Snow Versus Puss And Boots

I was going to go to the movies today for the 12:10 matinee of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.” The movie theater — the only one left in New Haven — is just a mile away. I used to walk or ride my bike to it to see films in the daytime.

But since it’s winter — even a mild winter — and I’m in my mid-eighties and I’ve already walked my daily two miles today before breakfast, I planned to take my car.

I prefer seeing films at their first screening of the day. That’s when I’m feeling fresh and the audience is the smallest. Sometimes fewer than 10 people. It’s like a critic’s screening, which is often what I took advantage of when I was the film critic for the New Haven Register, the city’s major paper.

I’ve been lazy for the past couple of years, ever since covid came to town. I haven’t been to the movies in nearly a year. There haven’t been many films I’ve been eager to see. But there have been some and I’ve missed them because I was careless or distracted or inert.

Going to the movies seemed more trouble than it was worth. And parking the car is always a drag. The older you get, the easier it is to talk yourself out of doing what you used to do routinely. It takes a special effort now to put down the book I’m reading and get out of my recliner chair.

And Turner Classic Movies keeps my eyes focused on fine films from the past. Most contemporary films in theaters are instantly forgettable. Even the ones that win prizes. And they’re always in color, which can be a drawback.

But I want to see the “Puss in Boots” film to check out its animation. Animation for the past six to eight years has reached its highest levels of artistic and technical expertise. The Peter Rabbit films of a couple of years ago are not just flawless but stunningly magical and their seamless relation to live-action is brilliant.

But just as I was ready to leave this morning for the first screening, it started to snow. Very, very lightly at first. Just thin flakes falling on the ground like stardust. But then it quickly took hold and started to fall like a tapestry and then like a thin curtain. And that was enough for me to talk myself out of going.

I hung up my coat and then stood by the front windows and watched the snow fall quietly on the grass and on the cars parked along the street and on the porch steps.

And a feeling of peace and intimacy and nostalgia and a kind of animal passivity took hold and the idea of fighting my way through this light though wet lace curtain of flakes seemed to go against my deeper need to stay put in my cave.

The snow lasted a little more than an hour and then stopped. It left no more than an inch. But by then, I had read deeper into to Cormac McCarthy’s second novel in his latest two-volume work, and I’d eaten a peanut butter sandwich and a couple of ginger snaps and sipped a cup of coffee.

And I figured that I had done what I needed to do and that the snow — in all its faint, shallow descent — had given me the excuse to take care of this interior business at the right time and in the right place, even though I didn‘t know it was due.

I will go out later and brush the snow off my car. And maybe tomorrow, Puss and Boots and I will get together in the dark and disappear into another layer of reality.

Nature has a way of making me stop and think, even when I have other plans. The difference between Nature and animation is that one of them is in the street and the other is on a screen.

That I can still tell the difference puts me in rapidly diminishing minority.

Ukraine’s ‘Anniversary’

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It will be a sinister day. A black Friday day. A kind of death day.

Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have been killed during this war, which Vladimir Putin doesn’t even call “a war.”

A year ago those people were alive. A year ago they had every reason to think they would still be alive on this date. The way you and I believe we’ll be alive a year from now.

We probably will be. We are not living in a shooting war. We live in houses and condos and apartments that are safe, comfortable, and predictably secure. That’s also what Ukrainians thought a year ago. They thought they were safe and comfortable and secure.

Children looked forward to the next day in school. Families had made plans to go to the park. Couples were on their way to the movies.

Now a hundred thousand Ukrainians are dead and two hundred thousand Russian soldiers are dead. And it’s only the first year of the war.

Homes are destroyed. Businesses are rubble. Bridges collapsed. Electricity fluctuating. And it’s winter and the heating systems are broken.

Six-year-old children never got to be seven. Young couples never got to live together. Grandparents never got to say goodbye to their grandchildren. Parents never got to save their babies.

All because of . . . nothing.

A fantasy, a delusion. Ukraine had not attacked Russia. It was just living its day-to-day life as an independent country. No ambitions other than to make life better for its people.

Now life in that country is terrible and getting worse.

Vladimir Putin is obsessed with a fantasy. He wants today’s Russia to become a 17th Century Russia again. He wants the imperial soul of Mother Russia to live again with the same boundaries as before. He wants Ukraine to stop being Ukraine and to tuck itself back into the old Russian Empire, where it used to be centuries ago.

Putin wants his fantasy to come true and he is prepared to crush Ukraine to make that happen.

