Iris DeMent.

After the sublime Iris DeMent concert at City Winery a couple weeks ago, she was selling copies of her new CD at a table by the door. I wanted one, but as I was waiting in line I remembered that I didn’t have any cash. I watched and didn’t see anyone paying with a card, so when I got to her I said, “I don’t have any cash, can I pay with a card?” She handed me a CD and said, “That’s okay, it’s yours.”

I was taken off guard, and I said, “Are you sure?”

She said, “Yes! Do you want me to sign it?”

I thought maybe she’d misunderstood my question and thought I was saying I couldn’t afford to buy a CD, but I was insecure and star-struck and not at all sure what was happening, so I just said, “Yes.”

I went and told C about the odd encounter. He had cash, but I was too embarrassed to go back, so I told him to go give it to her. He went to the table, but she was deep in conversation with someone, so he handed the money to the girl standing next to her who was helping sell CDs, but she hadn’t seen the earlier exchange and she had no idea why C was handing her money, and now she was more confused than I was.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the CD. I don’t know why she wrote “Fa Steven.” Maybe she was as thrown by the whole thing as I was.

City Winery is a great venue. I’ve known about it for years but never went, likely because in years past it would have been a little steep for me. They serve great food and of course wine is their thing, so you can go early and have a beautiful (though a little cramped) dinner, and then have dessert with a glass of port when the show starts. Which is exactly what we did.

I didn’t catch the Iris DeMent train till her second album, which all in all is darker and sadder than her first. But J and I literally didn’t take it out of the CD player for weeks.

She brings the same depth of tenderness to songs about grief or Jesus or erotic love or anger. Or this song, which, as far as I can tell, is about songwriting. It is a song about work. What she seems to say in this, and in all her songs, is that music is necessary, that music is salvation. What she does -- and this thought is hard for me to pin down, it flits away as I approach it – what she does is she makes a case for the redemptive power being not so much in any idea expressed in the song (god, etc.) but that it is immanent in the song itself, in music itself. It is how I feel, but have never been able to really articulate, about, as a non-believer, singing gospel music. The songs have power. Belief is beside the point.

Maybe I’m getting overwrought or overblown about such sweet, simple music. It’s just that her songs move me in a way that feels out of proportion and I’m always trying to figure out why that is.

It could be her voice. I was going to call it ethereal, which it is, but the word on the page doesn’t look quite right because her voice is, also, the opposite of ethereal. It’s subterranean, not just rooted but it is the root, of that thing, that world, that was not my upbringing in a literal sense but that I recognize as a deeper, older kind of “home” when I hear the Carter Family or Loretta Lynn, or taste the salt of country ham and red eye gravy. These things in my blood, in my cells. I could not hope, or desire for that matter, to explain what that’s about.

Oh, Baby.

This morning at 9 – on my “day off” C calls it though I consider it my only day on, since it’s the one day all week when I can write or shop or run errands, see a doctor, read, or sit and think – C and I went to a dreary little windowless office to be fingerprinted. It was – I believe, after I send this form to Austin so they can make sure I did not abuse or neglect any children in Texas while I lived there – the last component of a lengthy, tedious application to the adoption agency. (My favorite section was the one where we had to list the addresses and dates of every place we lived in the last 35 years. Attach additional sheets of paper if necessary, and it was.)

I downloaded Your Baby’s First Year for Dummies onto my Kindle last week. We don’t know how old our baby will be when we get it, but it’s possible he or she could be fresh out of the womb, in which case we’ll need to know about umbilical cords, formula, and jaundice, etc. It could just as likely be a year old and I’ll need to read another book.

Months ago or more, we were talking about kids and realized we had similar feelings: we both had wanted to raise a child but had put that desire aside as we got older. Seemed like it was getting late and it probably wouldn’t happen. But of course in the last two years both our lives have changed dramatically and maybe it’s not too late. It surely will be soon, but maybe if we step on it there’s still a chance. I’ll be 53 next month, but I figure I’ve got at least another good 20 years in me. That’s long enough to raise a kid. And C is 9 years younger. (It is strange to think, though, that when my mom was my age, I was in my thirties.)

