No, it's not a piece of paper stuck over her head, it's FASHION.

Put your best dress on, Martha, because you are going to want to go.

Wait, I'm almost ready!

Dorian Leigh, hat by Paulette, Paris studio, August 1949
Photograph Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Having grown up when I grew up (meaning that when I was in high school you were not properly attired until you had applied four shades of eye shadow and three shades of eye liner, wore sequins and tottered about in stilettos—yes, to first period Chemistry), what you wore defined who you were. Or rather, what you wore described who you hoped others would think you were.

And that’s what what we wear is about, isn’t it? Who you are, who you want to be thought of as, who you aspire to become. I still have evening gowns in my closet that I don on occasion (meaning, it’s Saturday morning and I’m the only one in the house), just to make sure I could still be “that” person if I need to/want to.

Mr. Avedon defined the look of fashion advertising, the look that people wanted to have for themselves. His photography gave movement and energy and joy, even, to clothing ads.

Wouldn't I look lovely in those…

Prior to his arrival (at the age of 21 with the sale of one photograph to Bonwit Teller’s for $7.50) photography of clothing was very practical, mostly in the form of studio-based front/back/side static poses.

Avedon took his models outside, in real surroundings (or made-to-look-real surroundings). The models were photographed twirling, primping, laughing. Good lord, these models could be actual people, doing actual people things! Caused quite a stir.

The fashionable way to jump a puddle

Avedon came to fashion photography just after the war. Harper’s Bazaar sent him to Paris to do some editorial fashion shots. Paris after the war was bombed out, and its people worn out. So much destruction to such a beautiful city, its culture and fashion dampened by four-and-a-half years of Nazi occupation, with shortages of everything from shoes to tires to milk.

Avedon’s images were images of hope, images that expressed the idea that women could once again look lovely and that Paris could once again be “The City of Lights.”

Twirling is not just for little girls…

And that was Avedon’s thing, as it were; expressing the idea that women were beautiful and loved wearing fashion. He captured how women enjoyed wearing clothes, as expressed in this image:

Enchenté, darling

Avedon worked continuously, and anticipated and embraced the changing ideas in the fashion world, from the opulent ‘50’s:

I get pouty when there's no champagne

To the “Youth Quake” of the ‘60’s:

Nothing like a fashion shoot with no clothes in it…

After long stints with Harper’s and Vogue, Avedon moved into more portraiture and advertising work. This exhibit, however, focuses exclusively on his fashion portfolio, and it’s a pleasure to meander through it, stopping at images that, well, make you stop. It’s almost hard to remember that fashion photography was his job, and he got paid to show off the clothes. His images make you want to be that person, not just wear what she’s wearing.

The quality of the images is stunning, but the exhibit doesn’t shy away from showing you the backroom, as it were.

Ya cut it here, ya slice it here, and we've got ourselves a good picture…

The design of the exhibition is very enjoyable. I highly suggest reading the wall text to garner a sense of the work and the time.

Darling, it's not paper, it's FASHION.

Okay, it might be paper. But just a little bit.

He was on assignment for The New Yorker when he died, doing what he loved doing right up to the end.

Thanks, man.

Avedon Fashion 1944-2000 is a traveling exhibit, organized by the International Center of Photography (ICP) with the cooperation of The Richard Avedon Foundation. It is at the MFA until January 17, 2011, and is free with admission to the museum.

Far and Away

My first encounter with the World Cup was in Ireland circa 1990, where I was living at the time.

Wait, I thought all roads lead to Rome...

I was trying to find myself a bedsit (a.k.a. a studio  apartment), and one afternoon I left work early in order to wander the streets of Ranelagh in search of one (at least the one listed in the paper).

This place looks nice...

I noticed that I was the only creature moving in the entirety of the neighborhood. Not a person, not a dog, not a car was in motion. I was the only articulatedly living thing as far as the eye could see. Not having been in Ranelagh before it gave me a creepy feeling, and it got me to thinking that I didn’t want to live in that part of town if that’s what it was going to be like.

Someone in the office had mentioned “the World Cup” that morning but that was an inconsequential sporting event in which I like most Americans had no interest.

Whilst walking down a very pleasant street lined with handsome brick townhouses and tidy front yards and half-open windows (all with lace curtains), an ungodly roar shattered the silence, out of nowhere from everywhere.

I thought  it was an explosion at the power station, possibly an earthquake.

It had to be one of those two things. What else could obliterate the silence with such a sustained, ear-splitting din?

Turns out, it was the Packie Bonner save in penalties during the Romania match (here).

Me Ma'll murther me if I don't make this save

Practically every single person in the country was in a pub (or a living room) watching the match on the telly, or  in the office (or on the bus) listening to it on somebody’s radio, and when Packie saved the country’s hopes, everyone’s voice was raised in relief, disbelief, and thrill-dom.

