Losing The Quiet

A crane hunts fish. Photo by me, April 2025.

I have not been writing much on my website this year, but that does not mean I have not been thinking about it. I think about it a couple of times a week, but I have been making notes, researching (often in the field) for my next novel and writing the first draft. Writing a book takes precedence over writing on a blog. 

A warm Georgia Easter Sunday in the 80s. Photo by me, April 2025.

 

The dark spots in the water below are turtles. I spotted at least thirty of them, but there were probably more. Photo by me, April 2025.

I have been taking my long walks in nature too, getting in the miles and enjoying the scenery. This past Sunday I saw a few deer and lots of turtles. I consider myself fortunate to be able to get out near home and enjoy the woods and not have to drive so far as when I lived in the city. The older I get, the more I cherish time away from people and the noise of society. The hubbub, the nightlife and parties stopped ten years ago in my early forties as I aged out of the scene. A person has to know when to get out and I am thankful for being out of it and being no worse for the wear.  I have reverted back to how I lived as a child and that was even more rural than where I now live. My long term introverted desire is returning to the countryside where I see and hear no neighbors. 

Photo by me, April 2025.

There are too many people crowded together into cities and suburbs in this country and you realize that if you ever do cross country travel by car through the wide empty spaces. When I was born in 1973 the U.S. population was 211 million people and now it is 341 million. The population of Georgia was 4.9 million and in 2024 it was 11.1 million which is more than double in fifty odd years. Georgia is the eighth most populous state and it feels like it with the traffic, the sprawl and everything in and around Atlanta being overcrowded. 

The continual plowing under of Georgia for more sprawl. The conversion of GA Highway 316 between I-85 and Athens from an at grade road to a controlled access highway such as GA 400. Photo by me, April 2025.

Most every place I knew as a younger person has become unrecognizable and that is difficult to think of as progress or being okay. I would be pleased if people would find some other state to pave over and sit in traffic as Georgia could use a break. The growth is unlikely to stop, but it is nice to think it could. Not only are we losing the natural landscape and the wildlife, but we are losing the quiet too.

Tress Facing Up

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

 

Browsing photography books on a recent rainy day I flipped through a book titled Facing Up by photographer Arthur Tress. I had not heard of him before and had never seen any of his photographs. It was an exciting bit of discovery to find something unfamiliar and immediately love it like in my younger days of looking across a dance floor and finding love at two in the morning.

 

Tress is a gay male American photographer born in Brooklyn in 1940. His first experience with a camera came at the age of twelve, taking photographs in Coney Island and this is where he began developing his own eye for framing the world in photographs. He studied painting and graduated from Bard before moving to Paris and traveling to Asia, Africa, Mexico and around Europe. Returning to the U.S., he photographed the civil rights movement of the 60s, politics and the Beatles. For the rest of his career he has photographed urban decay, children, life in Appalachia, male nudes and many other subjects that appear in his numerous books and in the collections of museums.

He was a peer and competitor of the more well known Robert Mapplethorpe. Tress' work is much more varied and interesting than Mapplethorpe, who seemed to be obsessed with orchids and sticking objects up his own ass and the asses of others. There is a place for Mapplethorpe, his work and his admirers (count me as one), but even as someone who has stood in museums and admired the stunning work hanging on a wall at close range, I do not get any sense of soaring or delightful inspiration from his work. Mapplethorpe, without fail, leaves me cold. 

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

By contrast, the male nudes by Tress in Facing Up are playful, fun, imaginative and still retain their eroticism without relying on vulgarity to shock a viewer. I get a sense of humor behind the photographs that dulls the edgy seriousness of the skill that it took to pose the models and shoot them. The intimacy between the eye behind the camera and subject feels natural.

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

 

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

The photos in this book were shot in the late 1970s. Tress lived on the west side of Manhattan near the abandoned Christopher Street Piers along the Hudson River that have since became infamous in gay history before the AIDS epidemic. The piers were a place where gay men would nude sun bathe, cruise for sex, do drugs, and engage in prostitution among other elicit activities. Among those ruins, artists such as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz would create  their art and find inspiration. It was Tress who introduced Wojnarowicz to the piers. Not in this book, but of note is that Tress also photographed in the cruising grounds of The Rambles in Central Park in the more secretive era of the mid 1960s.

