Decemberlands: Holiday Stories

By Greg Blake Miller and Svetlana Larionova Miller

In words and pictures, Decemberlands invites you into three distinct worlds, far from one another in space and time but bound by the universal tension between what we want and what we must give. From the sidewalks of postwar New York City to the workhouses of 19th-century London to a snow-covered peak in the deep American wilderness, join us for these unforgettable journeys.

Inside Decemberlands...

"The Bass Violin, or The Eight Musical Days of Sammy Grossmann"
December 1957, The Bronx. Holocaust survivor and door-to-door insurance salesman Aaron Grossmann's lone connection with his past is the music he plays three nights a week at a small jazz club. When his beloved bass violin is destroyed, his young sons Jacob and Sammythe latter an accordion prodigyset out to raise money for a new one by spending the eight days of Hanukkah on a whirlwind musical tour of the city sidewalks.

"Tim, or The Last Days of Ebenezer Scrooge"
December 1859, Cambridge, England. Tiny Tim Cratchit has grown into a bright but restless 22-year-old frustrated with the responsibility that comes with having been saved and sponsored by the generous Ebenezer Scrooge. On Christmas Eve, Tim is ready to quit his dutiful old life for good when ancient Scrooge appears and takes him on an epic journey.

"The Legend of Bobcat and Bear: A Children's Story"
December, Anytime, Grizzly Peak. When Santa's sleigh makes an emergency landing on a snow-covered summit, the fate of Christmas rests in the paws of a smart-aleck bobcat and a very sleepy bear.

"Greg Blake Miller's beautifully written tales are about people with real blood running in their veins, in places we will recall for a long while, and in situations that are rendered with a knowledge of how humans (and, yes, even bobcats) are both fierce and frail at all times."
- Kerry Candaele, Director of the award-winning film Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503514843

Greg Blake Miller

Greg Blake Miller is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher. He received Parenting Publications of America's top national honors for his feature and humor writing at OC Family and was later named Nevada's Outstanding Journalist for his work at Vegas Seven. He earned his master's degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California, where he won the prestigious Moses Fiction Prize. A former staff writer for The Moscow Times, Miller has written extensively about Russian history and culture, culminating in Reentry Shock (UMI, 2010). He holds a doctorate in international communication from the University of Oregon, where he also taught writing and media studies. Miller continues to teach creativity and storytelling skills as the director of Olympian Creative Education. Svetlana Larionova Miller is an illustrator, writer and translator. She has won multiple awards for her illustrations for OC Family, and her work has also appeared in Vegas Seven, Las Vegas Family and Inland Empire Family. She has translated for Russian Studies in Literature as well as for film and television, and has taught linguistics at Oregon's Northwest Christian University. Miller, who has also been honored for her poetry, is working on an illustrated memoir about growing up in the Soviet Union.

Book preview

DECEMBERLANDS

Holiday Stories

By Greg Blake Miller

Illustrations by Svetlana Miller

Copyright © 2015 Greg Blake Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

An abbreviated version of The Bass Violin appeared in the December 2004 issue of OC Family. A version of Tim originally appeared in OC Family in December 2002. A version of The Legend of Bobcat and Bear originally appeared in the December 2003 issue of OC Family.

Cover and book design by Thomas Speak.

Back flap photograph of Greg Blake Miller by Jon Estrada.

Back cover photograph by Elek Miller.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Olympian Creative

OlympianCreative.com

Rev. date: 04/14/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

697827

Contents

The Bass Violin

Or, The Eight Musical Days of Sammy Grossmann

Tim

Or, The Last Days of Ebenezer Scrooge

The Legend of Bobcat and Bear

A Children’s Story

For Harvey and Patti Miller.

For Ivan and Zoya Larionov.

The Bass Violin

Or, The Eight Musical Days of Sammy Grossmann

THE DAYS BEFORE THE DAYS

1.

My family name is Grossmann, which, of course, means Big Man, which, in the case of my father, sounds about right. He stood six-feet, three-inches tall and had a pair of shoulders that always looked like they’d clip the sides of doorways when he walked through. He was trim at the belt and his arms reached almost to his knees. He was the sort of man whose bones are connected a little too loosely at the joints; when he walked, his head bobbed and his arms swung and his legs shot out in front of him like a yo-yo threatening to abandon its string. All of this movement made him seem even bigger. My father was a man who, in motion, took up a lot of space. The key for him was to remain in motion. His first name was Aaron, which always struck me as the name of a patient man. He always spoke about where he was going; he never spoke about where he had been.

My father had a bass violin. He kept it in the corner of our little living room, leaned up against the wall between the piano and the overloaded bookshelf. It was so tall that I stood next to it to measure the changes in my height. When I turned three, my face was level with the curlicue opening, and I liked to shout in past the strings and listen to the way my voice sounded in there. By the time I was four, I had to bend down to do that. I was growing fast, all elbows and knees. I was put together just like my father. A baby brother came along that year, and I’d hold him close to the violin and pluck the strings. That always seemed to win a smile.

In the evenings, my father played the big fiddle for us, usually just after dinner. Sometimes he’d play it straight through till bedtime. Other times he’d stop to watch Milton Berle and laugh and shake his big smiling head that in America a man could make himself rich by dressing up like a girl on television. He liked Jack Benny, too, mostly because Benny played the violin. Dad admired the people on TV, but he did it with a bit of bitterness. Every time he saw an orchestra on the screen, he smiled at me with half his mouth and shook a long, elegant finger and said, You understand of course that I could do that too.

You should go do it, Dad!

If only you knew! he said.

For my father, stringed instruments were objects of devotion ranking somewhere between the velvet-shrouded temple Torah and the nape of my mother’s neck. He played with his eyes closed. Depending on the tune, he either bowed his head (Bach) or bounced it (Basie) or he let it move in slow, strange figure-8s (something of his own composition). He could pluck the strings like a jazzman or use the bow like a classical musician. His fingers—skinny as pipe cleaners and long as the gull feathers I’d find at Orchard Beach—rearranged themselves in impossible configurations, fanned out across impossible distances, moved with impossible speed.

How’d you do that? I’d ask.

His hands, my mother would say, are made of India rubber.

Nonsense! Dad would shout, and, just to prove himself human he’d crack his knuckles.

CarScene.jpg

My father sold insurance, door-to-door, in a Bronx neighborhood where he smiled at everyone and nobody ever seemed to smile at him. Every morning I watched him head down the stairs and then I ran to the window and waited for him to emerge from our building, beat-up brown briefcase in one long arm, the other arm shooting into the air to flash me a victory V. I signed him back and watched him head down the sidewalk, swinging that briefcase three feet in front of him, then three feet behind, a clock pendulum measuring the hours to the time when he could come home to his family and his music. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, the case swung faster than usual, more urgently, as if the minutes could be physically swept away, clearing a path to night. Those, plus Saturdays, were the nights when Dad would limber up at home, play my brother and me one last song, wish us sweet dreams, and take his bass violin out the door, down our stairs, and into the lamplit night. There he would pause on the sidewalk, hail a cramped, usually shared, cab and ask the driver to take him to a club called The Olive, where the life he was meant to have lived awaited him. Each of these nights I stood at the window, just as I had in the mornings. I watched my father try to maneuver the bass into the back seat, watched him apologize three times to the other rider. I watched him roll down the back window while the driver drummed impatiently on the steering