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Blue

12/27/2014

This is our house on the farm when I was 15. I had just gotten my nice 35mm camera and this was one of the first pictures I took. When I got the slides back from the store, I looked at this one projected up on our nearly white wall and puzzled about it for a while. I had a rough idea of how colour was formed, from light reflecting off things -- all the wavelengths, that is, except those which were absorbed -- and that colour was what remained.

Finally I called out to Mom and said, "Hey, Mom, look."

She came in and sat down.

"What colour is the snow?"

"White."

Laughing, I said, "No, Mom, it's blue. The snow is blue!"

She looked at it again and said, "No, it's white."

"Mom, just look at it. It's blue."

She looked again, and then at me with exasperation. "Don 't be silly. It's white."

Now I was getting exasperated with her. "Mom, can't you see that? That's blue snow!"

She got up and went in the other room.

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GRINCH

12/26/2014

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Linda and I were driving home from her daughter's house in Mississauga where we had enjoyed the whole kaboodle of Christmas: the unwrapping of presents with the kids, their emotions skipping back and forth on the scale of excitement and disappointment, as is the tradition; and dinner in a cozy atmosphere of wreaths, garlands and a wonderfully decorated tree, and of course lots of good cheer. And for entertainment we had watched, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas".

At some point this side of the Hamilton mountain, I broke the silence and said, "That Grinch movie was really odd."

Linda dragged herself out of her own thoughts. "What do you mean?"

"Well the essence of it is a complaint about the commercialization of Christmas. But with most complaints I've heard about that, they say we're forgetting the true meaning of Christmas, which is Christ's birth. But in this movie I didn't see any mention at all of anything having to do with Christianity or Jesus. Not a word or image."

"Right. I didn't see any either."

"So if you take away commercializion and you have no religion to replace it with, what do you have left?"

We sat there looking at the light from our headlights on the pavement trying to think of something.

"Nostalgia," I said. "I guess the only thing you have left is nostalgia."

Linda mulled that over and then said, "After a few years of only nostalgia, there wouldn't be anything to be nostalgic for, so there would be nothing."

I laughed. Okay, then there had to be something we were missing.

"Oh, it's a family reunion," I said.

"Yeah. Like a wedding."

"Or a funeral. But every year."

With some relief, we sank back into the Christmas songs on the radio and our thoughts.

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In the Night

12/21/2014

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Not sure I want to see the end of
religion, superiority, existential delusion;
Machinery is breathing so
heavily
out there in the Garden.

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Blue

GRINCH

In the Night

Stan Burfield's Blog

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