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

 

Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

This photograph titled Band-aid Fantasy taken in 1977 is my favorite from the book. There is a tenderness about this photo and the peeling away of the band-aid from the bare leg. There is sexiness too with the long legs of the two males exposed from the short shorts sitting alone together on the stairwell. As with all great photographs it is also an excellent manipulation of light and shadow. Arthur Tress, Facing Up.

 

Facing Up was first published in 1980 and again in 2004. If you can find a copy then grab it. Out of his long career and the accolades that he has received, it appears that his photos of gay life have been the least exhibited and the least appreciated. His photos of gay life deserve more recognition.  Stanford University does host an online collection of seventy of his photographs, including some of the nudes from Facing Up, here titled Gay Fantasies.

 

There is a recent documentary that has  been made about Arthur Tress titled Arthur Tress: Water's Edge.   Unfortunately, it does not appear to be widely available and I have not seen it.

 

Further reading about Arthur Tress: an excellent, lengthy interview with him from 1999.

Falling From The Stars

 

 

When I first heard the music of Nick Drake twenty something years ago, I did not know what he looked like so I did not know he was beautiful, nor did I know that he committed suicide in 1974 at a young age or that he was from a posh upbringing in the English countryside or that he was severely mentally ill. I simply liked the music that I was introduced to through his album Five Leaves Left from 1969. I liked his soft, fragile voice singing the introspective lyrics he had written over his phenomenal guitar playing and the string arrangements. 

Nick Drake in 1969 at the beginning of his music career.

When I was ready, I listened to his next album, Bryter Layter from 1971, and what a surprise it held as if he had matured and taken on a more jazz and rock influenced style. The songwriting was solid and slightly more humorous with self effacement. Bryter Layter became my favorite album of his and by then I knew enough about him to know that he was tall with a deep dimple in his chin, had shy eyes, a goofy smile that was not seen enough and was a beautiful man. I also knew about his death. 

Nick Drake in 1971. In two years Nick was a different person.

He was largely unresponsive to the world during the photo shoot in 1971.

By the time I came to his third and final album released in his lifetime, Pink Moon from 1972, it was obvious from the lyrics and spare recording that something had been seriously wrong with him and that he had fallen into a terrible state in three short years. The last song on the album, From The Morning, from the moment it I first heard it until today has always sounded like goodbye. 

 

Nick recorded other music after Pink Moon, though he struggled to write much at all sequestered at his childhood home and had a final studio recording session in 1974 for his potential fourth album. During that session, he had declined to a degree that he was unable to sing and play at the same time. His voice and lyrics on those five songs (Black Eyed Dog, Hanging On A Star, Rider on the Wheel , Tow The Line & Voices) are that of a broken human being. There is something sad and uncomfortable that those recordings were released as they feel like exploitation of someone who was mentally ill.

After the music, I began to watch the documentaries and read the books about Nick Drake in hopes of understanding how this twenty-six year old fell from the stars so quickly. In the years since his death, it seems that many fans have placed more emphasis on his life and death instead of his music. He has been made out to be a handsome, romantic young poet that was wrongly overlooked in his time and could only be appreciated and mythologized after he had been sacrificed. The music is often secondary to the image that has been constructed around him like a brittle sarcophagus much like what has happened to Kurt Cobain. For those that wish to compare Drake to Vincent van Gogh, please seek out some decency within yourself.

Upon recently reading the 2023 biography, Nick Drake - The Life by Richard Morton Jack, did it seem a more honest portrait of him finally emerged from the misty veil of legend. Other books about Drake have only given the last three years of his life a superficial overview and neglected the details of how ill Nick Drake became at the end. Not only was he extremely ill with schizophrenia, under his parents care in the country, but his personality had become violent and destructive when he was not catatonic, running away at all hours and for days, in the hospital, getting detained by police or being erratic in every possible manner. He refused to take his medicines, was getting conflicting medical opinions, had one shock therapy treatment, was overly indulged by his well-meaning parents and he should have been sectioned as he was possibly a danger to others. He did prove to be a danger to himself when he committed suicide by swallowing sixty pills, stripping down to his underwear and laying atop his bed on November 25, 1974 to die.

