THE THREAD | sketches for an unfinished Christmas letter . . .

 
. . . either this will make some sense . . . or if the fates allow we can talk about it later . . .
 
. . . but what I want to tell you about is the way Judy Garland sang the original version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” . . . and how she ended the second verse by singing “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” . . .  which doesn’t that actually sound like what we’re all doing right now? . . . as if the textbooks fifty years from now will refer to this as The Great Muddling Through? . . . but anyway . . . when it came time a few years later for Frank Sinatra to cover the song, he found that particular lyric to be too depressing and dark for his holiday spirits . . . so he sang instead, “Hang a shiny star upon the highest bough” . . . and yes, Frank, let’s talk about shiny stars instead . . .  
 
 . . . and so it came to pass that in these days two dads and two moms and a half a dozen children are standing on a hilltop in northwest Missouri on a Monday night at winter solstice in order to see The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn . . . and the children are racing around and complaining of the cold and the moms are gazing up in awe at the clear sky . . .  and one dad is setting up a telescope and remaining focused on lenses and angles and on focus itself . . . and the other dad stands with a beer in his mittened hand, thinking about that story in scripture when Abraham looks up at the night sky and God says, “So you see all of those stars? Your descendants will outnumber them” . . .

. . . and this mittened beering dad wonders about those stars, which ones might be aligning to and alighting upon these particular children running amok here, these kids with their feet planted to a planet in the midst of a pandemic . . . a pandemic that has both upended what their childhood shall be forevermore  . . . and yet . . . here they are, playing kick-the-can in a gravel lot on the edge of a Midwestern hillside where coyotes howl and geese fly overhead, where a glowing half moon hollers for their attention and two planets are near enough to appear as something we so desperately want to see as spectacular right now . . . 
 
. . . a conjunction in the astrological sense is “an apparent phenomenon caused by the observer's perspective” . . . but the two objects are not actually close . . . they just look that way. . . . and in grammar, a conjunction is a word used to connect clauses or sentences . . . or to coordinate words in the same clause . . . such as and . . but . . . if . . .  just attempting to connect . . . or at least give the appearance of connection . . .
 
. . . but for a moment . . . the planets are both millions of miles apart . . . and appear to be nearly embracing . . .
 
 . . . nor can I imagine being the Jupiter of the old tales, with Saturn for a father . . . and watching Saturn be so cruel as to swallow all of his sons and daughters . . . and how Jupiter schemed to trick Saturn into vomiting up all of his descendants . . . and how Jupiter led them in overthrowing their father . . .
 
. . . yet right now the mittened beering dad stoops next to the telescoping dad, who has turned the telescope to face the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn . . . and the telescoping dad says, “Hey, take a look” . . . and the mittened beering dad squints an eye near the lens and sees the two distinct planets so close, and he can see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn and how close they all are to one another and dancing . . . and it might have been amazing to show the kids this phenomenon of two embracing planets . . .

. . . but something bumps the telescope and the alignment gets lost and the telescoping dad can't find it again and the mittened beering dad is quite useless on this front . . . so instead the children must settle for hearing tales of the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn . . .  tales told by these dads who are not gods but mortals for better or worse . . . tales not so much about sky deities swallowing children or tales of a heavenly father bequeathing stars . . .  but mostly just two dads in a gravel lot on a hillside in Missouri, telling this gaggle of small humans to look up, look at those stars, those planets, that moon, see something new coming into alignment . . . you just have to seek it . . . and try to bring it into focus . . . 
 
And so anyway . . . all this to say . . . if the fates allow . . . this time next year I want to tell me stories with no mask between us and I will gaze in wonder as your mouth moves . . . and you can tell me about the choices you made, small or large, that helped you muddle through . . . and I will whisper about these small moments when the earth turned . . . just so . . . and two things that are so distant were suddenly . . . from where I am standing . . . aligned . . .
 
. . . and for the moment . . . we will both have to muddle through . . . and seek stars hanging upon the highest . . .
 
. . . and from a certain perspective . . . at least for a moment . . . it can be both a hardest darkest thing to endure . . . as well as hope sufficient . . . and light abundant . . .
 


Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Blessed Season to all . . . 

Andrew
 

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