I tuned into the Mosab Abu Toha event for an hour or so during a convenient break between classes and meetings.
It was an amazing outpouring of solidarity and poetry. He read from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear and talked about the new sounds he could add to his titular poem.
Pic: A friend grabbed a screenshot of me in a tile right next to Toha's. Something to treasure.
I felt so rich in poetry after I collated this collection to pass on to the organizers.
I had visions of myself just standing in the hallway shoving poetry under classroom doors, putting them on bulletin boards, and throwing fistfuls of paper into the air so it would rain poetry... like Regina George distributing copies from the "Burn Book" in Mean Girls, but more meaningful.
I hope I do a good job at the event on Monday. And I'm excited for Mosab Abu Toha's event on Tuesday--to which I have online tickets.
But the rest of Christmas was more traditional (for us, anyway). Big A was off Thanksgiving this year, so he's working over Christmas--this is the standard E.R. scheduling tradeoff. But the kids have learned to accommodate celebrations around his schedule over the years. I started to wake the kids up when A was on his way home from work after his night shift so when he got home and decompressed for a bit, we could go to cider, stockings, presents, and then Christmas pudding brunch, lazing around, snuggles, napping, movies, biriyani, and so on.
It kind of felt like the nicest Christmas in a few years. The kids have had a couple of rocky years recently, but we're on the other side of that now one way or the other. It's also our second year of Christmas without Scout--no one approaches his level of enthusiasm for Christmas, which will always be bittersweet.
I put LifeStraws in everyone's stockings including my own (during an anxiety-prone week is my guess). I'd wrapped everyone's presents long before I left for Greece. That was a while ago and I lowkey forgot some of the details, so I was nicely surprised as people opened their presents too. Ha. As for myself, my massage budget has been replenished, and I've been promised a trip to the Grand Canyon in October! I'd mentioned to Big A that I had poetry accepted to three anthologies this year and that I'd like to maybe get a book of poetry out into the world in the coming year--and I got a stack of autographed books of poetry including Mosab Abu Toha's for inspiration. That was the sweetest present.
Pic: Nu being a silly Christmas elf, and all of their siblings--Max, Huck, At--looking at them adoringly. There's a sliver of Big A still in scrubs in the corner and the clutter of opened and unopened presents all around them.
P.S. In the comments to yesterday's post, Nance used the term "sanitation worker." I'm not sure if it was intended as a gentle correction, but it worked as one. It immediately sounded like a more courteous term, and when I looked up how the relevant union refered to themselves, it seemed the term of choice. So it will be what I will use going forward. As the better Maya said, "Now that I know better, I [can] do better."
Tomorrow is Pongal, the start of the auspicious Tamil month Thuy, and I always think of it as a handy reset for any lagging New Year resolut...
