GLITCH-FREE

This being the close of my first year of blogs, I’ve decided to do a retrospective of holiday seasons past—relevant vignettes from A Patchwork Memoir, old Christmas cards and letters I sent, childhood photos, holiday crafts I’ve done with my godkids, and maybe even a children’s Christmas carol I wrote…if there’s a way to create a link, that is.

Dear friends and family,

Well, the rains have set in, and it’s finally gotten too cold to wear sandals—even with socks.

This year, after going to eight Christmas tree lots and seeing a dizzying array of firs, Ella and I apparently lost all sense of proportion. When we stood up the new arrival in our small apartment, we were aghast. Where would we live?

The last six months have passed in a blur, I’ve been so absorbed in writing a memoir—a patchwork of diary entries, letters, dreams, even bits of school papers, short stories, and scripts. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do since I went to Cadaques, a tiny fishing village on the Mediterranean, the summer I was thirty-two—lugging a ponderous satchel of old writing and an unwieldy suitcase with a large dictionary and thesaurus. A local—expatriate Jean Michelle—lent me his typewriter, which had a French arrangement of keys that proved to be my undoing. I don’t think I could be managing to write my memoir now without Ella’s new computer to help me organize the material—I’ve got folders within folders within folders.

Actually, it’s been great to have a project to work on at home because I’ve had to spend more time here than I’ve cared to. I’ve been catching colds and flus from Arielle, my friend Leia’s two-year-old. Once, after she lunged at me and affectionately licked my eye, pretending she was a dog, I got my first case of—I started to type “gingivitis,” then “tinnitus,” when what I meant to write was “conjunctivitis.” (Ah, the joys of peri-menopause. Sometimes I get to the middle of a sentence and can’t remember the beginning—or even what I was talking about.)

Earl and I went on a seaplane ride a few weeks ago—the champagne sunset tour. We took off from Sausalito, flew over Mt. Tamalpais and Stinson Beach, and circled low over the skyscrapers of San Francisco as the sun set and all the city lights winked on—lovely! Since we still had half a bottle of champagne left, we invited the pilot to join us (after we were back on the ground)—and he and Earl swapped flying stories. (Earl flew transports during WWII.)

I hope you’re all in the best of health and spirits. May your Christmas be gala and your year 2000 glitch-free.

Callie