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The last time I posted photographs of the things I find on City of Milwaukee sidewalks, it was December 2012. Here’s a year’s worth, from New Year’s Day 2013 through New Year’s Day 2014.

Last year I found several remnants of New Year’s Eve strewn about Milwaukee’s East Side, which is Party Central every weekend of the year but especially on December 31st. I’m always curious how something like the inside of someone’s shoe ends up on a sidewalk.

The spray-painted carp can be found in several places around the East Side. They travel in groups; there’s never just one. The “R” had fallen from the marquis of the Oriental Theater on Farwell. I picked it up and moved it by the front door; it was heavy, like iron. There was no dead body or dried pool of blood nearby.

Spring in Milwaukee usually lasts one month; two if we’re lucky. Most years we jump straight from winter into summer.

The sidewalks dry up. The salt flies away. Plants and flowers pop up through any opening the sun coaxes them through.

Summer sidewalks make a perfect canvas.

Milwaukee falls generally last longer than Milwaukee springs. Leaves make pretty patterns and get tangled up with lost or discarded things.

One of the funniest things I found on the sidewalks in 2013 is a white piece of paper with the words “Large” and “Wealthy” handwritten on it. I generally leave the things I find on the sidewalk on the sidewalk. Unless it’s money. “Large” and “Wealthy” was just too rich to leave behind. It’s on my dining room table right now.

At the tail-end of fall, we Milwaukeeans hang on to every little bit of good weather we can. We pay tribute to happy, flowery days in chalk. Bees are at the end of their life cycle. They no longer fly. They crawl, looking for warm spots on the concrete before they die.

If anyone ever tells you that Gummi bears and the like never spoil, they are wrong. A Gummi worm lay on the sidewalk near our place for two weeks, and two things about that were amazing to me: first, that no one stepped on it and smooshed it, and second, that it turned jet black exposed to the elements. After three weeks or so it looked like a skinny dog turd. Try explaining that to the young guy who passes by as you’re taking a picture of it.

Fall 2013 in Milwaukee lasted less than one hot minute. It got cold in early October and it’s been cold ever since. On a minus-17-degree day John and I bundled up and took an hour-long walk just to see what it would be like. Our knees were frozen in 15 minutes. The sidewalk outside a small building of condominiums was lined with ten or so discarded Christmas trees, still looking green and fresh. My iPhone was not capable of capturing all them lying in a row, waiting to be picked up for, we had hoped, recycling. So imagine the row of them continuing past your left shoulder.

The confetti was scattered all over the footbridge just north of Winsdor on Prospect. Every week a little bit more of it blows away.

Wishing you a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2014.

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IMG_9944The day after Christmas, John and I went out for a long walk in twenty-degree weather that culminated in stopping at our favorite German tavern for some beer and popcorn. We took seats at our favorite table and continued the conversation we’d been having while walking, which was really a long string of several short, separate conversations.

“Did you see this thread?” said John, handing me his cell phone and reading glasses.

It was open to a friend’s status update on Facebook, made on December 25: “Most horrible Xmas day ever,” it read.

John told me I should read the thirty or so comments that followed when I got a chance, which I did the next morning. They followed two tracks: “Spend your Christmas with us next time” and “Mine wasn’t so good either.”

Our friend’s dilemma got me thinking about my Christmases past, some that were brilliant, some that were dismal.

The Christmas I got my first two-wheel bike, a chrome and royal blue number with no bar in the middle, stands out as one of the good ones. So does the one when I got my chemistry set. My mother had a holy fit as I rode my new bike around and around our Early American dining room table, occasionally bashing into the backs of the chairs.

What I remember about the Christmas I spent in Florida are fake Santas in the sand, fake evergreen wreaths on the doors of manufactured homes, and palm trees with Christmas lights. The people I stayed with, relatives who were impossible to please, gave me a pastel pink sweatshirt with a built-in shirt collar and a knockoff of a George Foreman grill that weighed two tons. When it came time to leave, I didn’t have room in my luggage for the two-ton grill.

“I have to leave it behind,” I told the difficult relatives. They pitched a holy fit. I left the pink sweatshirt on the bed.

One of the best Christmases I’ve ever had was with John, when we packed two sleds, two sets of cross-country skis, our Christmas presents and our cat into his car and drove five hours to northern Wisconsin to a Finnish farm. We stayed in a cabin along a river with a fireplace and no TV, and took breakfast and dinner in the farmhouse and long breaks in a hot sauna. We skied, we hiked, we sledded, we read, we rolled around in the snow in our bathing suits after the sauna. Our cat played with a paper ribbon that had come off a present and took long naps in a window in the winter sun.

This year was also good. Still recuperating from our respective semesters, John and I decided to stay in Milwaukee and have our own Christmas. I did most of my shopping online at the last minute and wanted nothing to do with the Christmas cards; John signed my name and mailed them all. We did no wrapping. Our Christmas tree was the inflatable one we got at the secondhand shop last year.

Christmas morning we put all of our Amazon boxes and FedEx envelopes in a pile on the living room floor. We had no idea whose packages were whose, and we laughed when we got them mixed up. Our cats (we have two now) pawed at bubble wrap and jumped in and out of empty boxes.

