Four Homes, One Beard: 2022

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Oh, and I grew a beard this past month for the first time in my life. I should have led all this with THAT news.

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Last month I posted my annual birthday essay in which I searched for a possible correspondence between my age and the equivalent element on the periodic table; this year I am 54, and xenon is the 54th element.

As I explained, it is an idea that I credit to the late Dr. Oliver Sacks from one of the last essays, “My Periodic Table,” (here’s the link; subscription required) that he published before his death.

Some friends took me out to dinner the night before my birthday, which was very kind, and one of them asked me whether I had written anything recently. Whenever I live a year like 2022, the one we are about to see off, a year in which I wrote little and published less, I will admit to you that my replies to this friendly question can sometimes make me sound like a job applicant who knows there is nothing he can say to win the job: for several months in 2022 my answer has been, “No, I haven’t written much, but I’ve been learning how to edit video …” and my voice would trail off in the direction that I perceived my questioner’s attention had drifted off toward.

But on my birthday, I had indeed written something, and I explained the age=element concept to my friends, several of whom are between the ages of 24-30, and told them that this is a series that I have undertaken for several years. It elicited the unmistakable sounds of their approval for my clever brain: an “ooooohhhh” seemed to come from each one of them.

And then one of them asked, “How many more elements are there? Are there enough?”
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A Christmas Story

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

How (not) to cut down your own Christmas tree.

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Tree trimming was my least favorite type of trimming when I was young. I still lack the eye-hand coordination required to decorate a tree correctly; in fact, I believe that almost every tree I have attempted to decorate was quietly fixed upon my departure from the vicinity of the tree.

A beloved girlfriend one Christmas credited me with the expansion of her notions of tree decoration. She said, “You’re the first person I’ve known who does not put all the decorations on the ends of the branches,” which is true, I sometimes place them on the middle or sometimes closer to the trunk. And they she pointed out that I had overloaded one section of the Christmas tree with the same color ornament (albeit at different depths on the branches!) and this needed to be fixed.

Oh, Christmas can be a challenge for someone so rarely festive, like me.

One winter’s day long ago, a dear friend enlisted me in a project to cut down a real live Christmas tree from a local Christmas tree farm so that her son could experience a Christmas just like the one she and I had never, ever, ever, never had.
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Mr. Claus and Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I know Santa Claus, which I know sounds like a tall tale …

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I do not remember the moment I learned that the many Misters and Missuses Claus that we encountered in person or saw on TV were “not real”; the fact that there was no “a-ha” moment leads me to assume that I never bought the story anyway. Maybe so, maybe not.

There is at least one photo of my sister and me in a “portrait with Santa,” and I remember the typical session: I knew, just knew, that this fellow was not Santa and I did not feel betrayed by this. I did not know why he claimed to be Santa. I knew it was a guy overheating indoors in a snowsuit for reasons related to “things grown-ups do.” It did not make much sense to me, to be a grown-up who wore a snowsuit indoors, but I did not envy adults the many things that they did, said, claimed, acted as if, and always eventually emphatically insisted made sense despite the absence of any evidence of sense.
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