A Perfect Tree

I should have just kept last year’s tree.

What do you think?

If you took a ruler to this one, measured its height, its width, its weight, I’m sure I’m off by no more than an inch or two, an ounce or so.

Douglas Fir, Fraser, Blue Spruce?

I don’t know.

I’m not a Christmas tree snob.

I know what I like. I cut right to the chase. It’s a scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: I go right up to the first one that catches my eye, put my arms around it, give it a hug, lift it off the ground, (measuring, approximating, inhaling the aroma), and if it feels right I take it home with me.

And after all the lights and 30 years worth of ornaments have been applied, damn if it doesn’t look just like last year’s tree!

I’m not complaining, but it’s eerie. It’s like there is some kind of relationship, some kind of connection, some inner design I am working to. Has there been building in the cave of my brain all year – ever since we took the last one down, another perfect, platonic Christmas tree?

I don’t give it any thought, but I know it when I put my arms around it.

Of course, the tree has got to fit into a particular space, in a room with a specific ceiling height, allow just enough room for, at most, eight people who’ll sit around it on Christmas morning.

How does that tree feel, among all the other trees? Like the ugly girl, the awkward boy, sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the dance floor hoping for an invitation?

Or is it like Vertigo, to cite another favorite film of mine, when Jimmy Stewart dresses up Kim Novak to look like the woman he loved and lost, only it turns out he’s dressing Kim to look like Kim. The joke’s on him.

Is last year’s tree playing a joke on me?

Clearly, the intent is to make this year’s tree look like last year’s tree, and the one before, and the one before that. We have an idea, and everything we do is calculated to achieve that effect.

I guess I should feel a bit more empathy for the tree. We make a big show of the selection but, ironically, we don’t respect its individuality. Then again, is it really another, different tree? Is it the ghost of Christmas trees past? And what of the rejects cast to the side, too large or too small, too thick or too dry?

This, at least, is a better fate than theirs. This one, at least, was not cut from the soil and strapped to a truck and driven 500 miles for naught.

At least this tree was chosen.

Look at it now, standing there in the corner, all dressed up in tiny lights and handmade ornaments. It knows the truth, but it is content to allow us our illusion.

Our illusion?

What year is this?

1980?

1990?

If you’re not careful you can lose control, be sucked back a dozen years or more, forever trapped in a Christmas or Christmases past.

Christmas trees are time machines!

If I look carefully, I can tell the year, or come darn close. But usually you don’t look too closely at a Christmas tree. Usually, when the tree is done, you allow your eyes to go out of focus, allow your mind to drift.

But there, that ornament of a hockey player made from dough, I could swear we got that in1992, when Bobby was on his first traveling team. That February the parents and players went to Canada by bus. That was the first of several successive school vacations spent, for the most part, in a hockey rink.

And there, those faded blue and green balls, with the gold tracery, those were Mary’s parents’ ornaments, on their tree, and the year is 1949.

The shuttle craft? Press the top and Spock says “Live long and prosper”. That’s only, what, 20 years old or so? It’s amazing that it has lasted, and prospered, for so long.

Now I remember: We haven’t always had our tree in the same spot in the house. It used to be in front of the slider, before the desk went in there. Once it was in the other corner of this room, and there’s the hole from the screw we put in the wall – where we ran a wire to the trunk of the tree, to keep it from falling over again.

I guess there have been a few mistakes made, a few trees that were too tall, or too wide, or whose trunks were too thick to fit into the stand. But even if we choose poorly, we can always add an extra layer of ornaments, or turn the tree so that its bad side is facing the wall, or squint our eyes a little more tightly, fracture the light, bend the shadow, give ourselves up to the overwhelming urge to forget.

Right now, staring at this tree, I’m having a hard time remembering any bad sides, any bad decisions, any bad Christmases.

It seems that somehow, whatever is going on in the world or in our lives, we manage to make it to that place where by unanimous consent, everything’s just fine the way it is.

Maybe it is an illusion. Maybe underneath the lights and the bulbs is an ugly, twisted, corpse of a tree.

But maybe just this once, at this time of year, we just have to blink our eyes a few times and let it be.

So, how’d I do this year?

Isn’t it a perfect tree?

