We each leave our mark -- whether we mean to or not. There is no anonymous life.

While Gandhi and Mother Teresa left theirs through years of service, John Hancock, in 3 seconds of scrolly handwriting, said all he ever needed to. Babe Ruth only pointed. A cow's skull means Georgia O'Keeffe. But be careful about the mark you leave; you could end up like the Emperor Nero, bound for all eternity to share a blackened pasture with Mrs. O'Leary's cow.

If you decide to re-do your kitchen (like Santina and I did), and if you go the whole bit with the dishwasher made invisible (like Santina and I did), and if you then reach blindly for the silverware drawer, which pulls out, but inadvertently grab the dishwasher handle, which pulls down, your whole world will turn instantly topsy turvy and for a split second you will not even be certain of your gender.

Seems like we used to get a lot more Christmas cards than we do now. I trust this says more about the changing times than it does about us. Still, they're nice to receive. Diana touches base from Switzerland, Susan thanks Santina for the holiday cookies, LR speaks from the soul. And it's good to hear from Michelle and Barack, catch up with them, hear what they've been up to.

When I was in high school and just starting to shave, Bobby Poole enlightened me as to the nature of whiskers. They don't grow at a constant rate he told me, but rather they have two phases of rapid growth, the first phase beginning right after they've been cut, and then a second phase just before they're cut again.

(who was I to question a friend?)

And I confess that I have often wondered during all these intervening years just how many really stupid life decisions I might have avoided had I been only half as smart as Bobby Poole's whiskers.

I was shocked to hear today that Chad and Jeremy would be performing locally. Shocked that they were both still: a) living, b) performing together, and c) welcome in NH.

In probably 1966 Patty of the Cher-hair and I had sat stage right, front row in the u-shaped wrapping balcony of the Keene State College gymnasium, waiting impatiently through an interminably bad opening group, and boisterously joined the throng of stamping feet, whistles and catcalls for the main event. Finally Chad and Jeremy emerged. After three songs the President of the Student Senate rushed on stage and implored us to give them a big hand. Which was very confusing. Till we realized they were departing. And then we were told that one of them wasn't feeling very well. Stamping feet and catcalls returned as a drama unfolded backstage. The college refused to pay, citing breech of contract; and then there was some breaking of furniture.

I didn't see Patty after that. Dropped her off at home and never called back. We'd been out maybe three times, it might have looked from a passing bus that we'd be a good fit, but there was simply no spark. And even less maturity.

43 years later I'm hoping Patty is also still alive; and if she remembers me at all I'm hoping that she does not do so with the same glower that I reserve for Chad and Jeremy.

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Oh, but memory fails. And are we surprised? It was only designed to suggest possible locations of car keys; 43 years of personal dust bins is way out warranty. Never was Chad and Jeremy was it? Was Peter and Gordon (who maybe only had three songs).

Thanksgiving featured fourteen far flung friends from Vermont, Maine, New York and Massachusetts, as well as New Hampshire; stories from around the world. The old place was humming for a day and sweet stragglers graced our transition on Friday, but by Saturday the house had cleared out, leaving just the two of us, a bulging refrigerator, one groaning dishwasher, and simplified communications, as in: "So . . . pie?"

Whenever my daughter sees one of these warning signs she points a finger and says: "Ha! Whose idea of a child is that? Look at those muscles -- that's an Olympic athlete!"

But no, I say, those aren't the thighs of a long distance skater, that's just a stout child wearing the short, bulky britches favored by boys rolling hoops down Main Street at the turn of the 20th century, and he's got himself a nice warm sweater. (The right hand is, I confess, a bit troublesome; if he's not wearing a baseball glove this child must count lobsters in his ancestry.)

Whatever the case it's a waste of a good sign; with that 12 foot running stride, what's the chances of hitting one of the little buggers anyway?

Two ancient apple trees, run amok, canopy the addition on my house. On windy November nights they rake like skeletons across our second story bedroom roof.

