I could dispense with all the icons of christmas but the tree. We put ours up a few days ago, but this was the morning I needed to see it when I got out of bed at six a.m., with just its lights on in an otherwise dark house. Sitting on the couch, sipping my tea, letting my gaze drift across all the ornaments that each have their own little stories, it almost seemed that I could remember every tree I've ever waked to for 54 christmas mornings. A little later, as the light came up outside and a cold rain fell, I stood by the bird feeder with sunflower seeds in my upturned palm. The chickadees flitted and twittered around me, and one hovered for a few seconds at my fingertips, but could not quite muster the courage to land.

So on a Sunday you are relaxing with a friendly hibiscus flower in the warm sun on the patio of a house on the Best Coast, thinking about not much in particular until despite your frantic efforts at thought control the realization that on the following day, unless you make the decision to break out of the life that those around you expect you to be living you'll be shoveling two feet of snow off of everything that it buried back on the Least Coast and that realization suddenly sours the taste of your little week-long digression in Perfect Climate Land and makes you think of the lie that Gaugin gave back to Europe and how Paradise is always and only a place to be expelled from.

By his cars shall you know him. In 1966 my mother and I found and purchased a 1937 Packard as a gift for my dad. It was black in those days, and he had a lot of fun with it, and so did I, and I can still point out the location of the big dents in the front fender to prove just what kind of fun I had. The dents disappeared when the car was restored several years ago. Gene and I recently spent a couple of days getting the car running, because it had been sitting for a year after quitting one too many times under my dad. On its test drive down to Los Altos, two intake valves stuck and it began burping up exhaust gases through the carburetor, a profoundly embarrassing ailment for such a proud car. We had to have it towed up the hill. It will be fixed.

The 1965 Mercury pickup came into my life in 1972 in Prince George, British Columbia. It was the second car I ever bought (the first was a 1957 Jaguar XK 140). I put new rod bearings and leaf springs in it, and then built a little house on the back out of lumber borrowed from a construction site. The truck has been my dad's good worker since 1974, but has come now to the end of its days, overcome by rust in its body mounts. Anybody want a running truck with a great 300 ci straight six engine? They shoot horses, don't they? And the 1986 VW van? It has been mine for about a week, as of this photo. It's probably the 30th car I've owned, and will sit for several months in the California sun while I wait for spring in New Hampshire. By your cars, also, shall you know yourself. As far as I'm concerned, you don't know what it is to be human until you've committed serial folly with automobiles.

From the hills west of the San Francisco Bay you can see the sprawl of cities spilled south along the Peninsula, but in the early morning, from just behind the brow of a hill, all you can see is the sunrise. In the paper this morning there's a story on Harvard scientists who predict that the magnetic field of the earth may be due to flip, at which point the compass would no longer point to the north pole. If that were the case, would the sun then rise in the west?

The pharmacy where he pulled his last job, the one that got him 35 years, was torn down a decade or two ago, but many of the landmarks of the wild ride he took in his teens and early twenties still stand. The coffee shop where he and his girlfriend, Paula, would sit and talk for hours. The tiny house and garage where his mom and dad raised him and his eight brother and sisters. The motel from which he retrieved his brother, apparently dead of an overdose, and carried him the two miles home, laid him on his bed and found he was alive after all. The high school he dropped out of and the wide grassy median strip in front that was the colliseum for countless rumbles. And a few miles further, the motel where his 25 years as a fugitive ended with the fist of a cop on door of his room. He's been free for three years now, living quietly with Paula and traveling, spending time with his daughter who, until she married recently, carried his alias as her surname. "I was a sociopath in those days," he says. "I did what I did without any thought about the consequences. I didn't know what it was to feel regret or guilt." Only a couple of the many friends and associates he had then are still alive, and they are doing life without parole. He, at last, is doing life, but on the outside.

In 1953 when he was 13 John Daniels put his thumb out on Route 66 a few miles west of Oklahoma City and hitch-hiked to San Francisco. He needed to wander, and he wanted to see the West Coast. He was sharp and glib and good looking and stole what he needed to eat from stores along the way. He spent a month in San Francisco, with a side trip to Oakland to work for a few days as a pin setter in a bowling alley, but gave that up because he began to realize that some of the bowlers were rolling at him just for fun or meanness. A doctor and his wife took him in, but he got tired of the life and headed back home. About a year later during another ramble he spent the night with a waitress outside of Dallas, stole her '48 Plymouth the next morning and drove back to Oklahoma City. The law was not amused; it took him under its rough wing and gave him his first real home away from home, a cell in the top floor of the county courthouse. It was the first stay of many, and he began to learn the moves he would need to eventually earn the Oscar of the world of crime, a Most Wanted title and a couple of absentee appearances on TV shows like America's Most Wanted. He stared up at the top floor of the courthouse and shook his head. "There are ways to get out of a place, and ways not to get out. I remember more than one time when somebody would knot sheets together, crawl out the window and discover that he had seriously short-sheeted himself. You can't exactly run with your leg bones driven up into your shoulders."

