Christmases past have often felt like a game of offsetting penalties: If you give my children an Amazon gift card, then I will give your children an Amazon gift card of equal value. It all seemed nonsensical. Couldn’t we just give each other’s children a hug and Christmas wishes and call it a day? This year was scaled back and thus better, and while my children probably rue the socks and miss the cryptocurrency exchange, it all felt more like Christmas for me.

I came from a tradition where spouses give gifts. I blame my grandparents Doris and Ray, who gave each other lavishly wrapped gifts bearing tags that said “To Doris-Worsy, Love Raisy-Daisy” (and vice versa). The exchange took place while Bing Crosby crooned on the enormous console record player and a giant wood-burning fireplace warmed the house. Typically Raisy-Daisy would give Dorsy-Worsy a lace-trimmed silk slip, and she would blush like no one had every blushed before. Those slips were absolutely gorgeous, and when my grandparents moved into assisted living, most of them were absolutely dry-rotted in the box. (It is extremely difficult today to find a decent slip; most offerings are a terrible nylon polyester with a scant nod to lace. They are wildly and sadly utilitarian. I worry that my grandfather’s purchases over-hunted those grounds, thus rendering lovely slips extinct.)

Chris and I do not exchange gifts. This fact bothered me at first, and in the middle, and indeed for many years after that. But a happy partnership is quite the gift, a recent realization (thanks, cancer!) that has shut down any bad feelings. A few weeks ago, Chris asked, “Would you like to go back to Paris?” (Gentle reader, there is only one response to that question, especially when one’s last and only trip involved figuratively wearing a referee’s shirt and blowing a whistle to negotiate disputes between one’s children.) Chris had found round-trip fares from Orlando for under $400 per person for October. There was an expenditure for seat upgrades to poor person’s first class — the two-seat row on the bulkhead immediately after the first class cabin with free drinks and Coca-Cola — and the need to carry on one’s luggage. Perhaps this was a major violation of the spousal no-gift policy, but I called it Christmas nonetheless.

We are going to Paris to eat and see museums, not necessarily in that order. We may take the train up to Amsterdam, largely to see the Van Gogh Museum. My love affair with Van Gogh goes back farther than you can imagine, and as many things tend to do, it all goes back to Moultrie.

I grew up in Moultrie, a town in southwest Georgia that had a population of about 17,000 people. It was the kind of town where one’s mother flung open the door and pointed to one’s bike frequently, ordering rides to the library and to the Sunset Plaza Shopping Center. In 1980, I was 11 going on 12 and in seventh grade, and in case you think that I was a beautiful and lithe preteen, let me disabuse you of that notion with my 1981 Colquitt County Junior High School yearbook photo:

These were not kind years, and it certainly did not help that the short haircut that I imagined (a short, shiny bob, very French) had been translated into a center-part butt cut by Barbara’s Cosmetique. Fortunately, in an inspired fit, I wrote “me” with an arrow to point out my school photo in the event that my 51 year-old self forgot that girl. If it helps you imagine the then-me as the now-me, that shirt (my favorite) was a very bright yellow, and I was undoubtedly wearing it with the bright green denim skirt that I always wore it with.

I had a rich inner life, and a bicycle, and one other thing going for me that I did not even know: I lived in southwest Georgia when Jimmy Carter was President. People were willing to do nice things for Sowegans (with southwest Georgia being “SoWeGa,” and its denizens “Sowegans”). One of those nice things — which was a very nice thing indeed — was that millionaire philanthropist Armand Hammer agreed to send his priceless exhibit of Impressionist art for display in the Moultrie Public Library. I am not talking about the B-side of Impressionism, either: In a room roughly the size of my current living room, there were 10 to 12 works by (among others) Cezanne, Cassatt, Degas, and Van Gogh.

This is an event that never could have happened in current times: priceless works of art crammed into a small public library in rural Georgia, all guarded by a local deputy. There were small posts with velvet rope separating the viewer from the painting, and on the school field trip, there was a line outside the door as we all shuffled in, single-file.

