The Thirty Third Story

Another Christmas Story: I love the concept of the christmas tree. The first year I had my own apartment, in Oberlin, I went out and got one as soon as they went on sale. I brought it home. I leaned it against a wall. I called my Dad. The only words I said were "Dad, I have a problem" without pause, he responded "Five gallon bucket, gravel from the drive way" I said thanks and hung up. I swear to god, I hadn't even told him I was getting a tree.

The Thirty Second Story

Been a while, so, another story. This one is set in Union Square, Somerville, right before Christmas, probably the second year I was in business (though maybe the first). My friend Irka had been helping me out with some of my fairs when I overbooked myself. That day, I just had one small fair, and I had to drop off work for the Massart Winter Sale. I went over to Union square and got myself all set up before remembering about the dropoff. I couldn't leave my work there, it was 11 oclock in the morning, dropoff was only till noon, the fair was already open- so I called up Irka. "where are you, um, right now?" "in Union square, getting brunch" "Great! That's perfect! That's where i am, too, and I need you!" "Um, can I finish my waffles?" "Well, as long as you're quick about it". A few minutes later, I saw her, and with her the fellow who was clearly her date for morning brunch. I felt, suddenly, quite awful, but it being rather too late to avoid interrupting things, I went and did my drop off. I did make them both dinner, later, as an apology.

The thirty first story

Today: A story from when my parents were dating- this one has been independently verified by both parties, and they're very differently styled storytellers, so I believe that this story is true in all its details.
My Dad is Jewish. My Mom is... not. Who knows what she is- she was raised some branch of protestant, and believes in santa claus, but not in god. Regardless, she loves Christmas. For a long time during their courtship, my Dad worked for the army and lived in a shack in the Arizona desert. Mom wasn't a desert person, but she would visit regularly. One of these times she arrived very very late on christmas eve. Dad didn't have a tree. Mom was upset. I get different ideas of how upset from each of them- Dad says she was reasonable, she says she was not. Regardless, the end result was Dad, breaking into the base to steal a christmas tree from the lot, tossing it back out over the barbed wire topped fence.

the Thirtieth Story

For today, my one and only thanksgiving story. My family never much did thanksgiving growing up. There were four of us, and we ate dinner together every night. We didn't have any extended family within driving distance, and, most importantly, we're not people inclined to be bound by tradition. Generally, we didn't make a big deal of it. Dustin's family, though, makes a very big deal of holidays. After going to his extended big meal two years running, I put my foot down, and insisted that we were going to my mom's for thanksgiving. He, very logically, argued that my mom doesn't do thanksgiving, so I called up my mom, and asked if, you know, maybe we could do this thing? She was game, and called up my brother, who agreed to come out. Then she called me back and asked how traditional this ought to be. Since Dustin was so used to a big  thanksgiving, and I was keeping him from it, I thought we should try to do a turkey, and some pies. So mom bought some frozen pies, and a turkey.
Mom's a teacher, and her kids homecoming day was thanksgiving morning. She wanted to go to the game; we could either put the turkey on before and have dinner in the early afternoon- far too traditional for us- or wait till we got home and have dinner around 6. We opted for the latter. Then the game went into overtime, and there wasn't time to come home before picking up Tristan and Yukka, and it was pretty late before we got the turkey in. New Yorkers at heart, this was fine- dinner would be around 8. Mom has a roaster thing separate from the oven; we put the turkey in this and turned it on. It emitted black clouds of smoke. We took the turkey out and cleaned the roaster, put the turkey back in, mixed some cocktails and went down to the beach. About an hour before the turkey was scheduled to be done, we headed back up the hill to put on potatoes and check on the bird. We opened the lid of the roaster to a completely raw bird- the damned machine never got turned back on after the cleaning.
We had pie and wine for thanksgiving dinner, and turkey for dessert. We're adaptable people, and for that I am thankful.

The Twenty Ninth Story

Today's story takes place in Ohio. For my birthday, my mother gave me some amount of money and told me to use it to learn to fly. I wanted to go hanggliding, but much of Ohio has the wrong geography for that, and the amount wasn't quite enough for a flight lesson, so I decided to jump out of a plane. There was a place not too far from Oberlin where you could take a two hour course and then they would take you up; so I signed up there. The class was about 20 minutes of knowledge one might need when jumping out of a plane. This advice included the nugget that we weren't to have long in freefall and should pull our cords about 15 seconds after leaving the plane; but this was our first jump, and it would probably take us that long to start counting, so to just scream FUCK! at the top of our lungs about 5 times and then pull. (this was good advice)

The rest of the two hours was looking at a map of the surrounding farmland. We were supposed to land on their property, but again this was a first jump, and if we screwed up, we might end up at the neighbors'. Most of the farms we were to gather up our parachutes as best we could and find the nearest gate (gates were marked in red on the aerial view). There was one place where they were breeding thoroughbred race horses, and we were on no account to open any gates there; the woman had raised the lowest bar on the fences towards our goal and we should be able to roll under. "And THIS field. This field here- there is a bull. If you land here, fuck the parachute- there is a knife in you jumpsuit pocket, cut your lines and run for whichever fence is closest. Jumping out of a plane isn't dangerous. That bull though- that bull is dangerous" (I'm not sure whether this was good advice. Should one run from a bull? or back away slowly? Don't know, didn't have to find out)

The Twenty Eighth Story

My brother went to Japan for several years after graduating from college. The first Christmas he was gone, my mother and I flew to Thailand to meet up with him and his then girlfriend, Vika. There are lots of stories that come from that trip (the one about the hiking boots and lack thereof originates here). This is just a short aside, though. It is easy to lose track of days when traveling; Mom was more alert than the rest of us. Christmas morning found us on a plane on or way to Phuket. Mom pulled a tiny fake pine tree out of her carry-on and started singing christmas carols in the middle of the flight.

The Twenty Seventh Story

While we were in Mali, my mom and I wanted to get to Timbukto. There were two main reasons for this- the first was the libraries, and the second was the simple fact that it is Timbukto. I mean, you just can't get that close to Timbukto and not go. "That close" though, gives the wrong idea. It is still hard to get to timbukto. There is no road. There's the River Niger, and there's 4x4s. We got it into our heads that we wanted to take a boat. Boats are expensive. We had met up with a pair of British folks, and we were going to try and get together to find passage. They found some other folks (another british woman and a couple, one Danish, and one Bulgarian). The bunch of us ended up splitting a boat with another group from Spain, and a French lady traveling with her Senegalese husband. The last two actually knew what they were doing, the rest of us were dumbasses. Because we had negotiated separately, the english speaking group was to be sleeping on the boat, while the spanish speaking group was to be camping on shore. The first night, there was a storm. It was amazing- the wind was shearing horizontally, driving rain in front of it like a blade. The spanish tents ripped themselves to bits in their attempt to blow away. The boat was leaky, but designed for these storms and thus mostly fine. Clearly, the spanish people needed to come in. But the english speaking crowd had spread out blankets and mosquito nets and what not covering every inch of the boat, so for a long time, we ended up with all the Spanish people sitting in a row on three sleeping bags. Eventually, through diplomatic means, we were able to gain some more land, but there just wasn't enough room for everyone to lay down, so we all played cards and accused each other of cheating in languages we didn't understand.