Living in a small country when their national team is doing well in an international event is like being part of a tribe. A big, happy, on-the-same-page tribe. Everybody knew what was going on, everybody had something to say, everybody was excited.

The Irish Chamber of Commerce even had tips on how to deal with the inevitable “sickies” that would be called in on the day following a match, to wit; just deal with it, wouldja, when was the last time we’ve done so well?

That game, and that night

On the night Ireland lost to Italy in the quarter-final, my then-fella and I went out because, well, it was kind of sad being just the two of us in the living room with the tv.

We drove…somewhere, and when we crested the hill, I saw a sight that exposed the pit of my stomach to a primal fear I don’t believe I’ve felt since.

We were at a stoplight, and at one corner of the crossroads was a pub, and literally hundreds of people were pouring out of it onto the sidewalk and flowing into the street, shouting, jumping, drunk.

The bus on the opposite side of the lights couldn’t move for the mob. It was like a big yellow caterpillar being o’er-swarmed by ants.

The car in front of us was instantly engulfed by the pubgoers. A bunch of males yanked opened both doors, and pulled the elderly driver and his elderly wife from the car.

A young guy, a big guy, had the wife. He was tall and youthful and strong, and she was tiny and white haired and slightly stooped.

He grabbed her around the waist. You could see his huge paw on the small of her back.

He grasped one of her hands in his and lifted it into the air. He was so tall she couldn’t look up into his face.

And then…

…he started dancing with her. A gentle, old-fashioned waltz. Everybody laughed, including the lady. He deftly twirled her around a few times, and deposited her next to her husband.

The husband had immediately been taken over by the crowd, which I could now see were, um gideons (as in giddy). He was theirs, and they were his.

Everybody was absorbed into this swirling mass of happiness. He was smiling, they were smiling, and everybody was singing that year’s football song, “Olé, olé-olé-olé, olé, o-olé!”

And then they started on some auld sod song, and everybody, everybody, started waltzing with each other. Pandemonium, delirium, Ireland-onium, it was hard to know what it was.

“What the hell?” I practically shouted to my fella (we were still in the car). “You guys lost. Lost! And you’re singing!”

“We haven’t lost,” he said with a twinkle, “we’ve gotten further in this World Cup than in any other. We got to the quarter-finals! And we lost to Italy! One of the best teams in the world! The lads did well to have gotten so far, and we’re proud of them.”

An Actual Black of Dublin

When “the lads” returned from the World Cup, on the same day that recently-released-from-prison Nelson Mandela came to Dublin to personally thank the Irish Anti-Apartheid movement (and this is what he said), thousands and thousands (including me) were in the City Center.

"We are all members of the human family"

We waited outside Leinster House for the great Mandela himself to arrive. He gave a wonderful, powerfully moving speech. Before he got to the end of it, one of his entourage whispered something to him. Mandela cleared his throat and said, “The boys have just touched down at the airport, so I’ll stop now.”

The crowd gave him a thunderous cheer, then we pivoted en masse and ran down to O’Connell Street to find places along the parade route.

Nelson! Nelson! C'mon, I saved you a spot!

News people estimated that half of the country was in Dublin that day.

Half of the country.

And it was a joyous, joyous day.

Closer to home

When the World Cup came to America in 1994, the place I was working at was in the town of Foxboro and wouldn’t you know it, the Foxboro stadium where the Patriots play was chosen as one of the venues.

And, they were looking for volunteers.

"Yes ma'am, they'll be playing soccer. Yes ma'am, right here in the USA."

I was part of the credentials tent. Everybody, every body, needed to get badged: the players, the camera guys, the hot dog vendors, the security crew. And they all came through our tent. Hand over your paper work, and if you’re in the computer, you get to get a color-coded photo ID, developed with Polaroid and HP, so that the camera sent the image directly to the printer which printed everything out in one laminated go.

Believe me, this was cool high-tech-ness in 1994.

The Nigerian team came by just to come by, all handsome and African in their beautiful robes, passing out Nigerian football pins and telling us how happy they were to be in America and playing in the World Cup.

"A better future for Nigeria through football"

Talk about making everybody’s day, these guys were nothing but happiness.

So this one guy shows up…

A lone Japanese fella, standing in my line. I thought his face would split open from the smile.

He bows.

I bow.

I say something along the lines of welcome-to-Foxboro-do-you-have-your-paperwork.

He bows.

I bow.

He does not give me his paperwork.

“Do you have your paperwork?” I say with a smile.

“I frah Toe-keough,” he says back, the smile reaching almost his ears.

“Welcome to America.”

“I come foh Whorcup!”

“The World Cup. Yes, here it is.”

“I frah Toe-keough. I come foh Whorcup!”

More bowing, more smiling, one phone call to the translation tent.

