Month: December 2005

An era of sorts, at least for me, is ending: after years of trouble and several “reinventions”, the Media Play chain of stores is going under. This isn’t really surprising at all, but I find it kind of a bummer. I adored Media Play when it first opened back in the early 90s — Media Play’s presence in Buffalo actually predated Borders — but over the years Media Play’s prices went up while their selection went down, until at its lowest point a couple of years back, walking into a Media Play felt like walking into a nearly empty warehouse. The chain made a comeback in terms of product selection, and had recently become my outlet of choice for DVDs of movies I couldn’t find anyplace else except online, but their prices were still too high. The prices tended to be offset a bit by the gift certificates I’d get in the mail after joining their discount club, and I still liked the store, but I don’t think that Media Play ever really got a handle on just what kind of store it was supposed to be as Amazon and other companies grew, and even as Media Play’s DVD selection became excellent again, their music and book offerings remained a shell of what they’d once been and their prices, regrettably, remained too high.

I suspect it’s too simplistic to blame music downloading as a major source of Media Play’s troubles, since Media Play was suffering way before downloading was the avenue of music distribution that it is now, but I still have to admit to being bothered that more and more people just want to go online to buy the music and movies and books they want, or, failing that, stay within five minutes of their house. Doesn’t anybody like to hang around in a store anymore, and browse through racks, often finding things you never would have thought to look for on your own? When did walking around while shopping become a quaint concept? Does anybody else find this inexorable march toward One Stop Shopping for everything in our lives just a little bit depressing?

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Snow does weird things to drivers — and, well, to people in general. Whenever the weather forecast calls for a large amount of snow in the next day or two, we suddenly get really busy at The Store, as people stock up for provisions or something. It’s strange. Snow events where people get snowed into their homes for days at a time are pretty rare in these parts, Buffalo’s reputation notwithstanding — the last such snowfall happened several years ago — but there the people come, flooding The Store.

As for drivers, these seem to fall into two types (speaking only of the annoying ones, that is). There are the “What’s this stuff?” Drivers, who navigate their vehicles as though they have never seen snow in their lives before this exact moment. These folks will drive unimaginably slowly on perfectly plowed roads on days when the temperatures are high enough that the roads are nearly perfectly clear; or they will drive at an acceptible speed but, on a four-lane stretch of road, exactly straddle the center line, presumably because that’s the only way they can figure out where they are; they will begin their braking maneuvers for an intersection so far in advance that one wonders how they managed to accelerate from the stop position at the last intersection. And yet, all of this ridiculous behavior is confined to the streets that are perfectly plowed and passable.

The other category of Annoying Snow Drivers are the “Leap of Faith” Drivers. These folks occupy the other end of the spectrum; these are the people who have absolute faith that nothing bad will befall them while they are behind the wheel, and thus they drive with ridiculous abandon. Such drivers will, on a six-lane freeway where snow conditions have reduced traffic to just two lanes in each direction, will still attempt to use the passing lane at the same speeds they would use were the snow not there at all. These are the folks who will turn off a clear “main drag” kind of street onto a barely-plowed side road, and not reduce their pressure on the gas pedal at all, no matter how much they slide or how pronounced their fishtailing is. And these are the people who, when exiting a McDonald’s or a Starbucks, will completely ignore oncoming traffic and put the nose of their cars into the road, so supremely confident they are that everyone else already on the road will stop for them.

What’s interesting about these two camps of Snow Drivers is that these characteristics are limited only to the manner of driving, and not to the choice of vehicle. I’ll see people of the former camp driving their Hummers in snow as though they are driving a vehicle made of eggshells, and I’ll see people gallumping about the roads with total faith in their 1991 Ford Escort’s ability to overcome all elements. It’s bewildering.

Anyway, I remember a time, not too distant, when Buffalo drivers knew how to drive in snow. Where did all those folks go, anyway?

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Tomorrow I will be returning to work at The Store, so my postings here will probably not be as prolific as they’ve been over the last week.

Also, I have a couple of new photos up over at my Flickr photostream — some mundane stuff, to get the more saddening stuff pushed down a bit. So you can look at me sitting at my desk, and what my desk looks like when I’m not sitting there. Because, you know, few things in life are more interesting than a guy sittin’ at his desk. (Seriously, I love my desk. It’s a good desk.)

I’m toying with the idea of putting up photos of my bookshelves, so people can look and see what books I own. I recently gently chided Jayme Lynn Blaschke when he put up photos of his hand-made bookshelves, but at a distance and resolution that made title-snooping impossible, and having done that, I suspect I should put up or shut up, so to speak.