$19.95

I’ve got this gift-giving thing down.
I’m getting my older brother, the Baconwave.
Just $19.95.
It makes perfect bacon, in the microwave.
It’s a joke, of sorts. Bob lives down in Florida, and has been on this health kick lately. He says he’s given up the Guinness, and the fried Ring Dings. He runs now, in the mornings – and pumps iron when he gets home from work. He looks ten years younger, says he feels great.
I guess I’m being mean.
For Dad, it’s the Forearm Forklift Strap Set, just $19.95.
Dad’s 85, in great shape – and with absolutely no interest, or need, for moving or mowing or doing much of anything, except traveling. I tell him not to, but he sends me his itineraries. I don’t care to know the exact time and location of the good times he is having. I think he does it to irk me.
Not that he ever will, but with the Forearm Forklift Strap Set now - if he wanted, he could move a dresser or a refrigerator all by himself.
Hell, he never likes what I get him anyway. He doesn’t really need anything. I guess it’s a kind of sarcastic gift – if gifts can be sarcastic.
I guess I just have the holiday spirit. Well, maybe not the holiday spirit, but one of the holiday spirits. Grumpy? Sneezy? Doc?
I’m getting Dave, down the street, the Weed Thrasher: mainly because I like the name. It sounds like something you beat the weeds up with: give those nasty dandelions a thrashing.
Just $19.95, too.
Dave has no lawn, or yard, to speak of. He’s got concrete, and mulch, and that faux granite tile that’s suppose to last a thousand years, around his in-ground pool. If a stray leaf wanders onto his property, he pays someone to immediately Hoover it off.
Do you sense a pattern here?
I like to give people useless gifts, especially if the price is right.
Maybe I’m angry because – as a child, I never really got what I wanted. My parents could never get it just right: it was always the wrong brand, or wrong color, or the wrong size. And when that happens you have to smile and, with a super-human effort, stop yourself from turning immediately back to your pile and frantically ripping into what’s left.
All these gifts that I’m considering giving, are items that I’ve seen on TV too: odd items from late night television that I considered buying for myself. Eventually though, I fought off the urge and, instead, bought them for friends and family.
I am also intrigued that everything is $19.95.
I think it’s a conspiracy of some kind.
I get the feeling that they (the same ‘they‘as always) have figured out that $19.95 is the perfect price. It sounds nice to say. It tricks your mouth into mimicking a smile. You can’t say ‘nineteen ninety-five’ without grinning: try it. It’s also a price just high enough to allow you believe that you have a chance of getting something that actually does what it is advertised to do, and just low enough not to care too much if it does not.
It’s the magic number. Repeat after me: just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Just $19.95.
Someone told me it’s the As Seen on TV Index.
When the economy is strong, the ASOT Index goes up. Just last Christmas it was at $24.95. Since then though, it’s dropped like a stone.
Whatever it is, it’s working.
If it’s $19.95 I go right for my credit card.
I’m seriously considering getting the Ding King for myself. It’s this little contraption with thumb screws and suction cups that you place over the little dings you get on your car, and just by tightening the thumb screws – the ding pops out.
Just $19.95.
Not that I have a car worth taking the time to make cosmetic repairs to: I mean, the old Camry could benefit from an extended Ding King session, if I could get the sap off it first. But why bother: we don’t have a garage, so if I clean the sap off the car it would soon be covered again. And in a year or two it will be completely encased in sap, like a bug in amber.
I’m thinking about getting Mary a Snuggie.
You guessed it: just $19.95.
It’s just a big blanket, with sleeves.
She’s worried about work, about the economy, about me – so when she gets home she usually just curls up into a ball, on the couch, and passes out until it’s time to go to sleep. With the Snuggie she can be transferred directly from the couch to the bed.
I might get Riddex Plus, too: just $19.95.
I think we have mice in the attic, or the eaves or somewhere in the walls. They sound like they’re skating: pushing a puck in front of them. You just plug in the little Riddex box in any outlet, and the ultrasonic sound waves – they promise, drive the mice away (or distract them long enough to keep them from scoring).
There’s so much more, so many odd, unusual inventions: so many labor saving devices for just $19.95. The Girl Crush Jewelry Maker. The Ultrasonic Jewelry Cleaner. The Blendy Pen. Ambervision. Mighty Putty. Save-A-Blade. The Big City Slider Station? The Auto Vent SPV. Doggy Steps for aged pets. The list just goes on and on.
I think they should offer a mystery gift, filled with a random assortment of five or six of these odd devices, for just $19.95.
Is that possible?
Sure, why not. They don’t really cost $19.95. That’s just the magic number. They could sell them for a buck, or twenty dollars, or $3.99. But they’ve figured out they’ll sell the most if they price them at the magic number.
I might just go down the list and buy everything they have for $19.95. Then, when everything arrives, cover everything up in the cheapest wrapping paper I can find, load it all into the Camry’s sap-encased trunk, and go around town passing out gifts, pretending I’m the As Seen on TV Santa.
It’s not the holiday spirit. But what do you want, for $19.95?

