Dec. 3. OMG. It was late autumn when I went to bed. I woke up at 7 a.m. and looked out the window at Moscow’s worst winter. I felt like I’m living next door to Dr. Zhivago and Lara.

Where only three dead leaves were laying out there last night, my marble Buddha — who is, according to the ancient Chinese, supposed to be guarding the house against evil demons — was covered in 6 inches of snow.

Only that Irish dreamer Jimmy Joyce knew how to capture it in the last paragraph in his “The Dead.”

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Well, as usual, I’m among the living, but my soul is swooning as it always does when the clocks creak back every year, and it becomes too dark to see her eyes.

My soul, damaged and unrepairable from too many years in show business, is a serial swooner, and the early darkness doesn’t help.

I promised She, who is busy putting her library of books into a box for Goodwill, I would finish this column before 4:30 and put the chicken pot pie in the oven.

It’s one of those delectables from Harry and David, don’t you know.

I like to think that H&D were two tap dancers from the age of vaudeville, who went into the perishable food business, and are now part of myriad other feasts.

This pie was sent to us from my daughter, who is at a business convention in Hawaii, and wanted to make us feel better. We do.

Of course, if she really wanted us to feel better, two tickets to Hawaii would have been a super idea.

Oh, yes, there is the “tree.” It’s waiting to be hauled out of a closet and dressed for the season with dusty and cracked baubles, that has to be erected today as well. Now, where’s that angel?

Then there’s the clothes I have in the back of the car to take to Goodwill. That’s about the hardest job of the year.

I’ve spent the last month selecting those items, and it’s been more painful than I expected.

There’s the $400 camel hair top coat from Polo I bought pre-COVID to wear to a Christmas party.

It was cancelled along with all the parties, weddings, anniversaries and bar mitzvahs of four years. Still, people continued to have all of those events, and they paid for it.

My doctor and his friends and family had their annual Christmas party two seasons ago, and everyone there, everyone, mind you, came down with COVID. Deck the halls and bless them all.

The coat. It’s a lovely thing with four inner pockets, and now it hangs in the back closet with other victims of the years of the plague.

There’s the black suit from Ralph Lauren I felt I had to have for funerals. Don’t laugh, it’s an Irish tradition I inherited.

It has lapels so wide the Navy could land fighter jets on it. I’m keeping it clean, so She can lay me out in it when I pass.

And then there is that bright red wood duffle coat from London and the heavy blue naval officers’ coat and all those sneakers and 14 hoodies.

Well, a boy needs something to wear when it’s cold and late and the pie needs baking and the tree needs trimming. OK, where’s my angel? Please
pass my angel.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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