Today, my neighbor, an older woman who walks with a cane, informed me — very pleasantly — that soon the world will end.  “If you watch, you’ll see the signs,”  she added. “They’re everywhere!”  I nodded agreeably and smiled, then said, “Okay, wow.”  I was letting the dogs in. When I returned to the kitchen, Jill asked, “What was that about?”  I shrugged:  “Just Di telling me about the end of the world.” Our neighbor usually does nothing more than complain about her landlord. I’ve never heard her talk about the apocalypse. I’m not sure if it’s her loneliness, the season, or the recent snow that has worn on her.

Baltimore got 21 inches. Proudly we’re calling it the Baltimore Blizzard. As we are a Southern city, we don’t cotton to snow. It freaks us out. Everybody crowds the grocery stores the night before a storm, as if preparing for a siege (or the apocalypse?). Surprisingly, the forecasters got it right this time. Snow kept coming. Our power went out for 16 hours. We were about to camp in front of the fireplace when it returned finally. Living without power, we decided, is most inconvenient. Not that we have grounds for complaint. Jill, who works for Healthcare for the Homeless, visited one of her clients this week. He just got a tiny one-bedroom apartment after having lived on the street for years. She brought him a Christmas tree. He gave her a photo of the underpass he used to call home. Driving to work this morning, Jill saw plenty of others in the street. She started bawling. There’s only so much you can do, and then what?

Thick ice remains on some streets and sidewalks. Baltimoreans have staked out their curbside parking with lawn furniture. I waited till the last minute to shovel. The guy I usually pay to help me checked himself into rehab three weeks ago. It’s his second try at kicking crack. Though determined to go straight, he admits that it’s a long shot if he can’t get away from Baltimore.  “Drugs is everywhere,”  he says. That’s no lie: about one in ten Baltimoreans is drug dependent,  according to a recent study. So that’s our wish for the new year, that he can get enough help to get away.

Baltimore is not “The Wire.” Really. But, sure, you can find all of that here. Our mayor — convicted for petty theft of a few gift cards recently — has been the best mayoral advocate for the homeless in many years. She may hold on to her office yet. Holding on seems to be this year’s theme. If Obama can pass health care reform, I’m thinking, we could see the beginning of something, not the end.

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After Jill got a delivery slip from the U.S. Postal Service last week, she wondered why the package didn’t come. “Are they holding it?” she asked. I shrugged. I don’t pretend to know what the USPS does these days. When she phoned the post office, the clerk said, “We don’t do follow-up deliveries.”

“You mean if I’m not home to get the package the first time, I don’t get the package?” she asked.

“We only deliver once,” he said. “You have to pick it up after that.”

“This is new, isn’t it?” she asked. “Didn’t the post office used to do follow-up deliveries?”

“No, ma’am. Never.”

We know differently. But the clerk wasn’t lying, we decided; he just didn’t know any better. He’s probably a youngster and may have worked at the USPS for only a brief time. As far as he knows, it’s always been this way. It makes sense in a world of diminishing returns. Which reminds me that most people don’t know what they’re missing if they’ve never known how things were before. When my writing students hesitate to cut their sprawling drafts and worry that their readers will feel the loss, I remind them that their readers won’t know because all they’ll have is what you give them.

That’s why I never missed Santa in my childhood: my parents did not recognize Santa Claus — didn’t even mention him — because our Southern Baptist church thought him idolatrous. We had gifts and candy and even a tree, but no Jolly Saint Nick. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different had I the opportunity to believe in the bearded fat man. You tell me.

Re: holiday music: if I hear “Santa Baby” one more time, I might go postal. Though not a bad song by any means, it irritates as much as “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” (sung with a lisp).

While shopping in TJ Max today–it looks fairly healthy out there, by the way–I passed an older woman standing next to her adult daughter, who seemed intent upon her cell phone. The older woman glanced to the brightly-lit ceiling as if to check for rain, then said to no one in particular: “It’s hot everywhere, isn’t it?”

Yesterday while Jill and I were decorating for the holidays, we heard crunching behind us. It was Frieda, our basset hound, eating a fallen glass ornament. We stopped her, of course. A while later, Sophie, our orange tabby, padded by proudly with a mouse in her mouth. I said, “Jill, Sophie’s got a mouse.” Jill was sweeping up pine needles. She said absently, “Sophie’s so cute.” I said, “Jill, Sophie’s got a mouse, will you help me?” Then Jill reacted appropriately: she yelped. We ran circles around Sophie and cornered her under the dining room table. She dropped the mouse. Jill said, “Oh, it’s dead.” Then the dogs lumbered in, drawn to the hubbub, which to them always signals the possibility of hand-outs. Momentarily distracted, Sophie turned her head to the dogs. Then the mouse dashed away. I said, “The mouse is seldom dead, Jill. They play dead. then wait to make their escape–which we have just witnessed.” Jill said, “It looked plenty dead to me.”