I'm Not Counting

“Will the days fly by?” my youngest son asked me, early this morning.
Christmas, of course, was what was on his mind.
‘That depends’, I mumbled, trudging down the stairs. ‘That depends,’ I said, but it felt like a lie.
We certainly help create the illusion that the days are hurtling toward us, like snowflakes sucked into our high beams on the highway. But if we were to slow, then stop – get out of the car, turn our heads to the stars, we might find the flakes falling like, well, like snowflakes fall, so slowly to the ground.
I’m sure the single flake once it lands, looks back at the sky, and sighs.
‘I wish’, it probably says in a whisper, in that ever so low snowflake hushed tone, ‘I wish that I could feel what it’s like to fall through the sky, to float through the air, to have that feeling just one more time’.
It does no good to console the flake with references to the water cycle (but of course I make a pathetic try).
“It’s like the rain,” I say to my son over a hurried breakfast, “it falls to earth and then, fills the rivers, and then, well you know – ends up back in the sky.”
He gets what I am saying, smiles, and then to my magic ointment adds his fly.
“But what if I can’t wait, to evaporate?”
“You have no choice,” I say, impatiently, watching the minutes go by: “we are either too early, or too late”.
Even as I say that, though I won’t publicly admit it - I reject that fate.
I too hope for a moment eternal: in Christmas everyday, in Leap Year, and Un-Birthdays.
Everything I write I want to be poetry.
Every bite I take, I am hoping will taste of ecstasy.
Every breath I take.
Will the days fly by?
I suppose what I want to say – to live, is a life of days indistinguishable from one another. Not indistinguishable because they are so drab and gray and uneventful that they all blur into one groaning mass. But indistinguishable because each has a subtle, unique beauty, a beauty hiding, like a drop of rain in a swollen river.
I think what I mean to say, is that we do not need to speed up or slow down these days. We simply need to take the time – there is time, to consider, to touch, to remark on each one.
Today the sun was in my eyes as I drove my son to the Middle School.
The bearded traffic warden was his usual impatient self, frenetically conducting the cacophonous traffic: the yellow bus bassoons, the reedy SUVs, the breathless flutes of four-cylinder youth.
I merged into the traffic, split off from the high school stream, leaped over the confluence of high and middle schools, looped around the future movie studio lot, dropped off my snowflake and didn’t look back.
I know he will make it back home, this afternoon.
I know the day will fly by and he will once again drop down out of the sky, sigh, and say to me, “how many days before Christmas, Dad?”
And I will lie, and say “I’m not counting.”

Pilgrim Labor Crisis

The Plimoth Plantation, the nation’s leading producer of 17th Century Impersonators, announced this month that – in the face of dramatic drops in attendance and revenue at its ‘theme park’, and following on the announced layoffs of experienced staff members, that it is considering several dramatic new business strategies, up to and including changing centuries.
The following is a list – obtained from a former Lieutenant Governor of the Plymouth Colony who wishes to remain anachronistic, of the key strategies being considered by Plantation leadership.

The 20th Century:
Instead of Plymouth in its infancy (circa 1627), the Plantation is considering shifting its focus to the Plantation in its infancy – namely, the Plantation in the mid 20th Century (circa 1968), when it served the community as a kind of de-facto commune, getting the region’s long-hairs off the streets. (Ironically, ‘coole’ and ‘far oute’ were expressions used in both of these historic periods.)

