“Remember when a year felt like a long time?”

“I sure do.”

Craig Lucas, screenplay for The Secret Lives of Dentists (adapted from The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley)

Three recent searches that brought the searchers to “About Last Night”:

– “Where was John Betjeman born?”

– “The convention and genre on which reality TV draws.”

– “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” (And yes, I know where that quote comes from–do you?)

The Great Blizzard of 2004 is officially over and done with. The snow has stopped falling and the ice has started melting, and my mother and I emerged from our brick-veneered cave a few hours ago, blinking at the bright sunlight, out of the house at long last to dine at a restaurant–Applebee’s, to be specific–for the first time since we’d holed up on Tuesday night. (Actually, my brother and I had slithered north on an inch-thick sheet of ice to pick up a present on Friday morning, but we lied and told my mother that the ice had already melted, so it didn’t count.) Instead of attending the various family gatherings that were called on account of snow, I stayed home, opened presents, ate leftovers and various regional delicacies, answered e-mail, and watched movies.

The presents under the tree included two showstoppers, one funny, the other touching. My brother gave me a framed check for one dollar, drawn on the City of Smalltown, U.S.A., and representing his entire salary as a city councilman for 2004. (It was a souvenir of my having made the very first contribution to his campaign fund.) In return, the rest of the family chipped in to buy him a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., where he’ll watch me be sworn in as a member of the National Council on the Arts and spend a couple of days doing the town. My mother is no longer up to that kind of long-distance traveling, so he’ll be the Teachout family’s official representative at the ceremony. Needless to say, tears were shed by more than one person in the room when that package was opened.

Among the regional delicacies that I’ve consumed since the snow started falling were a foot-long stick of summer sausage and a half-pound of hickory-smoked cheese from Esicar’s Old Hickory Smokehouse, two robust foodstuffs not readily available on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I also bought and ate three GooGoo Clusters, the circular candy bar that is Nashville’s second most important contribution to American culture. So far the weather has stopped me from dining at Dexter Barbecue, but I’m hoping to gnaw on a rib or two before I hit the road.

I got an e-mail yesterday from my friend Laura, about whose wedding I posted last week. She saw what I wrote after she got back from her honeymoon in Branson, Missouri, and said she liked it (whew!). So, I gather, did a lot of other folks, including a reader of “About Last Night” who lives in Taiwan. It tickled me no end to know that my description of a small-town wedding in Missouri had been read and appreciated halfway around the world, and it also reminded me–as if I needed reminding–of how extraordinary an effect blogging has already had on the writing life.

I watched three films over the weekend that I hadn’t seen since their release, and one I’d never seen at all. My mother surprised me a few days ago by mentioned in passing that Mary Poppins was her favorite movie (who knew?), so we watched it on Christmas night, immediately following Miracle on 34th Street, which was new to me. I hadn’t seen Mary Poppins since my parents took me to a roadshow screening in Memphis in 1964, and was happily surprised by the effectiveness of the pre-digital animated effects (the songs are pretty damn good, too). We also watched Animal House, which my mother liked even more than Napoleon Dynamite. As for me, I hadn’t seen an uncut print of Animal House since my undergraduate days, and was delighted anew by all the clever little touches that time had wiped from my memory. (Remember how Fawn Lebowitz dies? In a kiln explosion.)

Best of all, though, was The Secret Lives of Dentists, which struck me as even better on a second viewing than when I saw it last winter, though I stand by what I wrote then:

Scarcely less impressive, and no less serious, is Alan Rudolph’s The Secret Lives of Dentists, an occasionally over-flamboyant but mostly straightforward study of the devastating effects of adultery on the marriage of two no-longer-young dentists (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis) so caught up in raising their children that they forget to love one another. Davis is shiveringly good as the guilty party, but Scott has the larger and more demanding part–nothing is harder than making an audience care about an emotionally inhibited character–and brings it off with self-effacing skill.

(The film to which I was comparing it, by the way, was Lost in Translation, and I wound up the review by commenting on American Splendor as well. What a month that was!)

