Happy New Year and pass the moisturizer

December 31, 2011

The cold and snow may be missing from this winter but one other seasonal staple is not: cracked and often bleeding hand skin.

When I was a boy, my mother told me I had such parched hands because I did not dry them thoroughly enough after washing them. For my mother, a problem was usually the fault of the person who experienced it. It would never have occurred to her that my dry skin was the result of the desert-low humidity of Minnesota winters. On the flip side, any challenge a person faced could be solved if that person acted properly. If you had a sore throat, for example, you merely had to gargle with warm salt water. Problem solved. Is this human-centric way of looking at our lives pessimistic (it is all our fault) or optimistic (we can solve most if not all of our problems by following simple remedies)?

One thing I can say for sure: this way of thinking is annoying. I rang in my childhood New Years as I do today: with hands as dry as mummy skin, and all the time thinking it was due to shoddy towel use. How much better if Mom had saved the guilt and taught me the value of hand lotion.

Such a strange way of thinking, especially from a woman who never once saw a doctor after I was born, her youngest child. And she lived another 38 years. Mom had problems walking the last five years of her life but refused to get a checkup. Her legs were her weakness, she said, laughing off every medical urging of her children. If she had half the faith in her own capacity to fix problems as she did in the capacity of her kids she may have caught the blocked coronary arteries before they killed her.

But we are all strange beasts. Unsightly winter hands and self-delusion are the least of our blemishes.

I’m a bad bad man

December 30, 2011

What if I was the evil twin? It’s always the other guy, somebody a friend half sees in a grocery store. But no, I was home watching the Vikings. It couldn’t have been me. Must have been your evil twin, the friend says, then giggles.

But what if I’m the polluted half of that shared gene pool? What if I’m the one who steals your keys in a drunken stupor and drives your car into a tree? The one who “invests” your money in a trip to Tahiti? The one who seduces your wife then dumps her when the ink on the divorce papers is still wet? What if I’m the one with the charm of a snake and the venom to match?

Somebody has to be the evil one. We push him into the shadows of the imagination and give him funny names, like Snidely or Lucifario. But he can’t always be a nightmare. Somebody has to steal, stab and murder. Why can’t I fill that job?

I want to be the bad boy, the one girls fear and desire in equal measure, the villain of legends told over cold beers on Friday nights, the one who goes out in a blaze of glory. I want to be Snidely, if only for an hour or two.

On second thought, I’d probably need a tattoo. Never mind.

Silent night

December 25, 2011

Santa Claus is dead to me, and the only time I experience the sparkle of Christmas is when I drive home at night and glance at the neighborhood light displays. But Christmas lives on as a shadow universe rubbing against my own: the anticipated glee of presents, of rarely seen siblings home from college for the holiday, the promise of games, the camaraderie. Once you feel that as a young boy it does not die. It shines like a silent star in your sky, an omen to follow through the desert, if only once a year.


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