If you can catch it, the season's spirit has the capacity to warm your lonely soul. But beware, there are dark spirits lurking around the holidays, as well.
This particular holiday season, I've found myself choosing happiness at every juncture. It's not that I think of happiness as a choice; our emotional states are much too vulnerable to environmental factors, naturally, for our own wishes to prove paramount.
But when and wherever I can, I'm choosing to see the joyous over the darkness.
I'm not sure why it is like this this year for me. Something must be going on. Maybe time is catching up with me, as it has a way of doing, and on some level I've come to appreciate that the opportunity to close out another year with my family, seeing their smiles, is as great a gift as there is.
That, and the knowledge that there are a finite number of such gifts, for time itself is limited.
Concretely, our activities are much like everyone else's. My kids and I watch romantic movies on TV; my youngest and I shop and wrap presents together. We imagine the happy faces of the smaller children when they find out what the imaginary gods have brought them.
We also have to eat. So she and I, while her older brother-coach was practicing futsol in the Richmond, visited Clement Street. We found a small coffee house; she ordered a bagel and I ordered edamame.
We visited the locally legendary Green Apple Books.
We fought traffic to park our car. We walked, crossing Geary Avenue four times.
The sky was blue, the church steeples outlined above us. To many, those are the symbols of the gods.
We went into a Chinese market. Many of the best hereabouts lie along Clement. She held her nose against the smell of fish. We searched for a certain Chinese soda she favors but they didn't have it; she bought some sour candy instead.
The lady at the cash register smiled and spoke perfect English. To the woman in front of us, who was Asian, she said "Thank you," and that's also what she said to us.
My daughter smiled as we exited the store, finally exhaling and breathing fresh air again. "I can't stand that fish smell," she told me.
"Maybe when fish forms such a big portion of your diet, you don't mind the smell," I suggested. "Maybe it smells good to you."
She raised one eyebrow at me, a skill she inherited genetically from her father, from me.
Now I like fish a lot, but I also hated the way that market smelled today.
***
The basketball court where her brother's futsol team practices is in a Lutheran Church facility, which also apparently operates a "day school."
We got back there, her and I, in time to watch the last four or five fast-paced scrimmages. Her brother was on the "yellow" team, wearing number 8. Kinda funny about the two of them, coach and player, they've always only been either #8 or #16, multiples.
He did it again, today. He wowed us. After over a month and a half off, with no soccer or practice whatsoever, he was dominant out there, on the small court, guarding his team's net and setting up their offensive thrusts.
When I got there, another Dad whispered, "The red team is killing everyone else."
If true that ended when we arrived. The yellows beat the reds, then the greens, then the reds, then the greens again, in a series of fast-paced 5-minute scrimmages. The cumulative score was something like 15-5.
What was striking was the way every time save one another player smashed into her coach, he being the last line of defense before a goal, he won the battle. Several times, the attackers ended up on the floor; whether or not that happened he ended up in control of the ball and jump-started his team's offense.
There was no way to count how many assists he had but he did score one goal during this flurry of action.
Afterwards, he said he felt good and glad that he's been continuing his weight-lifting and workouts multiple times daily. Since lately he has been expressing reservations about how important soccer may be to his choice of colleges, I've also been scaling back my own expectations.
But today, watching him perform, I had to ask myself why he shouldn't continue to shoot to be a star?
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