The Cold and Quiet Months
“Thank you terror / Thank you disillusionment / Thank you frailty / Thank you consequence / Thank you / thank you silence.” (“Thank U,” Alanis Morissette)
I do not usually enjoy the months of January and February. It is hard to forget some of the dramatically low temperatures recorded here in Chicago during those months in years past, and absolutely impossible to forget the year our toilet froze, and we were afforded use of a very recently deceased neighbor’s first floor apartment to make use of his facilities —the state of the shower curtain rather vividly suggested how he might have departed this earth, and there were empty pill bottles and actual diabetic syringes all over the living room carpet. I had cleared a path with my booted foot for us and our odd upstairs neighbor to navigate this minefield to the bathroom, but my partner would not go down there alone. There was a David Lynch meets Almodovar type of aesthetic at play, and the imagination did not need to run wild in such a setting—it was an undeniably squalid set of circumstances.
I believe a very pleasant kid just out of College now lives in the renovated version of that apartment and for his sake, I hope he never reads this.
I dislike being cold even more than I ever have, which is saying something. My feet get cold inside our apartment even with the heat on, and I’ll certainly need to keep my faux fur-lined slippers on in our apartment to maintain a foot temperature just slightly above corpse until Spring, but I am fortunate enough to have these slippers, and we have working heat that hopefully will persevere until the temperatures break.
And this year, despite whatever bleakness and cold the next months might bring, I am still looking forward to these cold and quiet months.
Many years ago, The Charles Hotel had a bar space called “The Quiet Bar.” It later became the warm and inviting bar of Rialto, and now houses Bar Enzo.
In an era of “more is more,” right at the end of the eighties, the simple monochromatic design of the space and stated emphasis on quiet conversation was a striking departure, and while I was far South of drinking age at the time, I genuinely admired the aesthetic.
These sometimes snowy, often bitterly cold, months are our entree to Chicago Spring, which is always magnificent, and yet I’ve always tried to will them away, which only serves to make them drag on even more.
There was a great essay by Emily McDowell here on Substack that came out mid-November:
While I generally have somewhat warmer feelings towards the holiday season than it’s author, reading it was such a relief, like when I discovered other mostly functional adults suffer from “intrusive thoughts” and when they think of saying wildly inappropriate things or pushing strangers into traffic, that’s where the story ends. It’s just another case of the demons lobbing soup cans at each other in the attic of my brain.
There’s such a pressure to get pulled into the current of holiday excess—a lot of this world is organized around the needs of larger entities that don’t have our best interests in mind, and the ubiquity of holiday advertising and its artificially constructed categorical imperative of: “spend, spend, spend!” is not just some happenstance. There is money to be made, and we as a consumerist society at large are the collective marks.
That being said, my childhood experience of the holidays, and especially Christmas, was quite magical. It was the time of year my parents turned their professional penchant for hospitality towards lighting up the shortest days for friends and family, and light it up they did, with a two story tree, Victorian-style fruit and pine wreaths my Dad would string while watching football on rare days off in December, and a cornucopia of food and drink. There was no crècheless corner, nor unlit window, and everything operated on analog timers.
Of course, I took this all entirely for granted, as if all families decorated their homes on the scale of The Kennedy Center, but the warmth and safety I felt in that big old house radiating light and abundance running up to Christmas is a place I can fondly return to in my mind, although my partner and I have campier aesthetic sensibilities and a rather more constrained budget.
Our Holiday aesthetic tends to upend tradition rather than embroider upon it—our one foot white artificial tree was left behind by neighbors a couple of years ago, and was decorated this year with tiny pictures strung on dental floss of loved ones and enjoyable experiences that marked 2023 (there needed to be a balance to some of the distinctly less enjoyable events that also transpired this past year).
And yes, we did print one hundred and twenty Christmas cards to send and give out in 2023, of which we have two left, and although it is time-consuming and messy, creating and sending cards is an enjoyable way that we can experience abundance through giving.
This being said, since we went rather ham celebrating Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas this year (albeit in our way), I am more than eager to mostly engage in more quiet and free pursuits during the first part of 2024.
No longer a wide-eyed child, and perhaps sparingly wiser, I find solace in unorganized time. One part of me thinks I dwell on the seismic shift of the 2020 quarantine too much, but I found a useful sense of space and possibility in that bleak time that was a welcome change of pace from the previous exigencies of the other categorical imperative of our society in the then before times: to work and produce constantly.
To have time to tinker with recipes, revisit boxes frantically packed in busier times, have long phone conversations and slowly create pieces of art was a revelation to me, even in a time of mortal uncertainty, and the naked fact of that uncertainty erased the doubts I might have had about my own competency as a cook, writer or artist. We needed food, and we needed the innate comfort of imagining and making things.
To be moved to take long walks, even dressed in multiple layers in the cold, satisfied something deeper in me than whatever professional achievements I’ve enjoyed as an adult. Experiencing prescence, even in discomfort, pushed forward my steps, and I’d warm up as I walked. Two layers of socks would help as well.
So given that we will never have any other choice than to be where we find ourselves, this January and February I intend to honor my own natural instincts towards both introspection and “time out of mind,” and strive towards simplicity, quiet intimacy and a recharging of my flagging energies to celebrate the slow return of the light by honoring what the darkness, cold and quiet might also want to bring to us.