Just Another Day

Sally go round the sun

Sally go round the moon

Sally go round the chimney pots

 Every afternoon.

 

Christmas Day has come and gone. For the crows cawing in the yard, it was just another day, nothing special. They cared nothing for the story of a babe born in a manger a few millennium ago that has grown to frenzied consumption and perhaps are the better for it. History suggests that countless human suffering might have been avoided if that innocent baby had never been born. No Inquisition, witch-burnings, world domination and colonization in his name, vile hypocrites willfully ignoring his true message as they gain great wealth and political power. The touch of dancing sugarplum magic, a few good songs and brightly lit trees indoors perhaps are not worth the price. 

 

But if that event never happened or never took hold, we would have invented others. Indeed, we already have in other parts of the world and some with the some catastrophic results (the Islam conquest, subjugation of women, jihads, for one, the endless trouble in the Middle East, the Hindu Caste system and beyond), so we’re to blame. 

 

Meanwhile, our little family here in San Francisco opened the little gifts we gave each other in the spirit of imagining what would give each other pleasure and help us with our next step in the cycling years. Needed clothes, fun games, utilitarian hairbrushes and hand-warmers, many books, culinary treats (granddaughter Zadie’s most enthusiastic whoop of joy came when she opened the package of Nutella!) and so on. We made and ate waffles, played one of the games and then had a lovely walk out at the edge of the land (Land’s End), all the way from the Cliff House to the Legion of Honor and back. Then the kids agreed to let me take them on my Vertigo tour—just about all the sites featured in the Hitchcock classic movie—and we watched the film that night. Part of my lifetime quest to initiate them into some of the classics that I’ve enjoyed, which they graciously put up with. Tomorrow we’ll stop at San Juan De Bautista on the way down to Palm Springs to complete the tour.

 

And so here we are, in this moment of the endless cycling around the sun, the moon, the chimney pots that hold the ashes of the flames that have lit our way forward and warmed our hearts. Every afternoon. 

 

Happy Kwanzaa, Boxing Day and for the crows, happy just-another-day!