I had this unexamined thought in my head that there are lots of babies out there who need parents. Don’t you always hear that? It’s not true. There are very few infants, and everybody competes for them. Adoptable babies are even more scarce for same-sex couples because international adoptions are out. People create web sites, put classifieds in college newspapers, Google Ads, looking for pregnant women who for whatever reason are not keeping their babies.

Now that the application is complete, someone from the agency will visit us on Monday to do a “home study.” We still have a lot of work to do to convert our office into a nursery, cover up all the electrical cords, get a crib and diapers, formula, and the rest, but that doesn’t have to be done yet for the home study, which I understand is more or less to verify that our apartment is reasonably clean and that we have room for a child. It’s hard to know how to plan our preparation since we don’t know when the baby will arrive or how old he or she will be.

Okay, now I’m feeling the pressure to write everything I’ve ever thought about babies and childrearing in this blog post – discipline, circumcision, gendered toys and clothing, school, homemade baby food, Santa Claus – but I’ll save it for future days. Maybe I'll blog while the baby is napping.

The deal C and I made is that since he makes a lot more money than I do (like exponentially), he’ll be the breadwinner and I will be a stay-at-home dad. I have to say I’m a little terrified.

What a crazy life so full of I-certainly-didn’t-think-I’d-be-doing-this-now.

Paradigm Shift.

When C and I first met, when I lived next door but was over here all the time, we spent hours lying in bed listening to music. He played me his favorite songs, and I made mix CDs for him of songs I thought he’d like, and he did. Most of the songs we played for each other were slow, emotional, romantic, Dolorean, Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes. That’s just how things were.

My Xmas present to C was a Jambox by Jawbone. It’s a speaker that connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to your computer or phone or whatever device. He has about a million CDs, and he hasn’t really made the leap to iTunes yet. But the only CD player we have now is an old clock radio that was so big it took up the whole top of his nightstand. In the office, we have my old Mac G5 tower, a great computer and very fast considering it’s about 8 years old (I edited Life in a Box on it), but it becomes more and more obsolete daily because the processors are not the kind required for most applications. I couldn’t tell you why. It’s like most computer things, it just is, and if you want to find any measure of contentment in your life you have to accept it. All that to say that the beloved G5 can’t play music anymore. The speakers died and since the computer is in its last days it doesn’t make any sense to get new ones. I am so unbelievably bored with this paragraph.

Whew. Much better. The contingent present was that I secretly uploaded all C’s CDs onto his iTunes on his computer so that when he got the Jambox he could play all his CDs! This was no small task. Like I said, a million CDs. And I’m not in the apartment alone much. But I got it done by Xmas, or so I thought. It turns out I had missed a big stash, a fat CD wallet which I didn’t know about and which held all his favorites. Hundreds more, and these are the important ones, the heart of his collection. So I’ve been uploading on and off all month, and C has learned how to do it, too. I did a bunch today. There are only about 50 left. It’s endless.

Also for Xmas, from his sister and brother-in-law, C got Apple TV, which, among the many things it does, plays your iTunes through the TV. I felt a little scooped, since now it’s not so impressive for C to be able to play his music on the Jambox. But the TV is in the living room, so it’ll still be useful to play music in the bedroom. Or in the car when we take trips.

Movies.

We saw Lincoln last night, and I struggled to stay awake in the first half, which I assume had less to do with the film than with the cocktail I had with dinner. But I don't know. I've never been a Spielberg fan. I perked up when that dress swallowed Sally Field and her grief in one gulp. (New Year's resolution: more Sally Field.) There are lots of things I want to say about the film, but I won't. It's really not fair, since I was dozing on and off for the first hour.

C's and my taste in movies overlaps narrowly -- and I kind of hate the whole multiplex experience -- so we don't go see a lot of movies. However, C's annual mission is to see every film in the top Oscar categories, and there are lots of movies I want to see among this year's contenders. So we have a nice list of movies to see together, some of them maybe more to my taste than his (the Sessions, Amour).

