Love

A Valentine’s Day Knockout

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It was as if every wish I had made in childhood for a hole in the ground to open up and rescue me had been answered in reverse …

* * * *
I bear a scar from the first Valentine’s Day that I had a reason to celebrate as Valentine’s Day, as a part of a couple.

Until the last decade, my romantic history was a long walk alone in an empty field, punctuated by moments in which I interrupted someone else’s walk, attempted to try a relationship, and discovered that I try people’s patience instead. (All the women I have dated are brilliant and accomplished and I was lucky to get to know them; I was stuck at age fifteen for an astonishingly long time, however.)
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‘I Still Believe in Santa’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?—Virginia O’Hanlon, a question published in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897

I still believe in Santa Claus.—Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, seventy years later.

* * * *
She was an elderly woman in a hospital near Albany, NY, on Christmas Day 1969. When a hospital maintenance worker who always dressed as Santa for Christmas came around her room, someone thought to take a photo of the handshake between Santa and Mrs. Douglas, who looks quite delighted indeed.

Mrs. Douglas and Santa shared a long history together, and they still do. Christmas is a day in which we can re-meet ourselves, re-meet ourselves as children, experience a sensation of faith if not faith itself. A little photo from 1969 of an elderly patient with Santa is a small glimpse of one such small moment.
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Cesium and Desistium

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Dr. Oliver Sacks gave me a gift for my birthday some years ago: a writing prompt that I use each year for my special-ish day: Write an essay in which you equate your age with the corresponding element number on the periodic table.

Since I am a nonscientist, this seemed like an invitation to a find a metaphor in a reflection of the year past and in one’s hopes for the year to come.

Today, November 18, 2023, I am 55. A Scorpio, whatever that means. A dear friend composed my birth chart a couple years ago and informed me that I am a “double Scorpio,” which sounds neat and intense, and my ego-driven side (in other words, all of me) hopes that this makes me sound mysterious and sexy, but it just means that both the sun and moon were in the same sign at the moment of my debut on life’s stage. To my non-astrology believing ears it just sounds like “double thing I double don’t believe in.” The periodic table as the source for an annual metaphor about one’s age, though? I fully endorse this exercise.
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