I came home and my hot water heater was broken

In addition to peanuts Southwest Airlines has started handing out small bags of graham cracker snacks. Sometimes the treats are shaped like hexagonal honeycombs. Sometimes they are shaped like mini jet planes. Today they are jet planes. I open the package and quickly realize that, en route to my mouth, the little crackers pass directly through the light-path of a sunbeam shining across my full, upright and locked tray table. Delight. I eat each cracker slowly, carefully pinching the belly of the plane between two fingers trying to obscure as little of the silhouette as possible. It looks like this:


And this:


And this:


And next to me an older man is relieved when the real plane shifts course and I lose my light stage. So I turn and look at the window and the tiny water droplets trapped between the plastic window panes. They have already refrozen into frosty crystals as I put my fingers against the cool window and tell myself I’d rather eat peanuts anyway.

no care for perfection or the presentation of finished products

I’ve always wanted to have a really gorgeous, classy Christmas tree. The kind you find inside the White House Christmas party, or at Generals’ houses with real candles instead of strings of mini-lights. I think secretly my mom always wanted the same thing, because this year as we pulled apart the folded box tops and picked though the top layer of Hallmark Garfield and Snoopy ornaments, she stood up to grab her coat as soon as I offered the idea of buying some new decorations.

We spent over an hour at the store debating the best color scheme to go with the teal walls and reddish chair of the living room. In the end we walked out with armfuls of gold balls, 50 feet of ribbon, and ridiculously expensive mini-lights that come with a lifetime guarantee never to go out. At home I hand picked every ornament and arranged and rearranged the ribbon until the tree looked more like an artistic masterpiece and less like a holiday hostage.

When I was done my mother called the family over to look at our elegant tree. My sister looked up from rewiring the old mini-light kit and said, “Oh, we’re having a ‘department store Christmas’ this year.”




I did this except for the large, sparkly poinsettia at the middle bottom.



I, also, did not decorate this.