Today, Christmas Eve, I received a card from Cape Cod, from Caleb. This is what he wrote:

Ho Ho Ho !!!! Merry Christmas to you and your entire family...& I hope you get every gift you wish for.....soooo have a great holiday !! & thank you!!! (Drawn heart) Caleb! (15 little drawn hearts).

And I just want to say Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas to all. God Bless us all and give us peace and good health in the next year. (Drawn heart)

Today I was remembering a Christmas six years ago, a hard Christmas for Maria because she had to make life defining decisions for her Godmother and Aunt, Aunt Lillian. Lillian was in the hospital in Poughkeepsie and the staff was adamant that this time she was not going home. She had to go to a Nursing Facility. Although there is usually a long waiting line, and lots of foot work and paper work, Maria managed to get her in Northern Dutchess, close to Maria's home. Lillian was admitted a week before Christmas. Maria followed the ambulance that brought her to Rhinebeck. As they were getting Lillian out of the vehicle, one of the men said to Maria, "Boy, that Aunt of yours is a real pisser" and told her that before they took off, Aunt Lillian said to the two men, "Boys, can you do something for me? Make a stop for me?" The men thinking that she wanted some magazines to read or personal items, said sure, and Aunt Lillian said, "Take me to the Poughkeepsie Bridge. I want to jump off."

Aunt Lillian seemed to adjust well the first day. The dietician came up to ask her what she liked to eat. "Oh, said Aunt Lillian, "I'm a vegetarian. But I would love a lamb chop." Because they rushed her into the Nursing Home, she had to share a room. She didn't like this and neither did the woman with her, who called her a "Princess" and would talk aloud to herself about the "spoiled princess". I let her get settled and went to see her after two days. Maria was in her room with her. Her roommate was wheeled out to see the Christmas Pageant, loudly discussing how the "princess doesn't want to go to the show like everybody else. Trying to make small talk, I told Maria that I had heard the coyotes the night before. Aunt Lillian looked up from the bed. Coyote? Uncle Phil had a coyote during the war. He carried it around with him." Maria and I exchanged looks and then Aunt Lillian asked for a cup of tea. Maria offered to go and get it and said she wanted to see the Christmas pageant anyway. Lillian and I had a nice talk, about family and old times and Maria came back with the tea. Later, going home Maria said the Pageant was beautiful, sad but beautiful, with the players being the patients. The three wise men came in on wheel chairs and Ria had tears in her eyes when she said one old man had a big bandage on his head, but a great big smile.

Maria was called in daily to calm Aunt Lillian down, who was not happy to be there and even managed for her to get a private room. The day before Christmas a nurse told Maria to stay home tomorrow, spend Christmas with your family. Besides, Aunt Lillian might adapt better if not given the chance to lean on Maria all the time. So she did. She called and the staff said she had visitors from Beacon and was talkative and responsive to her guests. But Sunday after Christmas they again called Maria, that things were not going well. Aunt Lillian was going downhill fast. Maria called the priest to come for the last rites, but found Lillian naked, not even a blanket on in her bed. The nurse explained that sometimes near death the human "thermostat" goes crazy and Aunt Lillian could not cool down. "Help me, help me die,"she begged Ria. "I called the priest, he will help you." But the priest seeing she had no clothes on would not go into the room. Get her dressed, he directed and Maria went back into the room. Again Aunt Lillian asked for her help, help me die. The nurse looked at Maria and Maria said sternly, We will help you Aunt Lillian, We will help you die. But first you have to get dressed. " Maria said the nurse laughed right out loud at Maria's words. But Aunt Lillian did get covered up and the priest said his prayers which calmed Lillian right down.

The next morning while Maria and I talked on the phone, Aunt Lillian died. I went with Maria to the funeral home. Lillian had made all the arrangements before, just the obituary had to be written. Where was she born? He asked Maria. "Harlem", she was always proud of that fact. He shook his head, we better just say New York City...people might misunderstand. He asked a few more questions, and then Ria said to him...about her birthplace - I want you to put in Harlem. That's what she wanted, that's what she is going to get" Maria did a great job taking care of Aunt Lillian, right to the end....and more.