Some fans and even some of his friends will quibble with the word suicide to describe what Nick did, but you do not ingest sixty pills that you know will kill you and hope to survive the same as placing the end of a barrel of a shotgun in your mouth. They suggest that because he did not leave a note that it could not be suicide, but Nick was no longer able to communicate through writing or speaking. He left his music as his final words and that is what should matter. By denying him of his last act of suicide, people contribute to the stigma of shame that people associate with it.

Another point of contention among Nick Drake fans is his sexuality and that is again discussed at points in this book. Some bristle at the suggestion that Nick was gay and claim that there is no way that he was anything but straight. Their argument is that if Nick was gay then why has no one of the same sex come forward to claim they had a tryst with him? I respond by asking, if Nick was straight then why have no women come forward after all these decades to claim they had a romantic relationship, or a one night stand with him? All that has come forward is that he had strictly platonic relationships with a couple of women, never discussed women with anyone in a sexual manner and that has been it. His life has been combed over again and again and there is equally no evidence that he was heterosexual. Perhaps, Nick did not even know what he was.

When I closed this book I realized that there was nothing to romanticize about Nick Drake or his life. He suffered in his last years and made those around him suffer too. After the countless biographies and documentaries, it is important to remember that it is best to enjoy his music as I do, but do not put him on a pedestal cast in bronze.

Nick's friend, John Martyn, recorded this song about him.

The White, Cold Heart of January

A snowy view from the second floor of my house. Photo by me, January 2025.

It was only supposed to be flurries here and it mostly was for over three hours, but the atmosphere was so dry that it became a high ratio snow and it gushed. At the three in the afternoon the snowfall began it was twenty-three degrees with a dewpoint of twelve and those were unusual circumstances to produce snow around here. A typical snow here is one with a high moisture content, produces big and fat flakes, is sloppy, heavy and occurs under conditions with temperatures in the low thirties and dewpoints in the upper twenties to low thirties. Yesterday, the conditions were different with an Arctic airmass in place and the snow was dry and productive. It has been a few years since a snow of this type occurred here and when it does, it creates havoc with quick accumulations that land on roadways turning them quickly into sheets of hard ice.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Photo by me, January 2025.

The storm's arrival at rush hour stranded people on the untreated roads over the hilly terrain of this area. Cars unable to climb these icy hills  were abandoned and if people were close enough to home they walked the remainder of the way. I observed many stunned and bone chilled cold people on foot coming up my hill from the river on a road that has no sidewalks, but plenty of curves.

 

 

If you are a native to northern Georgia, like I am, then you will remember the similar scenario that occurred on January 12, 1982 and it was called SnowJam! I was a couple of months shy of turning nine, but that was a fun storm as a kid and a horror show for adults. In some ways, it is reassuring to think that as much as life has changed in those forty-three years, that we Georgians make getting stuck in the snow a memorable adventure.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Photo by me, January 2025.

 

This was a minor snow here, amounting to an inch, that was a big headache for some. So far this winter, there have been five inches of snow here and within a short period of only eleven days between two storms in the white, cold heart of January. This is above average and compared to the two previous winters there was no snow, not even a flurry.

The cold has been exceptional too. This morning it was eleven degrees here and three degrees above zero in the mountain valley town of Blairsville. The U.S. Forest service stations at Cohutta dropped to six degrees and the one at Brasstown (not to be confused with the state's highest peak, Brasstown Bald) achieved four degrees. The temperature was below freezing here from 6PM Sunday to 1PM Wednesday for a total of sixty-seven straight hours. We reached a high this afternoon of thirty-four for only a couple of hours.

The U.S. snow depth map for January 22, 2025. Courtesy NOAA.

Aside from the cold, the most impressive aspect from a regional perspective was the record breaking snow from the southern tip of Texas, along the Gulf Coast and South Atlantic Coast. For most in the coastal areas this truly was a once in a lifetime storm and in some places it was record shattering.

Today's visible satellite imagery showing the snowfall through southern Alabama, northern Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

New Orleans received over nine inches breaking a record from 1963 by seven inches.

