Christmas. Third one at the store. First one I didn't mind.

Last night was the tamalada. Mom has made tamales on Christmas Eve since before I was born, and since Dad it's been the three of us at the kitchen table spreading masa on corn husks and not talking. This year there were five. Ray came, with a bag of oranges off his tree and an apron that says KISS THE COOK, which I have decided not to have an opinion about. And Roz came. Mom showed her how much masa, how thin, which way to fold, and Roz did it wrong for an hour and Mom didn't fix a single one, which for my mother is a declaration of love. Twelve dozen. Roz's are the fat lopsided ones. We're eating those first.

I gave Roz an old library date stamp I found at the swap meet, the kind with the little rubber wheels you turn. She stamped the back of my hand DEC 24. She gave me a box of ten new floppy disks, and on every label she'd written MONSOON, ACT TWO. Subtle.

Saturday we saw You've Got Mail, and she spent the drive home explaining everything wrong with how that bookstore was run. The TV at the Chinese place after was all impeachment. Nobody at our table looked up.

Merry Christmas to the thirty or so of you who write me. I don't know how you found this, but I'm glad.

Thanksgiving. I've been putting off writing about it.

Ray carved the turkey. That's the whole thing. That was Dad's job, with the electric knife from Sears that sounded like a leaf blower, and Mom handed it to Ray like it was nothing, and Ray stood up and started carving, and I went out the back door.

I sat on the block wall by the oleanders. After a while Roz came out with two plates of pie. She sat next to me and didn't say anything for a long time, and then she said, "He's doing it wrong, isn't he?" I laughed so hard I had to put my plate down. He was, though. Against the grain.

When I came back in, Ray said, "Wendell, I should have asked you first. I'm sorry." In front of everybody. I didn't know what to do with that, so I said it was fine. It isn't fine. He's a decent man and I'm being a jerk to a widower over a kitchen appliance.

The screenplay. I haven't written a new page since April. Act one is done and I think it's good. Act two is forty pages of the father walking around the house. He won't do anything. I don't know what he would do, because the person I'd ask is the person I'm writing about.

New thing at the store: a DVD shelf. One shelf, by the counter, next to the candy. The discs come in tall skinny cases, and people pick them up and turn them over like they fell out of the sky. A man asked me today if they'd play in his VCR. Chuy told him, "Only if you believe," and Sharon gave Chuy a look that could strip paint.

Mateo wants a DVD player for Christmas. Mateo also wants a Furby, which he says is ironic. He is fourteen. Neither one is happening.

Letter from Hollis today. Hollis was my roommate my first year of film school and he's the only one from L.A. who still writes, real letters on yellow legal paper, because he says e-mail is for people with nothing to say.

He got a job as a production assistant on a TV show. A real one, on a network. He drives around picking things up, stands outside a soundstage door telling people to be quiet, gets yelled at by grown men about coffee, and says he's never been happier. He wrote: "It's the bottom of the ladder, Fry, but it's the ladder."

I read it at the kitchen table twice, and then I went and stood in the backyard for a while.

I'm happy for him. I am. I'm also a guy with a key to a video store and forty pages of a father walking around a house. Both of those are true at once and I don't know which one to feel first.

I wrote him back four pages, mostly about the Barrister. I didn't tell him I haven't been writing. He'll know.

FROM THE SHELF: Breaking Away (1979). A kid in Indiana who wants to be Italian, his friends from the quarries, and a bike race against the college boys. His dad sells used cars and complains about everything, and there's a scene where he talks about cutting the stone for the college buildings that I made Mom watch twice.

Titanic came out on video yesterday.

I opened. When I got there with my key there were already people in the parking lot, in the heat, in a line. In more than two years I have never seen a line outside this store. The woman at the front had seen it in the theater nine times and wanted it anyway, because "it's different at home."

It's two tapes, a fat double box, and we had more copies than I've ever seen of anything. They covered the whole new-release wall and a table in the middle of the floor, and by last night there were maybe four left. Today they're coming back through the drop box, and half of them have tape two rewound and tape one not, or the other way around, or tape two in the tape one sleeve. I have rewound that ship sinking more times this morning than it actually sank.

The Barrister came in with his a day late and argued that nobody can reasonably be expected to watch a three-hour movie and also get it back on time. Honestly, it was his best argument in two years. Sharon handled it.

On our break Roz and I built an iceberg in the back room out of empty display cardboard. She took a picture. The film's at the drugstore. If the scanner at the U of A library is ever free I'll put it up.

This is going to be short, because some of it's mine.

Roz and I closed tonight, and right as we were locking up a storm came over the Rincons, the real kind, the whole sky going white every few seconds. We ran for her car, the little Honda with the Minnesota plates she still hasn't changed, and before she got the key in the power went out down the whole strip mall. Just lightning.