1610
Ten years before the Pilgrim’s landed, the Wampanoag village of Pawtuxet flourished. A focus on that year would allow for the layoff of the entire impersonator staff, the refinancing of every unoccupied home on Leyden Street, the installation of basic utilities (specifically, flush toilets), and the addition to the town’s low income housing, of 11 desirable units.

Pilgrim FX
For this approach, the impersonators remain faithful to the historical record BUT, sophisticated digital technologies and effects are utilized to create horrifically realistic portrayals of the more bloody (and therefore crowd-pleasing) moments in the Pilgrim story, including:
§ The beheading of King Phillip.
§ The drowning of Dorothy Bradford.
§ The big splinter that John Billington had removed from his butt.
§ And the last big layoff (2001) of 17th Century Impersonators.

The Mayflower III Paddlewheel Plymouth Harbor Booze Cruise
Three times a day, five times on weekends, the Mayflower – equipped with it’s own working Paddlewheel, would offer mini-historic-booze-cruises of the harbor during which costumed impersonators - confined to cages on deck, could be taunted and teased by the paying customers.

The Haunting of Burial Hill House
Requiring no Pilgrim impersonators at all, the 17th Century Pilgrim Settlement would instead, be transformed into a first-rate haunted house

The Pilgrim Improv Troupe?
You buy a ticket and we make it up as we go.

Timeshare Anyone?
Imagine spending a week in your own 17th century home, eating gruel, fending off pesky savages, and – helping to keep the towns’ rapidly rising number of wild turkeys in check. For just $10,000 you could spend one week every year in one of the world’s most famous single family homes (the first to order will have their choice of the Bradford, Winslow, or Standish units) – or, exchange your unit for a fortnight in a 9thth Century British hovel (eating gruel, fending off pesky Vikings) or a long weekend in 3rd Century Rome (eating gruel, fending off pesky barbarians).

Seven Flags, Plymouth
You want rides? We got rides! Well, one at least. The Mayflower Experience: a sort of roller coaster with only one large car – in which up to a hundred ticket holders are forced together, doused with saltwater, subjected to nasty smells, tumbled like clothes in the dryer, blasted with pre-recorded religious aphorisms, then left to fend for themselves somewhere else.
Want to go again?

Alternative History?
What if?
What if little Johnny Billington had actually discovered the Pacific Ocean (and not the pond that now bears his name) settled in California, planted a vineyard, developed the famous ‘Pilgrim Pub & Grub’ chain, eventually moving their massive World headquarters (designed to look like a big glass hamburger) to Plymouth’s non-historic, honky-tonk waterfront?
What if?
What if the term ‘Pilgrim’ were synonymous with ‘party animal.’
What if?
What if Squanto’s plan was to wait until he had earned the confidence of the Pilgrims then, when they were all asleep...

Let The Inmates Run the Asylum!
What if, instead of cutting middle management and asking the indentured servants (impersonators) to do more with less, we get rid of ourselves (the high-priced upper management, museum types, Mayflower descendants, retailers) and instead, really, honestly, obsessively, focus on creating an actual working, 17th Century settlement.
Hire dozens of additional impersonators and have them actually on site, all the time.
Instead of giving into today’s economic realities, fully embrace the 17th Century’s realities. Live off the corn we grow, the livestock we raise, and the beer we brew. Have perhaps, two or three sets of impersonators for each historic personage.
Script an entire year – and give visitors a chance to travel back in time – to a specific day, happening in real time.
Now that would be exciting.
That would be a reality worth paying for.
Let the Pilgrims actually run Pilgrim Town!
What a concept!

Ye Olde Story

There are quite a few places in Plymouth that proudly wear the “Ye’.
There are also a great many businesses and tourist attractions that claim to be olde, with the extra ‘e’, which is either an outright affectation, or an implication that the business in question is in part – or whole, really, really old. (An olde, but goode?)
There are also businesses that come right out and slap the word ‘Pilgrim’ onto their store front, the sides of delivery vans, brochures, business cards, web sites and the like – regardless of whether their buildings are olde, their ancestors came off the Mayflower, or they specialize in Pilgrim kitsch.
But there are only a handful of businesses in this historic community that can claim all three.
I call it, The Plyfecta!
And then there is my favorite Laundromat.
I probably shouldn’t say it’s my favorite, because that implies I’ve tried many and prefer one: actually I only recently visited this particular Laundromat, when our dryer kicked ye olde bucket.
But when I realized I had to find a Laundromat, I knew just where I would go.
Not only is the place where I chose to dry my delicates a certified Ye, and an olde but goode, and features ‘Pilgrim’ in its business name, but the wash and fold folks on Sandwich Street take it one big affectated step further - featuring a wishing well – one of America’s most endearing faux lawn decorations, in their name.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat!
If you’re looking for a Laundromat, how can you top that?
Well, how about with the words of Mary Elizabeth Dibley, the Plymouth colony’s first washerwoman, from her historic diary, entitled “Of Plimoth Laundree”.