Regina's husband didn't die in the blast that Timothy set off in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995, but he was hurt badly. Those injuries came on top of health problems he was already troubled with, and Regina nursed him along through another two years until he died. They made a chair for him of translucent glass with a slotted copper back and seat, engraved his name on it and placed it on the lawn with the others facing the long, dark, still, reflecting pool that runs the length of the space that was once occupied by the building. On a cold Friday afternoon, with the wind harsh at the corners of the nearly empty streets of the center of the city, there wasn't much to do at the memorial but open yourself to the riddle that there are reasons such things happen, but no reason that they should. You look for something, just anything, to be grateful for, and by luck there is sunlight trapped in cubes of glass, and some comfort, even if you know it is illusory, in that perfect order.

A man I know whom I'll call John Daniels has come back to Oklahoma City after a quarter of a century on the run. He's square with the law now and is trusting me to write his story, so we were in the basement of the Oklahoma City Courthouse looking up the records of his convictions from the 1960s. It took us a half an hour just to track down the dozen or so references in the old typewritten ledger books, sitting at a table in a room surrounded on all sides by floor to ceiling stacks of huge red leather bound, gold leaf titled ledgers of marriage licences. The criminal records were stored deeper in the basement. When John handed the clerk the list, she tapped her long red painted nails on the table and pursed her lips. She began to fill out a form, and asked for John's name. "John Daniels," he said, in that soft drawl of his. "No, dear," she said. "John Daniels is the felon whose records you are looking up. I need to have your name for the form." "John Daniels," said John, again, patiently. "John Daniels?" asked the clerk, looking at him with raised eyebrows. "Yes, John Daniels," said John. "You're John...?" said the clerk, "well, duh, I guess I'm slow."

I've lived through many grim Novembers in the past 20 years; grey, dreary damp days when it seems there is no bath you can draw that's hot enough to fill your need for heat. But this past few weeks the weather has been mild, and the skies have been clear enough from time to time to make it seem almost sunny. That, and the call of bushwacking the wilds of the Mink hills has drawn us out several times in the last week. And with each pass across this territory we find places that invite us back, places that have been visited only by moose and bear and deer, and the occasional hunter. Walking without a trail in terrain where it's easy to get lost feels in some way like flying. You can drop over the brow of a hill on a whim, and since there is no path to have to find your way back to, your next step is also your first. Something wakens in the mind that sleeps when you walk a trail that somebody else has laid.

Hank was 40 then, and I suppose I was about 30. His truck looked about the same as it does now, and I had a 1950 Plymouth station wagon that was my main ride, and a 1957 Jaguar sitting in the barn in a pretty sorry state of repair. Neither of us had much of a thought for what the next 25 years would hand us, though we both had young children, and more than anything, being fathers to our kids seemed to be at the top of the list of what was important about living each day on into the next. Among the many fantasies we entertained there were some that never came true. Hank was going to restore his truck, and I was going to restore my Jaguar. The Jaguar was winched out of the barn years ago by a dealer from New York in exchange for $8000 in C-notes stuffed into a fat envelope. But Hank keeps the truck running, hauling wood in the fall, and plowing snow all winter. It's not the restoration he dreamed about, but the truck is still doing what trucks are supposed to do--truckin'--and reminds us that what we long for at one stage in our lives is not necessarily what would serve us best at another.

The Warner river runs under a covered bridge just a few hundred yards from our house, backs up against a low dam built to feed water to a mill years ago and pools before spilling down a run of granite ledge and boulders. The place is as much ours as the low mountain to the south we see every day, and we call it our bridge because we live here, and this is our neighborhood. In the past couple of years a photo of our bridge has begun to appear here and there in the Great American Kitch Pile, on credit cards, in MacDonalds, on calendars and in bank lobbies. At first I was dismayed, because I was certain each duplication of the photo would suck the substance from the reality, and in the end we'd be left with a blank smudge, a fog, an emptiness at the end of the road. But it is not so. In fact, the photo has been functioning as a subversive pipeline for the real, and everywhere it appears, the wax museum has begun to ooze. A general panic is steadily growing as entire buildings slough off, walls melt and in some cities whole blocks have puddled, leaving only the photos of the Waterloo Bridge hanging, like the smiles of Cheshire Cats, in mid-air.