Mobile, Alabama saw eight inches.

Snow meets beach on the Florida Gulf Coast.

Pensacola Beach, Florida had seven and a half inches.

The small southwest Georgia town of Camilla accumulated eight inches.

Milton, Florida broke the state record for the most snow ever with 8.8 inches.

Savannah reported three inches of snow, but I suspect most of it was probably sleet.

This was a rare storm in that areas further to the south saw more snow than areas of the region to the north. Atlanta's record was not so impressive as it snows there more often than the other places listed. Atlanta broke the daily record  for January 21st from 1983 with 1.1 inches. I was ten at the time and do not have any particular memories of that snow, which was probably more where I lived in the northwest part of the state. We may have called that SnowJam 83! as every snowstorm after 1982 for several years was called SnowJam!

The Reunion Project

Photo by me, January 2025.

 

Just after six in the morning last Friday, the snow poured and kept at it for hours. It was a beautiful snow, wet and heavy coating the landscape in thick white frosting. When the snow tapered off as a period of freezing rain, there was four inches.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Photo by me, January 2025.

It was the most snow we have had in a few years and the greatest storm of the two we have had at this house since purchasing it. The snow lingered on the ground until Monday and by that time I was ready for it to be gone. Snow excites me less the older I get as if my lifelong romance with it has melted. I hope this is the only significant snow this winter.

Photo by me, January 2025.

Living on a winding road on a hill above a river there was no possibility of getting out on Friday. By Saturday a plow cleared the road and it was safe to get out the during the day before the refreeze of the slush by nightfall. In Monroe, Georgia, where there was less snow than where I live, I found a snowman outside a church.

*

This month I began writing the first draft of my fourth novel. It is a story independent of my four previous books, meaning it has nothing to do with my life, though of course it draws from my experiences. The folder on my desktop where I store my writing is labeled The Reunion Project, so I will call it that until enough of the story is written and the real title comes to me. As much as I would like to write a novel about Atlanta punks in the 80s, this book is set in the present day. The present is too interesting to neglect. At this stage, I have no idea of how long it will take me to write this novel.

 

Information Society, Walking Away (late 1988)

Time Is A Wild River

 

There was no meeting with an old lover in a grocery store as a piano softly played and the snow did not turn to rain in 2024. There was the potential to meet an old lover as we were in the same county in another state. I turned an invitation over and over in my mind as I watched boats on the canals of Fort Lauderdale. I crossed the Everglades, still turning it over when I stopped in his county. I withheld the invitation and neither did we happen upon each other through a chance encounter. The arbitrary boundaries on the map that compressed us into the same few square miles were not strong enough to force a meeting.

Dan Fogelberg's song is nice enough, but as much as songs may sometimes underline our reality, they do not create it.

 

I did speak with an old lover a few times this year. I wanted his side, his recollections and then after he read an advance copy of Shadow's Gravity, I wanted his opinion. Had I gotten enough right about us? His verdict was that I had in the condensed space there was for him. He said I made him sound too beautiful, but he was and still is. He invited me to meet him on a levee again, to watch the sky, talk about the future and spar over George Michael. He vowed not to slap me the next go-around. I rubbed my cheek and I chided him that I had not drowned.

 

There were deaths among my family and I saw some relatives who I had not seen in too long of a time. Life is filled with gaps and silences as much as we may say we are busy filling that time with the noise of everyday living.

My favorite moments this year were meeting my great nephew a few times and watching my nephew get married. I am not much of an advice giver, but I wished him good luck.

 

I loafed, gardened, finished writing the end of the Aviary Hill Series, read other writers, listened to music new and old, swam in the ocean (too far out as per usual), hiked and walked more miles than I could ever write about.

Carter campaign memorabilia on display at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Photos by me, March 2016.

Goodbye, President Jimmy Carter. Thank you to him for helping to preserve the Chattahoochee River.

 

At the end of this year, I kept asking myself where the time had gone, not just 2024 but all of my fifty-one years. I reflected and remembered what I wrote in Dweller On The Boundary: time is a wild river like one I swam in as a boy or watched beside the Indian mounds. Time is downstream from where I type this and it does not matter. The world keeps on spinning.

