"A Joy Forever".

Christmas is all around us. I am full bellied thanks to a loud and wild breakfast with Beth A, visiting town from the Mountains. Go tell it on the Mountains. We ate and spoke with mouths open, stuffed with falafel and onions and eggs and there were plenty of hand gestures and throaty bursts of laughter. This is Christmas, I think. Happy families eating together, babies everywhere, children excited about french toast dates with their Papas, mothers shrieking in joy welcoming heart attacks and hot flashes, experimental dinners done well and not so well, nice wine in glassware, chewed nail polish, middle parts and turtle necks, pearls, scarves, tinkling music, cheese platters, orange peels dappling the arms of couches, heads dipping sleepily while listening to Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens. She left me for the west again and now I am back tucked into my home, socked and slippered and blanketed and ready to read the afternoon away. But first, a note.

Actually, I have nothing worth writing save for a hearty 'Merry Christmas to all'. I love being on holidays. Oh, but I am reading a lovely book right now titled appropriately so, (to match my current outlook): "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss (genius Jonathan Safran Foer's frau). What a lady. What a book. Just now, my eyes scanned the floor of my living room to stop dead on a pair of elbow length cashmere finger gloves as orange as oranges can be, lying in wait, ready to be slipped into and worn around the house, shown off like a prize winning chow chow. I love them. Thinking of them, I thought of the last paragraph I read (and underlined without THINKING in the blackest of ink, sorry Anne M as it is your book and not mine) and the weight of giving. This is for you.


I'm ready to go back now, I said.

To my surprise, he got out, opened the door, and helped me in.

When I got back to my apartment, I thought I'd been robbed. The furniture was overturned, and the floor was dusted with white powder. I grabbed the baseball bat I keep in the umbrella stand and followed the trail of footsteps to the kitchen. Every surface was covered with pots and pans and dirty bowls. It seemed that whoever had broken in to rob me had taken time to make a meal. I stood with the photograph down my pants. There was a crash behind me, and I turned and swung blindly. But it was just a pot that had slipped from the counter and rolled across the floor. On the kitchen table, next to my typewriter, was a large cake, sunk in the middle. Standing, nonetheless. It was frosted with yellow icing, and across the top in sloppy pink letters, it read, LOOK WHO BAKED A CAKE. On the other side of my typewriter was a note: WAITED ALL DAY.

I couldn't help it, I smiled. I put the baseball bat away, upturned the furniture that I remembered I had knocked over the night before, took out the picture frame, breathed on the glass, rubbed it with my shirt, and set it up on my night table. I climbed the stairs to Bruno's floor. I was about to knock when I saw there was a note on the door. It said: DO NOT DISTURB. GIFT UNDER YOUR PILLOW.

It had been a long time since anyone had given me a gift. A feeling of happiness nudged my heart. That I can wake up each morning and warm my hands on a hot cup of tea. That I can watch the pigeons fly. That at the end of my life, Bruno has not forgotten me.

Back down the stairs I went. To delay the pleasure I knew was coming my way, I stopped to pick up my mail. I let myself back into my apartment. Bruno had managed to leave a dusting of flour over the entire floor of the place. Maybe a wind had blown in, who knows. In the bedroom I saw that he had gotten down on the floor and made an angel in the flour. I stepped around it, not wanting to ruin what he had made so lovingly. I lifted my pillow.

It was a large brown envelope. On the outside was my name, written in handwriting I didn't recognize. I opened it. Inside was stack of printed pages. I began to read. The words were familiar. For a moment I couldn't place them. Then I recognized they were my own.