Turns out he was a reporter, from Tokyo, here to cover the World Cup, and he was early (press credentialing wasn’t scheduled until the following week).

But he didn’t care. The Whorcup was going to be here, and so here he was.

A happier man I did not see for that entire event.

So the American says…

All of the above, my dear American friends who think soccer is lame, is what the World Cup is all about.

And the interesting thing about this year’s World Cup, the one that’s going on right now, is that it seems moderately to fairly good that we might have an outside chance of maybe possibly winning it on a fluke.

But then again, so does everybody else.

In addition to fielding a soccer team this year, the US is putting forth its unbeaten seven-legged race squad as well as its formidable hippity-hoppity roster

1. I wasn’t good enough;
2. Me being me was a pain in the ass to others;
3. My intelligence was something to be embarrassed about;
4. I didn’t know anything that was important;
5. I could be anything I wanted to be, as long as it was what he wanted me to be;
6. Whatever I wanted to do, I didn’t have what it took to do it.

When he died, I burst into tears, I was so relieved.

Him.

He’s been dead a long time, but I don’t off the top of my head remember exactly how long.

He was not an evil man, or even a bad man. He was just…a crappy father.

It’s possible he was also a mediocre husband, but that is not for me to say.

My father was stunted by his upbringing, I know that. He had that almost stereotypically cold, hard, Irish Catholic mother who had too many children and was mean to every one of them. The first time she ever told my father she loved him was when he was shipping out for World War II.

When my father used to defend his mother (“She gave us a roof over our heads, a warm bed to sleep in, and three meals a day”), I would counter with the broken elbow story (when he was ten she went to hit him with “an iron fry skillet” and he put his arm up to protect his head and she bashed him in the elbow; the records at the old Boston City Hospital say that he fell down the stairs).

He was a grown-up man in his late thirties when I came along, about 15 months after my sister.

Me.

My sister was a nightmare, and I suspect that dealing with her wore him out for me.

My single greatest memory of my childhood is just constantly being in the way.

My other memory was feeling that I was not enough to “make up” for my sister.

I was clever, I was the president of the choir and the captain of the (junior varsity) volleyball team. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t swear, I didn’t go around with a bad crowd, I read a lot. I did the dishes every night after supper.

And yet…

My father so done with being a parent that he just wanted to be left alone. Don’t call and ask for a ride from the bus station because you missed the hourly bus by two minutes, either walk home or wait for the next one. Don’t have any crisis of confidence because I really can’t take the time to buck you up. I’m not going to go to yet another of your concerts because the game is on, even if you are singing Mozart in a church. And don’t, under any circumstances, challenge me, because I can be meaner and nastier as a parent than anybody thinks I can be and can rip every rug right out from underneath you.

I learned to not engage with my father, because the outcome was almost never a positive. He made me very, very self-doubtful, and I preferred to find things and people that weren’t so damaging to my…self.

So, I kind of grew up on my own, a little funky, a little dorky, but damn if my friends didn’t get into ivy-league schools and those “small ivy” New England colleges that make for such great front-of-the-brochure images. Hell, I even got into one (for a while…).

It took a long time to start the process of getting him out of my head. Therapy was instrumental, as was allowing myself to have a relationship with a really wonderful guy who never sees me as my father did. Getting a glimpse of how other people see me (oh-my-gosh-you’re-wonderful!) has gone a long way to reducing my father’s voice to a very small one, and not one that I have to listen to any more.

And today is…

If you have a great relationship with your father, today will be a day to recognize and celebrate that. I can see how today is a good thing for that.

There are people who will be going to graves today, and tidying up a bit, and possibly having a bit of a chat with the man under the marker. There might be tears and sadness that he’s gone, whether it’s been one year or fifty.

There are others who feel the weight of family pressure to pretend that their father is not a drunk, doesn’t womanize, doesn’t take advantage of others, and is actually a good and decent person. Today will be a hard day for them.

But then there will be people who will only recognize the day because of the Sunday circulars, people who have (or had) a father that they have put from their lives because they couldn’t let him be in it any more.

If you’re in that latter group, it can take a long time to (learn to) be okay with that. It’s all about letting go of what you think you’re supposed to have, and just having what you have, with less judgment about it.

I am who I am because of what I’ve had.

What I had was a hugely negative father who was disappointed in the person that I was.

I lived for a long time believing what he believed about me.

But I don’t now.

Happy Father’s Day.

Jus’ sayin’.

We still miss you, Buff

Getting a Kitten for a Cat

One of the things we realized about Buffy was that she didn’t want/need a feline companion, but of course we only realized that after we got Buffy a feline companion, a lovely little fella named Eliot.

In spite of Buffy being entirely non-interactive with him, Eliot remained affable and happy, even though he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Buffy to play with him.

