Do You Have a Favorite Room?

 

There are beautiful coffee-table books about rooms. Rooms where famous people live, rooms where important events took place, rooms that matter.

Then there are decorators' pride rooms. Rooms that exemplify styles, show off design know-how, or used to teach Feng Shui = notions of balance and flow.

 

In the end, beyond all abstractions, are the rooms we live in. They are both neat and messy (depending on the moment), cozy and annoying (when things just don’t feel right), and most of all they are ours.

 

When my kids were little, their room was my favorite. It had the most design integrity and remarkable functionality, carefully put together for their respective arrivals. Now that the room is a guest room and a storage room for the belongings they chose to leave with us, it holds little charm for me.

 

My current favorite is my bedroom. Its corner is my office, i.e. where I write. It is the favorite hangout for three felines who confirm the room’s supremacy.

If you love to cook, perhaps your most-loved room is your kitchen. If you garden, maybe you managed a sunroom. If you are fond of bathing, maybe your bathroom is the one you favor.

 

As comments on Blogger don’t accommodate photos, sharing your favorite here will have to rely on descriptive abilities. This brings me to the writerly side of this post. Describing rooms in a way that makes them come alive and doesn’t cause reader’s tedium is an art all its own, and it belongs in good books.

THE THING MOST NEEDFUL

 

I had an epiphany when reflecting on last week’s private events.

What made me happiest was not having finished draft #2 of my current  MG WIP. (Yay!)

It wasn’t getting a request for the full finished MG manuscript (not the WIP 😀) from an agent I could only dream would ask. (Yippy!)

It was not agreeing to a critique exchange with a writer whose opinion and work I think highly of. (Hoorah!)

It wasn't even penning a first draft to a Picture Book whose character tickles my funny bone every time I think of it. (Hee-Hee!)

No. What made me truly happy was that one day I had an hour and a half video chat with DS, and he looked handsome and healthy. 

What made me happy was seeing DD’s post on an upcoming months’ performing schedule, which looked robust and promising. I know how important this is for her.

What made me happiest was that family members in Israel, all stricken with Covid, passed through it quickly and in fine shape.

This is what I realized: none of the things that made me happiest were up to me. The things that are up to me were good, but they ranked behind.

And all of this reminded me that happiness is not something to seek. Just count the moments of grace and appreciate they happened.

Appreciating you, if you are reading this, right now.

INTERNET TROLLS and OTHER PESTS

 

For the one percent who do not know what a troll is, there are two definitions.

1.      (In folklore) An ugly creature depicted as either a giant or a dwarf. 

1.      A person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content. In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.—

Neither is pretty, but the first have use in fairytales while the second are as useless as can be.

 

It’s tempting to engage with #2 trolls. Here’s my way: NEVER-EVER do that. This is precisely what these dark tormented souls want us to do. We can’t fix them. We can block them on sites we control, but they will pop up on others. They don’t change/reform/see the light from thoughtful responses.

 

Putting on my psychologist hat, I understand the online trolling impulse comes from the need for attention. If they can’t get it constructively, they get it any which way. It’s a misunderstanding of the notion of “being somebody.” To these poor souls, any attention is better than being ignored.

 

My prescription: IGNORE.

SOME SANTAS ARE JEWISH

 

Yes, Virginia, I’ve seen it with my own eyes

When DS was in preschool, one of my mothers’-support group friends related a scandal in her daughter’s pre-school. Like us, my friend’s family is Jewish. Unlike us, who sent our kids to a Jewish pre-school, Christian families were the majority in her daughter’s school.

Shortly after Christmas one of the kids asked her daughter what Santa had given her. The three-year-old gave an answer, which set the stage to a scandalous reaction.

 

“We’re Jewish,” she said. “We get presents from real people.”

 

Other parents wanted my friend to teach her daughter that it was not okay to infer that Santa isn’t a real person, and do it ASAP.

 

The thing is— Santa is real if you dig deeper.

Santa Claus, the giver of presents to bring joy to children on the darkest days of the year, is an idea. As such, it is real. But abstractions are beyond children’s literal thinking and so various individuals dressed in red, and donning floppy red hats with white pompoms, have taken to manifest the spirit of gift-giving on this one particular day.

 

Some years later, our next-door neighbors, a Norwegian family, asked if their friend could come over to our house on Christmas Eve and dress up in the Santa outfit so he can make the appearance for their twin daughters, then barely a year old. As he’d be coming straight from work, they needed a place for him to get into the outfit. Of course, we said yes. They left his outfit and a sack full of presents for their twins at our house. Our kids, by then teens, found the whole thing rather funny. It hadn’t been part of their childhood.

 

When the friend showed up, he was so drunk I had to help him wiggle into the outfit and catch him so he wouldn’t fall down while doing so. He needed help at every step. I lit his way to the neighbors’ door, holding my breath so he not collapse on the sidewalk. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw their door open and their arranged-for Santa waddle inside.

 

The next year, our neighbors asked if our son, by then in first year of college, would do the favor of being their Santa. “Last year didn’t go too well,” they said. Apparently, they had no other friends who would volunteer.

 

I asked DS, and he said he’d do it. It would be like a fun acting gig. The day after, our neighbors told me they had never had such a great Santa. Apparently, DS prepared Norwegian sentences to utter in an altered “Ho-Ho-Ho” voice, and his whole act was so hilariously memorable that as far as they were concerned he has the volunteer job for life. This Jewish Santa was the real deal.

And he did indeed materialized the spirit of Santa Claus for the next few years. The year he went to graduate school in Paris, the neighbors were bereft that he would not be there for their yearly tradition. By the time he returned from France, the twins no longer needed this concretization of holiday spirit. Santa now came in their own gift giving and receiving, no red hat and white cotton wool beard needed.

 

But I can attest at least one Santa was Jewish. I have the picture to prove it.

Please, no humbugs, folks. May the joy of gift giving and receiving be with you the whole yearlong.

Generosity and blessings

for the

👉New Year👈