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A while back I wrote a short-short story for a Flash-Fiction contest hosted by Artvoice, the Buffalo alt-weekly paper. I’d forgotten completely about that contest until I picked up the current issue, and discovered therein that I had not, in fact, won. Oh well.

The assignment in the contest was to write a story of less than 1000 words, and using somewhere in the story the Buffalo Central Terminal, which for newer readers is a beautiful railroad station in Buffalo that is no longer used and is a continual focus for Buffalo’s architectural-preservation crowd. Anyhow, the three winning stories can be found here.

Of the two “Honorable Mention” stories, I liked “The Sun of Marshes”, although parts of it felt forced and it’s not entirely clear just what “Frank” is doing. I liked “Green’s Predicament” a little bit less; it’s got a good mysterious and creepy vibe going, but I think the limit on the word-count imposed by the contest rules kind of kept the story’s author from really developing that theme. A decent effort, though.

But I outright hated the contest’s winning story, “For the Birds”, which was printed in the actual paper, as opposed to just appearing on the Artvoice website, as was the case with the two Honorable Mentions. I just didn’t like the tone of the whole story, the bitter and sarcastic “Look at what you f***ing morons have done to your city”, shame-on-you subtext, right down to the story’s closing line. Plus, it’s not even really a story — it’s a monologue, much of it straight history, delivered by a pigeon; and the dialect with which the pigeon speaks at the beginning of the piece is abandoned for pretty flowery language toward the end.

Anyway, what follows is my failed entry. I make no claim that it’s better or worse than the stories that won, but it’s mine.

“It’s too cold today,” Margaret said.

“Get my blanket,” Judith replied. “No, the plaid one.”

“The plaid one’s too thin.”

“The plaid one,” Judith insisted.

Two orderlies stepped in to help Margaret escort her mother to the car, and then into the vehicle’s passenger seat, wrapping the plaid blanket around her.

“It’s too cold for this,” Margaret said again as she got behind the wheel. Judith said nothing; she only took in a deep breath of air that for once didn’t smell of antiseptic cleanser. Then she held out her hand. Margaret sighed and handed her mother the green carnation.

“Dad hated this ritual of yours,” Margaret said. “You know it hurt him.”

Judith only nodded. Of course she knew. That’s what marriage had turned out to be: knowing that you were hurting the other person and doing it anyway.

Margaret drove. The streets of Buffalo rolled by Judith’s window, but Judith only looked at her wedding ring on her left hand and the green carnation in her right. These weren’t the streets she had known. The names were the same and even some of the houses were still there, but the old life was gone and today wasn’t about the new life anyway. It was about remembering the morning she’d said goodbye to him, one last time. Her sixty-third time coming here on a certain November morning. At 83, Judith didn’t figure to be back for a sixty-fourth.

There was light snow in the air as the Terminal came into view, the brown stone of its tower stark against a gray sky. Judith fancied that she could hear the whistle of trains, but of course that was just in her mind. The trains didn’t run anymore.

Margaret pulled into the parking lot, stopped the car, and got out. Judith insisted on walking herself, leaning on Margaret’s arm. She’d never needed help before. Even when Henry had brought her here, he’d stayed in the car; and she wouldn’t have asked him, anyway. This was her ritual, not Henry’s or anybody else’s, and even after he’d brought her here sixty-one Novembers in a row, it still amazed her that the only time they’d actually spoken about it was when he’d got himself drunk and yelled about how one day a year he had to compete with a ghost. But Henry was a ghost now, too. Judith had two ghosts to remember: one struck down in his 80s by a heart attack, and the other struck down in just his 20s by Japanese bullets.

Clutching Margaret’s arm with the other, Judith hobbled toward the doors of the Terminal. So much was gone from the building now, but Judith’s mind filled in the details as surely as if it were back in 1942 again. Even though the doors were locked, Judith knew that if she went inside, she’d see that old stuffed Buffalo standing there, its hide being rubbed for luck by all the other boys going off to war. Just as he had. She’d never gone inside the Terminal again, after that; she’d promised to be there when he came home, and he never had.

“There were lots of trains in those days,” Judith said. “Snow in the air, snow blowing through the steam, the sound of whistles and wind and people yelling. People saying goodbye on all sides. You can’t say goodbye like that to someone in an airport.”

Now they came to the doors, where Judith braced herself against the icy stone of the outside wall. She took a deep breath, and another, and another.

“Mother?”

“I need a minute, dear. Just a minute.”

