house.

we were to hear over the weekend. we didn't.

on Monday I said, we are walking right back down there. no phone calls. we're going to find out we've been rejected in person.

the landlord said, yes, I did give the house to someone else.

but you know what? I haven't heard back from them, and he ain't here, and you are, and the house is yours.

it's sooooooooo much better than the brick house.

he hasn't raised the rent since then. stubborn cuss.

it's been a major blow to my feeling sorry for myself ever since.

so, we have to, we have to, we have to celebrate impermanence. even when we don't like what it does...sometimes we end up grateful.

maybe, somehow, when my turn on the carousel is up, in some way I don't see now, I'll have a feeling it's something better beginning. and I'll say, you know, I could have accepted this better all along.

right now, I don't. I am fighting hard as I can to stay in the body I'm renting, and don't much see that giving it up will put me in any better rent district.

and so my assignment is to reach for joy, love, magic, wonder, amazement, and at the very same time come to grips with impermanence.

Christmas and New Year's. in one. that's my holy day this year.

Merry Christmas, and happy Christmas Eve to all dear gentle readers. I will be making my Santa rounds next week.

p.s. buying Christmas presents at after Christmas prices...kinda cool.

p.p.s sometime soon, I'll write about medical stuff. honest.