I preferred viewing the art while not on field trips, and on my blue and white bike, I rode to the library many times to look at the paintings. Someone recently asked me how long the exhibit lasted. I have no idea, other than it felt like my entire childhood. At that age, in that time, it did not strike me as extraordinary that I would wake up in my room on Quiet Cove, hop on my bike, pedal to the library, select a few books from the young adult section, and then stare intently at these paintings.

The Van Gogh — a painting of the Hospital at Saint-Remy — was my favorite.

I was telling my much-younger sister about this exhibit while we were in Orlando this October, and because the internet feels boundless, I googled it. It was not a dream, as I feared, and it really happened. On YouTube there are videos of Moultrie in 1980, Mayor Willie B. Withers’ Lincoln Continental spanning several city blocks, and a dinner to kick off the exhibition. At the end of the final video, there is Armand Hammer, expressing his hope that the exhibition could perhaps change someone’s life.

I almost burst into tears, for that life was mine.

Those were not easy years for me, the growing-up, and while I know now that those are not easy years for anyone, it seemed like such an isolated struggle. I dreamed of a better, more colorful, more sophisticated life. With a painting of a hospital in my mind’s eye, I took as many French classes as I could in high school. In college, the Francophone teaching assistant made fun of my accent and sentenced me to extra language lab. (I was definitely from the south of France.) It was in art history classes in college that I realized that Van Gogh was Dutch. (To be fair, he later moved to France where he undoubtedly spoke French.) He did not pick up a paintbrush until he was 28 years old.

I love the notion that change is not reserved for the young, that my favorite painter (then not-a-painter) awoke one morning and thought that perhaps he would dabble a little and see where it went. I started keeping a blog five years ago because I needed to make a change. I started painting three years ago because a friend at one of those wine-and-art places asked if I had ever taken painting lessons. I had never thought of myself as a creative person before those endeavors, and now I wonder how I lived with comfortably in my own skin. I do not think that I did.

Except when Christmas brought me new bikes — and especially the lowly Christmas that brought me a new piano — I have always preferred New Year’s Day. It is the promise of change. On one hand, change seems so difficult. On the other hand, it’s like that old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I have broader-reaching goals this year. I would like to have a showing of my art. I have been contemplating an Etsy shop. I have told my father that I would like to spend a week at his farm and do nothing but write, paint, and walk. But these changes, and the work needed to get to that point, seem easy to ignore.

So I decided to work on the small things in the way that I order my work life: with a to-do list. I have typed up a document entitled the “Good Habits Checklist.” Here is the an entry:

The days are the same, except that I allow myself a later bedtime on Friday and Saturday night, and I have exercise goals that are on a weekly checklist. I include one sweet a day not as a mandate to eat a sweet, but as a direction not to eat more.

Because there is still a bit of the overachiever in me, I have begun the Good Habits Checklist in advance of January 1. I have enjoyed the direction to express creativity in ways other than knitting for 30 minutes a day. I have tried cooking simple things, like candied kumquats, which brilliantly takes care of the “one sweet” limitation, a fruit serving, and 30 minutes of creativity all in one fell swoop:

I have begun quilting from scrap fabrics:

I continue to sew (and thus generate scraps for quilting);

And I am still painting:

It has been a far happier life to carve even a small time to make things. I thought that finding 30 minutes a day would be a burden, but it has not been. Staying off the phone helps. And in a gesture of good faith, I switched to Suave 2-in-1 Shampoo and Conditioner to shave off time in the shower. (It promises salon quality results, which is probably true if your hair maintenance consists of Chris’ cutting your hair on the back porch.)

I have promised to pay myself $100 cash for each month that I comply with 90% of the checklist. There is a sterling Tiffany olive branch ring that my daughter asked for, and received, this Christmas. With a couple months of diligence, I will have one just like it. I will wear it, and when I look at the olive branch, I will feel relief that I have finally made peace with myself.