Now, alas, the end of my stay is nigh. I have one day and night left, after which I fly back to Manhattan on Tuesday morning in order to greet Our Girl in Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, and I have to finish and file my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post before I leave town. Naturally, I’ve been putting it off. I hate working in Smalltown. (Blogging isn’t work.) But I don’t dare procrastinate any longer, so I’m going to get up first thing in the morning–well, second thing–and do my duty.

When I leave, it’ll be with the usual mixed feelings. I have a million things to do in New York, and I’ll be more than ready to get back to my desk. I love my work–probably more than I should–and I love my friends with all my heart. I even love New York, though it took me long enough to admit it to myself. (I didn’t really make up my mind about New York until after 9/11.) It is the place of my real life, and increasingly of my memories as well. I won’t be surprised if I spend the rest of my days there, whereas it isn’t likely that I’ll ever again spend more than a week or two at a time in Smalltown. Yet this town, and this house, are what I think of when I think of home.

As I write these words, I’m listening to a record by a friend of mine, a Brazilian singer who lives in New York and became an American citizen earlier this year. Right now she’s in São Paulo visiting her family, and I know her heart is as cloven as mine. I asked her once what language she dreamed in. “English, mostly,” she said, “but with an accent.” So, too, do I dream in and of New York—but with an accent.

When do we acquire the grace to feel at home where we are? Do we ever? Or can we do no better than to make a home for our own children, who will grow up and do the same for their children? I wrote those words in 1991, a few years after I moved to New York. I still can’t answer any of the questions I asked back then, perhaps because I have no children for whom to make a home, and now wonder whether I ever will. More and more I find myself wondering, too, what home means, and where it is. Yet at least I know where it used to be. Not everyone knows half as much.

I was awakened on Thursday by the sound of clanking and hammering in the basement. It seems that one of my mother’s half-century-old pipes picked the middle of the Great Blizzard of 2004 as the perfect time to spring a leak. Fortunately, my brother had the day off, discovered the leak by chance, and fixed it with minimal fuss. He can do that kind of thing, as well as every other kind of thing in the world that requires mechanical skill, whereas I can’t do much of anything beyond hanging and rehanging the pictures in the Teachout Museum. My poor father did his best to teach me how to fend for myself in the world of inanimate objects, but my brother scooped up all the relevant chromosomes, forcing me to live by my wits. Not that he’s short on wits, but he’s the strong, silent type (which didn’t stop him from winning a seat on the Smalltown City Council–he’s the family pol!), and as a rule he prefers doing things to discussing them. Our common ground is narrow–Westerns and family matters pretty much cover it–but we’re very close, especially for two such dissimilar folk, and if I were to find myself in the kind of jam that required bail or a getaway car, I’d call him first.

The blizzard is over, by the way, and though there’s just short of a foot of snow on the ground, life in Smalltown is slowly returning to normal. My brother and I took care of the day’s errands, after which I spent the afternoon working on my Washington Post column and reading one of the books I brought home to prepare for my next Commentary essay. I haven’t heard from Our Girl, but the Mutant has re-established contact via e-mail, and other holiday-related news is trickling into my mailbox from New York and Washington: it seems that one of my blogfriends is en route to an ashram in California, while another is headed for a dentist’s chair. I also learned, much to my delight, that Rachel Howard, the West Coast dance critic-blogger, praised All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine in the San Francisco Chronicle. (This link will take you there.) That’s my kind of Christmas present!

Alas, it turns out that our plans for Friday have been derailed by the weatherman. The surviving members of my mother’s family, plus such children and grandchildren as are within reach, have been getting together on Christmas Eve since time immemorial. My mother didn’t feel up to cooking for the whole clan this year, though, so we decided to eat out instead, and El Bracero being the only restaurant in Smalltown that’s open tonight, we figured on having chimichangas for Christmas. That was the plan, anyway, but the highways aren’t yet clear enough to allow the older siblings to drive with confidence, so our Christmas-eve family dinner has been cancelled. Sad news, to be sure, but my mother and I mean to make the most of it. Instead of slipping and sliding along the snow-covered streets of Smalltown, we’ll stay home, bake a turkey roll, watch Miracle on 34th Street (which I’ve never seen, believe it or not), and be grateful that we’re in the same place at the same time.

