Last night, we had potato soup, and asparagus, and grilled cheese, and settled in to watch It’s A Wonderful Life. (Yes, we were a few days late, but as Jews, we get the you-don’t-have-to-watch-it-before-Christmas exemption. Very handy!)

Oddly, I hadn’t seen Wonderful Life in a good couple of years, despite it being one of my favorite films of all time. Ever. In the history of filmdom. Or ever.

There was a while in this country when you could literally spend Christmas Eve flipping from broadcast to broadcast, as each channel played it in turn, and some years, that’s just what I did. In Israel, I watched it a few times on December 24 on Middle East TV (an odd evangelical station that broadcast from Cyprus but talked as if it were in Lebanon), and would inevitably feel oddly bereft for a few hours afterward.

But it’s been awhile. So last night, sharing it with my kids, as the snow fell lightly outside our window and we all snuggled up under blankets, felt good.

What has always held me so close, I think, is George Bailey’s humanity. He is a round character, a man of flesh and blood and dreams and resentments, a man who fails to live up to his own standards now and then, a man who is deeply good but is also, in the end, deeply human. This is, to my mind, the real genius of the movie.

But last night, I gained something new, too: George’s life — for all the divine intervention and love of his fellows — isn’t made to magically meet his dreams.

He isn’t given a cruise ticket by Uncle Billy, or a job in London by Sam Wainwright. Mr. Potter doesn’t get his comeuppance, or a well-deserved prison term. George is left with precisely the life he has been forced, through temperament and circumstance, to build for himself. You reap what you sow, and George has sown love and respect — and he gets that in spades, as the movie closes.

But we would be fools to think that his life now becomes easy, or adventure-filled, or devoid of the frustrations a Mr. Potter can heap on a man of principle — or even that George doesn’t continue to have his little fits of resentment and occasional crazy eyes (Jimmy Stewart, I love you so, but those eyes were over the top!)

No, George is as caught, and as stuck, as he ever was. The giddy joy in the end comes of suddenly knowing the real value of what he has, even if it’s nowhere near what he wanted.

It is perhaps unsurprising that this aspect of the film (something that was clearly always there) resonated with me as Aught-Nine draws to a close. I am, minus the threat of a jail term, George Bailey — a middle-aged American with unfulfilled and apparently unfulfillable dreams, all the appropriate resentments and occasional throwing of fits, and what is, bottom line, a Wonderful Life. No angel, but I have read Tom Sawyer.

Toward the end, Clarence says to an increasingly frantic and frightened George: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

Perhaps my goal should be to live a life that will leave an awful hole.

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And because I love you so, here’s one of my favorite scenes:

(Oh, and hey: Happy new year!)

The other day, I solicited suggestions for what a person with writer’s block might write about. My buddy The Grand Panjandrum suggested in the comments that I write about my part of the world: Restaurants. Local music. Public Transportation. Interesting personalities. Museums. Art Exhibits. Parks and other public spaces. Architecture.

The biggest challenge here is that all that is nothing I’ve ever written about! Well, music. I’ve written about music. And interesting personalities! Some of whom have been musicians.

I tend to write very big (Israel/Palestine, the fate of the free world), or very small (missing my babies, wanting to be Marketa Irglova), the latter with the sense that sometimes the smaller you go, the more universal you get. I find tension, and heart, and big questions at the extremes, and these are what I like to write about.

I find myself not bothering with the bits in the middle — I think in part because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m lazy. The middle bits are where you find messy details that require real digging, and I like either a sweeping drama, or an intimate moment. And I don’t like to have to work terribly hard to get there.

But as a writer without anything that really resembles a job, per se, if I don’t challenge myself, I won’t be challenged. So I’m going to mull this over a bit, and see what my brain turns up — if I have anything worthy to say about something that is close to hand, but not actually inside my gut.

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In the meantime, though, I can relate a little bit about that which ties me to (as GP said) “the part of this small planet I live in”: Oak Park, Illinois.

We moved to Oak Park in 1998, so that I could get my graduate degree on Chicago’s south side, while my husband worked at a high-tech firm in the city’s western suburbs. At the time, I had no idea that my family was bound up in Oak Park’s history, but as time went by, much was revealed!

Oak Park, as many know, was home to both Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway (two gentlemen who, if you ask me, had some pretty crucial screws loose. But I digress!). Oak Park loves its native sons, though they didn’t necessarily love it back (Hemingway famously described Oak Park as a place of “broad lawns and narrow minds.” The minds have since broadened considerably), and they are feted everywhere one goes.

Well, it turns out that my great-grandfather, Oscar Balch, worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, as an interior designer. Wright eventually designed a house for the Balch family, on Oak Park’s Kenilworth Avenue, where my grandmother spent several years of her childhood. The Balch House is across the street from the home in which Ernest Hemingway grew up (not, all you Hemingway-philes, the one in which he was born) — and Hemingway’s younger sister, Carol, became good friends with my grandmother (whose name was Esther – a bonus clue as to both my Hebrew name and my online username). In the fullness of time, Carol Hemingway babysat for my father, Ted Hauser, and he so loved her that when his sister was born, he asked to name the baby Carol. In Oak Park, these facts render me something akin to nobility!

Balch house.

Typically, though, while I find these connections oddly fascinating, the ones that really resonate are not those, but these: I eventually learned that my father also spent big chunks of his life in Oak Park, apparently in part because his maternal grandparents were here. In fact, after my daughter was born, I discovered that my father was born here, too — in the very same hospital, on the very same floor. And she, it bears noting, was born on the anniversary of his death.

Six months later, after we bought the house in which we now live, I learned further that he spent at least one summer of his college years in a house just six blocks south, on the same street. I have no idea why he was there — he attended Oberlin College, and his parents lived elsewhere at the time — but I’m guessing that he might have been staying with his grandparents.

As the daughter of a dead man (and, since he died when I was ten months old, I have never really been anything but), I find all of these odd hints and shadows and whispers of my father fascinating and tantalizing and deeply frustrating. I think that the latter is why I haven’t “found” the time to answer my questions (why the hell was he living in that house?). Because while the information might be interesting, it won’t bring me to him — and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted.

Sometimes I walk down our street, or go to the movie theater at which he must have seen a film or two, and wonder what it all looked like, then, through his eyes.

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So there! A little something about (let’s see…) interesting personalities, and architecture, and literature (which while not asked for explicitly, I think falls within the general outlines of GP’s request!), with a bonus stroll through my gut. Emily L. Hauser — full service blogger!