Holiday Thoughts
- Holiday Thoughts
big family Christmas gatherings slipped away again this year— no driving to Maine or Merrick Carolina or DC, or anywhere else family might be
last year with our two away in France, it was frittata for Hanukkah this year pork roast, only one boy and very few gifts— how far we have slipped Hanukkah came and Christmas with Dave, a prayer and some candles while Ben stayed out west—
no ritual piling into a packed car driving from snowy Vermont to metro New York through the whole long day with family nerves flaring [End Page 40] like fevers up and down the Northway, Thruway, Long Island Expressway then landing in Merrick where the temperature rose to a fervor of real German angst
instructed just so on piling the gifts after hours of wrapping and growing the piles— all those Christmases with his folks must be why resentment lurked— his folks the center, not mine making him the center not me
it’s good we had Ben, sweetness and light who became the center and saved the day of that Christmas-birthday-Hanukkah stew our lovely small boy in blonde curls rescued us from platonic, myopic, self-centered woes now it’s just us, and we’ve faltered— we were actually lucky back then to swim in that great big drowning pool of swirling expanding messy exhausting always sticky, Old World family glue [End Page 41]
Buff Lindau is a new-comer to writing poetry, but not to the study of literature. She earned a Ph.D. in English in 1974 with a dissertation on Feminism in the English Novel. At age 63, she is writing poems about her heritage of growing up in South Carolina in a reform Jewish household with parents of German and Eastern European roots. She and her husband raised their two sons in Burlington, Vermont, where she lives now, and works as public relations director for Saint Michael’s College.
