Alexis Rankin Popik's Blog, page 9

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2021!

 

Clark Van der Beken via Unsplash

A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN MARION

In December 2015, I wrote the blog below the *** break.  It seems like a message from a much different time–and it is.  So many things have changed. Kamiko is eleven now and, rather than begging to build gingerbread houses, she is giving me advice on COVID clothing (“Why do you wear the same thing every day?”) and makeup (“You should wear pink lipstick.”)  Of the two uncles in the 2015 post, one is a new dad and the other will be a father in a few months.  The tipsy auntie is the mother-to-be. There were no charades this Christmas Eve and only four of us at opposite ends of a very long table.  BUT with the new year and new vaccines, we have reason to look hope, so let’s look forward to better times.  “See” you in the New Year!

***

Last week (December 2015), I published a copy of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”  Now, Kamiko is back in Marion for Christmas, asking me if we can play all the games we did last year (games of which I have no memory), put the gingerbread house together RIGHT NOW and–although it’s midnight and all the adults are exhausted–play a quick game of charades before she sleeps.  So here is a reprise of  “A Child’s Christmas in Marion.”  Whatever holiday you do or do not celebrate this time of year, I hope you get some time off to enjoy yourself and I wish all of us a kinder, more peaceful 2016.

With apologies to Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”—

 One Christmas was…like another in those years around the sea-town corner.

 

Birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills

 It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy.

 Cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires.

There are always uncles at Christmas.  The same uncles.

Auntie laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight…I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill….I got into bed.  I said some words to the close and holy darkness and then  I slept.

MERRY CHRISTMAS 2015

SNOW DAY

Photo by Khai Dong via Unsplash

 

This past week, much of the East Coast got a early Christmas gift:  a Snow Day.  I had never heard of Snow Days before we moved to New England in the winter of 1996, but I soon began to look forward to them. First, the media was full of news of the approaching Nor’Easter. In the middle of the night, the silence the snowfall brought would be shattered by the sounds of snowplows clearing our road–often to no avail.  

By 6:00 a.m the local TV stations would run crawlers across the bottom of the screens, listing the school districts and businesses that would be closed for the day.  I would get up and tell our two sleeping little boys that they could sleep in because it was a Snow Day.  They would whoop and then go back to sleep but it wasn’t long before they were outside, having snowball fights and sliding around with the other kids on our street.  

I was working on a novel during those years and was glad for an excuse to take a day off.  No one expected me to do anything except to make hot cocoa.  In the afternoon, we would find a video the boys liked and often could repeat verbatim, and the three of us would watch it together. It was a beautiful reprieve from daily life.

This week, a note to parents from a Superintendent of Schools in West Virginia brought me to tears.  While it is true that almost anything can bring me to tears these days, the letter that Bondy Shay Gibson wrote to the families in the Jefferson County Schools was widely publicized, as it should have been.  This is what she wrote:

For generations, families have greeted the first snow day of the year with joy.  It is a time of renewed wonder at all the beautiful things that each season holds, a reminder of how fleeting a childhood can be, an opportunity to make some memories with your family that you old on to for life.  For all of these reasons and many more, Jefferson County Schools will be completely closed for the first snow day of the year….We will return to the serious and urgent business of growing up tomorrow.  But for today, go build a snowman.

It’s impossible to build a snowman in Oakland, California, where we now live, but in these times we can give ourselves a break and pretend.  Tomorrow I plan to give myself a Snow Day.  Wherever you are, I hope one day soon you can, too.

 

HOLIDAY FOOD!

Photo of holiday cookies by Brooke Lark via Unsplash

 

 

 

Holiday food is the best!  A a child, I always looked forward to the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie and at Christmas, my grandmother’s English Trifle.  My mother filled tins with homemade cookies as presents for family friends.  The holidays were a magical time.

The holiday food tradition is carried on now by my husband, who has been baking steadily since COVID infection began to spread last March:  cookies, cakes, pies, bread.  Every day has been a holiday feast. It’s a wonder I can still get off the couch unassisted.  After a month or so of this food fest, he branched out and began baking goodies for the neighbors on our little street. Now we are all bring each other food:  fruitcake (my husband’s is the best ever!), bagels from a special local shop, and new (to me) from my friend and neighbor Liat, a Hanukkah pastry:  sufganiyot.  They are a sort of cross between a beignet and a jelly or cream-filled donut, and they are wonderful! 

Prior my neighbor’s gift of sufganiyot, I had not particularly cared for Jewish holiday food, just as my spouse never much liked my grandmother’s English Trifle.  The first Christmas he came to my parents’ house, my siblings and I were oohing and aahing over the trifle, and he took me aside and asked, “Do you really think this is good?”  I thought about that for days after.  Our beloved trifle was composed of layers of store-bought pound cake,  jello, canned fruit cocktail and whipped cream—not exactly a gourmet delight.  But that wasn’t the point.  The great thing about Grandma’s trifle was we had it when we were all together at a joyful time, the holidays.

I will think about that the next time I am confronted with tzimmes and that dreadful syrupy wine at Passover.  It’s not the food–it’s the family, stupid!  And meanwhile, I have my Hanukah sufganiyot. 

TWO SONGS FOR THANKSGIVING

SF Bay Area Sunset*

 

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Stevie Wonder made me cry. I was zipping along I-580 when “Isn’t She Lovely?” came through my earbuds and my eyes brimmed with tears. I surprised myself.