So Ukrainian children must die and their parents must die and their homes must be destroyed and nothing resembling independence must survive. How do you make peace with such a man? How do you re-make your life when you’re not supposed to exist?

More than five million Ukrainians have fled the country. Two million are currently living in Poland. Many of them say they will never return to their homeland. Their children are learning to speak Polish.

What will it be like a year from now, two years from now? Will American Republicans say “to hell with it” and cut the money and armaments that the U.S. is providing Ukraine? Will America’s radical Right continue to support Putin and help Ukraine fall apart?

Will Ukraine survive but be so broken that it will take a generation for the country to heal?

It is an ugly, brutal, delusional, criminal and historically absurd moment in the world’s history. The Ukrainian people are the only heroes here, and the Poles the main humanitarians.

The U.S. is doing what it should do and doing it fairly well. Western Europe is beginning to wake up and lend a hand. And the Ukrainian people themselves have shown great courage and amazing resourcefulness in keeping their head above the brutality and treacherous chaos.

But after one year, the picture is still grim and the future malignant.

There is no happy ending in sight, as the rest of the world prepares to watch the Oscars on television and the bullshit on Tik-Tok.

An Ideal Winter

It’s been a mild winter here in the northeast. Except for a three or four-day period of brutal below-zero temperatures, we’ve mainly had temperatures in the mid-twenties to high-thirties most of the time and even a lot of low-forties. Today, for instance, it’s 43 but ‘feels like’ 46.

We’ve also had a lot of rain, which has buried the drought that overtook the state last summer and has filled our reservoirs. So we have plenty of water now to drink and to shower and to flush the toilet.

What makes this southern New England winter most unusual is that we’ve had no snow to speak of. Maybe half an inch once or twice. I’m fine with that. Looking at fresh fallen snow is a joy to the eye but a nuisance to the feet and the car.

I have hanging on my wall above my desk in my study the latest classic Travelers Insurance Company oversized calendar for 2023. Each page features a Currier and Ives print from the 19th Century. Each month shows what New England looked like a century or two ago in paintings from that period.

The print for February is titled, “Winter Time at Jones Inn.” It shows about two inches of snow on the ground and on the roofs of the inn and the nearby barn, with two oxen pulling a sled filled with logs and a horse leading the way and a small dog standing in the snow and another horse in the background next to the inn with a couple of people standing alongside.

The tall trees are bare and smoke is coming out of the chimney on the inn’s roof and the sky is gray and threat of more snow a possibility. And it’s all in the countryside and not a trolley or fancy sled in sight and the air is quiet and the bushes are hunkered down and if you were standing off to the side, you could almost hear an crow call in the distance and watch the clouds move slowly across the landscape like Old Man Winter stretching his arms in a sleepy way and there’d be no shouting to spoil the quiet.

That’s the kind of winter I’d want, if I could choose what kind to have. A winter in a print on a calendar showing what it was like a hundred years and a half ago. With no iPhones and laptops and cars and trucks and cable television and 24-hour news and motorcycles and burger kings and social networking that tells lies and poisons the truth and military-style guns that kill children in school and sea-stuff that strangles whales and soil-stuff that banishes bees and hate-stuff that banishes truth.

If a couple of inches of snow could produce a world like that, in all its simple straightforward stuff, and an inn with a dog and a horse and a hill in the distance and air that is still and quiet and a room with logs ablaze and enough light to read a novel, then I would wish for more snow. But until such a world shows signs of re-emerging, I will look at my calendar and be grateful for the uncovered ground outside my window.

I Can’t Get Them Out of My Mind

Most things you can put out of your mind in a hurry. They’re not that important or they only have a half-life of interest in your daily attention span. You can’t give everything the same amount of time for thinking. You’re not a robot.

And not everything is of equal importance. What you most care about are things staring you in the face. People or events that need taking care of right now or, at the very least, soon.

And then there are the expanding circles of relationships. Your loved ones come first. They could be family or close friends or lovers or your dog or cat. They are Number One.

But if you and your family aren’t particularly close or if you don’t have much of a family at all or if your family lives far away and you only connect with an occasional phone call or text message, or if you don’t own a dog or a cat, then the circle may widen and include more casual friends or friends from the past who have drifted away or friends you have just made but with whom you don’t yet share a whole lot.