Just so you know: it takes a cat a while to kill a mouse. If you can get the mouse from the cat within the first ten minutes, you can toss it–fairly unharmed–outdoors.

We attempted to direct the cats in the direction of the mouse’s escape but, well, you’re familiar with the expression, It’s like herding cats? So we gave up and everyone went about his or her business. Then, two hours later, while cleaning up, I lifted a package that was on a dining room chair and there it was: the gray mouse. Apparently he had been hunkered there all this time. He leaped away. And I leaped back. Then I called for the cats. They came running but only because they thought it was meal time. I tried to explain to them that it was indeed meal time but not the meal they expected. But no matter how I attempted to direct and guide them, they could or would not pick up the scent. So the mouse got away.

Jill and I decided to let nature (such as it is in our household) to take its course. Every six months or so a mouse gets into our old house. They’re in the walls or on the porch. We saw one in our garden this summer. But after they get in, they don’t stay long. Usually one of the cats gets them and we find the broken body in the morning. They never eat the mouse, though I’m sure Frieda would, if given the chance. We expect to find the dead mouse any day now, but maybe the mouse will get lucky and find its way out. We’ll call that our holiday miracle.

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Jill and I spent Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania. That’s coal country. If you want a sense of what Pennsylvania is like, watch “Deer Hunter.” The Keystone state is rural. Some would call it hillbilly. We like it because it’s got great antiques and great old architecture. We drove up to Bellfonte and gawked at its gorgeous array of Victorian mansions. And we stopped at a lot of antique malls.

Driving one of Pennsylvania’s two-lane blacktops, we saw a startling sight. It was a black bear as big as a Harley Davidson, lying on the shoulder of the road. The bear was dead. It had fallen from the roof of a four-wheeler, where (already dead) it had been strapped. The hunters were trying to retrieve it, though I don’t know how they were going to get it back on top of the truck. The thing must have weighed 500 pounds.

The state game commission estimates that there are about 30-40 bears for every 100 square miles of forest in Pennsylvania and Maryland. If you haven’t seen a bear lately, you should know this: they’re covered with long, silky black hair and have the heft of an overstuffed couch. They look so different from the animals we usually see (deer, squirrel, dog), it seems outlandish that anyone would shoot one. Pennsylvanians have been shooting them forever, apparently, even when they were scarce. We in Maryland kill them too. By the way, you’re not supposed to say “killed.” Say “harvested” instead. Hunters pride themselves on eating the meat.

I eat meat too. Not bear meat. But just about anything else. I ate elk once. And let me say this right here: I don’t mind hunters shooting deer. There are too many frigging deer in the world. Of course, there would be fewer deer if there were more bear. See how that works? Basically, the way to hunt bear is to scare it out of hiding. Then take aim. Since a bear is a big target and isn’t spry like a deer, I don’t see how this is very sportsman-like. From the accounts I’ve read, the hunters mostly spend their time tramping through the woods making noise. Bears are cagey and secretive. That’s all they have to work with. If you’ve read Faulkner’s “The Bear,” you get the idea.

As I am not a hunter and have never hunted, I can’t speak for the atavistic thrill of shooting large animals. I do know that when our backyard was over-run with rats some years ago, I would have given anything to have taken a rifle to their cavalier cavorting—they were so brazen, they might as well have been sunbathing back there. I had fantasies of picking them off with an M-16.
But that’s different than going into the forest and spooking a big animal out of hiding and shooting it. Think of Bigfoot. He just wants to eat his berries and dream of finding a mate. Lest you get overly worried, bear-hunting season lasts only three days. In any case,  I don’t get it. The only live animal encounter Jill and I had last week was with Frieda and PJ, our dogs, who always travel with us to Pennsylvania.

We kept the dogs on the backseat of the car. When we stopped (at one of many antique malls), I barricaded them from getting to the front seat—because we had a bag of food on the floor in the front. When we return to the car, Frieda, our basset hound, had managed to get into the front seat, even though the barricade had not been moved and nothing (e.g., water bottles) had been knocked over. It was as if she had levitated. We found her with her head in our food bag. In the fifteen minutes we’d been gone, she ate half a pumpkin pie and half a loaf of bread. We laughed because that’s about all you can do when it comes to Frieda, though, as I carried her to the back seat, I might have muttered, “I’m gonna shoot this dog.”

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