We are having the second snowstorm of the week. I woke up thinking of snowmen. Last year I read The History of the Snowman by Bob Eckstein and was fascinated by the historic facts presented of the snowman. The author really did a good job, searching art museums throughout the world, looking for the first sign of a snowman. Because of the nature of snowmen (they melt) there was little seen of them in art, but then in the 15th century they started to appear in winter scenes.

Their history is a shady one, snowball throwing started the American Revolution with the Boston Massacre...some boys threw snowballs at the British soldiers. Also, a fort in upstate New York was attacked by Indians when the men, during a snowstorm, left the fort guarded by just two snowmen. Early snowmen were both snow men and ladies, and some of them were quite risque. The snowman really became popular in the 19th and 20th century in advertisements. They advertised everything from cars, to candy, to alcohol and not one snowman ever made a penny for representing a product. (Unlike Tiger Woods who up until recently made millions of dollars by endorsing products!) Bob Eckstein called the years from 1975-2000 the "white trash years" of the snowmen, with Hollywood making movies, not only cartoons, but bloody killer Snowman movies and snowmen being exploited all over the place.

The Guiness Book of records lists the people of Bethel Maine as building the largest snowman. They keep breaking their own record, no one challenges them. The latest was a snow lady, 122 feet and 1 inch high. I think they are working on another one right now. Anyway, when I read the book I thought what a wonderful project for Tivoli, not the biggest, but maybe the most snowmen in a Village. Everyone could go to the park, or maybe just make a snowman in their yard, or maybe a whole crowd of snowmen.

Then this morning I had another thought...snowmen in the cemetery. We just finished decorating Maria's grave with a grave blanket, so the cemetery was on my mind. Any what better place to make snowmen? Lots of space, no one would bother them. They would get people to gather in a place that used to be used by families to picnic and spend time with their departed families. And, I bet Guiness doesn't have any record of the largest number of snowmen made in a cemetery. January 18th is World Day of the Snow Man (a fact I stumbled on in the internet) so I think a snowman -at least one - will show up in the cemetery on that day.

Yesterday I read at Margaret's Memorial. I was not going to read and then I thought well, I wrote it, Margaret would have liked to hear it, so I got up, the next to the last person to speak and read my page and a half on my experiences with Margaret and a few of the times we had shared. People started to laugh as I got into the second paragraph about Margaret and the bread dough and they kept on laughing. It made me feel really good because I love to make people laugh (sometimes I don't even mean to.) I think it started when I was in eighth grade and my father was in the hospital with a heart attack.

In those days they kept you in the hospital for six weeks, flat in the bed, no pillow, nothing. My father had always been a very active man and this, plus the doctor saying he would never ski again, had depressed him deeply and I saw a side of my father that I had never seen before. The hospital was one block from the high school, so everyday I would stop in to visit him on my way home from school. One day I told him what had happened that day. "Bill Eggling made himself faint today in school, " I started. My father looked at me blankly. Why did he do that? he asked, and I said, "Well, Mrs. Collins, our history teacher was late in coming to class, and he just told everybody he was going to make himself faint. He went up to the front of the class and held his breath. First he turned kind of red, then white, then he tumbled over just as Mrs. Collins came into the room. Now the man in the next bed, put down his newspaper and looked at me, like what happened next? "Well', I continued, Mrs. Collins screamed "What's going on?" and someone said Bill wanted to show us how he could faint. Bill already was starting to sit up and Mrs. Collins ordered him to the nurse, assigning another boy to go with him. "What did Mrs. Collins do then?" my father asked and I said she shook her head and said, "And they shot good men like Lincoln." Well, my father smiled at that. The man in the next bed said he knew a guy in the service that could make himself faint...he thought it would get him out of the army, but they didn't care. And he started to tell us his stories of the war. After that everyday I would look for something funny or interesting to tell my father. And there was always plenty of material a lot of it involving the strange Bill. One day he went too far and lit lighter fluid on his desk, so we didn't see him for quite a while after that. Anyway, there were a variety of teenage boys doing weird things to report back to the hospital room, trying to get at least a smile.