Margaret squeezed Judith’s arm and then she stepped back, moving not more than ten or fifteen feet away, but she might as well have not been there at all. In her heart, Judith was sixty-three years away.

Judith recalled his embrace, the smell of his freshly-pressed suit, the sound of his whisper in her ear, the warmth of his lips and the softness of his fingertips on her cheek. A few minutes, there on the Central Terminal main concourse, and then he’d been gone. Gone to war, and beyond.

Two years later she’d met Henry.

“I think you’d have liked him,” Judith whispered. “Henry loved a good fight too, and he treated me well. He was in France, you know. I met him after he got back.” She glanced down at the green carnation, still in her hand. “I think you’d have liked him, even though he preferred white roses.” She reached up and pushed the stem of the carnation into a crack in the wall, beside the door. “I’m not going to make it next year, my love. I don’t have any more Novembers. But I had sixty-three more than you did, and I hope I lived them well. Parts of them were for you.”

She was almost finished. She stuck a folded scrap of paper into that crack in the wall as well, a scrap she’d kept with her for so many years. A scrap that, when unfolded, bore a faded typed message that began, “We regret to inform you”.

Judith gestured to her daughter, her Margaret, to help her back to the car. The snow was picking up.

It was, as Judith had said, her last time. She died the next February.

On a colder than normal morning the next November after that, a vagrant awoke in his spot against the wall of the Central Terminal. He looked around and shook his head. It had been a dream, obviously, but he’d thought for one second that he’d been sleeping on a bed of green carnations and white roses, and that he’d heard the whistles of those long-departed trains.

For more on the Central Terminal, go here.

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After staying a few extra days while everyone else went home over the weekend, the Mother-In-Law departed yesterday afternoon, which means that for the first time since Little Quinn died, our little family is alone again. Now, I suspect, comes the really hard part, because now we have to do our own heavy lifting to get our lives back on track again. Trouble is, we don’t know what track that is.

That’s the weird thing about death. The automatic instinct is to kind of go back to the way things were before this person came along, and in Little Quinn’s case, that’s not totally out of the question, since it was just fifteen months ago and I can remember fairly clearly what it was like before he was here. But that seems fake, and even a bit disrespectful to Little Quinn, doesn’t it? So we’re stuck trying to make space in our lives for a family member who no longer needs any space at all. On top of being a sad feeling, it’s a weird feeling as well.

Since Little Quinn was born, I never spent that long a time at my writing desk, mainly because I never felt that comfortable being that far away from him in case he had a sudden breathing problem or something like that. This, coupled with the fact that my little office area was the only relatively unused bit of space in the apartment, led quickly enough to all manner of things being piled in there (hence the immense clutter that formed in that space, as pictured here and here).

At the time of Little Quinn’s passing, I was working to reclaim my desk and office area. Just days before he died, his new stroller was delivered. It was a pretty slick item: its seat was detachable, and would fasten into a secondary base with hydraulic lift for home use. This, plus the wheeled IV pole to which we attached his pump, would have meant that we could finally have Little Quinn at the dinner table with us, and that I would be able to set him up in my little office area while I worked. I was looking forward to that. Alas, Little Quinn never even got to sit in his new stroller. A person from the company that delivered it was scheduled to come out and fit him for the stroller last Wednesday. Two days too late, as it turned out. Alas. (The stroller is being donated to a local home that provides equipment to people in such situations.)

I did most of my writing at that desk, really: rough drafts in longhand, and I feel better when surrounded by my books. I’m still reclaiming that area, but now, of course, Little Quinn won’t be sitting in there with me. Oh well. The things we can control, and the things we can’t.

The trouble with death is that we want so badly to get “back” to normal, but we can’t: what we have to do is construct a new normal, which will by necessity feel wrong because that new normal won’t include enough vestiges of the old normal. It’s quite the conundrum. Maybe it will be easier for us since Little Quinn’s “normal” was so different from everybody else‘s “normal”, but I don’t know. After the initial reaction, at Little Quinn’s birth, that his cerebral palsy was going to destroy our lives, we’d recalibrated to instead see it all as our lives plus Little Quinn’s cerebral palsy. Now we have to recalibrate again.

This we do, a tiny bit at a time. The apartment still seems terribly silent, and it still feels terribly odd to leave the apartment without a diaper bag on my shoulder. The Wife and I hold hands in public, which we normally weren’t able to do because one of us always had two hands on the stroller. But a tiny bit at a time, we’ll carve out our new lives. It starts with drinking coffee in the morning, with wearing overalls for the first time since last Monday, with cleaning up areas of the apartment long buried beneath accumulated stuff, with writing, with reading. With living.

