Cable from NorthCentral Pennsylvania on the eve of the New Year

Legs stretched out this evening beneath the floral print covers at the Pine Barn Inn in Danville Pennsylvania, home of the Ironmen. A cup of tea cooling on the bedside table. Whomp out the window of a helicopter touching down at Geisinger, the hospital just up the hill. God knows what tragedy required that flight.

I had promised myself to spend the night writing on the manuscript. I’d like to send revisions for the first half of the novel to my agent – it sounds so funny, affected, snobbish – by the end of 2012. But the rumble of the window heating unit, the Christmas lights in the bank windows, and the events of the eve call for something else.

Tonight, here at the Pine Barn, my aunt on my father’s side celebrated her 80th birthday. My uncle sang her a song in a rich, wavering voice. Grandchildren from North Carolina, Michigan, Boston, and all corners of Pennsylvania convened in the banquet room, presented her with a scrapbook, and celebrated the wonder of a woman she is.

Raised in a hardscrabble Pennsylvania coal town, child of two hard-working parents, my aunt raised five children, helped raise fourteen grandkids, and lived on a backroads working farm here in Northcentral Pennsylvania – and all with a steady hand, tolerating no fools along the way. Each year my uncle buys her a necklace with a snowflake on it. Each Christmas as far back as I can remember, she wears it.

I have a distinct memory of being in trouble with her as a kid, after my friend Justin and I – age ten or thereabouts – lured my sister onto frozen creek, in the hopes she would break through the ice. She did. We got in trouble. As I said, she tolerates no fools.

About a year ago I wrote about an Adam Gopnik article which appeared in the New Yorker, considering the difference between artist and onlooker. I remember very well pressing the “publish” button – late at night, sitting in front of the fire, in the salon of the Adak. Thinking that I knew where I stood in this equation, and felt good about my decision. His final paragraph continues to haunt me:

We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.

It has been good being back in Philadephia. I like being around buildings that are old. Working at Greensaw, hanging with the guys, and writing hard. The release of Mixed Martial Arts continues to be critical, along with evening jogs across the Ben Franklin Bridge.

The other night I went to the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center and saw Alisa Weilerstein play the Elgar cello concerto, opus 85. With makeup worthy of a Keystone cop, clutching her instrument hard to her, grimacing, broken horsehairs from the bow confused with her own thick strands, she did not disappoint. I saw her in the lobby afterward. What a slip of a thing!

Tomorrow I wake around 6:30 am to walk four blocks from the inn to the center of town to catch the 7:40 Susquehanna Trailways bus to Port Authority, in New York City. There I will lock the door for four days, opening it only to let the dog go pee, working otherwise on the revisions for the first part of my novel, The Alaskan Laundry. The goal is to send the manuscript out to publishers in February or March.

At the time I read it I thought Gopnik got it just right. You either do or you don’t. Take that leap or stay safe. There are rewards for both. Neither path is easy, and both can lead to regrets.

Witnessing the passion with which Ms. Weilerstein played the Elgar concertos, listening to my uncle sing, watching videos at the farm of my cousins leaping over pass rushers, playing football in the snow with my sister’s husband-to-be, going through my own struggles to get this book perfect – it’s hard not to wonder. Hard not to question decisions, things said, stances taken.

But that leads to nowhere. Nowhere at all. Mornings lying awake wondering ah, that time. And evenings – especially this evening, with these gauzy curtains fluttering in the blow of the window unit, and the whale’s eye of a TV interrogating – what else to do but laugh? Laugh and give thanks and be humble in front of powers much larger than yourself. Powers that can place seat you by someone who met you at the age of nineteen, and, moments before, sang so beautifully to you in celebration of your 80th birthday. Powers that can require a helicopter to come lift you out of an awful situation and into the hands of people trained to make you better. Powers that can allow you the privilege of stretching out your strong legs beneath the stiff covers of a motel bedspread, lean back against the varnished mantle and take stock of it all.

Thinking, at the close of 2012, “What a planet. What a planet that allows such a thing.”