How Do You Sparkle?

We think it was one of our best dinners.

Roasted Turkey
Fresh Orange-Cranberry Sauce with Walnuts
Herb and Onion Stuffing
Mashed Potatoes and Gravy
Lima Beans in Cream
Baby Peas
Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows
Dixie Salad
Corn Pudding
Read All About It Rolls
Favorite Old-Fashioned Gingerbread
Dutch Apple Pie
Punkin Pie
Toll House Pie
Vanilla Ice Cream
Whipped Cream

Because we were four, I set the table with Grandma L's pheasant plates of which we have five. And the single teacup you see in the picture above. Dixie Salad was a black horse in my book. Mother seeded a whole pomegranate and added apple pieces, raisins, and Cool Whip (the original recipe asks for sweetened whipped cream). I may add here it was delicious. The lima beans were another runaway winner, but not so surprisingly. I made two of Rachel B's recipes: gingerbread and orange cranberries. Each luscious and deep. Mother gave up on the gravy before she began. The dreamboat stuffing was so easy and yum yum. Fobsi dropped off her homemade rolls and the Toll House Pie before joining her in-laws. B declared his plate the most attractive at the table and suggested a picture.

We planned to open the bubbly—Kristian Regále Sparkling Apple Beverage—and never did. Father read aloud the beguiling label at the end of the feast: It's Time to Sparkle. He then turned to us and asked, puzzled: How do you sparkle?

Visible Ink

Because I am feeling petulant, I will demonstrate fastidious behavior. This is my favorite pen.

It is called Pilot VBall Liquid Ink Roller. Clearly, I prefer red. It is shapely. The barrel is a tube of blood-like liquid. It is beyond lovely. I am also happy because I believed this model to be terminated and it's not. A model like Pilot Precise V5/7 Rolling Ball had come on the scene.

It is carried by major stores. I came across the VBall this week at Hillcrest Stationers. Stores like Office Depot or Staples discontinued stocking it, thus my assumption it is not available. You can't believe everything you read. I can now buy as many as I want online plus shipping. What a future.

New Year's Day

A Poem by Billy Collins

Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year's Day—

a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.

"No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference," writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the
Annunciation,

this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.

I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.

As an only child—
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning—
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.

And one more might be a small consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
on some kitchen calendar of the future,

the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,

party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.