IMG_9846John unwrapped two large snifters wrapped in brown paper bags and poured us some Drambuie, a gift from me to him. We watched “Uncle Buck” and “The Sopranos” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Summer Fun: Hyde Park Live,” filmed in London this past summer. I cooked a small ham and sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

It eschewed all kinds of tradition. And it was beautiful. With each passing Christmas, I grow less tolerant of the hype. It really bothers me that Christmas was only two weeks ago, but it feels like two years. That the day after Christmas the carols stop and the TV sets scream “Markdowns!” I can tell by the way the horns are honking on our busy city street that the good cheer has stopped. In the past week we have received three tax forms. When it’s over, it’s over.

You wouldn’t expect the Christmas that occurs a month and a half after your mother dies to be a good one, but that one was actually pretty nice.

The most heartbreaking Christmas I ever had was the year I left a bad relationship. It was 2002, and I was also estranged from members of my family because of an incident that occurred the Christmas of 2001 that I had the temerity to speak out against. It caused a very deep rift that was still going on a year later and as a result, I had nowhere to go for Christmas.

My brother invited me to stay with him at his condo in Ohio. Some friends in Wisconsin invited me to Christmas Eve dinner with them. I decided to go out with my friends then spend Christmas Day driving to Ohio.

Christmas Eve dinner was at a Chinese restaurant with dark paneled walls and red velvet drapes. It was the scene from “A Christmas Story” but with better furniture. And it was crowded. I liked that my friends had turned this into a tradition for their family. Their adolescent son regarded me tentatively, as if I were stealing some of the attention he’d normally get.

Despite being thankful for someplace to go that evening, I was also feeling desperately lonely. My brother would be at my parents’ when I got to Ohio, so he would leave the key under the mat. I had received an email saying that while it would be OK if I came for dinner, it would be better if I just came for dessert.

IMG_0097All right, I wrote back, see you at seven.

Christmas Day I received a message saying that I was no longer invited for dessert.

I let myself into my brother’s condo, unpacked my things in the back bedroom, and opened a bottle of wine I’d brought in my suitcase.

As bad as it felt to be alone Christmas Day, the eight hours it took to drive from Milwaukee to Ohio were sparked by unexpected flashes of love and light: four phone calls from six friends who were calling to see where I was and how I was doing. Who knew I was driving to somewhere and nowhere at the same time, that I wasn’t invited to Christmas and why, and that just five months earlier I had left an abusive man.

      • One of the calls was from the friends who’d taken me to the Chinese restaurant.
      • One was from a friend who was looking forward to spending New Year’s Eve with me.
      • One was from a very handsome man in Wisconsin I’d had a few dates with.
              • One was from Jan and Greg, two loves of my life.

They told me they couldn’t wait to see me, that they loved me, and to be careful driving, they’d see me soon.

Our friend’s December 25th Facebook post struck a nerve. “I can commiserate” was the general tenor among the comments. “Friends always love you,” wrote one person, with a little heart at the end of the sentence.

Another person acknowledged that Christmas is a difficult time of the year.

However, he added, “If you don’t ask too much from it, sometimes it surprises you with more than you requested.”

If Christmas is bad for you, I hope you make the most of the next ten months before it all drums up again. I will be there for you next December if you need me.

For those of you for whom Christmas is good, I bet you are also the sort whose goodwill isn’t contained within two months of hype. May you be blessed for that.

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Don’t player-hate, but for Christmas I asked for – and received – three CDs of old record albums I owned in my late teens and early twenties: Close to You by The Carpenters, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, and Glass Houses by Billy Joel.

The first reminds me of high school, when I listened to Close to You over and over, fascinated with Karen Carpenter’s vocal range. Singing along with her was the first time I realized I might have some kind of voice.

Rumours was a colossal hit when I was in college a few years later. It was one of the albums I played as I, an art minor, drew and painted by the back screen door of the house I rented south of campus with three girlfriends.

Glass Houses reminds me of my first car, a 1978 glacial blue Pontiac Lemans with no radio. For a year I drove around with nothing but the sound of tires on pavement and my own thoughts in my ears. The following year I bought a Craig cassette player and a pair of Jensen speakers. After they were installed, my brother recorded several of his favorite record albums on a bunch of blank tapes and gave them to me for Christmas. He’d labeled each of the dozen or so tapes by hand on the white cards that lined the plastic cases: The Royal Scam by Steely Dan; Jazz by Queen; A Trick of the Tail by Genesis. Glass Houses was another. I bought a brown vinyl carrying case from Peaches to keep them in. I still have them all.

The other day I imported my three new CDs into iTunes on my Mac, something that at age 18 I couldn’t conceive of someday being able to do. I don’t know how we start out in this world so dependent and timid and how years later we realize that we can now find our way around the world without anyone’s help. I don’t know how I evolved to this point technology-wise, but here I am.

I  created a new playlist list on my iPod, named it “Old Record Albums,” and uploaded the tracks. I pulled on my boots, zipped up my hi-tech ski jacket, hit “Shuffle,”and left for a long walk along Lake Michigan in fifteen-degree weather.

I walked. And I listened. A few of the songs made me wince and others made me laugh out loud for joy.

And I suddenly wished that my mother had had an iPod with the songs of her late teens and early twenties: The Swingle Sisters; Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass; Andy Williams; Sam Cooke. And I wished that she had listened to it while taking long walks along a winter lake, her hands shoved deep in her pockets, her heart as light as magic.

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