December Delights

After two days of teasing drizzle, the real rains have come. In the back of the house, the steady drip of the ceiling leak that the contractors can’t quite fix. Here in the front, Public Works workers in bright green raincoats are cutting the green shoots at the base of my neighbor’s tree for reasons baffling to me. Rivulets run down the streets, the trees wave in the wind and Czech carols from my old LP give a meaning to it all that touches my heart. Puts it all into the story of a cozy home on a dark and wet December day. Not quite my childhood mythology of snow and a roaring fireplace indoors, but close. 

 

The whole feeling of randomness in this life, of mere news and entertainment and sensation and distraction and lists of things to do, is suddenly wrapped in the full embrace of a beautiful meaning,evoked by the first note of the first carol on the record. A needed reminder that we are players in a story in which every sight and sound and feeling has a significance that needs no explanation. We simply need to pause and let it wrap around us and savor its touch and taste and sound. 

All of this brought to life by the miraculous capacities of our gifted human faculties to create, to express just about everything a heart can feel and a mind can imagine through music. Music composed and learned and played on instruments that join together in their unique voices, captured on disks and machines engineered by scientists and sold in stores and stored on shelves. All products of human labor designed to bring beauty, comfort and a sense of deep belonging into our hearts, hearths and homes. As I said in an earlier post, we don’t need any miracles greater than these. 

 

While I sometimes think I would like to live in a perpetual summer, in fact, the seasons of this life make for a fuller and richer existence. I experienced all four growing up in New Jersey and here, now, listening to this music, I’m feeling some nostalgia for the particular tastes, textures, sounds, feelings, possibilities, splendors, each season evokes, savoring these songs that were made just for this moment. 

 

I think I’m “beating the system” by going to warm climates every January to teach— in the past few years, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and soon, Singapore and Bangkok. I will enjoy wearing shorts in January, but now I’m thinking I’m cheating myself of these old, cozy, familiar winter feelings. It has never been the same in San Francisco as New Jersey, but still a touch of Winter’s loving embrace—and especially when year after year, our family went with three others up to the snows in the Sierras. 

 

The needle lifts off the record, the soothing sound of rain now instead of the songs and in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the sense that “all’s right with the world.” A switch from the European mythscape that has lived inside me my whole life (Bach, Dickens, Da Vinci, etc.) to the American one, sung to life by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald. George Bailey had it right: It’s a wonderful life.