 

My favorite new song of 2024 was And Nothing is Forever from the Cure's 2024 album.

My favorite new to me old song for 2024 is Cars and Explosions (1979) by a long ago Atlanta band called The Fans.

I saw so few new films this year and that is unusual for me. My favorite among the limited selection was Sebastian.

The Christmas Spirit Shebang

Catching the Christmas spirit. December 2024. Photo by me.

This has felt like the quickest Christmas season, I thought, as I walked into Rich's, or the shell of what was a Rich's department store until Macy's murdered the Atlanta institution. I will forever have a warm place in my heart for Rich's, the Christmas of 1992, working there and being a part of the team to bring the holidays alive at a local senior living home and dodging Holly under her mistletoe trap. I also would like to relive the late seventies with my grandfather purchasing me chocolate covered peanuts from the bakery at the Cumberland Mall Rich's or the eighties with my mother buying eclairs from the bakery at the Cobb Center store. Yet, those are Christmases past and the scent of expensive leather no longer wafted through the store as I looked at the marble floor.

I have written about so many Christmases from the 1970s through the 2000s which were terrible, strange, oddly funny or weird in all four of my books that you could collectively call them The Art of Bad Christmases Series. I promise, they are fun for the entire family and should be read with a cup of whiskey laced eggnog by the fireplace.

I hear he's nice. December 2024. Photo by me.

 

December 2024. Photo by me.

Monkey Gone To Heaven according to The Pixies. December 2024. Photo by me.

The Christmas of 2024 was tame and could never be used as inspiration for a story in a book and there are no complaints about that. I went to see Christmas light displays, made notes for my next novel and had some satisfying conversations.

I also got sick on the weekend before Christmas. While catching the Christmas spirit among the last minute crowds on Sunday at a mall, I caught a cold. Perhaps I caught it from the foolish man wearing gym shorts in forty degree weather as he trudged by hopefully seeking out a bargain on some pants and underwear.

Tube Socks The Stray Kitty performs.  December 2024. Photo by me.

My nose ran marathons and I had used so much Kleenex that I was Rudolph or an 80s rock star coke fiend without the fun. That was the big mishap this year. There were no family secrets revealed and nothing smelling of reindeer shit came down the chimney; there was no Claxton fruitcake this year either. I napped on Christmas and worked my way through a box of chocolates, not the old and discolored kind my grandmother gave me each Christmas as a kid that resembled something from a litterbox. The neighborhood stray cat visited briefly and performed Stop, Drop and Roll in the rose beds too.

Between naps, cat entertainment, cups of coffee and squirts of nasal spray my thoughts went through Shadow's Gravity, my last novel. I was replaying scenes and I kept getting stuck on how I had described a three-way sex scene as going skiing. I had no embarrassment over it and laughed several times that I had the guts to write honestly about my early twenties. It was the Christmas of the three of us singing RENT's Seasons of Love on repeat so... Rarely do I ever think of a reader's reaction to something I write, but about that particular scene I have. I hope they laughed and that image is permanently burned into their brain.

My mind also pondered The Dead Internet Theory, which is not entirely true, but with AI and bots it seems to be becoming more true by the passing day. If it can take down social media or help create a new and better one then maybe it is not such a bad thing. I miss the 90s internet of Geocities websites and AOL chatrooms on every imaginable topic. The internet had hope and Encarta! I still have a working AOL email address from the 90s which I check daily, radioxguy@aol.com, and I am never surrendering it.

The day after Christmas, I am glad the whole “shebang”, a fine word my mother often used and I never hear anymore, is over. Also, I swear I watched the music video for WHAM's Last Christmas in 4K only twice this year. The amount of hairspray that was used in the making of that video would be enough to fill an oil tanker.

Onward to 2025.

 

On The Sixth Day

 

Cover art by Jean-François Octave

Sweeping up leaves on the driveway, I realized there were only six days until Christmas. I tugged at my fleece pullover and wondered where had the time gone. It seems like the other day it was October and the leaves were only beginning to change and we were on the eve of deciding whether democracy lived or died. Wherever the times goes, to the land of lost socks, the forgotten news bin of people in New Jersey mistaking planes for alien drones or the recycle bin of my desktop – I suppose it does not matter.

