LETTERS FROM HOME: CHRISTMAS LETTER 1995: THE CHRISTMAS GEESE

Dec. 21, 1995

Dear friends,

Some of you are old enough to remember a television series called "That Was the Week that Was." It presented the news of the week in review, but in a wacky, irreverent way. This letter is like that show, except for the wacky and irreverent part and that bit about the week.

Against the wishes of both of our families, DC and I purchased an old house in March. Actually, they liked the house, not the neighborhood. There was a drive-by shooting and an instance of drug-selling in the park next door during the year, but a lot of kids were simply swinging on jungle gyms and playing spirited basketball games.

Not long after moving in, a big wind ripped two limbs off one of our cottonwood trees. One crashed through our bedroom windows, the other crushed the roof of our car. Welcome to the neighborhood.

The folks two doors down from us are restoring a house that was once a mansion. We're working on our Arts and Crafts home, too, in what only appears to be slow motion. And that's my fault.

The problem is that only one of us has the appropriate talents. DC's parents gave her an early Christmas present of a detail sander, and she loves applying toxic chemicals to old paint and scraping off the gummy residue. The delight is akin to popping packing bubbles, I gather.

It was along about the time we bought the house that I decided to become more serious about golf. No, not serious. Sincere. I played twice a week, practiced twice a week and took a biweekly lesson. Golf became my spiritual path, my guru a pro named Preston.

Golf may be so intriguing because it's absolutely impossible to attain perfection. It's like life.

In September, somebody dumped a litter of black and tan puppies in the neighborhood. We claimed two of them, named them Hank and Lucy, aka the Monsters. Nothing is too strong for them to tear apart, no corner of the house is too much trouble to travel to for the purpose of establishing a privy, and nothing is too disgusting to eat.

We love them dearly.

DC works two jobs, belongs to a service club and a city commission and helps out at church whenever possible. She's usually toiling on some project at 6 in the morning (I hear her in my dreams) and on something else when I get home from work late at night.

That we hardly see each other is a source of sadness and a condition we plan to improve in 1996.

She drives herself so hard there's no time to worry about whether moving here was the right decision, no time to fret over the continuing miscarriages.

Moving back to our birthplace in Missouri was instinctual, I have concluded, like the impulses guiding the V's of geese we see overhead these days. DC calls them the Christmas geese.

Archly I remind her that hunters are waiting to blast the Christmas geese from the sky. But still they come. Life is waiting to put children through terrible ordeals and heartbreaks, too, but still we want them to come. For the joy.

In golf, I have deduced, the great mistake is to focus on the result -- judging the place where your ball ends up or your score as good or bad. It then can become a game based on fear of screwing up.

The joy is in swinging the club. In hitting a ball as purely as you can, or looking for a ball in a stream and finding a great blue heron instead.

Joy is seeing Christmas geese in your beloved's eyes.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.