A Valentine’s Day Knockout

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It was as if every wish I had made in childhood for a hole in the ground to open up and rescue me had been answered in reverse …

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I bear a scar from the first Valentine’s Day that I had a reason to celebrate as Valentine’s Day, as a part of a couple.

Until the last decade, my romantic history was a long walk alone in an empty field, punctuated by moments in which I interrupted someone else’s walk, attempted to try a relationship, and discovered that I try people’s patience instead. (All the women I have dated are brilliant and accomplished and I was lucky to get to know them; I was stuck at age fifteen for an astonishingly long time, however.)
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‘I Still Believe in Santa’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?—Virginia O’Hanlon, a question published in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897

She was an elderly woman in a hospital near Albany, NY, on Christmas Day 1969. When a hospital maintenance worker who always dressed as Santa for Christmas came around her room, someone thought to take a photo of the handshake between Santa and Mrs. Douglas, who looks quite delighted indeed.

Mrs. Douglas and Santa shared a long history together, and they still do. Christmas is a day in which we can re-meet ourselves, re-meet ourselves as children, experience a sensation of faith if not faith itself. A little photo from 1969 of an elderly patient with Santa is a small glimpse of one such small moment.
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Everyone Loves a Parade

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

That time I almost led the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by accident.

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Each Thanksgiving morning I experience the flutter of a memory of a moment in which my own experience of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles almost came true. Mine was going to involve accidental participation in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade between my bus and train, however, which is a notion that even the late John Hughes might have rejected as far-fetched.
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