Advent Calendar 6.

Open the window
and there's another window
though which you see another window
and another, and so on, shrinking,
regression down to a point.

Bam.

Advent Calendar 5.


A baseball.  I can't think of a more American symbol.  If there were a board game where the players were countries, and you needed a piece to represent each, ours would be a baseball.  (Except that it rolls, and pieces need a flat side to stay put.)

Stitched cowhide, with printing to tell its pedigree, rests perfectly in your hand, weighted and built to be thrown.

Each one is hand made.  Last I saw, in Costa Rica,  in conditions that are pretty tough.

Red waxed thread, white hide, blue printing.  We should change "American as apple pie" to "American as a baseball".

Advent Calendar 4.


And some days you forget to open.

Yesterday - a brick.  St. Louis is a capital of brick, so prized that people from New Orleans drive up here, find falling-down houses, load them up and take them home to help gentrify.  An interestingly symbol-laden area of commerce that combines the urban attributes of theft and beauty.

Advent Calendar 3.

When you do advent calendars, the whole thing is cardboard, you pry open the window, sometimes corners tear.  I wonder if there once were wooden ones, brought back year to year.  Or big ones, with a real candle behind each window.

Today's opens and there is, indeed, a candle.  A strange hybrid of utility and history and art.  We light them now for the table, because of their flattering light.  Once they were lit because they were the only light you could get.   So at night  everyone was candlelit. As in a Kubrick film that most people don't remember, Barry Lyndon.  I have never forgot the candlelit interiors.

Now we are lit by spirally fluorescent doohickies that, if they fall to the floor, make a toxic pile of glass and chemicals.  Drop a candle and your house could burn down.  But probably not. Usually there's just  a beautiful little puddle of wax.

Advent Calendar 2.

Open the window today and there's gravity.  Oh yeah - gravity.   Pulled trillions of pieces of matter together, forming Earth and, eventually, us.

I wonder why gravity was never a god.  Certainly the ancient god-designers knew that something was keeping them stuck to the earth.  Something made dropped things go down and not up.  But I haven't found Gravity, God of the Assembly of the Universe (although, I'll admit, I haven't looked).  Closest I've heard is Hawking's' statement that gravity, not god, made the universe.  Which sounds wrong.  Seems to me that either God made the universe - by definition, really - or no one did.

Gravitas is a Roman virtue, not a god.  It means, uh, gravitas.  Others are pietas and dignitas.  Man, we could use more of all three.

Advent Calendar Blog

Open the first window and there's.... December.   Winter's first chapter.  If the reason why we don't live in California is the change of seasons, here it is, without compromise.

In St. Louis the leaves are there on November first and gone by the end of the month.  We go to standard time, the darkness comes even sooner.  The tropicals and tender plants worth saving are brought inside, the perennials go to ground, the rest are doomed.  The fish in the  pond slow down and I rig a warmer to keep a hole in the ice, or they'd be doomed as well.

Today is sunny, that bright blue sky, bigger because the leaves are down.  Isabel, whose ancestors are from the West Highlands, doesn't want to come inside.

Bede's Sparrow

"The present life of man, O King, seems to be like the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad.

"The sparrow, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged.

"So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are entirely ignorant."

From The Venerable Bede.  Told over a thousand years ago.