A tiny bit at a time.

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The Indestructible Mr. Jones was pleasantly surprised by The Fantastic Four, a movie which I’ve avoided because it just doesn’t look good to me, and because I never much got into the FF when I was an avid comics reader.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t quote Mr. Jones, though, who appears to be on his bimonthly blogging binge right now:

Seriously, I get that The Thing isn’t attractive (to a human — for all I know he may be the cat’s meow to a boulder), but I think it was a bit unnecessary to have him be immediately rejected by his wife (whom he adores, of course), twice, once when he first comes home and the second, after he’s caused/saved dozens of lives.

Well, you have to admit — she’s probably thinking about how physically painful certain aspects of married life are about to be, right? I know that subject would certainly cross my brain….still, I get his point. The whole “Lonely superhero” thing is one of the staunchest clichees of the whole superhero gig. (Witness the end of the first Spiderman movie, frex.)

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Steven Den Beste is always the first to admit that as a rule, he’s just not funny. If you want a very long dissertation on something from an engineer’s perspective, he’s your guy, but bringing the funny just isn’t his bag.

But this made me laugh. I’m going to quote the whole thing, because it’s short and because SDB’s current blog doesn’t have any kind of permalinks. It’s from yesterday, December 7:

PJ Media apparently is going to be having regular “blogjams”, whatever the heck those are, featuring Michael Ledeen and Marc Cooper. For the moment they’re calling it the “Michael and Marc Show”, but Charles Johnson asks for “a colorful permanent name for this show”.

How about M&M? No one is using it!

Once I got it, I laughed out loud. First time SDB’s ever done that to me, and I’ve been reading the guy on two blogs for just about as long as I’ve been writing this one.

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As I noted we’d be doing as normal, we put up our Christmas tree the other night. This year we’ve finally eschewed the real tree in favor of, well, a fake one. I did sort of miss the ritual of going out to some little parking lot full of expensive trees and finding the small but still lovely one that everybody else passed up, and I miss that amazing scent of fresh pine that permeates the apartment while the tree is up — no number of burning pine-scented candles or incense can create that same aroma. I did not miss standing outside in the bitter cold (somehow, tree shopping always fell on the coldest day yet of winter) sawing the chunk off the bottom, nor did I miss the sometimes Herculean effort of getting the tree straight in its holder (normally made even more Herculean by our unfailing habit of getting a tree with a sizeable, but unnoticeable anyplace but home, kink in the trunk that means you can have the bottom straight and the top cockeyed, or the bottom cockeyed and the top straight, but not both so we end up rotating the tree so that the cockeyed top or bottom looks less cockeyed from the most common sightline to the tree in the apartment. Whew.

Nope, none of that this year — just unpack, unfold, and plug in. And decorate. And here’s how it looks:

Not too shabby. We’re also used to a wider and shorter tree, but that’s of small concern. We’re happy with it.

And this Christmas season, from time to time I’ll post a photo or two of some of our favorite Christmas ornaments. We use very few generic, “box set” ornaments — the ones that come in the four-packs at Target or Wal-Mart. We started out using quite a few of those, when we were first married, but each year, I pick out a handful of new ornaments at Christmas stores and places like Vidler’s (for God’s sake, Western New Yorkers reading this, if you’ve never been to Vidler’s in East Aurora, close your browser and go! -Ed.). The result of this process is that our Christmas tree becomes more and more personalized with each passing year, and each ornament has a memory now of a time or a place, and sometimes both. And yes, we include The Daughter in this practice, so when she finally moves out on her own, she’ll have a good set of ornaments of her own to start with. (So too it would have been with Little Quinn. I’m going to keep buying him ornaments, though. He’s still a part of the family, if not in a physical way.)

Anyhow, this is the oldest ornament we own. My grandmother (who died in 1986) made this for me when I was, I think, no more than two years old. (It has a mate that belongs to my sister.) Somehow, its color has never faded one bit — the trim and the tassle are still vibrant gold. It’s a pretty big and heavy thing, which means that it has to be hung from a strong branch, and that tassle requires that it be hung fairly high up (cats plus string tassle equals disaster for said tassle). But I’m glad to see it, every single year when we unpack the ornaments.

Similar care must be paid when hanging this next one, which came as a set of three (the others being Santa’s sleigh and a church, all with the same windchimes beneath). I bought these from an outfit called “Past Times”, which used to be a really nifty company whose catalog formed the basis of a lot of my Christmas shopping in the mid and late 1990s. (Past Times is still around, actually, although it appears that they’ve abandoned their US-based shipping service and only operate out of the UK now.) I often daydreamed about opening up a bookstore in a college town and decorating it with tchotchkes from Past-Times…but no matter. I always loved their ornaments, and maybe if the finances are ever good again, I’ll throw some business their way.

