Felony & Mayhem Press

I am fortunate enough to spend my Christmases with some friends who live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Their location is so rural that deer occasionally wander up to stare at me as I sit on the deck with my morning coffee, and that snow actually stays on the ground, deep and crisp and even, rather than turning in minutes to citified slush. A lifelong New Yorker, I am charmed to the bone.

I’m also a passionate cat-lover, but I am delighted to spend time with my friends’ big, boisterous dogs. My Jewish soul is thrilled by the decorated tree, piled with presents wrapped cack-handedly in Walmart’s shiniest. (And my Jewish soul was profoundly ticked off this year, when the tree proved “too much of a bother,” and was replaced with a listing jade plant hung with a handful of ornaments. BRING BACK THE DAMN TREE!) All in all, my few days in Pennsylvania offer, every year, the most wonderful vacation from my life.

This year, though, it wasn’t the tree or the dogs that provided the most profound reminder that I was not in Kansas anymore: It was my friends’ twenty-three-year-old son. Or, more specifically, his unrelentingly sunny disposish. (“He’s always been like that,” says his mother. “When he was little, he’d come running into the kitchen and say ‘I had THE BEST DAY!!!’ I’d ask what had happened and the answer was always something like he had found a pretty pebble.”) New Yorkers, we’re not like that. We regard cynicism as our birthright, and tend to think of happy people as being too dumb to have discovered self-loathing.

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