December 19, 2009
Saturday

The snow began before dawn. “6 to 12” somebody said. Another source predicted “12 to 20.” I went out at about 7:30 for what I considered emergency supplies — a full container of half and half (as backup for the one currently open and about three-quarters full, or one-quarter empty) and a full can of coffee. I’d forgotten them last night when I stopped by the Giant on the way home for more sfratti making supplies for Ron.

I triggered some accusations of grinchiness by sighing on my Facebook status about the giddiness with which some people were rhapsodizing about the snow. It’s just snow, I said, not pennies from heaven, and it represents losses and risks for many people. Only people who are idiots enough to go out, I was informed. I was thinking about the hungry and the homeless and other marginalized people who are more at risk and suffer more losses in extreme weather than at other times. Lest you think me cloyingly altruistic, know that there is a self-serving element to my grumping about the snow. Though I am safe and warm, people I love must be out and about, they are not where I can see them, and I worry.

It snowed all day. Measured with my Dominick Costanza yardstick, the accumulation was about 6 inches by early evening. I didn’t accomplish much. Today would have been the perfect day to wrap all the presents currently occupying the dining room table and ready it for our Christmas Eve lunchtime repast of pasta with sauce, ceci soup, sfratti, and whatever else gets made. Lynn will be here, and we’ll open presents, and remind each other how much we love each other  Then we’ll be off to separate activities for Christmas Eve, because I will not be that mother who demands that everything be done exactly the way we’ve done it since before you were born, who thinks we’re all headed for hell itself if we don’t attend the same church service together.

On this very date last year I wrote about what women want. I had an answer to the question posed by the DeBeers diamond conglomerate: “If everything you ever bought her disappeared overnight, what would she truly miss?”

“None of it,” I wrote. “Not one single thing. The memories of the push and pull, the give and take, the ups and downs of twenty-five years together, the joy that being the wife and mother in this family has brought me, can never be taken away from me.”

The ad that has caught my attention this year is from Kay Jewelers. It shows a woman sitting in a rocking chair cradling an infant. A man comes into the frame, the woman tells him it’s two in the morning and the baby just now fell asleep. He plugs in the Christmas tree, and it bathes them in a warm glow. Two in the morning of our first Christmas as a family, he says. And he hands her a box, which he opens for her (because she is holding the baby) to reveal a pair of diamond solitaire earrings.

Everybody say ooh. Everybody say ahh. I sighed. I smiled.

Tonight I saw the same commercial. Same soft music. Same beautiful mother and child posed as only a Christmas ad can pose them. Same handsome guy getting all misty about his first Christmas as a father. He opens the box.

Not diamond solitaire earrings.

A Citizen watch.

Men! Do not be deceived. A watch, even a diamond-studded eco-friendly watch that runs on light and never needs a battery and costs $600 and is the same kind that Eli Manning wears, is not what a woman who is up with an infant at two in the morning wants. Obviously, she already knows what time it is. Kay ad people! Scrap this ad. Go back to the diamond earring version.

What do I want?

A love letter. Still a love letter.

From the Archives
December 19, 2004 — Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: (The day and date noted above suggest that I am composing this piece and typing it out only hours after the events described. That is certainly not the case. This is being written a few days after the party and is being backdated to give the illusion that you’re getting dispatches from the front lines of my life. You’re not. You’re getting emotion recollected in tranquility. If it was good enough for Wordsworth . . . )
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