Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Duck! There goes Christmas!

Christmas is like a roller-coaster I feel sometimes. You start off quietly - Christmas is three or four weeks away. Then you start to pick up speed, but it’s still two weeks or more to go.

Then you go over the crest and suddenly you’re picking up more and more speed. A week? That’s no time at all! Each day just flies past and suddenly you’re bursting into the Yuletide festival, covered in tinsel, turkey and wrapping paper. You look about, thinking “What just happened?”

By the time we get to Boxing Day, you feel completely shattered. The suburbs are quiet and almost deserted while everyone is away. It’s like the silence after some awful catastrophe in an old disaster movie.

It doesn’t help that I’m still carrying a respiratory infection from the winter that I can’t get rid of. I was scheduled to read the lesson in church the week before Christmas, but my voice was so hoarse and croaking that I had to postpone it for a week. Not to mention the way my right ear keeps blocking up until I can only hear out of my left ear.

The answer for the latter problem seems to be steam inhalation. What a wonderfully old-fashioned cure! I thought my doctor was too young to have even heard of it, but he recommended I give it a try.

So if you’re looking for me, I’ll be out in the kitchen inhaling steam and looking at the pile of Christmas cards I never got motivated enough to post out.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Broken Things

The other day I got up feeling very muddle-headed after sleeping for an hour in the afternoon of a very hot day. I blundered around in the kitchen, trying to make coffee, and ended up knocking my mug off the counter.

It was one of those big black mugs with your name lettered in gold on the side. I picked it up and at first it looked all right, but when I touched it, it broke in half.

My grandfather bought those mugs. He got three of them, one for me, my sister and my mother. Michael, Julie and Mary, they said in gleaming gold lettering. Now the gold was worn and almost illegible. He’s gone now and so is my mother.

My sister is three years younger than me, but her health is not 100%. I spent a lot of time looking out for her, and I wonder how she’ll go if I’m no longer around one day.

Coming up to Christmas, you tend to think a lot about the past. 

And the future.

There’s my half-sister and her family. The youngest member of the family would be her grandson Nathan.

It’s funny to think that whatever we have will eventually belong to him. He doesn’t really know our generation. The people we knew and loved are just names to him, sometimes not even that. I guess it’s hard for him to understand a world and a century that he hardly remembers.

I sit there at family dinners sometimes and watch him. He’s big and tall and has a loud voice; he’s interested in cars and parties and his friends. Typical of his age, I guess. 

It’s one of life’s little jokes that you only really feel connected to previous generations when your own has begun to fade away and drop out of circulation.

But for now I suppose I’ll take my tablets, watch my diet and see how far into the 21st century I can make it.