26

My favorite day: December 26th. It is over.

I love Christmas, but it really stresses out alot of people around me, and I am glad to be through it. It was a good day. We planned well, and had the big shebang at our house on Christmas Eve day. Nobody in this family really wants to participate. They show up and roll their eyes as though we all understand each other and endure the time together for the sake of the children. But the children aren't children anymore. They are urban waifs who do not believe in anything, nihlistic little wannabes who suffer tragically in imitation of the homeless, a slap in the face of the truly poor.... So it seems a little silly to go to the extent that I do, but I have my fun, and some traditions must survive my former life, right? Next year we will tell everyone we are leaving town and stay home. The food is ridiculous. Excessive. But I didn't spend much this year on gifts, and had fun making candy, except for my shoulder injury.... it hurts. My son was flooded out of his underground apartment two weeks ago, so his holiday was spent relocating, which I don't thing was a bad thing. Sometimes it takes a push to move on, and he had been in the same funky little place for a long time. It did mean that he couldn't come up for christmas, but then he probably wouldn't have anyway. This way, I can pretend that he really wanted to, and the flood prevented him from a truly family holiday. HA!! He celebrates the 26th like I do. In our family, my former family, the pressure to be the Waltons is so intense that the day is lost in imitation of something we never were. In this family, it is different, but much the same. I don't know what is right. The older I get, and the more families that become mine, I have so many versions of Christmas to compare with my childhood, which seemed so simple. But it was a simpler time. My father loved my mother. My aunts and uncles were intact families. We celebrated pretty much the same way: not much money, lots of love and food. Board games. Remember board games? We got Haley Travel Scrabble. She was happy for a minute. That was worth it all.

Today, I am going to do something I ordinarily leave to the stronger in the herd... I'm going shopping on the day after Christmas. I am not looking for a sale, although I wouldn't mind one.... but I need something to wear to my job interview on Thursday. If I get the job, I will have to wear suit-like things. Suits, I guess. I will try to find some way not to do that. I am already looking for the back door. I see myself trying to be the one administrator who is allowed to wear levi's to work. It is tough to be this special. What I know is that I really had it made in my last job. And I knew it then, but I had to get married. Had to. It wasn't a shotgun weddin'... don't get the wrong idea.

So here I am, Clinton Street waking up beneath my bay window, rain falling down down down. There is a mountain of laundry awaiting my folding expertise. Why does it matter that the hand towels, the wash cloths, this dish cloths, the dish towels and the cloth napkins are each folded correctly? Who taught me that? They are all square-ish, and really, who cares? And bath towels. In my opinion there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who fold in thirds and the ones who fold in halves. Kurt Vonnegut said (in Cat's Cradle) that there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones you know and the ones you don't know.

I don't know.