Don't tell Buffy, but our butts are touching

In hindsight, we understand that we handled the introduction of the two cats rather badly—we rushed it, and Buffy wasn’t ready. But gosh Eliot was so cute, and why wouldn’t my cats be mutually affectionate and snuggle up together?

Apparently, there’s a process involved in making that happen, and we did not follow the process.

And even if you do follow the process, there’s no guarantee that you will have cute-cat-calendar companionship.

Getting Another Kitten for Another Cat

When it was time to make a teeny tiny addition named Milo to the household, we knew we had to go more slowly with the introduction, even though one of the reasons we wanted a kitten was because Eliot seemed so friendly and, well, big-brother like.

When we brought Milo home,

Me…ow?

Eliot was on his perimeter patrol of the yard, so they didn’t meet.

I wonder…who else lives here

We helped Milo get acclimated to his “Sanctuary Room” (aka my office), where he would live until all interactive feline emotions and interactions were, as they say, good (which in cat parlance is completely pejorative). Such a tiny thing, Milo, the room seemed very large, and so quiet—  no cat/human siblings crying/shouting/gobbling up all the food. He tumbled about for a bit (“Huh, it seems I have four legs…”) then curled up and went to sleep.

Just…so…tired

Milo had a very very loud cry when he woke up and found himself alone in the big room (So loud! So tiny!), By this time Eliot had returned from his duties and was curled up on the back of the couch in MSPG’s office. An interesting thing about cats, they might look like they are in the deepest, most undisturbable sleep but when something attracts their sleeping attention, it’s like they were always awake.

A Meeting of the…Cries

Immediately Eliot went to the closed door of the Sanctuary Room and sniffed and scratched. Then he made a loud and uncharacteristic sound, a cross between a cry and a command. Who knows, really what cats are saying…

Eliot’s vocalization stopped Milo’s crying. I have decided to think that when Milo heard Eliot he realized he wasn’t all alone, but again, we’re talking cat-ification, of which I know nothing.

Eliot stared at the door,

then ran downstairs.

So much for our presumed alpha cat.

A word about how we found Milo

Milo Suetonius Barney MacFarquarson and his five siblings were born in a car.

A very nice young mother and her young children living in a third-floor walk up took in the kittens and the mother, even though the very nice young mother was not the owner of the car.

The very nice young mother believes that the mother cat used to live with people, as it was very good with all the humans living in the home, and was house-trained

Having an extra seven mouths to feed, even if they are small cat mouths, is something that I imagine stretches this family’s resources, but  you can’t put a price on goodness.

Maybe it’s because I played Winston Churchill in 8th grade, but my only thought when I heard that was, “You are the head of the United Nations, dude, step up to the plate with strong leadership and determination to succeed, or step aside.”

Because good lord, if the United Nations is “overwhelmed” by what’s happened in Haiti, why even bother trying?

I was five-going-on-six when you were murdered.

I was a little white girl living in a nice working-to-middle-class seacoast neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts.

I can’t say I remember anything about your murder, although as I grew up the the three murders that defined the country were never far from anyone’s recall. First President Kennedy, then you, then the President’s brother Robert.

I remember understanding that John Kennedy was killed because he was president, and Robert Kennedy was killed because he wanted to be president.

And you were killed because you were black.

In my seacoast community, the one where Mr. Boudreau from up the street would go out clamming on the flats at low tide, nobody was black, although I think back then the nomenclature was “negro.”.

So in a way, Martin, you were the first black person I ever knew.

When I went to camp the summer after fourth grade, there was a black girl in my cabin, although I didn’t recognize her as black. Her name was Charlotte, and she had freckles, but you couldn’t really see the freckles right away because her skin was almost as dark as her freckles. Until I met her I thought only Irish people had freckles. Charlotte was very pretty, I thought.

I used to watch “Soul Train” because I liked the music and the kids on it were older than me and looked great and danced really well. I didn’t realize everybody on “Soul Train” was black until my father pointed out that everybody was black on “Soul Train.”  Then I realized everybody was black.

I grew up with a father who was not racist but prejudiced. He once told me “You can date anyone you want, but don’t bring home a black man.” He also wouldn’t allow one of my closest high school friends into the house “because he’s a faggot and I don’t want him sittin’ on my toilet seat.”

I got invited to the Honor Roll Dance of a private boys school junior year. One of his friends asked one of my friends to the dance as well, and the four of us went together. On the way home we got lost because the dance was in Boston and I only knew how to get back to Quincy on the T. At two o’clock in the morning four white kids in prom clothes driving a gold LTD down Blue Hill Avenue were scared witless because Blue Hill Avenue was “where black people live.”

During the summer after high school my best friend and I went to see an Eddie Murphy movie way over at the movie theater in Somerville. A bunch of still-in-high-school girls sat behind us. When the movie started, one of them said, “Eddie Murphy is really good looking–for a niggah.” They all snorted with laughter.

