Christmas/New Year's blog

December 28th

Hi, everybody –

Since we’re not doing a “Charmed Monday Minute” Dec. 25 or Jan. 1, I wanted to at least check in, wish you a joyful holiday season, and let you know what’s going on here.

Healing update: I have really been going through the fire with the nerve condition that started with a dental procedure November 7. The past two days have been pretty good (hurray!) and I’m trusting that will hold. Two days last week, when I returned from California after Richard Carlson’s funeral, were lie-on-the-couch/don’t-move awful. I’m headed off tomorrow (Friday, December 29) to rest and get some detoxifying treatments at a spa in upstate New York. After the setback I had from the trip out West, I gave up on the idea of going somewhere far away. I’ll give you a report on the spa after I get back.

Richard Carlson: Some of you have asked about Richard Carlson’s memorial. It was really beautiful, 700 people in attendance, and included in the service were a lovely slide show of his life with his family, and an audio clip of a talk he gave in the parish where the memorial was held. Despite the tragic circumstances of his early passing, the service was a real celebration of his amazing life and contributions.

Wonderful restaurant: When I was in the Bay Area, Patti Breitman (Richard’s former literary agent and mine) and her husband Stan Rosenfeld took foreign rights agent Linda Michaels and me to a really delightful restaurant in Berkeley. It’s called Café Gratitude and is vegan, mostly raw food. The dishes all have affirmations for names, i.e., “I am beautiful,” “I am loving,” “I am abundant.” Richard would have approved. And the food was amazing. Here are a couple of the quotations from the walls:

“By letting go, it all gets done.
The world is won by those who let go.
But when you try and try, the world is beyond winning.”
Lao Tzu

“Abundance can be had simply
by consciously receiving what has already been given.”
Sufi saying

If you’d like to read more about Café Gratitude, here’s a link: www.withthecurrent/menu.html.

The Moran/Melton family Christmas: The miracle was, we had one. I’d been so sick we didn’t even get a tree until the night of the 23rd, and we had to let the branches drop so we actually decorated it on Christmas Eve. That’s a first for us. It’s a precious little tree, though, and I love being able to keep it up through Epiphany on January 6th and have it keep its needles.

Siân, William’s daughter, has a job at Urban Outfitters and had to work late on Christmas Eve, so it was just William, Adair, Nick, and I for December 24th dinner, and Bobby-the-cat for added company. Despite all the recipes I’ve given in recent “Charmed Monday Minutes” for the traditional meal we usually have, we didn’t do anything traditional this very unusual year. Adair brought stuffed mushrooms and a winter vegetable puree. I made a vegan Caprese salad (yes, of course: tofu masquerading as mozzarella), and baked apples. Those without nerve damage shared a lovely bottle of Italian red wine.

On Christmas morning, William and Siân and I went over to Nick and Adair’s place for Christmas morning with them and the two dogs. Such a sweet experience start to finish! It was our first Christmas in maybe seven years with any of William’s kids with us on the day itself, so it was really special to have Siân there. And Adair totally has the Christmas gene. Her sense of decorating and gift-giving and tradition---well, it warms the heart of a mother whose favorite movies include Miracle on 34th Street (original version) and Elf.

Among the wealth of lovely and thoughtful gifts I received were:

From William, a Philip Stein “teslar” watch. You may have seen these on one of Oprah’s “favorite things” shows. They’re amazing. The watch contains a teslar chip to protect again electromagnetic radiation. A host of studies indicate that wearing it improves athletic performance, calms the mood, helps sleep, and even promotes healing (I want that). I am loving having this watch on my wrist. If you want to read about it, you can check out www.philipstein.com/ .

From Adair, a professional portrait of Aspen, officially Adair’s dog but mine, too, (I found her starving on the streets of Kansas City). Aspen is, gosh, twelve now, maybe thirteen, and she moved in with Adair and Nick when they got married. Doubly special: the photographer said to Adair during the shoot, “While we’re here, let me get a few of you with Aspen,” so I have the most exquisite 5x7 of my precious daughter and precious dog together. I put it on my altar because those two faces say L-O-V-E to me.

And, again from William, an invisible dog! You see, I would love to have a dog who lives with us, but William has always wanted to wait until we have a bigger place. Since I’ve been injured, though, he was thinking that a dog would help me get better. When I asked him if he was okay with doing Christmas Eve at our place and Christmas morning at Adair’s, he said, “But one of your presents will be really hard to get over there.” Hmmm. I’d asked for a watch. Something told me he was thinking “dog.” I told him I couldn’t take care of one in my current situation, so on Christmas morning he gave me a card with a cute little white terrier on it and a promise that when I’m better we can go to the shelter or contact a rescue organization and adopt a living, breathing pooch.

I am mega-lucky to be so loved.

After presents, we went to Zenith in the theater district for Christmas lunch. Nick and Adair went home to play with their toys, and William and Siân and I went to the movies---plural. We saw Dream Girls and Charlotte’s Web. I liked both of them a lot, and of course I’m a major pushover for Charlotte, “a true friend and a good writer.”

Wishing you a beautiful, bountiful, and peace-filled 2007: I trust that in this New Year you’ll see dreams take shape, you’ll grow in wisdom and the ability to be happy, and that each of us will put forth energy in whatever way we can to make our entire world more peaceful and whole.

I’ll close with something that really spoke to me. I hope that in the retelling it will mean something to you, too. I was watching 30 Days, Morgan Spurlock’s very positive reality show on FX in which someone spends thirty days living and working in very different circumstances from their regular life, usually with people whose lifestyle or ideology differs vastly from their own. In this episode, a minuteman, an armed civilian who patrols the border to keep illegal immigrants from crossing, went to live with a family of undocumented Mexican immigrants in LA. One day he was out working with the man of the family. They were clearing a plot of land and out from under a rock crawled a creature that was, to human sensibilities, ugly---even creepy. It was sort of worm-like, but it had feet so it was sort lizard-y, too. As soon as he saw this humble, crawling thing, the Mexican man, who had been through so much hardship in his life, said, “Let him go so he can enjoy his life.”

I’m still not sure why that was so incredibly meaningful to me, but it was and it still is. We’ll all here to enjoy our lives---all people everywhere and every being of every description. I made me want to do what I can to help everyone whose life touches mine have the opportunity for that joy, and it made me promise myself to get some joy every day, even the ones that, at first glance, look pretty crummy.

Love and best wishes,
Victoria