Merry Christmas! As I had expected and hoped, Grandma’s gift to me, as well as to my parents, was a generous check. I’ll be putting mine into the Sickles Street Furniture Fund, established last month to rid my apartment of the scourge of end tables constructed solely of empty corrugated cardboard boxes, and a complete lack of chairs. Later, my mom’s brother, John, stopped by to start arguments and lecture us on a variety of topics, including the railroad industrialist Jay Gould, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, his DSL service, and Köblentz, Germany.
For dinner, we had some tasty Cornish game hens my mom prepared with rice stuffing and cranberry sauce.
As always, I got way too many gifts: food, books, music, DVDs. There was the usual passing around of the phone among us to talk with absent family members, Dana in Ireland, and Andrew and Jess in Wyoming.
We drove back home in the afternoon. At dusk, the landscape through the window of a car hurtling through lonesome country resembles a dark, tranquil sea.