I found new Christmas music between cleaning out the garage, painting a room and browsing online sales that were rather lackluster this year. My soundtrack for much of the last month has been the double album Ghosts of Christmas Past (Remake) released in 2015 by the Belgian record label Les Disques du Crepuscule.

It is a mix of thirty-five tracks of offbeat, eclectic, amusing new wave and post punk Christmas songs. The artists on it include Aztec Camera, Tuxedomoon, The Durutti Column, Michael Nyman, Isolation Ward, Ultramarine and others. It is the type of album that holds your attention and takes surprising turns down streets unfamiliar. I think of it as wearing Raybans on an overcast day because why not?

It sure as hell beats another suffering through of Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You. That song makes me think of the kind of person such as an ex who was so shallow that he would sing that song to himself and point at a mirror or any shiny reflective surface.

Some of my favorites on the album are:

Isolation Ward's Lamina Christus

The Wake's Jesus From The Block

Winston Tong's Twelve Days of Christmas. Who doesn't want seven Arab houseboys?


Swinging Buildings' Praying for a Cheaper Christmas

Marsheaux's We Met Bernard Sumner at a Christmas Party Last Night. The title alone makes it a favorite.

 

Those are only a few of my favorites, I have enjoyed listening to the album from beginning to end over and over. There is only one song that I dislike, The Arcadians' Write Your Letter. It stands out from the rest of the album as it sounds as if it is straight out of the 1960s. I hear it and think I should put a flower behind one ear, a feather behind the other, wear a fringe vest and hitchhike barefoot through Laurel Canyon.

 

My world is like a cloudy day of gauzy memories, the evening is fading, the lights are just coming on to battle against the night and anything is possible. I brush the bangs out of my eyes and finger the hole in my wool sweater listening to this album and it reminds me of my ghosts of Christmas past.

My old Nissan 200SX in the falling snow Christmas morning 1993. 

For a minute I am in the early nineties walking out the door of my mother's house on a dim Christmas morning. Snow showers are gushing flakes and I am there with my video camera recording all of it. I am twenty years old turning to look at the stickers for Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund and 99X on the back of my car. The earthy scent of the fallen pin oak leaves is overpowering and my hands are cold. Where has the time really gone?

Bethlehem, Georgia & The Christmas Card Tradition

The post office in Bethlehem, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2024.

Growing up in the 1980s and watching Atlanta television news there were some stories that would be recycled every year during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year. One was the lighting of the Rich's Great Tree in Downtown, there would the annual Hosea Feed The Hungry and Homeless on Thanksgiving, the Christmas parade, the Peach Drop at Underground and at least one of the television stations would assign a field reporter to drive northeast of town to far-flung Bethlehem, Georgia in Barrow County to do a story on Christmas cards. 

Bethlehem, Georgia in 1978 when I was five years old. It looked more like a traditional town then than it does today. The tiny post office then is in the second row on the right. Images courtesy WSB-TV archives at the University of Georgia.

Bethlehem, Georgia in December 2023 and December 2024. There is very little remaining of what stood in the late 70s. It looks less like a town today and more like a wide spot in the road. Photos by me.

I did not know where Bethlehem, Georgia was located when I was a child in Paulding County. I had never been there until a few years ago when I moved out of Atlanta. Now I pass through every couple of weeks on my way to Monroe. Bethlehem is a small town, population seven hundred and fifteen as of the 2020 census, that is more of a community than a true town with a cluster of businesses and sidewalks. It reminds me of where I grew up in another small Georgia community in the 1970s and 80s. Except, Bethlehem has one traffic light and a post office and my hometown did not. My old community has long since been swallowed by the Atlanta sprawl of subdivisions and shopping centers and unfortunately the sprawl is now beginning to edge towards Bethlehem too. I hate to see it happen again as no place in Georgia north of the Fall Line seems to be immune from it.