Let's say you grew up in Cynthiana, Kentucky, and came upon the chance, a couple of years ago, to start up a factory that would create a hundred or more jobs and consume nearly half a million pounds per year of locally grown produce. What's not to like? You'd be manufacturing something for which there's a guaranteed, if dwindling, market, and since everybody knows there are certain, um, risks associated with the product, it's not like you are forcing poison down anybody's throat. So you take the opportunity, and sales simply explode to the point where you are churning thousands of cigarettes a minute. Recently, you give a tour to a Yankee and his nephews, and he seems really enthusiastic about what you've been able to do here for the local economy, although he politely asks a couple questions involving absolute versus relative morality that you've heard before and are comfortable with because nobody, after all, has a particularly good answer for them. It's all about choice, after all, you think. How do we know who we are if can't choose to do what we want? You hand out some free samples, and later glance out your office window to see him and his nephews sampling your product in your parking lot.

There's a restaurant in Cynthiana, Kentucky called Bianke's that has been in business for more than a century. Photos from every graduating class of the high school hang on the walls (23 graduates, if I remember, in the Class of '37) and several celebrity photos are scattered around, but not featured prominently. Dick Clark, for example, hangs on a closet door in the second dining room, above the letter of appreciation he wrote in 1961. When you walk in past the cash register and the five foot wide blackboard with a daily list of the week's specials, the local folks look up from their coffee with the kind of frank and open gaze that tells you, if you had any doubt, that you are not from these parts, but you are provisionally welcome, anyway. The coffee isn't bad, and you can smoke anywhere except in the front half of the Dick Clark dining room.

You don't go to a Purdue football game in 30 years and you sort of forget just how much fun they can be. First there's getting really really drunk and going and sitting on a hard bench seat with 80,000 other people watching large young men in a game that involves a great amount of agility, strategy and money. Then you get to go back to your cars and get really, really drunk all over again and sit in folding chairs by the tailgates and shout and laugh and talk raunchy with thousands of other people and throw your trash around everywhere because why do they hire clean-up crews anyway? Kind of makes me want to take the SATs all over again and go back for a second round.

Follow the sweeping scythe of the dark moon, and taste what seeps from the severed stalk. What is this harvest we have turned from, though even with no thought of what we need there is that appetite still, that punishing hunger. Little Mikie knows best. You are a fool if you are not afraid. On this night even the devil walks with a bodyguard.

Off to Indiana for the week, and I took the Screech Mistress over to Steve and True for a vacation. Parrots suffer nobly the friends of their owners, but I think that Fred actually enjoys her visits. Steve and True feed her like doting grandparents, and Fred always comes home with less enthusiasm for sunflower seeds and a longing for more shrimp.

Steve asked me if I had appropriate reading material for the trip, and I said no. Even if I had the best bag of books imaginable, I would still have denied it, because Steve had that look in his eye that I know as the Literary Proselitizer, and I admit a terrible weakness in the face of it.

If I loan you this book, he said, you have to promise to return it unbent, unblemished, unharmed, unripped, and in better condition than I gave it to you. I made the promise. What did it really matter? He NEEDED to loan the book to me.

This is one of the Flashman series, published in 1971, and the mythology that accompanies any of the Flashman books is that if you read just one, you'll be infected for life. Harry Flashman is a character lifted by writer George MacDonald Fraser from Tom Hughes 1857 novel "Tom Brown's Schooldays," and in that old book was held up against the shining example of Tom Brown as everything that a boy should not be...a coward, a bully, a liar, a cheat and a manipulator. In short, a perfectly loathsome hero well-suited for the late 1960s.

As a reviewer writes, "...Fraser has fashioned a character who managed to get himself involved in what appears to be practically all of the significant historical events between about 1840 and 1900.
      "Fraser claims that Flashman wrote his memoirs in his old age, and that these were rediscovered in 1965 and that Fraser was asked to edit them. Releasing one "packet" of adventures at a time (not in chronological order) Fraser -- through Flashman -- takes his readers to many of the battlefields and exotic places of the 19th century. The books are in Flashman's voice, with Fraser only adding some explanatory historical notes.
       "The series is remarkable for a number of reasons. This is not your usual historical fiction, where honor, truth, and bravery triumph. No, not at all. In fact, Flashman freely admits to being a poltroon (our dictionary suggests "base coward" as a definition, and that's exactly what Flashman is). Other than preserving his own hide there is little that Flashman cares about ... except seducing the ladies. And he is very good at both. Much of the fun in these books is that, despite his best efforts, Flashman always manages to wind up right where the action is -- and that he invariably emerges as the hero (if only because all the witnesses to his cowardice are dead)."

