Meredith and Rob made this wonderfully folky, mellow CD that they sent us with our holiday cookies, and I’ve become addicted to the playlist. I put it on and start doing the dishes or writing a letter, and it’s all very sweet, and slow, and meanders achingly from the Indigo Girls to Coldplay to Aimee Mann — and then suddenly Boston comes on with “More Than a Feeling,” and I am happy that my hair comes down to my shoulders now because it means I can headbang while I type.

I hope my 2006 is like that: gentle fun, until something really rockin’ happens all of a sudden that messes up my hair.

I have decided to write about Ben tonight, because

a) he’s one of my most faithful readers, and
b) I think he’d like it. And it would make him smile like this:

and that would be a lovely thing. Look at those laugh lines around the eyes — I’ve been working on growing laugh lines as good, and I think it’ll take me till I’m at least 50.

It might have been Ben’s smile that first drew me to him. He has a slow blooming smile, but it has a wonderful, involuntary inevitability about it — once it’s started to grow, nothing will stop it, not even Ben. And it’s consuming — while he’s smiling, it looks as if the act is taking up all of his concentration and focus. Which is probably why it’s such a great smile.

When Ben and I became friends, I think was going through a phase in which I was trying very hard to be charming. That is, I had noticed certain behaviors I was capable of which I had decided were attractively lively and delightful, and I did my best to cultivate them. Mostly this consisted of donning an attitude of happy amusement with the world and laughing as much as possible. (I know, doesn’t that sound awful? Fortunately it didn’t last long and I don’t think anyone noticed.) But the wonderful thing about my friendship with Ben as it developed is that I came to almost always feel completely natural and at ease with him.

Which is probably why he is the one I called and kept up all night when I came home joyfully drunk in the wee hours of one night in senior year — as well as the one I called for solace after a particularly brutal day of teaching. In his presence I have been exuberant, stony, flirtatious, bitter, wheedling, demanding, loving, hostile, sorrowful and sarcastic. I have confessed dark ill feelings towards friends. I have tickled him mercilessly. I have repeatedly taken and bulldoggedly held the opposite position in an argument just to see how he responds. I have traveled all over the emotional map with Ben and he has never in all our years together shown one moment’s frustration or annoyance with me (though surely he has felt it).

Ben is a fantastic artist and my very favorite dance partner in the world. I wish he would go into musical theater, because he also has one of the nicest singing voices I’ve ever heard, and it shouldn’t stay inside his car. He is wildly self-conscious, abominably over-analytical, confusingly devoted to family and tradition, deeply principled, often ridiculous, and one of the bravest and kindest human beings I know.

And I forgot to mention that he used to be a barista at a fancy coffee place, but is paralysed by the prospect of figuring out how much sugar he wants to put in his own drink. Also he can twist himself into a pretzel while standing on his head. (Don’t neglect the special skills section on the resume, dear!)

*******

Ben and I met at 1369 this evening to discuss the personal statement he’s writing for application to graduate programs in human-computer interaction. And now that the whole world knows that, he’d better get right back to work and finish the damned thing so I can edit it already!

Since I find that when I fail to report on my activities to you — faithful voyeur — the vessel of my memory empties quickly and I forget what they have been, here is a quick review of holiday week adventures that I should like to hold on to for longer than they will live within my poor brain.

We went to two lovely small dinner parties; one at Jenn’s, where there was a belt-tightening spread of delectables that included homemade ricotta gnocchi with two choices of sauce, and a roasted vegetable torte that took my favorite almost-doctor two days to make. Two days, people! This is the kind of fortitude that it comforts me to know is beating in the breasts of the future of the medical profession. We also had the good luck of being invited to a joint Chanukah/Christmas celebration at the home of our compatriots in the adventure of Jewish-Gentile miscegeny, Marina and Alex. There was turkey and sufganiot, a decorated tree and a chanukiah, and a well-thumbed book on inter-faith marriages was sitting underneath the coffee table, and it was all quite inspiring. Ross and I will have to keep up with the Christmassy side of things better next year, as we’ve been lighting Chanukah candles all week long but there is no sign of mistletoe anywhere in our cosy house.

Sunday itself we spent mostly with Grandma Evelyn, whose apartment is now festooned with extremely well-aligned pictures hung by the eagle-eyed Ross. Hooray! While we were there we watched Adam’s Rib on her gigantonormous television screen, and have I told you lately that I love Katherine Hepburn? Have I told you there’s no one else before her? Fill my heart with gladness, take away all my — ahem. Anyway, Adam’s Rib is of the strange breed of 50s movies (it’s actually from 1949) that would like to think of itself as radical and feminist, but ultimately still holds a terribly narrow and condescending view of women. Nevertheless, it’s quite a romp and you get to see Spencer Tracy lifted off his feet by a very muscley woman and good old Katherine sticking her tongue out at him under a court-table.