So we sat in the car with the rain coming down like gravel and waited for it to pass, and she rolled her window down an inch and breathed in and said, "What is that? It smells like pennies. And green."

Creosote, I said. It's what the desert does right before it rains.

And she said, "Smell that," to herself, quietly, the way you'd say it to a kid. She doesn't know. I never told her.

So I kissed her. Or she kissed me. We've been arguing about which ever since, and I think we're going to keep arguing about it for a long time.

The power came back on around twelve-thirty. We didn't notice right away.

Mom told me at breakfast that she's been having coffee after Mass with a man named Ray.

Ray sings in the choir, too loud, which Mom said like it was a good thing. His wife died four years ago. He retired from the Air Force after twenty-two years fixing airplanes, and he has a mustache like a push broom. They've been having coffee since May. She waited to tell me because, she said, "I knew you'd make that face." I made the face.

Tonight he came to dinner. Mom made chiles rellenos. Mateo already likes him, because it turns out a few Sundays ago Ray fixed the derailleur on Mateo's bike in the church parking lot, which everybody apparently knew about except me. He calls her Irma like he's been saying it for years. And after dinner he went and sat down in Dad's chair.

Nobody told him not to. Nobody has said "Dad's chair" out loud in two years. He couldn't have known. I got up and said I had to open in the morning, which isn't true, and went to my room.

I know I'm being unfair. I know it the whole time I'm doing it. It's like watching a customer walk toward the counter with a tape you know is three days late. You know exactly how it's going to go and you can't stop it.

The last Seinfeld was on tonight and the store was a ghost town. For about an hour and a half maybe four people came in, and one of them just wanted the bathroom. It was me and Roz and a wall full of new releases nobody was going to rent.

So we talked.

More about Roz, since she keeps showing up in here. She's from Duluth, Minnesota, she's getting her master's in library science, and she works twenty hours a week at the store because she says it's the only job in town where you put things in order and people bring them back. She reads on her breaks. She has a laugh like a door that sticks and then opens all at once. She's the only one at work who calls me Wendell instead of Fry.

Tonight she asked me why I left film school, and I told her. All of it, the phone call and the drive home on the 10 with everything I owned in the back seat. I've never told all of it to somebody who didn't know him. She didn't say she was sorry. She said, "What was his favorite movie?" I said Shane. She said she'd never seen it. I said you have to. She said, "Then I have to."

We locked up at midnight and stood in the parking lot talking until almost two. About what, I couldn't tell you. Card catalogs. Minnesota winters. Whether Seinfeld was even a good show. The fastest two hours of my life.

I have a key.

Sharon made me a shift lead, which means I'm a key holder, which means I open and close and I'm the one who has to go talk to the Barrister now. It's a key on a ring. I've been carrying it in my front pocket and touching it all day like a rabbit's foot.

When I told Mom she cried and made flan, which is what she does for good news. I didn't tell her how I felt, which was two things at once: proud, and like I'd signed something. Two years ago I was editing a short film on a flatbed at one in the morning and thought I was going to be somebody. Tonight I was proud of a key.

Roz made me a crown out of an old poster from the back room and said, "Long live the king of the world." I wore it the whole last hour of close. Chuy took a picture I will never allow on this page.

Two years.

It's a Saturday this year, so Mateo and I went to the movies, because that's what you do. There wasn't anything new either of us wanted, so we saw Titanic again, since it's still playing everywhere. Mateo's third time. Row G, on the aisle. He held the popcorn between his knees.

On the way out he said, "Do you think he'd have liked this one?" I said no, too much kissing, not enough boat. Mateo said, "Yeah." Then he said, "I'd have made him come anyway," and I had to stop at the drinking fountain for a while.

This journal is a year old this month. I didn't think I'd keep it up. About a dozen of you write me now, which still feels like getting mail meant for somebody else.

There's a new girl at the store. Roz. She's a grad student at the U of A and she has worked here exactly one week, and in that week she took the Classics section, which has been alphabetical by title since the store opened, and rearranged the entire thing by director. Nobody asked her to. The next morning Sharon walked in and just stood there. Roz had to put it all back. She did it without a word, except she left one shelf of John Ford together in the corner, and Sharon either hasn't noticed or has decided to let it go.

She asked me what she should rent, since I'm "the one who knows movies." I said Paper Moon, because I always say Paper Moon. And she rented it. Nobody ever actually rents the one I say. She brought it back the next day, rewound, and said, "The little girl smoking in bed." That was the whole review. It was the right one.

FROM THE SHELF: Paper Moon (1973). Black and white, Kansas, the Depression. A con man who sells Bibles to widows gets stuck driving a little girl to her aunt's, and she turns out to be a better crook than he is. A real father and daughter play them. I push it on every tired parent at the counter. Two have come back to thank me.