Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

As we look back in appreciation of the abundance around us, we are looking ahead toward new growth and more sustainable perspectives. Join us in taking a break from the struggle and acknowledging the people who matter the most. It’s like a balancing act between glasses half-full and half-empty.

The changing seasons have been abrupt in central Swingstate. I’m looking out at a snowy garden teeming with birds. Our dog Ruby bounds around the yard keeping the squirrels at bay. She is a two-year-old golden retriever-Irish setter mix, and we adopted her just after Gven’s birthday in May. Ruby has her own room (cage) in the corner of the living room, and she has made herself thoroughly at home.

The major event of the summer was a gathering of the Golly clan to celebrate the patriarch Chas’s ninetieth birthday. Anabanana, Jeaniebeanie, Jojo, Sven, Rocko, their spouses, children and grandchildren joined Helena, Chas, and dozens of their Fairfield Glade neighbors for golf, boating, and a big party in his honor. For good measure, we celebrated Helena’s eighty-ninth birthday and their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary too. It was an awesome weekend for older kids to appreciate their parents and younger kids to catch up with each other. The stairstep age distribution of Sven's four siblings, eight nieces and nephews, two adult children is a tribal wonder to behold.

It has been an eventful year for Scott’s parents. After years of macular degeneration, Helena’s right eye had become painful as well as nonfunctional, and they decided the best treatment option was a prosthetic eye. The process of making and fitting an acrylic eyeball was fascinating and a little scary, but the surgeon and the ocularist who built and painted the eye are an impressively skilled pair. The support team, especially our sister-in-law Cindylou Who-Golly, helped manage the logistics, and the new eye looks perfect.

Jessi’s custom builder and handyman business in Brooklyn is keeping him busy when he isn’t working for the electrician at an event space in SoHo. During visits to Ohio, he spearheaded our long-planned bathroom renovation by doing new plumbing, wiring, framing, and tiling with help from Gven, Zelda, and Sven. In October, Jessi and three housemates moved to a new apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant that allegedly has an awesome view of Manhattan.

Gven and Sven will be in New York for a few days after Christmas, so they will see whether you can really see the Empire State Building from the kitchen. They weathered a rainy July weekend in Michigan exploring corners of Antrim County we hadn’t seen in a long time. Our meandering led to Camp Maplehurst, where Sven worked briefly in 1973 with his traveling buddy Scott Hastings. By pure coincidence, campers from the last 50 years were having a reunion that day, and they welcomed us as though we were one of them.

Zelda gets smarter and more beautiful every day – just my opinion – as she approaches her four-year anniversary at Half Price Books. It’s an additional bonus that she lives close enough to drop by for an occasional Sunday dinner. Zelda took a vacation in April to visit her friends Anton and John in Chicago. She balances the demands of work with passions for baking, knitting, hiking, and spending time with her cat Nora.

Sven made the challenging transition to production coordinator/grumpy old man at McGraw-Hill – and he likes it! Adapting to change is the name of the game, so he looks forward to learning a lot more about digital publishing as the industry morphs into a whole new definition of textbook. Thanks to the expanding taiji classes at the rec centers and the good folks in the drum circle, Sven has ample opportunities to get grounded, find a rhythm, and sometimes even shoot baskets.

Gven teaches yoga at police and fire academies, the county courthouse, a major insurance company, a recreation center, and her home base at the Yoga Factory. She joined her sisters and cousins in September for a fun reunion weekend in Helen, Georgia. Sad news came in November when her Dad and the Surratt family suffered the sudden loss of Gven’s stepmother Mavis to a heart attack.

Jessi and Zelda are home for the holidays. The tree is up, and there is a fire in the hearth. We’ll have lutefisk, mashed potatoes, and peas. Some things don’t change so much. Have a fertile, cautious Year of the Rabbit.

Peace on Earth & Peace of Mind,
Sven and Gven

Recipe for a successful Xmas

1. Shop for tools at Sears Hardware, books at Acorn or Half Price Books, shoes at Macy's, food at Weiland's and the Clintonville Community Market. If they don't have it, you probably don't need it.

2. Appetizers: egg nog (alternative: Brooklyn brown ale), herring in mustard sauce, aged gouda, sharp cheddar, wheat crackers.

3. Dinner: lutefisk baked with garlic and butter; mashed potatoes with garlic and cream cheese; pork-beef meatballs with garlic, bread crumbs, pine nuts, parmesan, romano, and parsley; peas; tossed salad with poppy seed dressing; braided bread; sauvignon blanc.

4. Dessert: apple crisp and tea while watching a movie and dozing off in a comfortable chair.

5. Go outside and do qigong in a light snowfall.

6. Stay up late. Sleep late.

7. Breakfast: coffee with Bailey's, walnut-date bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese, blueberries, yoghurt, apple crisp.

8. Open presents slowly. Try on the new wool socks, new boots, new jacket. Read the first chapter of the new book. Listen to music that everyone likes, or at least music that nobody hates.

9. Go off to separate rooms for awhile and take a break from each other. Bring in more firewood. Take the dog for a good long walk.

10. Dinner: flank steak marinated in Jamaican jerk rub, baked sweet potatoes, green beans with garlic and slivered almonds, pinot noir.

11. Attempt to watch a movie but doze off in a comfortable chair. Go outside and revive by hanging from a trapeze and doing qigong briefly because it's getting cold. Must be that nor'easter that's about to slam into the whole Eastern Seaboard.

12. Don't stay up so late. Don't sleep so late.

13. Get up, read the paper, meditate, eat a spartan breakfast of bread and apple crisp; clean the kitchen and den; dispose of all the wrapping paper, boxes, and miscellaneous packaging materials.

14. Supper: leftover sweet potatoes with salmon, leftover mashed potatoes with meatballs and peas. Marshmallow fudge for dessert.

15. Go out to an actual movie in an actual theater; engage in complex four-sided negotiation whether to see Black Swan, The Fighter, or The King's Speech, and end up seeing True Grit instead. Not bad.

FRD

It's File Release Day. Leave the tracking, forecasting, and documentation until Monday. It's all about jack, according to Bill. We talk about books, families, co-workers, a former student who can scat like Ella, and the small connected world.

Because I am celebrating the cramp leaving my left calf, the tension exiting the row of cubes I share with four other production workers, and the completion of a project, I am buying another Red's Rye Ale before we go our separate ways.

If your past is in print, your future might be in digital files sent out from a server to a wider world. Our parents, raised on radio, could not have imagined the network we navigate, and we have no inkling of the wonders our kids will know.

So I speed home and eat turkey noodle soup, sit in my favorite chair, and scratch the dog's eager ear. My wife re-starts a movie called "The Time Traveler's Wife," bittersweet but not cloying, and I sleep the undisturbed sleep of a glass half full.