Finally all the singing and playing is over! Last night Christmas Eve service was fairly chaotic with everybody showing up at five and all the different people/groups trying to rehearse at once, sound system a wreck, but the service Lessons and Carols happened and cantata is over and the group I play pennywhistle with on vacation until probably February. It was all fairly arduous. Got my Christmas spiced nuts mailed off to agent and editor Jen Brehl and Gordon Lish, packages to sister, cousin and the lighthouse people — great new calendar from Jeff of the Lighthouse, he becomes a better photographer every year. I haven’t even opened all my Christmas presents yet. Young cat DT trying to eat the battery lights on tree. Just came back from big Christmas dinner with the Kays down the road. Lots of laughing this year.

Printed out Simon the Fiddler yesterday and I can hardly bear to be away from the manuscript. working with a red pen now on paper. This is what I like best. When that is done I will enter the corrections and then its off to Jen and Liz. No word on when they will start in production on the movie for News of the World but then I would be the last to hear.

These are heavy horses. Police horses, they look like Percherons. They are at least 16 hands, assuming the police riders are average height. Not controlling any crowds as far as I can see. Assuming they have borium shoe-nails for getting a grip on pavement but you never know. The martingales have no attachment between front legs to the cinch/girth so don’t know what good the martingales would do. Also the stirrups don’t seem to be the breakaway type. Also their boots/leg protectors don’t go over the knee.  So I guess this is just for the optics.

When the news came over the radio to all parts of America, most people had no idea where it was, what was there, and many were not really sure where Hawaii was. Thomas Merton, in his earliest autobiographical writing, remembered walking down a nearly-deserted New York city street and hearing the same radio news from one open window after another; that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Every radio tuned into the same station; one uncompleted sentence would be carried on from the next window he passed.

This was Pearl Harbor. A safe berth, tucked away from Pacific storms and waves, the big destroyers neatly lined up. This picture taken October of 1941.

And so this precipitated my father into war, and many fathers, brothers, other relatives into a world-wide conflict. HIs war ended after he made it through the battle of Iwo Jima, on board the U.S.S. Finnegan, and in ’45 at the surrender of Japan wrote to my mother — from some unnamed harbor (Navy censors)— about a British band playing, yelling, cheering loudly as they walked around the streets, celebrating, everybody celebrating with them.