When I set out on my own, I lived in a wonderful apartment in Dorchester near the Ashmont T. I worked in Foxboro at the time and so every morning I had to drive down that Blue Hill Avenue to get to Interstate 95. For a month I was petrified about driving down Blue Hill Avenue, because I grew up in a house that differentiated between the races and grew up at a time when the news was full of scary scary pictures of really angry people doing mean and hurtful things to people of the other race. I was sure I was the only white person driving down Blue Hill Avenue, and every day I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white. Because I feared that something might happen to me I never looked around.

Then after that month, after nothing happened to me, I took a breath, removed the memory of my father from my head, and looked around. And I saw them. All the black people. The little girls with the many braids and the brightly colored barrettes, standing at the bus stop clutching a lunch box in one hand and daddy’s hand in the other. And the dads stood at those bus stops with their little girls as hundreds of cars drove past, not embarrassed, not annoyed, just being dads.

Until about five months ago I was the only white person in the condo complex I live in now. I had been living here for maybe three years when I realized that I was the only white person in it. Pat lived next to us for a while, with her mother, and her two sons, and her daughter and her daughter’s two daughters. Since we shared a wall, and since we introduced ourselves, Pat invited me in to see her place. It was very clean and very nice. She wanted to get my opinion of her new bedroom furnishings, whether I thought as she did that her new bedspread was too large. It was a beautiful bedspread, kind of Venetian style with gold and purple swirls. It was, as she thought, too big. She didn’t have the sales slip anymore, and bought it at a store that I buy things at. I said, “Well, you still have the tags on it, you can still bring it back.” She said, “A black woman? Bringing back a bedspread with no sales slip? You white, girl, you white.” Then we both laughed.

She had two teenage sons. They were black teenage males, which is why they were sullen and didn’t talk to me. And then I stopped looking at them the way the media presented them and just looked at them the way they were, and saw that they were only teenage males, and that’s why they were sullen and didn’t talk to me. They weren’t tough guys at all, and one I’m pretty sure was gay.

About four years ago I struck up a lovely, albeit whispered, conversation with a a New Yorker  in the Relaxation Lounge of the Elemis Spa at Mohegan Sun. She was black, I was white, she was from New York, I am from Boston, we both didn’t win the World Series the year before. Her 23 year-old daughter just came back from a seven-month tour of duty (in you know where…) as a Marine sergeant, and this woman admitted to me that she couldn’t really remember any of the last seven months.

Martin, I’m telling you all this because maybe if they hadn’t killed you all those years ago, things would’ve been different. Had your peaceful but insistent tactics of standing up for yourself and what you believe in (which in your case was the United States of America and freedom and equality for all of its people) been able to continue, maybe those tactics would have diffused the ignorance between the whites and the blacks, and maybe the anger and fear stemming from that ignorance wouldn’t have been so angry and fearful, or lasted so long.

The America you wanted, that dream that you had, the one that was “deeply rooted in the American dream,” is still a tantalizing vision, one that maybe we have started to see for ourselves, but is still sadly distant.

And that’s why I’m sorry they killed you.

I. Hated. This. Movie.

Why? It was a crap movie.

It was boring.

It was boring because the story was dull and derivative and just more of the same-old same old.

And I was pissed off that I had to sit through nearly three frigging hours of it to find out why: the director and the screenwriter were the same person.

"In our world, man does not suffer shame for asking directions."

“Avatar” is crap the way the last “Star Wars” movie was crap: because they let the director write it.

Yes yes, it’s a fabulous 3-D event and all that, and yes it might prove to be an “important” film 50 years from now, but oh my yawn, I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Because I already knew what was going to happen, every step of the uninspired way:

• People from somewhere else wanting something that someone else has? Check.
• People from somewhere else willing to destroy all and sundry to get the thing but pretending they aren’t gonna? Check.
• People from somewhere else sending out a decoy to deceive the people having the thing? Check.
• Decoy finding he likes the way of the people having the thing? Check.
• Decoy falling for the daughter of the head people who have the thing? Check.
• Decoy deciding to fight for the people having the thing and ending up their leader? Check.

Okay, there’s the movie. You don’t have to go see it, because you’ve already seen it, a hundred times before.

As for the special CGI effects, what is the point of having “the machine that goes ‘ping!” if that’s all you got?

This wasn’t a movie, this was an uptake on “Fantasia” with words. Nifty visuals and re-imagined things in a newish type world. Too bad it wasn’t left at that.

And yes we did think ourselves very clever on the way home with our “‘Dances with Wolves meets ‘The Smurfs’” thing (although someone else was funnier with “Smurfahontas”), but all I could think of was, “This movie is just full of men doing violent destructive men things because there aren’t enough women around.”