Years later I was taking an English class at Bard with Professor Wilson, a well known and respected teacher at Bard for many years. We were the night class, mostly adults, but had a full schedule. We read Moby Dick plus had writing assignments every week. One time he came into class, smiled at us, and said, "Last week after this class, I went home, made a fire in the fireplace, poured myself a glass of scotch and started to go through your papers. I got laughing so hard that Mrs. Wilson (his wife was the Registrar at Bard) came downstairs to ask what was I laughing about and I told her Mrs. Fritz." That's when I knew he was talking about my paper and I blushed red as a beet but was also as proud as I could be. I made Professor Wilson laugh.

It was not easy to get Margaret to laugh. She smiled a lot, but held her laughs mostly in reserve. I remember one time at the Black Swan I was telling her about a Larry David show where he had a particular type of hair caught in his throat, and she got laughing so hard. Margaret was beautiful when she smiled, but when she laughed it was like plugging in the Christmas tree and all the lights and decorations lit up like magic. That was her laugh and I hope I made her laugh yesterday too.

I was looking for something last week in one of my drawers and ran across a file of writings that Maria had given to me. They were written by her for her English class, English 101, when she was a student at Columbia Greene College. Here's a part of what she wrote:

"When I was a child, my mother belonged to the Columbia House Record Club. Once a month, Nick our mailman, would deliver to her a flat, square package. Sometimes it was the selection of the Month, which meant she hadn't mailed in an order. Usually she returned these, although I do remember her keeping a few. Most of the arrivals were long awaited and most desired. James Taylor, Carol King, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, and Bob Dylan all came into our lives this way. If we happened to be home from school when the latest album came, we were treated to an impromptu party. She remove it lovingly from its outer wrappings, carefully put it on the old black stereo, and after blowing once or twice on the needle, begin to play it. Just once how I wish I could return, spiritlike, to peer through the window and see the five of us dancing barefoot in that livingroom of my childhood. We were joyous."

I first was introduced to the Columbia Record Club by my sister Barbara. She was working at Texaco at the time, was making "good money" so had enrolled in the club. In 1955 the Club was still in its early stage, but already had more than 128,000 members. Barbara bought Frank Sinatra, Broadway hits - I knew and still remember all the words to Pajama Game and My Pal Joey. One time she got Rimsky Korsakov Scheherazade (probably didn't send back the monthly selection), but I loved the mysterious haunting sound of it. That was what was different about Columbia. They had "Negative option billing practice" where every few weeks you would get a postcard in the mail with the monthly selection. You had to either mark NO and get nothing that month, or pick another selection. It could get ahead of you, if you weren't prompt in mailing back the selection card and usually once you got the package, you opened it, thought what the hell, put it on, and then you were stuck with it. Weird Al Yankovic has a song in which he described the Columbia Record club as a larger commitment than getting married. And it was. It didn't take long for the records to add up both in quantity and in money. In its hey day, which Maria writes about in the 1970's there were more than 3 million members.

Of course there is no such thing (at least I don't think so) of the Record Club today. With the internet music is a completely different animal these days. But there was something, something special about getting the music in the mail, putting it on the record player and hearing Cat Stevens right in your living room.

I've been thinking a lot about memories lately. I guess a class on how our body ages started it. The memory, short term, is the first to go. That's why we can remember who we sat next to in second grade, but can't find where we put a certain letter or bill. And then Margaret's death, following the year after Ria, and all you have left of them is memories.

You don't have any memories before your child is born. Oh, maybe the conception. Timmy was conceived on New Year's Eve and he's told me his father kept the cork from the champagne bottle. I remember about two weeks before Ria was born, I was watching the Memorial Day parade and a drummer banged his drum right in front of me. Ria jumped in my belly about a foot and I recall thinking, "Well, at least she isn't deaf." They say you never can remember the pains of labor, as soon as they hand you that beautiful baby, it is forgotten. I don't know about that...it comes in handy when you are arguing with your kid, and you start in about the delivery and what you went through.

