When a very serious person like me who has written many serious essays, and some really serious essays, and a few even really, really serious essays, sits down to write an essay as an essayist, it is expected that the essayist essaying an essay will write many drafts of said essay before the essay is really well-baked (or should that be well-Francis-Baconed?) as an essay and so is ready for release into the literary wild. This is what is expected, this is what is done. But not today. This is therefore not an essay. Not that kind of essay anyway, as you can see since this is not a proper sentence, which cannot, should not, must not, appear in an actual essay.
So what am I doing and why am I doing it, then? Many reasons crowd around me and my slowly diminishing mug of morning coffee. I can refer to them in shorthand with just three words: daughter; father; and snow.
Daughter
Our daughter experienced her first art show yesterday, at a lovely cold day out-of-doors event in a suburb of the University of Maryland campus, just off Adelphi Road. It was a rousing success. She gave a short speech and even sold some of her art. She specializes lately in mostly nature-based cyanotypes, and they are very beautiful even as they are very varied. So let me warn all you Raspberry Patchers: This is an advertisement of sorts, and herewith it launches:
You, yes you, many of you anyway and most of you probably, have recently spent all sorts of effort and money to enrich, amuse, and convey your love and gratitude to family members and friends in celebration of the holiday season. Now it is time to indulge yourself just a bit, to acquire something new for the still-new year that you can cherish for your very own in your very own home: Buy a Hannah-in-Blue cyanotype artwork. The http for the website is offered below; all you have to do is view the small number of art pieces on offer (just a few of many), choose the one or ones you want, and follow the instructions about how to receive and pay for them.
You free subscribers to The Raspberry Patch, no, I am not trying to make you feel guilty, not trying to twist your conscience or dizzily twirl you shaman-like out of your hard-earned money. I am rather offering you an opportunity for joy. You deserve some of that, as does everyone.
The Hannah-in-Blue website just went up a few days ago. All the prices are set for the time being at low, introductory, get-to-know-Hannah levels. You won’t want to miss this opportunity. Now here is what you need, so go ahead, please take a look—it won’t hurt to take a look, won’t cost you a penny.
Maybe you forgot to buy someone a holiday gift you should have gifted, and now suddenly you realize that you are in post-seasonal arrears. Well, this is your chance to make amends. If you make my daughter happy, you will make me and my lifemate (Hannah’s mother) happy. You want to do that, I know. Because you are a good person. Or you are trying to be.
Father
Was my father a good person? Depends on who you are, as in good to whom and for what? If you think I am about to pour out a wellspring of stored up angst concerning my father, and my mother, and others I could name, forget it. This is not an essay, remember, and those sorts of things belong in memoirist essays, or in shrouded semi-autobiographical novels like the kind Saul Bellow (and others) used to write. Once I am done, if I ever am, with The Age of Spectacle, I might try my hand at something like that. But not today.
I mention my father only because today, January 6, 2025, is his 120th birthday. He was born here in Washington, D.C. during the Roosevelt Administration. That’s the Theodore Roosevelt Administration, in case you’ve not ciphered through the math yet. He was one of ten children, a first-generation American as were all ten of them. (My mother was one of seven, also all first-generation Americans. Imagine the cornucopia of cousins……)
My father made it to 78 years old with one of the first artificial veins implanted in his neck in 1964 at Baylor Medical Center by none other than Michael DeBakey. My father was not famous of his own accord, but his surgeon was. He was somewhat infamous, yes, but only on a very minor scale. That is not to be discussed here except in scant prologue below; you must wait for the novel, if there ever is one, to get the whole, the ganze, geschichte.
(This would be a good time, I think, to pause to take a look, or another look as the case may be, at www.hannahinblue.com. I know you’re tempted, or else you live in a temple of self-discipline made of iron, brass, and abstinence.) This only-daughter of ours is, of course, the granddaughter of the man I am talking about. They never met: My father passed away in November 1983, and our daughter was born in April 1985. Her middle name is Miriam, the “M” coming from my father’s first name, Milton.