“Being thus arrived in a good harbore and brought safe to lande, we felle upon our knees &, what do thee knowe, but founde we were knee deepe in a small brooke of pleasante waters and, the thoughte came to me – well, actuallethly, the smell came to me, and I remarked to Goodman Bradford that he was ripe in age and stench and that I would, for less than he might imagineth, undertake to wash his doublet right then and there. Blessed be ye God of heaven, who had brought us over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered us from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set our feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente and, despite all that, left both man and woman with an all too earthly odor and a chance to make a bucke”

Unbelievable!
Yeah, you’re right, it is unbelievable. Not the Laundromat – no, that exists, but Mary Dibley – ye olde Pilgrim Washer-woman: I made her up. I got carried away by the Ye, and the Olde, and the whole Pilgrim shtick. But can you blame me? Whether its trinkets or toiletries or auto parts, history is good for the bottom line. Heck, even the movie folks got into the act (rumor has it, that their first idea was to call their venture, Ye Olde Pilgrim Celluloid Companie).
On one hand, it’s silly. On the other hand, it associates your business with people who were adventurous, brave, hard working and – most importantly, successful.
At its worse, Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat is just that – a Laundromat.
At its best, washing your clothes in the waters of Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well Laundromat might somehow imbue them with the spirit and vitality of our stalwart Pilgrim forbears.
Plymouth was the first town in America where someone casually remarked to someone else – (and someone else wrote it down) ‘there’s something in the water’. And if its ‘in the water’, the implication is clear, it could get ‘in the clothes’!
Its possible!
I should make it clear though that, the owners of Ye Olde Wash and Fold, are not making that kind of claim: not specifically, not outright. The only claim they make – as far I can tell, is that they are not responsible for lost or stolen items.
The attendants, I should inform you, do not wear traditional Pilgrim garb.
And the workers don’t look puzzled when you ask them where you might get an espresso while your doublet is drying.
Though directly across the street is the Jabez Howland home – an actual 1667 saltbox style, cedar shingled structure with leaded windows and tours available – the building that the Laundromat occupies seems to have had almost all vestiges of its past put through the rinse cycle.
Instead of the wide plank floors that tourists might envision, there are only the remnants of artificial floor coverings and, beneath that, what appears to be plywood.
Instead of traditional clapboard there is aluminum siding, and a giant flap on the southern side of the building that – when opened, allows the servicing of the washing machines from the outside of the building.
Inside pop music plays from a few small speakers, and two large ceiling fans turn counter-clockwise while several dozen washers and dryers roll monotonously forward.
It is definitely cleaner than your typical Pilgrim household.
It’s definitely warmer than your typical Pilgrim home.
But hey, whadda ya want: this is America!
We like to associate ourselves with the best of our past, but if the history actually shows through - if the old beams haven’t been plastered over and the wide plank floors haven’t been hidden under at least two coats of linoleum, something must be wrong.
Which is not to say that Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well can’t do the job.
If your clothes need washing but history bores you, rest assured – you won’t have to use a washboard: there is an abundance of late model Maytag machines.
Don’t be confused: the pilgrims did not come over on the Maytag – though if they had they would have arrived with brighter whites, and more vibrant colors.
Ye Olde Pilgrim Washing Well is, in the end, just a Laundromat.
If you’re planning a visit, bring something good to read.
Bring quarters too: the machines don’t take shillings, or pence, or Canadian coins.
Bring a basket or two of Ye and Olde, and maybe a pint of Olde Grand Dad. After an hour or so taking it all in, who knows how bright your whites might be?