Anyway, last Friday we were all at Margaret's house, looking through pictures, picking out specific ones to display at her Memorial. One was of me and I said, "Oh, yes, that was a Tivoli clean-up day and we were all at the park afterwards for refreshments. Liz was with me and we rode around town picking up bottles and garbage." Now, where the hell did that come from. Margaret had labeled the picture 1993, 16 years ago, and one look at the picture and the whole day comes back.

That's like with Ria. The other day I remember the summer before she died and we were sitting by the pool, watching the kids in the water. Rachael was sitting with us and I turned to Maria and said, "Ginny sent me a joke today. I think it's funny, do you want to hear it?" Ok, Ma she said with a little shrug, like why not? So I started. And the funny thing is I never can remember jokes, I always forget an important line or even the punch line, but this joke sticks in my head like glue, probably because I was with Ria. Well, I started - an old couple were on their first date, and they go out to eat, have a nice meal, nice conversation, lots of wine and they end up in his apartment. Sure enough, a little later they have sex. Afterwards, he is thinking, "If I knew she was a virgin, I would have gone easier on her." And she's thinking, "If I knew he could get it up, I would have taken off my panty hose." Well, Rachael huffed..."That's disgusting," and got up and left. Maria looked at me seriously, and said, "Poor old people, everyone makes fun of them" and then she laughed, her wonderful laugh, that I hope I will always remember. And I laughed too, and we kept laughing thinking about the old lady with her panty hose on. And that's what I mean about memories. We really don't have control of them, they can pop up anytime and just about anything. And I am thankful, oh so thankful that I have them..of Maria, of Margaret, of Bucky and Daddy, Uncle Jack, Grandma and Poppy, on and on. It's like a part of them is still here, stuck somewhere in the cauliflower folds of my brain. Hiding, but ready to come out at any minute.

My neighbor Mary Alice once said to Maria that "your mother can get along with anyone" a really nice compliment and in most cases true (we won't mention Barry at Kosco). My friends can vary from Ginny that sends me e-mails of internet interest. The last one was "called caterpiller seen in dormitory" and it was a picture of four or five guys on top of each other- , mooning, with their legs sticking out - it did look like a caterpiller. Timmy's sister Meg also is an e-mailer. The last one was Halloween Costumes that are just wrong - and they were so tasteless (and funny) that I can't discuss them. Then I have a friend Crissy with whom I can have a lengthy discussion on how difficult it is for women to pee in the woods, "you always end up wetting your shoes". I know people that you can have a political conversation with, both Democrats and Republicans, but I had a hard time last year with anyone thinking McCain was the choice. And all my neighbors and I can go on about living in Tivoli and how good it used to be.

Then I had Margaret, who was a wonderful combination of all the above. She too could pick out the best internet jokes and send them. One last year was a woman singing about Sarah Palin, with a man playing the piano in back of her wearing a Moose Hat. "Don't speak for me Sarah Palin" in the tune of Evita. I still laugh at that. We too talked about urine, but our conversation was how asparagus affected it and the chemical reasons for the change in its odor. My last long conversation with her included discussion on the movie she had just watched about Frost and Nixon and did Nixon really think that he was above the law as President. And we talked about the book I had just read in Cape Cod "That Old Cape Magic". There was one line that had stood out to me and I repeated it to Margaret "Why does a rich country likes ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?" and we discussed how that line applied now to the health debate and who decides who gets what kind of health care. Pretty heavy stuff for our last conversation.

Picking up the Old Farmer's Almanac this morning, I realized that this varied type of information and interest is exactly what has sold the Almanac since 1792. Last night's moon was called the Full Beaver -no reference to the caterpiller please. November 8 is when black bears head to winter dens and November 20 is when skunks hibernate. Today, Election Day, is when the first dog was launched into space in Sputnik II in 1957. And even a quote from Emerson, "the sky is the daily bread of the eyes". Something for everbody and something to think about this cold autumn day. Weatherman says snow showers on Thursday and the almanac agrees using the rhyme "first its glowing, then its snowing". And hopefully, silly e-mailing is a coming.