So, it is the night before the night before Christmas and you still have shopping to do. Do not panic — our editors have put their heads together and assembled a selection of interesting, affordable and sure to please gifts you can pick up at your local store or receive electronic delivery on.
When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol In Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (the full title) in 1843, he chose to make the least frightening of his apparitions the Ghost of Christmas Past. That makes sense. Christmas memories tend toward the sweet.
The assault on, with, and by music continues, and grows. I love music, but I don’t know how long I can hold out, in a world in which escaping from music has become increasingly difficult.
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One of the best things about winter — yes, there are some — is how clear the sky gets at night.
Disney it ain’t. I think you know what I mean: all those lovely Walt Disney cartoon movies, in which the birds flutter lovingly around the sky, and the fawns gambol in the meadows, the butterflies flit about like ballerinas, and the ever-so-cute bunnies and squirrels and chipmunks scurry — the word probably was invented to describe cartoon rodents and lagomorphs — nearby.
It was the first gray, windy, wintry day, a day that could be in November or February. Such days can chill one to the bone, physically but spiritually, too.
Out here in the woods, if you’re going to watch television chances are you’ll get it via a satellite dish.
This has its annoyances — the “local” stations the satellite company chooses are in West Virginia, for instance. I wonder what television news covered there before they had meth lab explosions to lead the newscasts, but never mind. There’s no television at all when it is raining.
Sitting on a back porch in upstate New York, having coffee and enjoying a beautiful morning, it is as if I’m on a different planet.
The story has it that Townes Van Zandt, the folksinger, was asked how many kinds of music there are. “Two,” was his reply.
Asked to name them, he said, “The blues and Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”