I don’t expect to be posting again until next week. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing between now and then, may it lift up your hearts as high as being with my family has lifted mine.

Merry Christmas!

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past,

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”

As of this moment, Smalltown is covered with ten inches of snow, and more is supposed to come before morning. My brother spent the better part of the day skidding around southeast Missouri in a truck. Not me. I went outside just once, trudging to the end of the driveway to collect today’s Smalltown Standard Democrat (no hyphen, please). Though my mother begged me to pull on a pair of my late father’s boots first, I ventured forth into the winter night without even bothering to don a coat. I’m pretty sure she wanted to spank me when I came back in, but instead she settled for giving me a lecture about the dangers of catching cold. That done, we ate dinner, watched the weather on TV, then switched over to The Blues Brothers on AMC. I don’t expect there’ll be any more trips to the video store until Sunday, meaning that we’ve got to make the four movies I rented yesterday last until then.

For those of you who just joined us, I’m home for the holidays, and “About Last Night” is emanating from a rickety old card table set up in the middle of the guest bedroom of my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., located midway between St. Louis and Memphis. Smalltown is dialup country, meaning that it takes forever for me to tap my blogmail (thanks to all of you who wrote about my recent postings, by the way!), while most of my preferred blogs and Web sites load even more slowly. On the other hand, it’s not entirely unpleasant to be semi-detached from the outside world, and I can always count on the Standard Democrat to take care of my urgent news-related needs. Here are some of Wednesday’s headlines: Races Heating Up for School Boards. Hefty Fine Is Handed Down. Post Office Working Overtime. Holiday Drivers Must Take Extra Precautions. Casket Truck Driver Busted. Party Planned.

Needless to say, my mother and I haven’t been seeing many people since the snow started falling, but we did run into Mrs. Yeakey, my former babysitter, in Wal-Mart on Tuesday afternooon, just before we went home to hunker down for the big blow. Improbable as it may seem, the woman who took care of me four decades ago whenever my parents felt the need for a night on the town is alive, well, and as spry-looking as ever. (She’d attained a certain age even then, meaning that she must be eighty or so now.) Nobody ever gets very far away from his past in a small town–there’s always somebody just around the corner who knew you when you were in kneepants, and has at least one embarrassing story to tell.

I called Our Girl in Chicago in Detroit (she’s visiting her own family for the holidays) and the Mutant in New York (she isn’t) earlier this evening. Neither one was home, though, so my mother and I decided to live dangerously and raid our dwindling video stash for a second feature, Napoleon Dynamite. You might not think a seventy-four-year-old woman from Smalltown would find such fare amusing, but she’s always been receptive to off-center comedies, this one included.

We said goodnight after the credits rolled, and I set the thermostat and withdrew to my bedroom, there to check my e-mail one last time and choose a book with which to read myself to sleep. I looked out the window a moment ago and saw that the footprints I made when I picked up the Standard Democrat have vanished beneath a fresh layer of snow. I can’t see any tire tracks, either, which isn’t surprising. It’s been hours since anyone drove down our street. The only sounds I hear are the muffled whirr of the winter wind, the rumble of the downstairs furnace, and the unsure buzz of the ancient alarm clock on my nightstand that would wake me up if I needed to be anywhere on time come morning, which I don’t. Maybe I’ll do a little work on one of my unfinished pieces tomorrow–or maybe not. I haven’t yet tired of the exquisite privilege of having nothing to do.

Sleepwalking through the all-night drugstore

Baptized in fluorescent light

I found religion in the greeting-card aisle

Now I know Hallmark was right

And every pop song on the radio

Is suddenly speaking to me

Art may imitate life

But life imitates TV.

Ani DiFranco, “Superhero”

After trying in vain to make some headway on my Washington Post column, I decided to clear my head by taking an afternoon nap. I’d been reading earlier in the day about how the young Gustav Mahler played the first movement of his Second Symphony on the piano for Hans von B