Happy Endings

Driving up to Sacramento on Thanksgiving, we could see the snow-capped Sierra far to the east. The air was that clear and crisp our whole visit.

I've grown to love the neighborhood where my daughter and her family live. There are so many trees that remind me of my youth in Michigan.

A place with actual seasons.

The trees in the park near her house are gorgeous this time of year -- leaves red, yellow, orange and green.

My youngest and I made five pies -- two pecan, two pumpkin and one apple. Others in the family made the turkey, dressing, gravy, three green salads, sauteed brussel sprouts, Waldorf Salad, broccoli, other veggies, other side dishes and other desserts.

It was a magnificent feast -- as it is for many people, Thanksgiving is my favorite meal of the year. As a boy, I loved dark meat; later on I grew to like white meat; as I've grown older, I now once again strongly prefer dark meat.

The kids baked this turkey to perfection, as far as the dark meat was concerned. So juicy, perfect.

The rest of the five day weekend involved a lot of driving, homework, more college application stuff, football games on TV, and writing.

It's impossible at my age to not turn to memories during the holiday periods. I can easily summon the moment as a young child, with my nose pressed to the window of our house in Royal Oak, that I first grasped the enormity of the fact that every snowflake hitting the outside of that same window had a unique shape.

This was math at its best -- capturing the concept of infinity.

An infinite number of anything implies unrestrained uniqueness. The concept of unique appeals to the inner mathematical core of a writer.

Writers fancy ourselves as unique voices. We are arrogant in this way -- that we believe our ability to string together words in a visual narrative is as distinct as our fingerprint.

It's our verbal fingerprint.

Storytellers need to believe that stories matter and that the way we choose to tell ours matters as a result.

We may not ever discover why we write; or whether it is a gift, a psychological disorder, an urge to connect, a desire to be heard, or a malady not yet diagnosed by medicine.

But we write. We write and write. I've written millions of words. They've been read by hundreds of thousands of people.

The other day, in the park, shooting the photo at the top of this post, I felt I could look through those beautiful orange leaves to heaven.

I don't know what I mean by heaven.

My 18-year-old son was here the other day when some Christians showed up at the front door wanting to talk to us about Christ. He politely explained to them that he is an atheist and they politely moved on to ring the next doorbell in their missionary outreach.

Maybe by heaven I mean what I felt I was glimpsing was the end of my own particular story. If so, it was a lovely shade of orange, like sundown in the tropics.

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