. . . is all about the devil you know. In thinking about the Christmas season, I’m reminded of the Cleveland years. The eastern side of Cliffview Road near the corner of Weston was a sequence of nearly identical tract houses built in the late forties for homecoming veterans and their new families. Our neighbors to the left were the Downings, a couple with two daughters: Holly, the oldest, who often babysat for my brother and I, and Regan, my age. While Regan sometimes joined the boys in neighborhood play, the Abbotts and Downings never consorted as families. There was, however, an identity among the four of them, a gravitational pull toward center that I envied. It was so unlike the vague desperation at home.

I suspect one of the reasons we didn’t mix socially was that Mr. Downing was the complete opposite of my father who, as unsocial as he was, ruled our event calendar. Or, rather, Mr. D was the opposite of my father in every way but one: they were both loners who had nothing in common with the rest of the world. Now that I think of it, they both also generated fear in their children. Then there was the veneer of superiority they both carried around with them. Okay, maybe they were two hateful peas in a pod. Like Mr. Downing, my father was quiet and sinister, a red-faced ball of anger and resentment with a violent streak. There were rages from room to room. Silences. Biting language. Not to mention the time he . . . but I see I’m going off track here and should go more deeply into this some other time.

What I wanted to tell you was that on Saturdays after mowing the lawn, Mr. Downing relaxed by putting jazz records on the hi-fi. Then he would turn the speakers out to the patio and play an assortment of pot- and pan lids with a set of wire drum brushes. Drum brushes. As if he was in a smoky downtown club and everyone was hep. Only he was playing his wife’s kitchenware, it was a patio on Cliffview Road, and it was only us kids. For such a cool cat, he was darkly fierce about this activity; it was not only his damn right, but something he was compelled to do. We were under strict instructions not to disturb him while he was playing. I know, right? Ruin his solo or something.

We were under strict instructions not to disturb his lawn, either. If anyone started across it after a winter snowfall, he’d tear open the front door like a mad little demon and shriek, “Get off my snow!”

Snow. That’s why I’ve remembered all of this. We’ve just had a pretty good snowfall here in Connecticut. My family and I invite you to walk all over it. Merry Christmas!

. . . I wore as a young man in a foreign city was not making eye contact. Because, I suppose, I had the sort of eyes that impressed others as belonging to a lost soul (I have tried to change this, with middling results), meeting someone’s glance could lead to uncomfortable contretemps, like that time in Cambridge when a stray look around the cafe called forth an eerie guy from the shadows.

But I digress. The point is that there used to be in the seventies a bookshop in London with a life-size wax manikin of Freud standing in its front room. My recollection is that the shop specialized in poetry and was out a bit from the center of town. Although I found a handful of Heaney paperbacks I’d been looking for, I had a question. Not making eye contact, I sidled up to the gentleman standing next to the register. “Do you have such-and-such a volume by Ted Hughes?” No answer. I glanced up.

Like the girl from Ipanema, the bearded man looked straight ahead not at me. It took a few seconds, the longest few seconds I can remember, while a sequence of fright and confusion and embarrassment bounced across my brain. Feeling I’d been the seventies version of “punked,” I looked around to see the reaction. No eye contact? Good. I paid a real person and left the shop.

. . . Anne Sexton’s letters is that, even as she types a blue streak to her correspondents, spiraling up and down about her flaming inner life —

“ . . . sometimes I am a little crazy (withdrawn for a time and then flashing into a manic excitement, wild words, wild talking) . . . and yet not quite as crazy as all that . . . ”

— she thinks in poetry. Here is a fragment of a letter from 1962, word for word, ellipses and all, but unprosed:

At night the dump was lovely,
burning in gray and scarlet fires out over the water.

I remember most the rain, the rain, the rain.
It was sept, october, november and december and
it rained. I had never seen
Christmas lights up over the streets in the rain . . .

I drove out to the coast in five days . . .
stopping seldom except once
at Reno where I won about 50 bucks . . .
it was a wild ride.

I love the mountains and those huge trees, the redwoods.