When I was a boy they were proper little apple trees, stout stems with afros; and they enjoyed the luxury of an open field. On summer evenings, after the field was mowed, my brother and I would hit baseballs; many a ball was snatched from the low branches of that first apple tree. If you could hit a ball into the second apple tree it was an accomplishment indeed, you might be allowed to lean on the bat to admire it for a moment. And if you could throw a ball back from the second apple tree . . . well you couldn't throw a ball back from the second apple tree . . . but if you could have you'd have been superhuman. So we tried.

So here's the thing . . . when you decide that the 25 year old wood stove in the living room has become more threat than comfort, and then you sell it on eBay to someone with imagination, and you buy yourself a nice new stove, and when the new stove weighs 445 lbs., and you decide to spend money that you shouldn't to have a splendid section of Mexican wall tile installed, it's a reallyreally good idea to get the tiling completed before you have the stove delivered.

Someone in my work world, someone I don't know a bit, is making life difficult.

Puts me of a mind of my uncle Archer. Archer Pleadwell. Archer, dead now, meant no harm even at his most vital; but during World War II, while stationed in Guam, the Irish boys in his company treated him like dirt, wouldn't have a thing to do with him. I imagine Archer, twisting one way then the other in front of a mirror, trying to see what they saw.

Months passed before one of the lads let slip that the first English tax collector in Ireland, some 200 years prior, was a deeply reviled man named Pleadwell (Plaidwell, he called him). Sins of the father.

You just never know who might be trying to get in touch, so I keep a cordless phone in my darkroom.

Has this ever happened to you? You meet someone for the first time and you have the immediate sense that the two of you have so much in common that you are destined to become fast friends. But it doesn't happen. And with the passage of time you grow to think the other person must be kind of thick. But 30 or 40 years later you decide that if anyone was "right" it was apparently the other person; and that you have been the dummy all along?

Does that ever happen to you? It happens to me.

A lot.

When I was fifteen I could lure the cows from the barnyard up to the night pasture with a promise of apples and the expectation of a starlit night. Willy would lead the way and the others would follow through the woods in a straggling bovine procession.

High on the open field that was the night pasture I would knock runty Baldwins to the ground and chuck them downhill where they'd be rooted from the grass by snuffling cows, their near vision compromised by side-mounted eyes.

But that was very long ago. Nowadays the cows sleep in the barn, the apple trees are all but gone, and I do shoulder exercises in the distant hope of encountering a cow and an apple at the same time.

Last week while walking on the bed of this old railroad track my wife encountered a bear. She (my wife) was wearing a headset and listening to her Italian tapes. The bear, who had no truck with Italian, gave up the trail. Now Santina is afraid to walk there. But she does it anyway.

I like that in a person.

Santina and I attended a talk and slide show last night at the library. The speaker, Sy Montgomery, studys the 500 tigers that live on a preserve along the Bay of Bengal. Since they have no roads there the local people travel by water and the tigers consume an average of 300 of them a year; mostly the hungry tigers swim out into the Bay of Bengal and silently snatch unsuspecting passersby. As a result I'm sure they go through a lot of the guys who man the boats.

On days like today when everything I do goes wrong, braving the tigers doesn't seem such a bad option. If you also have days like this, and if you could come up with a paddle, we could maybe both explore this further.

Ferdinand Magellan was famous for circumnavigating the globe. He didn't actually do that, but that's what he's famous for. Eighteen of the 259 men who set off to sea with him did manage to survive the 3 year voyage from Spain to Spain; a journey during which they generally abused and mistreated the people they met along the way. Magellan himself went evangelical in the Philippines and was hacked to pieces for his zeal.

That was nearly 500 years ago and maybe things have changed, but I've always thought it prudent to follow local customs when far from home.

I have often wished I could be braver than I am; wished that I could take big chances, risk everything.

Paul Woetzel came to my house in the woods in the mid 70's to corral a swarm of bees. He came armed with nothing more than a corncob pipe. And when he'd finished the work he calmly walked into the woods and dealt with the errant bees that had crawled up his pant legs. It was, I thought, the height of bravery. John Wayne without the swagger.

Fact is, this is as brave as anyone should aspire to be. Even just a little bit braver (no matches for the pipe, or a disconcern for errant bees) would qualify as stupid.