ALC

I have been approaching the holidays this year with a certain amount of fear. Last year brought calamity, a season between Thanksgiving and Christmas filled with dread, pain, uncertainty, and tears. At least there was that highly satisfying binge-watching of all seasons of “The Great British Baking Show.” If you are to be sick, and I hope that you are not, “The Great British Baking Show” is perfect: Everyone is incredibly kind, the plot is simple, and if you nod off during The Showstopper, you’re none the worse for wear. Plus, you have a solid set of new life skills, for you can dazzle slightly drunk people at cocktail parties with your recently acquired knowledge of pastry lamination and Genoise sponge.

But one of the real pleasures of adulthood is its ability to throw a calamity into the mix as a distraction from all other calamities. And so it was on the Sunday before Halloween, when I decided to take Emmet for a walk around 8 p.m. after a frantic evening of painting my son’s bathroom. Refurbishing his room was a project that was supposed to have happened last winter, and did not, and was happening now for good reason: The room had a mattress on the floor and little else, and if you ever wanted a poster child for “Love Doesn’t Live Here Any More,” you had but to look at his room. But dogs — even smart poodles — are not particularly gifted painters, and after several hours of my painting and his being told to wait (a command that dogs — even smart poodles — do not particularly understand), Emmet was about to blast off. I leashed him up, and stepped out my front door, and 30 steps later, my neighbor’s dog had broken free of his yard and was literally trying to rip off Emmet’s tail.

And by literally, I mean LITERALLY. As in, I will never use again the idiom “rip someone a new one.”

Because it was completely horrible, I will not say much more other than to say

1. Emmet had to take so much Tramadol that I became worried that he would develop a raging opioid addiction and that we would become the unwitting stars of some ghastly made-for-TV movie bearing the name “Tramadoodle.”
2. Giving a smart dog several medications at once over a three-week period is exhausting. Hot dogs work only a few times, and as I’m writing this, I realize I should have upped the stakes and considered a monetary bribe.
3. He has healed from the attack far better than I have.

But at least there was Elvis Costello — or to be more accurate, Elvis Costello in the rain. Chris and I met 34 years ago in a college cafeteria, and it was a relationship that spawned a lot of mix tapes — an endeavor that took a dual cassette deck and hours of pressing buttons at just the right time. A year or two after we began dating, Chris put “When I’m Sixty-Four” on a mix tape, and with that, the future started to take focus. Last week a law school friend, who had no idea of this history, sent me a You Tube video of this song, and I almost broke out crying at this part:

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more

Chris’ mix tapes often featured Elvis Costello’s songs. This was one of my favorite lyrics:

Whenever I put my foot in my mouth and you begin to doubt
That it’s you that I’m dreaming about
Do I have to draw you a diagram?
All I ever want is just to fall into your human hands

So when I found out that Elvis was coming to an amphitheater in Saint Augustine, rain-or-shine, I bought fifth row tickets, and I made up show up early. The evening brought a land war: I sat next to a man who occupied his chair like a much larger man, apparently emerging victorious in numerous coach class airline battles and intent on emerging victorious that night. There was an older pot-bellied white-haired man who danced all night and had more fun than anyone. The couple behind us, over the decades of their relationship, had grown to look exactly alike. They wore matching red T-shirts with the iconic Elvis Costello photo depicting him in the mid-80s, a thin and wiry man, looking ironic as he sang into an old school mic.

Here is what I learned from the Elvis Costello concert:

1. He is no longer a thin and wiry man.
2. The sound engineer must have been a rank amateur selected at random from the audience, for that was how it sounded.
3. His voice sounded terrific on all of the new songs he had written, all of which were in a smaller, less ambitious range.
4. His voice sounded not as terrific on all of the old songs, which was what everyone came to see.
5. The audience helped him out on all of the old songs, and that was just fine.
6. I am glad that Elvis Costello had no expectations of me to be the same person as I was in 1985, for I am no longer a thin and wiry woman who sounds just like she did over 30 years ago.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned that if I ever become a back-up singer, I would like my name to be “Kitten,” just like the singer to the left. (Brianna (to the right) was pretty incredible, too, but really — she should contemplate a name change.)