By Bureau of Engraving and Printing. - U.S. Postal Service; National Postal Museum: 1967 Christmas Issue

There is a special Christmas tradition that this little town just off the newly finished exit off Highway 316 is known for: the Christmas postmark from Bethlehem for Christmas cards. The tradition began in 1967 and at the time included a special issue postage stamp from the United States Postal Service which has since been discontinued. The special postmark still includes the Three Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem and reads, 'Greetings from Bethlehem.' During the first Christmas season, the tiny post office that employed a postmaster general and one part-time employee handled 500,000 cards and letters. Over three dozen temporary employees were hired to handle the volume.

Over the decades since, I wondered if maybe the tradition had waned, but when I mailed cards this past Sunday, the slot for out of town mail was stuffed full. It was a happy sight for me to know that people were still sending cards and sending them out of Bethlehem for the postmark. In a time when the cheap spectacle reigns supreme over value and people cannot seem to be bothered with most traditions anymore like dressing appropriately for funerals and weddings it is surprising to know that this one continues.

Every year my family sent out Christmas cards and I still carry on the tradition though I never receive a single card in return. The last year I received a card in the mail was in 2003, the last Christmas my mother was alive. I refuse to let the tradition die that I see as a way to acknowledge someone and wish them well during the holidays without relying on a soon to be forgotten social media greeting. I wrote about my memories of Christmas cards last year.

 

Merry Christmas, season's greetings and happy holidays to you.

A Modern Death

The film Harold and Maude, 1971.

The other night I decided to watch one of my favorite films, Harold and Maude about an eccentric young man who falls in love with an eccentric and much, much older woman. The two meet in the 1971 film over their shared appreciation or hobby for attending the funerals of strangers. It might sound morbid, but this is a tender and comedic take on a coming of age story. I have loved this dark comedy film since I saw it as a child in the 1980s and I had a bit of a crush on the slim Bud Cort with his dark hair and blue eyes. The movie, directed by Hal Ashby who also made one of my other favorite films Being There, was a critical and commercial flop when it was released, but over the decades it found its audience and became a cult classic.

The film was on my mind due to the recent sudden death of a cousin. Their death, was the second sudden death of a cousin this year. Both were too young to have died and both died alone at home only to be discovered later. The coincidental circumstances seemed odd to me being so close together. Perhaps it says something greater about the loneliness and isolation of modern life in the United States stitched together by cell phones and social media. Or maybe it simply says something about those individuals.

Additionally I was bothered at how the information of the deaths spread through the family. In both cases I was notified by text message, one from a family member and the other from an elementary school classmate who was friends with my cousin and to which I was very grateful. In the second case, I would have likely not known about my cousin's death until much later or at all. It is possible as there have been other family deaths over the years that I never knew about until many years later. These were people I was close with as a child, had meant something to me and it would have been respectful to have said goodbye at their funeral.

Is it so hard to pick up the phone and text or better yet call someone to tell them that a family member has died? Have we lost even that little bit of decency and courtesy?

How deaths are announced now are on social media like a press release written to whom it may concern and especially on Facebook sandwiched between the silly cat videos, fattening recipes, political gripes and photos of restaurant meals. There are several problems with this way of announcing a person's death.

It is unseemly for a person to log onto to Facebook, if one does that at all, and scroll through the newsfeed of ads and discover that your cousin or anyone you know has died like it was a status update of having gone for a walk in the woods.

 

Another is that not everyone has Facebook or there are people like me who go months or years without logging into it. I loathe Facebook despite having an account because of how the service operates and how people use it. One significant problem with announcing a death on Facebook is that there is no guarantee that the algorithms will allow it to be seen and not buried in the crap of ads, pages and groups that I do not follow or all the stupid recipe posts from people who seem to think posting hundreds of times a day on Facebook is a real job. You cannot assume that just because you posted something on the service that people will actually see it.

At the conclusion of one's life do they not deserve better than to become a status update on Facebook? What does it say about them and what does it say about us that this is thought to be acceptable manners?

I am as frustrated as Harold was with his mother and society in the early 1970s. I do not live on a remote island without a phone or lack an outside connection to the world that makes me unreachable. I have all of the same means of communication available to me and more than when people seemed to pass on family news quite easily and quickly before the invention of Facebook. It is no wonder people are dying alone in isolation because people are losing touch with their humanity due to the coldness of technology. Human connections have been replaced with technological ones and people will not realize it until it is too late as they clutch their cell phones, stare into the abyss and keep feeding the machines and algorithms absolutely and mind-numbingly meaningless data.