And then there are the people you don’t know at all. You don’t know their names. You don’t know what they look like. You don’t know how they spend their days or where in particular they live. You don’t know how old they are or what their voices sound like or how tall they are. You don’t know anything about them at all.

Except that they’re dead.

That’s how I feel about the people of all ages and sizes who have been crushed by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. So far, 40,000 of them have been killed by buildings that collapsed on them from the Earth’s sudden convulsions.

Men, women, children, babies, pets, farm animals, good people, bad people, young people, old people, middle-aged people, farmers, artists, writers, mechanics, cooks, athletes, sick people, healthy people, teachers, doctors, nurses.

All crushed within seconds from the homes they felt safe in. In the early-morning hours of what promised to be an ordinary day.

The mother and father kissing their young child ’goodnight,’ at 9 o’clock. By three o’clock the next morning, they were all dead. House after house, apartment after apartment.

Ambushed by Nature. (Who’s in charge of Nature, by the way? What demonic force shook the Earth so hard that babies cried out in the night in pain and death? Who is in charge of earthquakes? Who does one point a finger at and say, “God damn you to Hell? Who is in charge of Hell?)

I know none of these people by name or in any other way. And yet, I can’t get them out of my mind. The brutality of their death, the very fact of its anonymous savagery, the blatant evil of its choreography, its maniacal indifference to the innocent.

The survivors, of course, are ruined. They have no homes, no places to rest their terrible pain, no warmth in the cold, no food to sustain them, no way to embrace their dead children, no future to build upon.

No one deserved this. The children especially did not warrant such annihilation.

Yes, many of the buildings were poorly made. And yes, people will be punished. And yes, houses and apartments will be rebuilt and a kind of life will once again take place.

But those men, women, and children –especially the children — that died in the middle of this volcanic maelstrom are dead forever. They will never get to live again.

The dead children will never again get to run through the grass and laugh at the size of the butterfly poised on the edge of a buttercup.

They will never get to watch the sunset over the sea or the mist gather along the edge of a canal.

They have been tossed like broken dolls into Death, from which there is no second chance.

The Untimely Death of a Squirrel

He lay freshly dead, his blood still glistening on the asphalt in the early morning light.

If I had touched his belly, it would have been warm. Instead, I held his tail and lifted him gently off the street and carried him next to the house where George H.W. Bush lived during his student days at Yale and where his son, George W, spent his baby years.

Alongside the house is a grassy area protected by a row of fir trees below a small ridge of granite rocks. I placed him there. If left alone, he will eventually disintegrate into the leaves and into the soil and into the meanness of Nature that had given birth to him in the first place.

He had been hit by a passing car that did not stop to see what it had done and to move him, at the very least, to the gutter. Squirrels are the most versatile and near-sighted acrobats of the natural world. They can scale tall trees and narrow overhead wires and scamper like rugby players across lawns and paths and streets, until they are run down by speeding cars.

This squirrel was run over on the street that Charles Dickens called the most beautiful street in America, during a long-ago visit to New Haven. The houses are mansions once inhabited by men who ran the country. Now they’re all owned by Yale and used as academic fortresses. The Yale president lives in one. The provost lives in another.

The dead squirrel now lies silently between them.

I feed many birds early each morning in two locations: next to the Yale hockey rink and a mile away to the left of St. Mary’s cathedral church. More than a hundred of different species show up at the hockey rink and about 60 or more show up near St. Mary’s.

And so do squirrels — half a dozen or so. Everyone tends to his own food. The squirrels, sparrows, starlings, doves, pigeons, blue jays all eat together at the same time, without anyone chasing away anyone else. I make sure there’s enough hulled sunflower seeds and peanut pieces for everyone.

They are so grateful that they meet me at my car when I first show up, and accompany me to the feeding area. I go every day, except when it rains or snows. They count on me, and I try not to disappoint them.

The squirrels especially love the peanut pieces and eat them like gifts from heaven. They sit on their haunches and hold the peanuts in their little paws and chew them into oblivion. They are so focused on their peanuts that they look like monks reading from their prayer books.

When I find one of them murdered by a fast-driving car, my heart sags and my spirit tumbles.

I will be buried in a cemetery less than half a mile away. It is an old historic burial ground that houses some very old and some very famous people. My gravestone is already in place and only lacks the date of my death to make it complete.

I hope many squirrels will come visit me, once I take up residence. I will always be touched by the intensity of their eating habits and the virtuosity of their aerial acrobatics.

When squirrels are active in the neighborhood, it’s difficult to keep a straight face.