I’ll post more ornament photos as the Christmas season marches on! (And other bloggers would be well advised to do the same. It’s been a while since I kicked off a blog-meme!)

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It’s always funny when the Bush Administration gets the talking points a little bit too late:

This month, as in every December since he took office, President Bush sent out cards with a generic end-of-the-year message, wishing 1.4 million of his close friends and supporters a happy “holiday season.”

Many people are thrilled to get a White House Christmas card, no matter what the greeting inside. But some conservative Christians are reacting as if Bush stuck coal in their stockings.

Whoops! Look what happens when Mr. Rove is otherwise occupied.

This whole “War on Christmas” thing is just absurd, folks. America is a nation that is constantly changing, and it simply is no longer a country where you can just assume that any person you meet is a Christian who is going to be in the exact same place you are on Christmas eve, doing the exact same things, drinking the exact same eggnog and singing the exact same hymns. That America is gone (if it ever really existed at all). We’re a land of Christians and Muslims, and Jews, and Wiccans, and atheists, and Buddhists, and whatever else, and this whole thing on the Right — “You will celebrate this season in the way that we will tell you to celebrate it” — is nauseating. Especially when they get indignant about the Christmas tree, which was originally a pagan tradition adopted by Christians in Germany in the 1600s to celebrate not the birth of Christ, but “the annual Feast of Adam and Eve” — something the Jews and Muslims might also celebrate. America isn’t the 1950s Norman Rockwell painting anymore. Like it or not, America has become a place where “Merry Christmas” no longer applies to everyone.

Now, the fact is, I don’t much like the phrases “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings”, because they just feel trite, and not in a PC way, either. The alliteration in “Happy Holidays” bugs me, and if I’m greeting someone whose religious background I do not know, I like to actually say “Have a joyous holiday”. I see nothing wrong here — “Joyous” is a word with more emotional heft than “Happy” (did Beethoven set an “Ode to Happiness”? Nope!), and “Holiday” is a perfectly respectable word, being an etymological descendant of “Holy Day”. It seems to me that saying “Whatever holy day you are celebrating, may it be a joyous one”, albeit in fewer words, isn’t anti-Christmas, and it certainly isn’t anti-American: in fact, I think it’s a good illustration of what America is all about. It celebrates pluralism, and that American ideal of people of many cultures coming together; and if that sounds anti-American to you, well, maybe you ought to take it up with the Founding Fathers, who put that exact sentiment in Latin — E pluribus unum — onto our nation’s Great Seal.

I do say “Merry Christmas” to people I know to be Christian, or to people I may know to not be Christian but who still celebrate the birth of Jesus. This is, in fact, entirely possible: one can honor Jesus and his message without necessarily being Christian. (Every January, after all, I honor Martin Luther King, and I’m not black.) But it doesn’t do to assume that all people celebrate the winter season in the same way, and for the same reasons. I like the way “Merry Christmas” sounds: it’s got this antiquated feel that “Happy Holidays” completely lacks. “Merry” is a word that isn’t much used to describe emotional states these days, and in fact, I’d be willing to bet that if I could somehow tally every use I’ve ever made of the word “Merry”, they’ve fallen into exactly two categories: use as part of “Merry Christmas”, and to refer to a certain character in The Lord of the Rings.

Whenever I hear someone from the Right calling for a strict return to “Merry Christmas”, I get this distinct dictatorial vibe: “You will treat everyone around you, and be treated yourself, as a Christian.” The one-size-fits-all approach to Christmas is, in my view, demeaning to America and demeaning to Christ. I’m not playing along.

So, to all my readers: I wish you all the most joyous of Holidays.

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I’m finding Saddam Hussein’s trial antics amusing, in that “Wow, this guy is totally divorced from reality” way. He’s clearly mugging for whatever supporters he still has in Iraq (and there are some; these guys always have supporters). But I actually laughed the other day when he played the martyrdom card, intoning that he isn’t afraid of execution. I wonder, then, why he didn’t martyr himself rather than cravenly submit to capture? When he was hiding in that spiderhole, why didn’t he have a loaded sidearm with him, and why didn’t he pull his own plug when discovered there?

It’s easy to play the brave martyr when one is on trial under heavy guard. We’ll see how brave he is when they place the noose around his neck.

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