Harold and Maude, 1971.

In order for me to find out about my cousin's death via Facebook, I had to track it down through specifically searching for it. I only found out about the funeral plans two days in advance through third hand information from someone I am not even friends with and that is pathetic. The funeral stood a better chance of Harold and Maude randomly attending than it did for me. I cannot attend due to the scheduling and I will find my own way of saying goodbye like Harold driving his car over the cliff and walking away playing the banjo.

Dispatch: A Classic Winter Evening

Photo by me, December 2024.

The evenings are the time of day I love the most in the winter. The sunset is early, by five thirty, in the first part of December and there is a cozy feeling about it. The nights are longer than the days and it is fun to count up the hours that are spent below freezing. During cold spells even this far south we can spend more hours in a day below freezing than above. During true Arctic outbreaks there are days when it never climbs above freezing even with the brightest sun. 

 

I love cold weather, I feel more alive when it slaps me in the face and I can wear a heavy wool coat and a scarf. I enjoy watching the last of the light fade into the west from my kitchen windows and feeling tucked away inside the house. I am not out much in the night anymore, my eyesight is too poor for night driving even with glasses. It makes me feel older than I am, but I like looking out on the descending darkness from inside. So many times I have had to cut an activity short or end visiting with someone to beat the darkness home.

Tuesday evening with temperatures in the thirties I listened to an old friend, George Winston's December album. It enters my mind this time of year, every year, with the blurred Christmas lights, frosty ground and chilled red noses. I feel the cold and peacefulness just from looking at the simple and sophisticated early 80s cover. The music is not all that challenging for classical music, but it need not be. It is possible to listen to music as it is to look at art or read a novel for the simple reasons of joy and pleasure. Not everything has to be a chore or be viewed with a critical filter as is all too common today as if everybody is an expert or academic or a wannabe critic.

I tried to remember when I first heard George Winston's December album. It would have been in the early 80s when it was released in 1982 as this music seems to have always been with me, but I cannot pinpoint a specific memory. Maybe it was in a gifted class or riding with my father in his Cadillac and this played on Peach FM 95 Atlanta? I would like to think that I can remember everything, but that is impossible. It seems doubly impossible that an album of pastoral piano solos would reach number fifty-four on the Billboard charts or sell three million copies, but December did. It was a different time when instrumental music had a place on the radio and perhaps the American populace was less regimented in its listening choices. I was nine years old at the time and I remember that I listened to or heard all genres of music, but maybe my family and childhood were exceptional in that regard and I cannot project that onto the country as a whole.

My favorite piece from the album would be the Variations on the Kanon which refers to Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D. It is a more jaunty arrangement than the overly sentimental Jean-Francois Paillard arrangement that was popularized in the 1980 film Ordinary People. I love that film, relate to much of it, and think Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton were outstanding in it - but not that version of Canon in D.

Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People

That film got so much right from the again "simple and sophisticated" clothes with a neutral palette that my mother wore and which appeared briefly in the U.S. from the late seventies into the early eighties before bold colors took over, the styling, the acting and Timothy Hutton was epically adorable and I knew that at seven years old. Except the music...I have gotten far, far off the path of where I began and damn if I cannot help myself against the beauty of Hutton in that film.

 

But one more photo of Timothy Hutton stretched out on a bed and in a well made sweater back when sweaters were thick, worth the money and made in the U.S.A. Yes, sweaters are not what they used to be, just like music, and you can read about why that is here. The last high quality sweater I can remember buying in an average department store was in the early nineties.

Back to December and 2024.

I still listen to this album in the winter and not just at Christmas, but into early March when the trees are bare, nights can be cold, there is the slimmest possibility of snow and the sun sets early. Piano solos may not chart anymore on Billboard, sweaters and movies are not as good as they were, Timothy Hutton and I have both aged, I cannot see at night, but I can still enjoy the fading winter light and December. The times and tastes have changed, but there are classics around as simple as a winter evening to enjoy. Seek them out and cherish them.

George Winston died in the summer of 2023.