I haven’t had anything that I truly want, much less need, for years. I am fortunate enough to be satisfied with my life and couldn’t really ask for more materially (anyone want to transfer stock and keep me out of the workhouse at eighty is more than welcome to contribute to the underwhelming fairy dust fund).
Purely as a lark, though, I filled out a Santa List along with the fam this year, which detailed the things I wouldn’t mind having in a more perfect world, namely:
— A thirty foot wood-hulled, gaff-rigged sailing yacht with offshore cruising capacity to which I can retire, and finally answer the perennial siren’s call of all melanin-deficient peoples to head off into an empty blue horizon
— A 5,000 square foot structural masonry workshop and warehouse with a terra cotta tile roof where I can restore unloved antique furniture and discriminatingly select its next custodians
— sustained peace and quiet, let the reader understand that I am now the father of adolescents…
— “the time that I lack to sit in the synagogue and pray /and maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall /and I’d discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day /and that would be the sweetest thing of all”
— alternatively, ribbed silk and cotton socks in a panoply of hues (in particular mulberry, moss green, mustard yellow, burnt orange, prussian blue, vermillion, powder pink, and ivory), as well as some sour candy balls, would suffice