There was nothing new in the story, no surprise twist at the end, no clever “right back atcha” Nature beat down of the machines and the People from Somewhere Else; I was so hoping that the, thing, the People from Somewhere Else toppled turned out to cause the destruction of the item that they came to the planet to get, a kind of a “Ha-ha-HA! Stupid man-people with your guns and heavy equipment, I am Nature!” thing.  But nope, just the same old retelling of the pillaging of the earth and the attempted eradication of the local people, no matter that they were blue and very tall. And cat-like. Oo, very new, never been thought of before.

Director Cameron is a very good director, and by definition that makes him a very good story teller. But that does not translate into being a good screenplay writer. And that’s a shame, because for this movie-goer his entire effort was wasted by his failing to craft a story that grabbed me and made me care about what was happening to the characters.

If you do go see it—and that’s what you should do, just see it—you have to see it in 3-D, or else all your ticket money will be wasted.

One of my most memorable Christmases occured many years ago when I ended a relationship on Christmas Eve day: we had been seeing each other for over a year and I was terribly fond of the fellow, but I could no longer pretend that his excessive drinking didn’t bother me. Since he didn’t think he drank too much (or too often), I ended it.

Because he was a generally good person, his overarching concern on that Christmas Eve day was that I not spend the next day on my own. He offered to not mention our breakup to his family so that I might join them for Christmas dinner, instead of our planned dinner-à-tête. I declined.

He couldn’t believe someone would want to be alone on Christmas. And he was doubly disbelieving that someone like me—a single woman, living alone in a foreign country (Ireland) that celebrated that holiday in a big and meaningful way—wouldn’t be unbearably lonely on that particular day.

How could I tell him that not only couldn’t I wait to be free of this unhappy, untruthful encumbrance, I was positively thrilled to have the day to myself?

I had both of our meals—chicken breasts with parsley cream sauce and carrots—for both lunch and dinner on Christmas day, and they bookended a renewing, solitary walk through the streets of Dublin (the pubs aren’t open on Christmas day).

I had a wonderful, wonderful Christmas.

Now, there are people of my current aquaintance who would be just as horrified as my former paramour was that I would look forward to Christmas on my own.

But there are others who would merely nod their heads in understanding.

The Story

I bring up the above because, well, it’s the holidays! Be of good cheer! Love and joy come to you!

And a big, fat raspberry to you, pal.

Many people dread our three-fer holiday season, and I get why. Halloween is okay because you mostly interact with strangers, little kids at that. But Thanksgiving, oh my word, that whole family-around-one-table thing, a daunting and possibly painful venture that can quiver the most stout of hearts (because you know they are going bring up the she-broke-the-turkey-platter-and-tried-to-repair-it-with-frosting-when-she-was-eleven thing again, no matter that you’ve gone on to become a world-famous medical specialist who is about to cure cancer once and for all).

And after Thanksgiving, why, it’s four weeks of stress and shopping and parties and, well, alot of cheese.

And then, da-dadada-da-DA!, Christmas Day itself.

And what a day it is: Children won’t get what they want (or enough of it), adults will try to suppress their mounting dissatisfaction with how their lives are turning out, and everybody will pretend to like that smelly old half-deaf aunt they have to have to dinner.

It’s supposed to be like this

We all have some idea of what Christmas is supposed to be like. Maybe it’s the movies; maybe it’s a vague childhood memory; maybe it’s that d@mnable Dickens story. The season’s commercials are full of fluffy, falling snow and happy, perfectedly proportioned people. Print ads are full of white teeth and jewelry. Everybody’s got everything they need and everything they want, and everybody’s happy with everybody else and positively delighted to be with them.

Oh, who wouldn’t want to have a Christmas like that! Did I mention the ice skating and hot chocolate?

Sometimes, you get some of that type of Christmas: maybe not the jewelry, but maybe the hot chocolate; maybe not the perfect proportion, but maybe the snow. And it’s okay.

It’s all okay, just the way it is, with whatever you’ve got.

Just because you don’t have a Martha Stewart lifestyle doesn’t mean your life isn’t okay.

The reality is that you don’t live in a 300 year-old brick house with a four-foot wide fireplace, you aren’t going to give a brand new Mercedes tied up with a bow to your special someone, and you may just tip over the tree when you try to put the angel on top of it.

What you have is what you have; some of it might very well be crap, but some of it might be, well, okay. The Christmas in your head is probably not the Christmas staring you in the face; why not just fade out that Christmas-in-the-head and have only the Christmas-in-the-hand?

It’s supposed to be like the Victorian Christmas Card

The idea of the tradition of Christmas is a little made up, you know. The Pilgrims didn’t have it; they downright outlawed it. Oliver Cromwell over in England actually cancelled it (this was after he defeated the king and got the king’s head cut off, so he was a little bit of a sour-puss anyway). Christmas wasn’t declared an actual holiday in the United States until 1870 (a coupla years after Thanksgiving got declared one). There is no unbroken Christmas tradition of celebration and gift-giving going back hundreds of years. It just ain’t so.