There has been a lot written about 2020’s altered Thanksgiving due to COVID. Certainly five of us spaced at one long table brought back memories of the years when 20 to 25 family members took up two or more tables, spilling into adjacent rooms. We had a small group for Thanksgiving this year, but we amused ourselves with very old memories of the tension between my mother and her mom over the making-of-the-gravy. It was a dependable drama every year and we all had a good laugh–so my tears were not about the pandemic’s effect on our Thanksgiving.

It didn’t take long to realize that, thanks to Stevie Wonder’s great song, I was reliving the happy arrival of a baby girl in our family last summer and the anticipated birth of another grandchild in May. Again, I thought of my mother. In her final days, she talked about all the family events she would not live to see, which didn’t bother her one bit. I thought about my own life and all the time I spend worrying about what might lie ahead. And then I had an epiphany:  This is it, Kiddo. Enjoy it now, every day, while you can, and stop fretting about what might or might not happen. Or, as James Taylor wrote in a song: “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”

CAT PANDEMIC

 

CatmanDeux after lunch.

Just when you think the pandemic can’t get any more tedious, along comes your cat to mix it up.  Today (Sunday) I woke up and took a good bit of time to figure out what day of the week it was. The rest of the day flowed from there.

My husband, all suited up like a nuclear plant worker for a safe trip to Costco, asked for a grocery list. While doing that I completely forgot my live-streaming Pilates class, for which I had already paid.  I rushed downstairs, followed by the cat, and rolled out my new, extra-foamy mat.  While I set up the computer on the floor and checked into the class in progress, I was distracted by the sound of shredding foam.  That is when I remembered it was the cat’s lunchtime.

CatmanDeux was a sleek 12 pounds when he was picked up on the streets of Staten Island, shipped to a Mary’s Kitty Korner in Granby, Connecticut, and promptly adopted by us.  Four years later, he is an obese 17 pounds and whines for every meal…as he did throughout the entire Pilates class.  When I didn’t respond to the incessant whining, he expressed his displeasure by knocking everything—piece by piece—off a nearby tabletop while I tried to complete “The 100” on my shredded mat.

There is no happy ending to this story, except that the cat did get his lunch after class.  Otherwise, one day is so much like another that it is hard to remember what day it is, which Zoom event is coming up, and when it’s time to feed the cat.  It is enough to make anyone whine.

WABI SABI

Wabi-Sabi

From the archive:

I came across the term wabi sabi a few months ago and immediately bought a book about it, Simply Imperfect by Robyn Griggs Lawrence. I am always looking for ways to make a virtue of imperfection. According to Lawrence, wabi sabi is the Japanese art of appreciating things that are imperfect, primitive and incomplete. I tend to think of it as a type of décor, but it is more than that. However, making home a sanctuary, a simple place without clutter, disturbance, noise and distraction, is an important element. It is a philosophy that promotes attention to the people and objects around us, treating everyone and everything with reverence, generosity and respect—sort of Mindfulness on steroids. Attention to food and drink is part of living in the moment. While I was writing this, Chef Eric Ripert (Restaurant Le Bernardin, New York City) popped up on the TV screen, intoning in an irresistible French accent, “When we eat, we begin with the eyes.” The camera cut to his simply prepared and beautifully arranged dishes—very wabi sabi. Here is a partial list of what Robyn Griggs Lawrence writes is and is not wabi sabi:                  

 IS Wabi Sabi                                   Is NOT Wabi Sabi

Bare branches                                    Flower arrangements

Handmade items                               Machine-made items

Cobblestones                                      Concrete

Hemp                                                   Polyester

Clotheslines                                        Electric Dryers

Hand mixers                                       Food processors

I don’t know anyone who consistently falls into the left-hand column, and clotheslines and hand mixers are definitely not in my future, but the goals of simplicity, mindfulness and appreciation of life are good ones. I think I’m going to add to that dinner prepared by Eric Ripert.

 

NOTE:  If this is your first visit to this blog, check out the other postings and subscribe.  And if you haven’t already, buy my novel of madness, mystery and mayhem:  Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate.

ELECTION CELEBRATION

Photo by Nicolas Tissot via Unsplash

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s an election celebration! Before we settle down to the hard work of reconciliation, compromise, COVID control and appreciating people who aren’t like us, let’s take a couple of days to celebrate hope and happiness.  My daughter and husband took videos of some of the celebrations in the streets of Oakland and Berkeley yesterday.  I have tried (successfully, I hope) to include a very short clip of Lady Liberty and other dancers on Grand Avenue Saturday.  Bill’s video, which unfortunately was fuzzy, caught a disabled elderly African-American man popping wheelies in his wheelchair on College Avenue.  What a guy!

If all goes well, you can click on this link and then on the itty bitty square and you will see a 13 second video of Lady Liberty and other celebrators.  RenderedVideo

HAVE A HOPEFUL WEEK!

ELECTION FATIGUE

Everyone I know has Election Fatigue.  Between tomorrow’s election, COVID, and the onset of winter, I HAVE HAD IT!   Will we elect the party of the donkey or the party of the elephant?  It matters and I want this election to be over and done with—after all the votes have been fairly counted.

 

To keep a serious subject a bit light—instead of a gloomy blog, I planned to post photos of a donkey and an elephant—the animal representations of the Democrats and Republicans.  Unfortunately, even that was fatiguing.  There aren’t any donkeys pics in our photo stash, so a zebra will have to do (sorry, zebra).

Finally, even if you, too, are fatigued–if you haven’t already, make sure you vote by Tuesday.    I never thought we would be in this situation, but vote because OUR DEMOCRACY DEPENDS ON IT.

TRAVEL DURING THE PANDEMIC

When the pandemic first became known, I had only an inkling of how much the pandemic would limit my ability to travel. Now I am learning to travel in place. Continue reading →