Ben and Erica have both been in town, too, and I got to see them separately — which is nice, because I am selfish like that. (Or maybe it’s the fact that I can only pay attention to one human being at a time, because there’s only so much of my brain alloted for listening to other people in the first place?) Erica always turns me into an annoying evangelist for the merits of various genres of art — by which I mean writing and tv, mostly — because she has such strong opinions about what she does and does not like and I am a frustrated teacher who can’t abide being disagreed with. As a result I showed her two picturebooks that she hated and made her watch an episode of Monty Python, which thank the lord she at least had the decency to chuckle at.

Other things that will fall through my sieve of a mind soon: we made mocha-banana-chocolate-chip muffins, which turned out beautifully. My parents had 70 carollers in their house on Christmas Eve. 70! I fell on my butt getting into the car outside Marina’s house, so I am no longer waiting for the first tumble of the winter. I saw on Tuesday that the river was frozen over, but it’s been warm since then so I think it’s already melting again. And the best news of all is that we are planning an (all-too-short) trip to Singapore in February! Somehow three years have managed to pass since I was last home, which quite frankly I think means that the clocks have all gone mad. I am not in my upper twenties I am not in my upper twenties I am not in my upper twenties

Here’s to the last three days of 2005, lovelies! Salud!

Magnitude 1:
Genial, non-threatening, and highly adorable. Often accompanied by hawaiian shirts and enthusiastic waves. Only one row of teeth is visible. Observer may feel protective and warm towards the smiler.

Magnitude 2:
Upper and lower teeth are shown and cheeks begin to puff up and redden. Observer may feel smiler’s joy suffusing his or her own breast.

Magnitude 3:
Nose-wrinkling and eye-crinkling are clear features of this level of magnitude, which is correlated to the procurement of giant boxes of grape juice. At this point the smile is so consuming that the smiler cannot sustain a standing position and must be seated with knees bent and feet tucked under the body. Observer may begin to worry that smiler’s face is at risk of cracking.

Magnitude 4:
Rarely seen, this is the highest level of magnitude on the scale. Nose-wrinkling and eye-crinkling continue, now taking on a slightly diabolical aspect which may trigger feelings of nervousness in the observer. Hands are stretched out in a grabbing motion, as if the smiler seeks to draw bystanders into a frenzy of excitement.

Presumably in response to this comment, a letter from Erica was waiting in my mailbox yesterday evening. It is a charming epistle, with its words covering every square centimeter of space, written in alternating directions on a long sheet of paper, and detailing the causes and effects of ulcerative colitis as caused by the proximal ingestion of broccoli and cheap chocolate ice-cream. I’m not sure what to make of it, but I will tell you that we have plans to reverse engineer a Silano pizza tonight. And thanks to this letter I’ll be sure not to follow dinner with dessert.

It also it put me in mind of a few other memorable missives I’ve received in my score and six years:

There was the (form) letter from the secretary of the Queen of England when I was about 8 or 9, thanking me for my interest in her royal corgis and regretting that she was unable to send pictures, due to the many such requests she receives every month. It had a seal and everything and was quite thrilling, even though it wasn’t written in the Queen’s own hand. I believe my mother still has it, sticking breathlessly to the pages of a huge binder full of assorted childhood flotsam and jetsam.

There have been many, many love letters — Hi, long-distance-relationships. I don’t miss you one bit — but almost as many envelopes in which a broken heart is sealed under the flap. I still have most of those, fraying at the folds and moldering gently away in shoeboxes.

But the most epic correspondence of my life took place early — the year I turned twelve, when my best friend Debbie’s father took a sabbatical and she went away to live in America. I was devastated, but we promised we’d write each other a letter a week the whole time and let me tell you, we were devoted. The mailing frenzy started as soon as she left (her first letter raved about the fact that they showed Cosby Show reruns every day on the television) and I don’t think either of us ever skipped a week that entire year. These were sheets stuffed full with creative energy, too — sketches, comic-strips, song lyrics, literary criticism. Debbie started keeping a running tally of every Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt she saw (I think she got into the hundreds). We sent tapes back and forth and clippings from newspapers and magazines that we thought would amuse. Everything went into a giant cookie tin I opened every week to deposit the new arrival.

When Debbie (whom my father, for reasons known only to himself, insisted on calling “Debris”) returned the next year, everything was different. Primary school was history and we’d been thrust into the dark and exciting world of Secondary school… where the kids graffitied on the desks. We were suddenly teenagers. Boys were maybekindasorta interesting. And I had two new best friends we had to negotiate.

Debbie and I were never the same. But we poured our whole pre-teen hearts into those letters and I will never forget how much it meant to me that we kept our promise every week.

…about yesterday’s pantomime is that it prompted the following exchange on the way home:

See, I still don’t understand the pudding machine. What was it for?

Well, he knew the cushions of doom would defeat the giant’s sackbutt.

Here are the (gangsta-rapping) goose, the (extremely short but very large-handed) giant with his sackbutt, and both halves of the cow. Not shown: Cushions of Doom.

Ok, gotta run. Avi’s in town.