I am sure my father would approve of you buying some of her artwork. He sold stuff himself, but his stores all failed. He did once sell 500 cases of brown water to an avaricious fool during Prohibition—1927 I think it was, so the Coolidge Administration during which the business of America was business, something my father obviously took to heart—and escaped to the French Quarter with the cash. He turned nearly all the cash into a large diamond, which ended up in due course on my mother’s finger and, in further due course on granddaughter Hannah’s finger….where it is right now.
So you can see that this is no trivial, artificial connection I speak of. If you buy a cyanotype the diamond will glow, and my father, wherever his spirit is hovering, will have a good laugh (if hovering spirits laugh……how should I know what they do?). If you buy two it will glow brighter. It will be magical, it will touch off serious wow-in-the-now frisson and, as you know from The Age of Spectacle manuscript, that is the main meme of our epoch.
When I came along during my father’s 47th year he decided that yet another failed business, pump-primed with more money borrowed from already arch-browed family members, was not a good idea. So he ended up working for Sealtest Dairy—which was beforehand Chestnut Farms Dairy and after a while part of Kraft, Inc.—thanks to some help from a man named, I am not kidding here, Walter Diamond.
The dairy facility—complete with an extremely loud milk-bottling mechanical apparatus that occupied an area about the size of a bus terminal, and a truck-deck facing Rock Creek to both receive dairy-products from the near countryside and then dispatch them properly reorganized next day on what used to be ubiquitous home-delivery trucks—was sited just across from Georgetown, westward facing Rock Creek along 26th Street, NW between L and M. My father joined the Teamsters Union in order to work there. When he suffered two strokes at age 59 (I was 13) it was the Teamsters Union that arranged and paid for his life-lengthening surgery at the hands of Michael DeBakey. My father, a concrete sort of thinker who never read a book in his life (because he really couldn’t), was sure that Jimmy Hoffa himself had personally arranged all this. Maybe he did…..who knows? In any event, no one bad-mouthed Jimmy Hoffa in our house.
Snow
The real reason for this not-an-essay, however, is the snow. Snow elicits celebratory energies in me; I don’t feel like doing any real work. It’s about noon here at Antebedlam, our home on the hill, and we’ve already got about 9 inches piled up hither and yon. It’s still coming down pretty good, and is predicted to continue off and mostly on all day and into the deepness of the evening. We here in the Washington area have not experienced a snowstorm this grand in some time, and we (most of us, I like to think) love it.
The snowblower we own now for a number of years won’t start. Scilla is not happy about that. Neither am I, but we’re not surprised. We haven’t tried to start it in years. It got a plug-in pulse-starting device to make it easy, supposedly, to start; it’s not working. I wonder if the machine was made in China. Non-union. Some People’s Republic, huh? What a snowjob.
When the sun shines the day after a storm like this it is a marvel to behold, as anyone with eyes to see who lives in a snow-prone place knows. That’s when the cameras come out. And the cameras will come out for sure tomorrow because this is a special snow for a very important reason: It is Joni Pearl’s first ever!
Our sixth grandchild Joni was born this past February 12th to Hannah’s younger brother Nate and his wife Jae. To everyone’s surprise and initial dismay, Joni was born profoundly deaf. I say “initial dismay” because we have all since learned—Scilla and I; Nate and Jae; Hannah, Ben and the Three Sisterteers (Yael, Amalia, and Aviva); older brother Gabriel and his children Isaiah and Cosima; and whole extended families on both sides beyond in which Joni and her parents nest—to appreciate an expanding number of heretofore mostly hidden blessings through Joni’s birth.
Just one of those blessings, probably the most obvious, concerns medical science and clinical practice. In October Joni endured successful cochlear implant surgery, and since then she has been getting used to sound to join her acute sense of vision. That surgery was unavailable to those of my father’s generation, and even to my own generation except in far more primitive, iffy form.
Joni and her parents attended her Aunt Hannah’s art opening yesterday—did I mention the art opening? Joni approved of her Aunt Hannah’s art; she squealed for joy during Hannah’s talk. Several times. There are marvelous magical cyanotypes of Joni. You can’t buy those, but if you send Hannah a good clean negative of a photo of your young child or grandchild she can turn it into custom-made cyanotype art for you. I thought I should mention that her studio is in that sense fully interactive. Oh, here, let me help you with that: www.hannahinblue.com.