There have also been trips to visit family, both mine and Chris’, and a contemplated return visit to his family that required some horse-trading: I have agreed to see his niece’s little theater production if he takes me to see a University of Georgia basketball case. It seems only fair. And then there was the story I told at my Dad’s house about the time I stayed at room 1214 of the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead, a trip necessitated by government travel and permitted by the low government room rate.

It was after midnight and the phone rang. The woman on the other end asked to speak to Jack. In my drowsy voice, I told her that she had the wrong number.

The phone rang again a few moments later, and the same woman insisted on speaking to Jack. Again, I told her that she had the wrong number.

And of course, the phone rang a third time. The woman was certain that she very much had the right number and that I very much knew Jack’s whereabouts. She told me to put him on the phone, for she was his wife.

Reader, I am no harlot. I was instead a tired government attorney who needed her sleep before court in the morning, so I asked, “What number are you calling?” And she replied 214-xxx-xxxx. I knew two things: 1) My father, who was living in Texas at the time, had a 214 area code, and 2) I was staying in room 1214. So I asked if she was staying at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead. She paused, said she was, and asked me how I knew. I told her that if Jack lived in Dallas — and I was pretty sure that he did — she needed to dial a 9 to get out of the hotel switchboard. She apologized and hung up. And having saved Jack’s bacon, I fell soundly asleep.

I was in Buckhead the day after Thanksgiving, yet that was not the story on my mind. Chris and I had taken MARTA in from the northern suburbs, and as we left the station, I remembered some of my favorite times growing up. My dad would travel to Atlanta for meetings, and he would often take me with him. We stayed at a little hotel — the Terrace Garden Inn — across from Lenox Square Mall, and during the day he would stay there and go those meetings. But I would have breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which I would sign to the room, and a $20 bill in my pocket, which Dad would give me to last the day. And I was free until the time I was supposed to meet him for dinner. I would walk across the street to the mall, and just walk around in Buckhead, and take stock of all the people, the colors, the buildings, the stores. I had plenty of money for food, and if I was careful and saved, a little money for a treat, and when I was 12 and 13 and 14, I felt like I owned the whole place. There was so much freedom and so little care and so much trust bestowed in me. There were limits, to be sure, but I set my own rules. And as a 51 year-old woman walking through the streets of Buckhead on Black Friday, it all came back.

Thanks, Dad.

But then it was back to normal: the house, the job, the responsibility, the whole notion of being an adult. That included a grocery shopping trip on Sunday. While Chris lovingly scouted out the perfect olive oil, for he cooks, I not-so-lovingly scouted out the Publix-brand mild dishwashing soap, for I clean. (On a budget apparently.) My phone buzzed in my pocket, and a text said Craig passed away last night.

Craig was a friend of mine from my swimming days, and by everyone’s count, on the short-list for the title of the Kindest Man in the World. We live in the same neighborhood a few blocks apart, and even after my pool days ended, I would see him out walking. “You need to write that book!,” he would yell across the street. Or “My wife loves your painting!” or “It still makes her cry in happiness!” for he had hired me to paint a picture of their home as a Christmas gift. He was a constant ray of sunshine, Craig was, and a loving father whose girls flung themselves into far-off places, like the Czech Republic, where Craig would visit them (and no doubt, make a million friends).

If I had cancer, then Craig had CANCER, and while he never complained or even much talked about it, a story made the rounds. He passed out at work. There was a horrendous operation. He survived. He continued to work. He went to an event honoring him as Man of the Year while he was living in Hospice. And I suspect that he willed himself to make it through one last Thanksgiving so that he could tell everyone that he loved them, and was grateful for them, a final time. He was only 65. I miss him. So does everyone else who knew him.

And so I stand in the middle of this beautiful, sad, and funny life. I just finished reading Prairie Fires, the door-stop sized biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I came across one of Wilder’s observations: “Now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” While I know that it is true, sometimes I wish it were not.

ALC