That said, the annual mission is his, not mine, and I will probably draw the line at Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty. He owes me big time for sitting through the Hobbit.

Christmas Miserable.

C and I, along with his mom and sister, went to see Les Miserable today. C's sister's husband, not a fan of musicals, ducked out to see Django Unchained and met us later.
My facebook feed has been abuzz with the Miz the last couple days, but most of the comments seem to be framed by comparison to the various live productions of the play. I’ve never seen it. This film was my first experience with the show and the music.
Here are a few bullet-point impressions:
1. People randomly run into significant people from their pasts with alarming (and tiresome) frequency.
2. Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway. Okay, I was already in love with her going in, but I don’t even quite have words to describe what she was doing. I have the sense that her performance in this has set a new mark. I sat there slack-jawed the whole time she was on the screen. To me, it felt historical. The biggest flaw of this film is that her character dies 20 minutes into it. I suspected there’d be a ghost appearance, but I wish it had happened sooner.
3. The music is very affecting at times. I shed quite a few tears. But can I just say that it’s basically the same song over and over with slight varations. Being a verse-chorus man, I’m always amazed at how shows like this become so popular. Waiting and waiting for the song to land is eventually exhausting, to me.
3. The cinematography is a little claustrophobic. Love all that splotchy skin, but a big musical with an epic story and so much sweeping, soaring music, well, I want a few long shots.
4. Helena Bonham-Carter has made quite a career out of that hair, hasn’t she? Love her.
5. I’m a big fan of long books, long plays, long movies, so I hate to say it, but it was l-o-n-g.
6. Anne Hathaway.
7. Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway.

Joy.

I’ve been thinking about Christmas and sadness lately, in the face of C’s apparently pure childlike joy in the preparation, all the small rituals of the season, shopping, wrapping, decorating. I’m letting myself enjoy it, too, more and more, despite whatever reservations I have had, which all sort of pool around consumption, consumerism, and Christianists (all those hard C’s).

My favorite Christmas songs are the sad ones. That doesn’t necessarily mean much because my favorite songs of any kind are the sad ones. But there’s so much about Christmas that is sad: longing to be with distant loved ones, missing those who’ve died (and, statistically speaking, likely died at Christmastime), our fixation on the needy. Somehow the poor are more innocent this time of year.

And then I heard this song that a friend posted on facebook this morning – by Tracey Thorn, who for decades has been writing so beautifully and simply about our messy complicated adult emotional lives – and my thoughts crystalized in a way that a great song can make your thoughts crystalize (in fact, come to think of it, maybe that’s actually the whole purpose of a song, hm…).

Christmas doesn’t work without the sadness. Sadness is the background. The winter holiday (which, sorry, predates the perfectly illustrative and beautiful story of the birth of Christ) is a ritual of hope that joy survives sadness. And has no meaning without sadness. I guess everybody but me already knew this.

No matter how bad things may get, there’s a moment when it stops getting worse and starts to get better. The world turns.

O Christmas Tree.

Our Christmas tree is now complete. I think it’s perfect. It embodies elements of C’s and my respective childhood Christmas trees, but aspects of it evoke just the two of us together.

It’s decorated with ornaments that C’s mother has given him over the years, along with several that we’ve picked up in our travels together, lots of traditional glass balls, a set of handmade glass birds and such that my parents gave me, a few cut-paper snowflakes and origami birds that I made last year. It’s a real tree, which C’s family always had growing up. We had a real one when I was very young, but an artificial one most of my childhood. It was a good fake and we loved it,  and the shape of the tree C and I picked out this year recalls the shape of that tree.

This is from when we used to get
a real tree. (Click on the pictures
to make them bigger.)

After struggling for years to figure out how to do the winter holidays, I’ve relaxed completely into an old-fashioned celebration of Christmas. All I had to do was remember how Christmas was, how it felt, what we did, before it became so polluted in my mind with all the fundamentalist culture war stupidity, the shrill onslaught of ads and catalogs and buying stuff that’s just going to end up in a landfill, and the bitterness and tension of everyone’s families growing and changing. Back when it was just about Mom’s cookies, and Grandma Lenore coming to visit from Minnesota, and exchanging gifts, and pickled herring on Christmas Eve, and being at home with people I love.