My childhood Christmases I don’t really remember, except the one where I got the Hot Wheels cars and race track and my sister got the Barbie Makeup Head (well, that’s what we wanted). I do remember that every year my mother would kick all of us out of the house, including my father (after he got down from the attic the box we stored the tree in), on her “this is the day” Saturday so she could set up the tree on her own.

We had no sing-a-long while stringing popcorn garland, no make-a-wish whilst throwing the tinsel all over the tree, no solemn meaningful tradition of singing “Silent Night” as the star was placed on the top of the tree. I don’t recall making Christmas cookies with my mother and sister.

And you know what? It’s okay. My mother is now 81, and every day that I still have her is a gift. If I was ever pissed off that she didn’t give me that perfect childhood Christmas you see on tv, I am way, way past that.

It’s supposed to be like the replica Victorian Christmas Card

Christmas these days is mostly a frenzied and frenetic dance of buying things. Lots of buying lots of things in lots of stores in lots of malls that have lots of parking spaces already taken by other people buying lots of things.

There is also a “fantastic home” element to things these days: we can nip out to the back yard and we can collect pine cones and we can spray paint them gold and we can create a perfect holiday centerpiece using them and the driftwood we picked up this summer down the Cape and saved for half a year.

You know what? You can’t.

And you should stop beating yourself up about it.

Your Christmas probably won’t be anything like what you see in the movies/commercials/ads, because nobody’s Christmas is like that, and I’ll tell you why: those Christmases are made up. Yes. Completely artificial. An image created to sell you something.

Families are broken; relationships falter; children and parents look at each other and think “who the hell are you?” And we think it’s only us, it’s only now that these things exist, that way back when-ever people were more decent and families were more loving and people made better and truer decisions. I am here to tell you, “nuh-uh.”

In all of recorded history people have been happy and people have been sad. People have been laid back and people have been having conniptions. People have made the absolute dumbest choices in love, people have drunk themselves into penury, families have imploded under the self-created weight of expectation. Always. Good and bad; selfish and giving; happy and sad; healthy and diseased; always have humans had all of these things. We are different, certainly, in what our societal norms and cultural expectations are, sure. But not worse.

We are human. We have foibles. We fail. We succeed. We get surprised by how well other people think of us. We are grateful for love. We are relieved when stressfulness ends. We are human. And it’s okay.

It’s okay to be okay with what’s okay

So you know, if the dog throws up on the newly opened Wii thing, if your first-time-tried Yule Log looks more like a peat bog, if last year you went to Aspen and this year you can only afford to take the T into the Boston Common to see the Christmas lights, it’s okay. If your kid really wanted new skis and all you can get him this year is a new ski hat, it’s okay. If you are afraid to splash out for the half-dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot you usually get because your company is going to have layoffs come January and so only get two bottles of prosecco, it’s okay.

It’s okay. Your Christmas is going to be okay. If a loved one is serving in the military overseas, just love them (and send them email). If your father has end-stage Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recognize you, be gentle with the fellow, hold his hand, and tell him you knew him a long time ago and that he was a good person.

If you are in the middle of a messy, heart-wrenching divorce and the kids want to spend the holiday with your almost ex-spouse, let them go, cry your eyes out, then treat yourself to either dinner out or a quiet night in with the clicker all to yourself.

If you’ve lost your job and feel terrible that you really can’t get anything for your kids, maybe it’s time to start that sing-a-long popcorn garland stringing tradition.

If everybody-but-one is at your table because that person is lost in the grip of alcohol or drugs, acknowledge their absence and raise a glass to the hope that they’ll find their way back to themselves and to you.

I don’t wish you a merry Christmas.

But I wish you a good one.

We got her when she was this big.

She was my first real pet; the goldfish that we got every week from Woolworth’s when I was little didn’t count.

We got her from a very nice lady-couple who lived in a former dairy farm up in New Hampshire.

We were going to name her Spike, but when they sent us her photo we knew her name was Buffy.

I was very concerned that I wouldn’t be a good pet owner. I mean, I had to keep getting new goldfish at Woolworth’s every week because they always died.

I read a bunch of books on how to own a cat. I wasn’t sure I was up for the job. I was afraid I would make her a bad cat. I mean, don’t you need to know things about cats in order to own a cat?

Buffy was a cat, not a goldfish, and she was a wonder. Very little, very independent, very keen to learn the ins and outs of the house. She learned how to use the litter box in two seconds, and knew where her food and water bowls were. She already knew everything she needed to know about being a cat.

And she seemed to like me.

