Except for the fact that Rosemary now has a very good and new laptop (purchased last year) and that my 16 year-old granddaughter, 16, is giving us tremendous problems, our life in 2013 was pretty good.
I wrote about it here and I don’t think I
can top it. Lauren is now 11 but she still acts like a little girl even though
she understands that Santa Claus does not exist and that her father is really
the Tooth Fairy.
It is snowing outside so I can almost
celebrate a white Christmas looking out of the window into the back garden as I
write this.
There is a smile on my face because while
Christmases change from year to year (and we think not for the better) there is
one most pleasant constant. This is a Christmas card from my friend the illustrator
Dick Allen and his wife Susan.
I know Allen because many years ago he did
paste-up work at Vancouver Magazine. With the then art director Rick Staehling
and animator Marv Newland they had attended the prestigious Art Center
in LA.
Allen, I sometimes think, lives daily in the
past but when he emerges from his house he does so in a time machine that brings him to this present. I like Allen's past. Perhaps there is less
evil (even if evil was always with us), it is a world of many colours but pastels, too. It is pleasant to admire a Christmas
card, one that has come in an envelope with a stamp and addressed in very nice handwriting. I like to think that the envelope, in spite of its contemporary
digital coded date really came in Allen's time machine and that he hand
delivered it one evening when I was not looking.
Thank you Dick Allen for this real
Christmas cheer. And a very Merry Christmas to you and Susan.