It seems to me that when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, pre-Reagan majority, pre-Jerry Falwell and the rest, people could celebrate Christmas with varying degrees of religiosity or none at all and not be at each other’s throats. My family was not religious. Christmas was mostly secular. We did have a small ceramic crèche that we set up every year. To me, it represented the story that Christmas was based on. I didn’t give much thought to whether it was literally true or not, let alone consider the notion that whether people believed it or not implied something important about their goodness and worth.

That's the fake one. Not a very
good pic of the tree. But those pants!

I took a sick day today. I left work Friday with a scratchy throat and headache which turned into a nasty chest cold by Saturday morning. The way it all started in my chest like that made me fear that this was going to be one of those winter colds that linger for weeks, but I sucked on zinc lozenges all weekend and I felt a little better this morning. Maybe it’ll pass quickly. Still, I’m coughing a lot and my head hurts, so I decided to stay home and rest. We have a busy few weeks coming up, and I don’t want to be sick for Christmas.

We had Saturday tickets to Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway, which we bought months ago, unaware that it was opening night, and I had to let C find a friend to go with him because I felt miserable and knew that if I went I’d cough through the whole thing.  C came home a little disappointed in the production, which alleviated my disappointment somewhat. It also helped that on Friday, we saw The Great God Pan (a new play by Amy Herzog who wrote my favorite play last year, 4,000 Miles) at Playwright’s Horizons, and it was great.

On the way out the door this morning, C said, “You’re going to finish the tinsel today, right?”

We’d done the rest together last weekend, the lights, the ornaments, but we didn’t have tinsel yet. C bought some on his way home from work one day last week. While he was at the theater Saturday night, I tried to put it on the tree, but I ran out of energy after one package. It didn’t look right, I didn’t feel good, I stopped. Too much pressure.

Both of us grew up with tinsel-Nazis. C tells me the rule in his house was one strand per branch. My dad’s rule was a little more abstract, something about making them look like actual icicles. There could be more than one strand, but they had to hang completely free. I don’t think my dad even let my mother near the tinsel, let alone kids.

My dad's childhood tree.

Between the risk of expensive, fragile, and often irreplaceable objects being smashed by small clumsy people (and the hazards of the attendant shards of glass) and the aesthetic demands on an object fraught with the memories of everything good and bad about Christmases in the past and present and some aspirational future -- not to mention expected to be pleasing to look at for a month -- decorating the Christmas tree was not a job for children.

I respected that, I think. I know I agreed with my parents that we had the most beautiful tree of all. No spray-painted macaroni kindergarten bullshit on our tree. It evolved slightly over the years, but at its apogee the lights were tiny and all blue, the ornaments were glass balls only, and the icicles were clear glass. (As I remember, when they stopped making tinsel out of actual metal foil and started using Mylar, my parents in protest stopped using tinsel. But it may be that those two events were unrelated and I’ve fabricated drama out of my past. It’s been known to happen.)

Those glimpses of an adult Christmas are more powerful in my memory than any of the kids’ stuff, which was always a little ugly to me, I think even then. If there was anything creepier than that strange scene in the barn with the talking animals and everyone frozen and staring at an immobile newborn for DAYS ON END, it was enslaved elves, an extortion list, and the drooling fat man sliding down the chimney in the middle of the night.

See those slippers? I loved them. My mother
made them with two sticks and a ball of yarn.
My mother is awesome.

It’s still a puzzle to me why parents get such a kick out of working their kids up into a frenzy of anticipation so intense they cry and pee their pants. Everyone justifies it saying that they want their kids to “experience the magic.” I suspect it’s really about the thrill of pulling off a practical joke on a bunch of disruptive, demanding little people who’ve thrown their parents’ lives into unimaginable chaos. There’s nothing magical about discovering you’ve been lied to. For years. By everyone around you.