the Boast of Christmas Past...

It's finally over. The presents are unwrapped, my son's new toy car has one of its doors merrily broken off (not that he cares in the least), the tree, while not taken down yet, is getting dried up and crotchety. If it could talk it'd have a rheumy, cracked voice and it would say things like "Back in MY day, I'd get new water every morning. People stuck colorful boxes under me. There was this little monster that kept knocking ornaments off me. These days hardly anybody even remembers to turn my lights on in the morning. Nobody notices the old tree. Nobody comes and visits. It's gettin drafty in here. I'm losing my needles. Throw another tree skirt around my stump, would'ja?"

I'm not going to wax nostalgic about Christmas this year. It was pretty good. We didn't travel to see any family (who live several states away) and that was, frankly, the best gift of all. We stayed home, my wife and I, with our three-year-old and his baby sister, and we just chilled out. We turned on the old gas fireplace (does that qualify as an oxymoron?) and at four o'clock that afternoon, for lack of anything better to do, we packed everybody in the car and went to the park. It was bitingly cold. Zane ran around like a little wildebeest. My wife ran after him delightedly and I carried my daughter all bundled in my coat, her little round face the only thing visible, like an indian poking her head out of a teepee. It was great. It was so peaceful and pleasant that it was, to be honest, a little surreal.

I don't deserve this much happiness, do I?

I feel out of place in today's America. Am I wrong or does it seem like people are taking a strange, perverse, mirthless pride in being stressed out and miserable? A few years ago, my wife, who was then working in the corporate world, told me about a conversation she observed between several of her coworkers. They were all comparing escalating stories of how rushed and overwhelming their weekend schedules were. If I remember it, they went something like this:

"Ugh. Saturday was hell for me. I was on the road by eight with nothing but a coffee and a danish and a carload of kids. I had to coordinate four kids with two games, one rehearsal, and two practices between them. I didn't get home until ten!"

"Yeah, that's tough. Me, I was in the car at six because my son's soccer tournament was forty minutes away. The twins' piano recital was twenty minutes later across town. I got a speeding ticket, had a fender bender in the parking lot of the junior high, and got into a three-way fight with the umpire and another parent at my daughter's softball game."

Oh yeah? Well me and my kids slept in the car on Friday night to save time in the morning. We peeled out of the driveway at five til dawn and had to cut through eleven backyards to make the starter's pistol at the track meet! I had forty-three stops, made dinner in the trunk with a hibachi grill and a can of sterno while the car was idling at an intersection strategically positioned between Joey's tuba lesson and Tiffany's ballet tumbling class and STILL squeezed in a workout, two hours of research on this morning's report, five minutes' quality time with my wife, an oil change and a three-quarters of a lawn mowing."

Or something like that.

And that's the misery and stress some people actually choose. I look at the news and it would seem that the world is simply chock full of pain, loss, tragedy, death, destruction, want, greed, hate and overall, plain-and-simple bad mojo. A good chunk of the people I know are unhappy. A lot of them have crappy marriages. Most of them dislike their work. More than a few have experienced great personal losses of the size and scope that I cannot even wrap my brain around.

And here I am, in the center (my center, at least) of this great big stewing cesspool of yuck, and I'm happy. I feel guilty about it! I'm happy, damn it! I have unbelievably awesome kids (granted, they are 3 and 7 months, so they haven't had much chance yet to turn really awful), a career that pays pretty durn well, and that I would continue working at even if I stopped being paid, a gorgeous, delightful wife, good health, great teeth, a decent bowling average, and a mother-in-law whose company I actually enjoy.

Wow.

So what's the deal? I don't know, and to be truly honest, I don't care that much. This new American arms-race of stress and misery is one rat-race I am very happy to bow out of. I lose. Darn.

So anyway, this was just one big long ramble. I am gonna go have dinner now and do some work. Merry post-Christmas to you all, and for those of you intent on outdoing everybody else in the stress department, may you have a horrid and miserable new year, full of anxiety, noise, and breathless rushing.

That was sarcasm, by the way. (grin!)