VISIONS OF PLUMP LITTLE SUGAR PLUMS

Dad just fell onto the tree again.  That's twice in one night.

The stereo is playing The Twelve Days of Christmas again - this time the Bing Crosby version and all I can think of is a drunk and bitter Bing mentally abusing his son(s).  Bing has this way of singing the "me" in "my true love said to me-ee" that rubs me the wrong way.  He adds an extra syllable to the word--just Bing's way of making the song his own I guess.

Dad just made that tree his own.  Or the tree owned him.  Or the whiskey and the tree collaborated on owning Dad--a joint venture--so much so that Grandma's packing up now for the long drive home, a couple of hours early--the long drive home to grandmother's house she goes--over the river and through the woods, I presume.  Heading back up north she will go.  She doesn't like driving in this weather; it's really just cold and damp and that's "black ice weather" for grandma and you know, "anything could happen."  But "anything" just DID happen with Dad and the tree, AGAIN, so grandma has done the mental calculus and determined the black ice might be safer.  She may be right but I don't have the options she does, in terms of flight.

I noticed the birds down by the river just refuse to fly south.  I suppose they're not supposed to otherwise they would right?  Unlike grandma they have no free will.  What is the instinct to fly south anyway?  How deeply ingrained is that desire in their birdish DNA?  Is there something about the angle of the sun or the temperature that trips the internal alarm and tells them, as a group, fly THAT way?  Or maybe it's the one dominant bird that has the strongest, most urgent alarm and when he flies the others just conform.  Maybe the alarm is as simple as "as soon as it gets cold enough it's better to be flying than not" and then once they're in the air the birds just fly in the direction they know to be warmer, sensing a slightly more favorable degree of temperature in THAT direction (south) down to a hundred-thousand decimal places?  I guess that wouldn't make sense in light of weather patterns--a persistent "lake-effect" warm front could send the ducks to Canada.  An area of high pressure swirling around the Great Lakes sending swarms of geese to Buffalo.

I remember standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal with my Dad just as flocks of commuters were coming off several trains at once it must have been, all coming straight at us standing in the center of the great hall. "Where did all these people come from?" I asked Dad.  "Points north," he answered not really looking at me, just sighing at who knows what.  I imagined a huge funnel and God or someone pouring this soup of people from a bucket he had by his heavenly throne into it and watching them swirl around, purses and briefcases and dog-eared novels and inky NY Timeses and Daily Newses, ties flapping and skirts spinning as they spiraled down the funnel into Grand Central.  Now, freed, they clicked in their wing-tips and heels at me looking for a crust of bread.  Dad didn't really understand when I threw the stale pretzel in the trash.  I think he might have had a drink then already even though it was morning.

Bing liked his bourbon too.