Good Haul

I’m as happy with what I didn’t get for Christmas as what I did.

• I got a white high-neck long-sleeved nightie. Psych!
• I got a book by Jonathan Kozol one of the last of the American heroes. Psych again!
• I got four sherbet glasses from the early 1920s that I'd fallen in love with at an antique store in November. They cost $25 for the set and are the color of a peacock’s wing. One has a chip in it and what could be nicer than that?
• I got a camera from Old Dave. I got this only after I found out he thought we were no longer exchanging gifts after all these years. No longer exchanging gifts! When I had just finished wrapping three sweaters and a new bathrobe for him since the old bathrobe has under the left arm something resembling a hash tag – you know, the symbol for number - only it’s 8 inches around. Pretty drafty for the cold nights when the wind is up. When he saw my face he said “Poor T! Go buy yourself something!” (This reminded me of when an old flame of my sister Nan said of her ironing that it certainly didn’t look like any shirt his mother would have ironed. Her response: “Does this meat cleaver that I’m about to bury in her your head look like anything of hers?” ha ha. ) So I did “go”, right to Best Buy where the clerk told me they no longer carry the Nikon D-90 that I have been burning to own but she looked it up on Amazon for me, she was that nice. She found a reputable seller, made sure it was a new one and not a rebuilt one and had me email the link to myself. Two hours later I had ordered thing and sometime next Monday it will land on my front porch.
• I also got a funny little cube of a radio with that little slot-like mouth into which you can set your iPhone so you can wake up to music OR news OR your own playlists and podcasts. Joy! This came my way only when because one of my kids asked for it as a gift and when I saw its awesome properties I asked for one too. (Well that’s not QUITE what happened. In the pre-Christmas chaos I ordered the darn thing twice from Amazon and so talked myself into wanting since an extra one was coming to my house anyway.)

I was happy about all these things and happy too that I didn’t have to talk myself into wanting a bunch of stuff I never heard of before, like a belt you can wear that gives you periodic electrical shocks to reduce your love handles or some such.So a nightie, a book, some glassware from the old days, a clock to mark the passage of time and a camera to record it with. It was almost as good a Christmas as the one when I got that model of the naked lady AND the see-through frog... And really Dave is a pretty good guy. Anyone who reads this blog knows that. Here's a picture of him that I've always really liked. (And now he even has a decent bathrobe :-))