There was something marvelous about having this creature, this non-human life form, in the house. She brought a different attitude to living and communing, one that was knowing and flexible. That cushion is taken, well, that one isn’t, I’ll curl up on that one. If I jump up enough times he’ll relent and let me sleep on his lap. If I stretch up high enough and hold onto her pant leg she’ll give me some cheese. If she won’t give me cheese, maybe he’ll give me ham.

It took me a long, long time to understand that even if she was the size of an infant, she was a fully-formed, instinctual animal. She knew what she was doing, even if I didn’t.

Perhaps because she was born in a barn, she was fierce in her desire to be outside. She would make rips in the screens, clawing to get out. Especially if we were outside.

We live in a nice leafy place, were all the yards are unfenced and run into each other. It was a good place to be a cat, lots of shrubs to hide under, and flat rocks in the garden to sleep on and get some sun.

During the warm months, Buffy would spend her entire day outside, just being. She had her places, and for the most part that’s where she was.

She was a cautious cat, always checking to see what was around before she went out the door. As soon as she heard a mechanical sound that was unfamiliar, off she went under the shrubs. But when I pulled into the drive way and got out of the car, she would run out from wherever she was just to say hi. She would often come in the house when I did.

We had three pet names for our pet: Buff, the Buffinator, and Buffanutter (from the Fluffanutter sandwiches I used to eat when I was little). When we were alone and I was whispering sweet nothings into her fur, she was always My Buffy-girl.

She liked to sleep.

But then again, she was a cat.

She was lithe, and mostly graceful. Apparently she had a small head, which I didn’t realize because she was my first cat.

You couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do, but she would let you know when she wanted to do something, like go out.

When she wanted to sit on your lap, her purr was like an engine, loud and steady. There was no thing greater in the world than Buffy wanting to sit on your lap. Buffy sitting on your lap was like a proclamation that you were a good person.

I do believe I loved her.

I found her late on Thanksgiving day, broken and unresponsive at the turn into the street where all our condos are.

I thought at first she was all hunkered down, the way she did when she was about to pounce on something.

But as soon as she didn’t move as my car approached I knew something was wrong.

My guy brought her inside on the sturdy cover of an outdoor tote. We covered her body with a towel and put her in the downstairs bathroom; it has its own heat register and was warm.

Buffy never regained consciousness, never moved, never blinked an eye. Even me, with my happy and positive outlook on life, knew that there was nothing that could be done. “She’s not anywhere,” my guy gently told me, himself looking to find even one consolation. She wasn’t feeling pain, we guessed.

My beautiful girl, with the lovely long pale ginger fur and the white patches on her feet, didn’t purr. She didn’t stretch her neck when I stroked her head. She didn’t pull her paw away when I touched it like she normally did.

Buffy stopped living about 7:30 Thanksgiving night, after all the guests had left and the house had been put back to order. It was just my guy and me, and the other cat, the one I insisted we get because Buffy was probably lonely, being in the house all day by herself while the two of us were at work. Turns out, I was wrong about that, she was a loner, and didn’t appreciate another cat in the house, especially a rambunctious younger male cat who never understood why Buffy didn’t like to play. Had the other cat spoken English, I would have told him that biting Buffy on the bum was not something that she liked, and that’s why she didn’t play with him. But, he remained ever hopeful.

We buried her the next day in the garden.

In the 11 years that my guy and I have been together, I have only seen him weep three times: this was one of them.

We dug a hole under the forsythia bush she liked to sit beneath. It was, helpful, to be doing something for her. We removed all the loose rocks, and made sure it was deep enough that she would remain undisturbed. We placed some white tissue paper on the bottom of the grave, and my guy gently put Buffy’s body on top of it. We covered her with some more white tissue paper, and secured it with some of the smaller rocks. We put back the soil by hand, then tamped it down. We laid a nice garden stepping stone on the spot. We will get some creeping thyme come spring and plant it there.

I didn’t expect the grief. I didn’t expect the all-encompassing emotional pain, that tears your heart and almost makes you vomit. I didn’t expect to sob myself to sleep, grateful that my guy would just wrap his arms around and let me wear myself out. I didn’t expect to think about it all the time, to have my mind go back to what was taken from me whenever the task at hand was finished.

I didn’t expect to miss her so much. She was supposed to grow old with us, and when the end came it was supposed to be at the end. Somebody was not mindful in their driving — going too fast down a short side street with on-street partking — and in that randomness of life, for some reason Buffy was out there at exactly the wrong time. I know it was not intentional, but somebody took Buffy from me because they weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. Her life was not supposed to be removed from my life, not yet, and not like that.

When I told a friend of Buffy’s death, she told me that one of her cats is deaf and yet she still lets her out, “because the cat is so happy being out there.”

Buffy had a happy life, full of trees and leafy plants, and a house with a lot of soft places to sleep.

Sleep well, my girl.