At my computer on this Christmas Eve I am listening to Chris Botti’s “Impressions.” It is melancholy, and I feel its aura of sadness… I think the root cause of my sorrow is merely seeing a book I didn’t like the looks of by an author I thought I did… rather shallow on my part, I suppose… I won’t mention the book titles to damage the book I still want to read or cause people who side with the book I don’t like to write me off as a loser.
Mom is Christian and has set up her plastic tree… it is a small tree, and despite being plastic, a pretty one. Unfortunately, I did not get any meat or other condiments for Christmas Day… so we shall have latkes tomorrow… and our “Christmas meal” will be had on January 1. I guess it doesn’t matter–neither Mom nor I care a lot about Jesus’ birthday… Tomorrow I mean to finish a book called Great Cats, and this week I mean to read The Wolverine Way and pamphlet 1 of Great Epics of India: The Puranas.
I wish I could convince myself that I had enough time afterwards to read Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Perhaps I shall, before picking up and finishing The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. After it I shall read The World of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great: A Portrait of a Woman. Then I will move on to either my further research for A History of Frances Westin Williams or my research for Tales of the Firebird… both are pressing, because I want Mom to see to see A History of Frances Westin Williams before her dementia becomes too pronounced for her to get much out of it, and I want Tales of the Firebird to be written and published while it can do some good in the War in Ukraine. Both books will take a fair amount of research beyond what I have done.
In this last year Uncle Charlie died… Mom has been developing dementia for a while… Yet I believe that as long as I live, God lives in me. Despite the melancholy of Chris Botti’s trumpet, I believe I can be happy.