I'll be finished with the book in a week, and if you don't tell Steve, I'll be happy to lend it to you. Just return it, of course, in better shape than it was when I gave it to you.

Hen of the Woods carries the subtle flavors of smoke and wood and grows in dense, branching clumps that sometimes can tip the scales at 100 pounds or more. Joan brought home just 20 pounds from one find, and left most of the mushroom to repropogate for next year. We chopped and fried it in olive oil and garlic, ate as much as we could and froze the rest. But that was several weeks ago. The Hen's time in the woods is past, and we must wait out the year for its return.

Little Mikie and I were arguing last night. He said it would. I said it wouldn't. I said it couldn't. Too early, too...too hard to think about it. He said I was a fool in a fool's paradise. I said that's my choice, and who invited him anyway. He shook his head and grinned. It wasn't a nice grin. You're bigger than me, he said, but you aren't bigger than this.

The heart of the burning bush is mineral blue, where the hand is a cold brush and even the memory of warmth is a taint. If only I knew my longing for the song of some thrush in a meadow would matter, I would easily throw off this mantle, touch tongue to the rock and trace my steps back until I came upon the root of this memory. Fool that I am, I had forgot that any miracle will do.

Who doesn't remember the red fezzed flying monkey slave-soldiers of the Wicked Witch of the East and the way the witch dispatched them to find Dorothy and her three companions? In the movie the monkey minions took to the skies with a slow, almost stately, flight, but for the Warner Fall Foliage Festival Parade the monkeys were tethered to Jesse's industrial-sized forklift and gave chase to a suspiciously manly Dorothy, two versions of Toto (both of whom got into periodic dust-ups with other dogs along the parade route), and the rest of the cast including a couple of Munchkin ballerinas in tutus and bad-ass trees throwing apples. They called it a float, but it was really a rolling, leaping, somersaulting production. Too much somersaulting, perhaps, because several of the monkeys, including Shirley, reported bouts of seasickness along the route.

It follows that after a season of growth there should be a season of rest. The flower fruits, and spent, then drops its seed. The seed sleeps, to be wakened months later with moisture and heat. It makes sense, but it is also terrifying. And exhilarating. Frost takes the tomato vines and we haul the last of the produce inside, and wait for that dreary slide through November into darkness. I hate these frosts, but find them also exciting, because I feel driven forward like an actor in a great cautionary tale. With a little help from Enrique de Tuscon I recalled Ezra Pound's perversion of the old english ballad (Summer is icummen in..):

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
and how the wind doth ramm...

When I was 21 and living in British Columbia one idyllic summer, I failed to notice, or admit, or understand what was coming, and did not build the little cabin that I had intended to put together for me and my bride in the fall. Winter came in, and I suffered through it. Frost is the slap of the master's stick on the shoulder of the novice zen monk. Attend to the moment. Attend. Attend.

I was standing by the stove stirring up the wort, had just bagged the hops and dumped it in the mix when I got the sudden notion to take a turn around the kitchen to see what I might have forgotten to put into the brew. Next thing I knew Jesse had jumped into place by the pot, stirred down the foam, and brain-bruised and addled by the fumes scooped the buds out of the stew and opened his mouth ready to chew a bite out of this brew before it had even been juiced by the yeast. Stop, Jesse, I shrieked, desist, as least, or wait a piece, for the wort is not the beer even though it's clear we're nearly there, but not near enough, I fear, to stave the hunger for that malt; my words brought him to halt. "It's not my fault," said he, "but you're right, we'll wait if not for the bottles, than at best the bucket."

When we know that two people love each other, the world brightens, and what is ugly and painful retreats for a while into the shadows. And then when these same people marry, something altogether different happens; we see how love becomes strength, how love steps forward with a power far beyond the couple's pleasure in each other, how love not only brightens our world but knits up what is essential in our lives. This marriage, then, gives us courage. And may it give Crissy and Morgan the center for living their lives long and well together.

Wedding vans. For the past three months Joan has been thinking flowers. And berries and crabapples and leaves and bittersweet and birch trees and a hundred other flora, all of which she is assembling for Morgan's wedding this weekend. We have a parade of vans about to depart to truck all the stuff down to Massachusetts. That's all there is for now. But we're all too busy to screech.