Resisting Despair and Finding Contentment
Therapeutic Journaling with Max #1: Christmas Day, 2024
A very nice Christmas Morning with my sweetie of 40 years, Mary. Just the two of us, together with our coffee, which was very good indeed this morning. And a handful of mostly stocking-stuffer kinds of inexpensive presents, any one of which would have been a fantastic treasure to my Aunt Grace, who raised me, or my father, who from time to time assisted in that effort. Aunt Grace, the second oldest of 8 children, grew up mostly in the 1910s. She occasionally commented and a few times recounted in detail the austerity of her early youth and the brutality of her own father, in Clam Falls, Wisconsin. She loved Christmas as a child, she said, because if she was lucky she would get some new underwear; and if it had been a good year each child would get an orange. Recounting her memories 50 years later, the oranges still put a glow on her face. And no doubt the underwear was useful.
My father was born a decade later and mostly raised in the Red River Delta town of Garland City, Arkansas, after the family moved south just before the despair of the Great Depression settled over the country. He never talked too much about … well, about anything, really, and certainly not what he got for Christmas. He did comment more than once about what he wanted and never got, which was a woodburning kit.
To placate his disappointment, he gave me one when I was about 9 or so. I was the recipient of his childhood dream because in addition to being his least favorite son and most problematic child, I was perceived as being artistically inclined. I enjoyed it, and spent a good amount of time with the little tool. But I would not have spent 40 years nurturing disappointment if I hadn’t gotten it.
Since I was not only the artistic but the intellectual child, I always got books. Sometimes I really loved the books, sometimes they missed the mark a little in terms of my literary tastes. But I always read them, even while secretly nursing my own disappointment about not getting a BB-gun, which I wanted so badly that a couple of times I walked the mile or so from our home in Faith Village up to the Western Auto store on Callfield Road to gaze longingly at the Daisy carbine style BB-gun next to the real rifles and shotguns in the rack behind the counter. I dreamed of the time I could shoot at sparrows and assassinate grasshoppers and cicadas – which I presume are still called locusts back in Texas.
Wisely, my aunt and my father never gave me one. Some 25 years later, however, Mary gave me one, and I loved it. A reissue of the Daisy Red Ryder. By that time, I never thought about killing micro-game animals anymore. But I had a great time sitting on the deck in the backyard, shooting at a target I made out of a cardboard box and being kind of joyful about finally having my own little BB-gun. I still have it in its original box, in very good condition in the far end of my office closet, where I run across it from time to time when I go looking for something I can’t find anywhere else.
Anyway, books were good, and I treasured them, and learned from them. I remember one book in particular, a collection of horror stories for youths several years older than me – all my books were for kids older than me, because both Aunt Grace and Father understood that I would find books written for children my age embarrassing. But I remember that book because I learned my horror of horror stories from it. I never recovered from that horror, and to this day do not understand why anybody likes horror stories or movies. And while I know some people giggle their way through the most grotesque and terrifying stories and movies, I simply can’t understand the gratification. On the other hand, by that time I often found my favorite stories in the Readers Digest Condensed Stories that Aunt Grace would get each quarter. Some great stories there, and I would read all four or five.
I still love to get books as Christmas gifts. And I also like to cook and eat, and to watch TV shows about cooking and eating. So, I was thrilled that Mary gifted me with the newest Stanley Tucci book, What I Ate In One Year. I knew about this book from a couple of favorable comments about it in one or another online publication. To be sure, it never had occurred to me to want it. In fact, I try NOT to want books, reminding myself each time of the stacks of unread books on one our dozen bookshelves, and the even larger mental stacks waiting to be ordered from online bookstores and bought from decommissioned library book racks and local bookstores. Just two days ago, for example, I thought hard about buying the entire set of Phillip Roth's Zuckerberg novels, after running across a review of Zuckerman Unbound. I can't remember for sure if I have already read it, and know for sure that even if I have, I’d love to do so again. But I suppressed the urge to push the button on the Thriftbooks website, telling myself that maybe, perhaps one day, I would revisit this urge.
Back to the Tucci book, though, I had never felt an urge to buy it, but I was favorably enough disposed toward it to grab it and leaf through it, almost immediately realizing that it was the perfect book for the moment.
I say it was – is – the perfect book for the moment because, as I told Mary, when I first woke up this morning I lay in bed for a while, in a pleasant mood because I slept well for more than 7 hours, a rare event for me, and because I was highly confident that Mary and I were going to have a thoroughly pleasant and quiet Christmas alone. Which is to say that I didn’t wake up tired and terrified and bitter than our world seems to have been hijacked in recent years by malevolent dictatorial clowns that make me think bad thoughts about people I used to grudgingly like and sometimes even admire. To quickly clarify, I haven’t lost any close friends over the hostile takeover of our nation and world by fascists and brutes. And I hardly had any close family members to be estranged from, with the very small handful of close family members whose love I most treasure being of the same political and philosophical bent as me. So, I haven’t suffered any significant relationship loss at the personal level.
What I do regret, however, is that the fear and bitterness in myself has become a real distraction to my own joie de vivre. I stay angry, depressed, or frightened most of the time, it seems. And it’s hard to look forward to a future that consistently looks bleak to me. With that awareness in mind, I have, for some time, self-consciously thought that I need to spend some real effort ‘looking for gratitude’ as some of the philosophical self-help-oriented friends and pundits I read and know personally have written. Or as I would say it, I need to find relief and joy in the small things and stop giving so much of a shit about the big things I can’t do much about, like saving the world and ensuring the survival of liberal democracy.
That doesn’t mean that I must, or will, give up my political activities and determination to steadfastly resist the drift toward illiberalism and tyranny that characterizes our own country and so many other countries around the world. It just means I need to schedule my time and apportion my emotions a little better so that I can take delight in the routine experiences and joys of life that, truth be told, probably won’t change too much even if Donald the Horrid should firmly ensconce himself as the first dictator of the United States.
Anyway, as I was lying in bed feeling rested and comfortably pensive this morning, I resolved to take a step toward reclaiming a happy perspective on the world by committing to write each day … and to write not bitter rants, but notes about the things that I truly am grateful for, and to reflect on the pleasant memories and realizations that almost each really and truly bring.
So … I opened the Stanley Tucci book and saw what it was … a diary of sorts, of what he ate for one year … not recipes, which are easy enough to find, but thoughts and philosophical musings about the meaning of food and eating and, thus, life. More about what Stanley DID, where he was, who he was with, than what he ate. Well-done, as the reviews I’ve seen have noted. Sometimes laugh out loud funny, other times just wryly amusing. Or something in between – I was particularly amused by a line I found when I randomly opened the book to a page about a restaurant in England, in which he commented that he would rather be flayed than to play golf, which verified that he is a man after my own heart.
This, then, is my first attempt to write my diary. In a few days I’ll reread the above lines to find out if I think the literary content is OK, while acknowledging from the outset that this is a failure, because it's a little too long. Too much rambling. Too many threads. And at about an hour to write, it’s just more than I can or want to record on a daily or almost daily basis. Nevertheless, it has been therapeutic to record these thoughts, on this very blessed Christmas day … my 72nd as a living human being, my 39th as husband to Mary Pliska, and my 19th living in the New York Capital District.
Holiday Blessings to all!