What does this have to do with the snow? Well, Hannah is currently a 4th-grade math teacher. The private school that employs her and that also teaches two of her three daughters (the other one, the middle daughter, attends the Sienna School) decided after the COVID-era zoom-teaching experience that snow days would no longer be gifts-to-children-from-above days, but remote zoom-teaching days. Hannah thinks this innovation is very close to impious, bordering on obscene, even constituting a kind of micro-murder of multiple pieces of childhood. (Artistic types have been known to explore the far sides of exaggeration.)
When the Holy One, Blessed be He, sends abundant snow, we of course think of Psalm 147, verses 16-18:
הַנֹּתֵ֣ן שֶׁ֣לֶג כַּצָּ֑מֶר כְּפ֖וֹר כָּאֵ֣פֶר יְפַזֵּֽר
מַשְׁלִ֣יךְ קַרְח֣וֹ כְפִתִּ֑ים לִפְנֵ֥י קָֽ֜רָת֗וֹ מִ֣י יַֽעֲמֹֽד
יִשְׁלַח־דְּבָר֥וֹ וְיַמְסֵ֑ם יַשֵּׁ֥ב ר֜וּח֗וֹ יִזְּלוּ־מָֽיִם
The English translation is good despite not being able to capture the alliterative genius of the original: “He spreads snow like fleece, sprinkles frost like ashes, scatters hail like crumbs: Who can withstand his cold? He sends his word and melts them; He makes the wind blow and the waters flow.”
So, Hannah reasons, if nature is the ur-source of radical awe, the pulsating core of deep faith in a Creator who is supremely artful as well as merciful and compassionate, then why should little children be made to sit in front of a screen at a time when they should be focused on cultivating their own capacity to appreciate radical awe? That is what snow days are for, obviously and of course—it’s the frozen foods version of heavenly manna, after all. The folks who run a Jewish Day School would, should understand that, one would think.
I certainly agree with my daughter on this one. I remember as though it was just yesterday my unstinting revels as a child upon waking up to a free frozen slipping, sliding, sledding, snowball heaving holiday from school. And then to cast off sopping coats and gloves and thaw out for hot chocolate! With graham crackers with melted butter! O, for the love of winter caprice. In that same spirit today Hannah is a rebel for joy, a warrior for awe. That is what one expects of a true artistic soul, who finds and shares her own sense of radical awe through her cyanotype art. (Did I mention her cyanotype art?)
It’s too bad we are not yet set up to photograph snow crystals like the great Wilson Bentley (1865-1931) did. Those photos Hannah could make into mind-bending, soul-expanding cyanotype art. If somehow you have or could acquire photo negatives of snowflakes, Hannah could render them into cyanotype art for you. You would want to own and display them; my father’s diamond would glow like a thousand suns. (This is not a subtle advertising hint; it is a telepathy dart aimed at your forehead.)
* * *
Daughter, father, snow. Love, gratitude, awe. Art, diamonds, blessings. I’ve nothing left to say in prose in this not-an-essay. That leaves us, rather leads us, to poetry. So here’s one that Joni might like one day. She’ll be able to hear it as well as read it, and if I could tell you how much joy that prospect brings me I would be some sort of literary genius. But I am not, hence I cannot.
So for those in the ambit of today’s glorious storm, I bid you a wondrous snow day—and now on to Joni’s poem.
Joni’s Sneeze
Sneaky rays of sunlight crawled up my nose
I sneezed twice, rattling from head to toes
Why that happens goodness only knows
It’s certainly not anything I ever chose.
Tiny goo droplets sailed o’er land and sea
Zooming by bushes, rising up into trees
What if some slathered a hive full of bees
Or brought lady bug civilization to its knees?
You just never know with a thing like a sneeze
Floating about up there on the breeze
Wither it wishes it fearlessly goes
All the way back to the sun, you suppose?