Poem for December: Now Winter Nights Enlarge.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge
Thomas Campion

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-turned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense
With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well;
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.

After the glum “I hate winter” poem of November, I chose this poem because it captures what I like about winter. The lines “Let now, the chimney’s blaze/and cups o’erflow with wine” is delightful.

Like November’s poem, the old-fashioned language made this a bit tricky to memorize, but it wasn’t very difficult.

Thank you, John Hughes.

His name hasn’t come up in the “Goodbye Dead Famous People” lists of 2009–at least not the one’s I’ve seen. Checking IMDB, it’s not hard to see why. Looking over the list of movies Hughes wrote from 1991 onward, tells us that an entire generation has grown up only knowing him as the writer of (sigh with me, Gen-Xers) Dennis the Menace, Beethoven’s 4th, Baby’s Day Out and Home Alone 3. But let’s roll back a screen or two. Scrolling over the movies Hughes wrote in the 1980’s is a treasure trove of lifetime movie highlights.

Mr. Mom. (1983) I wasn’t even ten, yet my entire family watched and enjoyed this movie. Among other things, this movie opened my eyes to the idea that one shouldn’t assume that the husband is going to get a new job before the wife does, and an iron makes an excellent instrument for warming up cold grilled cheese sandwiches.

Vacation. (1983) My family didn’t watch this movie until 1988, after we spent a month driving across the country and back in a station wagon, but oh we did laugh. Classic scenes, classic lines, classic story.
Sixteen Candles. (1984) A preview of what it would be like to be a teenager, though I knew even then my teenage years would be a lot more of Joan Cusack, and a lot less of Molly Ringwald.

The Breakfast Club. (1985) Lori Tollinger’s mother came downstairs at just the wrong moment, leaving me with an awkward memory of the most dramatic scene. This movie also fed my bad boy fixation and I worried for years that my hair would unknowingly be as dandruffy as Ali Sheedy’s. Now, thanks to psoriasis, it is, though my adult self handles that better than my teenage self ever would have.

Pretty in Pink. (1986) Girls who can sew do get the guy. Also Annie Potts as the coolest small business owner ever.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (1986) Forshadowed my teenage years: upon viewing with my mother and brother I grew annoyed that my mother kept saying, “Principals aren’t really like that,” “Parents aren’t really like that,” “That isn’t even possible.” Being an adult and not a pre-adolecent like me she missed the point. This is the perfect movie about what we all wish adolescence was like. Also includes one of the most beautifully filmed visits to an art museum ever. And Charlie Sheen as a bad boy. Which it turns out he really is. Hughes could have stopped here, with this movie, he really could have. But he continues.
Some Kind of Wonderful. (1987) This movie will forever remind me of Lori Tollinger. Captures the delecate negotiation between parents and children. What happens when their dreams are different? Also a reminder that getting the girl isn’t the point, sometimes.

Uncle Buck. (1989) Aside from starring the funniest fat man ever, John Candy, it also includes the best illustration of why a toothpick is not the best prop when trying to make a good impression on a girl. I saw this the first week of school my ninth grade year, on a school night and it will always represent that freedom of adolescence, even if I can’t really recall much of the plot.

Home Alone. (1990) I saw it. You saw it. Heck, everyone saw it. The irony of John Hughes in my life was that by the time I had actually caught up to the age of his characters in his best movies, he started writing movies for children the age I was when I started watching his movies about teenagers. But Kevin McCallister’s fight against burglars will forever be remembered by millions of Americans.

And thus ends my relationship with John Hughes. He went on to write movies that I consider really awful, though I’ve not seen most of them. I went on to face my high school years without movies about teenagers. But what he did write about teenagers before I came of age, I found to be true to my experiences. When I watch John Hughes movies, I’m usually reminded of the elementary school me who saw those films and tried to figure out what being a teenager would be like. He offered a portal into a world I hadn’t experienced yet, and many of his observations turned out to be true to my experience.

I like to think that, had he not died this year, he would have turned some corner and begin writing movies that mattered again. But maybe not. Maybe his movies that mattered only came at a certain time in his life. That would have been okay too. They were enough.

Best books experienced in 2009

In 2009 these are the awards for:

Best novel based on another novel:
Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher
Lenore Hart

Best book that illuminated the creative process behind a sitcom of my childhood:
Sit, Ubu, Sit: How I went from Brooklyn to Hollywood with the same woman, same dog and a lot less hair
Gary David Goldburg

Best gardening book for people with not a lot of money to buy fancy stuff:
Gardening when it Counts
Steve Soloman

Best Historical Fiction Combined with Star-Crossed Love, the Boston Molasses Disaster and Pro-Labor Leanings:
The Given Day
Dennis Lehane

Best Tiny Book that Propelled the Creation of a Landscaping Focal Point:
Arches and Pergolas
Richard Key

Best Thing You Can Probably Do for Yourself
with honors in Best Title:

Full Catastrophe Living
Jon KabatZinn

Best Account of My People:
Plenty
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKennon

Best re-reading of a Top-Ten Book:
Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver

Best start of a YA series:
City of Ember
Jeanne DuPru

Best How-To Book Written by My People:
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide for Self-Sufficient Living in the City
Kelly Coyne & Erik Knutzen

Best Book to Transform Your Pacific Northwest (and other regions too) Backyard:
Gaia’s Garden
Toby Hemenway

Best Book Featuring a Hard-as-Nails Heroine:
These Is My Words
Nancy E. Turner

Best What-If:
Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life
Tony Wolk

Best Collective Voices And I-Can’t-Recommend-This-Enough!:
Three Girls and Their Brother
Theresa Rebeck

Best Set-In-WWII-Historical Fiction:
Skeletons at the Feast
Chris Bohjalian

Perhaps the Best Fiction Book I Read in 2009 and You Should Read It Too:
American Wife
Curtis Sittenfeld

Worst Book That Totally Dragged Down The Series:
The Prophet of Yonwood
Jeanne DuPrau

Best Meander Through Some Characters’ Lives:
Eat, Drink & Be From Mississippi
Nanci Kincaid

Best Intriguing Premise Historical Fiction:
The Birth of Venus
Sarah Dunant

Best Re-Reading of a Book I Loved as a Teenager:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith

Best Youthful Voice of Which I Probably Won’t Like in Movie Form:
Me & Orsen Wells
Robert Kaplow