For several days now I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike and tell me what to post in honor or celebration or at least recognition of the new year. Do I quote from a book about new beginnings? Do I share some quirky list of reading-related resolutions? Recap the highlights of the past year in books? Review something? Relate something? You see my dilemma.

At the eleventh hour I’ve come up with this: great writing. I want to give you great writing, as a reminder of why it is that we’re all in this crazy business of books, and why it is that reading is such a delight, such an indescribable pleasure when the words are right and the writer is even more so.

I’ve had no trouble settling on WHAT writing to share with you, as there is one book that I’ve fallen more in love with this past year than I have with any other (and oh, there have certainly been others). The book I’m referring to is not written for children, but it does feature writing by a man who wrote, without question, some of the finest books ever written for children. And, as I discover anew each time I read another book or essay or letter, he penned, some of the best material ever written for adults. I’m referring, of course, to E. B. White. And the book I’m about to quote from is a collection of his essays called One Man’s Meat (Tilbury House, 1942) — the book I was happiest to add to my home library in 2007.

First, a selection from White’s essay called "Progress and Change" published in Harper’s Magazine in December 1938, soon after White had relocated from NYC to North Brooklin, Maine. I’m including it just because I think it showcases White’s writing so incredibly well:

My friends in the city tell me that the Sixth Avenue El is coming down, but that’s a hard thing for anyone to believe who once lived in its fleeting and audible shadow. The El was the most distinguished and outstanding vein on the town’s neck, a varicosity tempting to the modern surgeon. One wonders whether New York can survive this sort of beauty operation, performed in the name of civic splendor and rapid transit.

A resident of the city grew accustomed to the heavenly railroad that swung implausibly in air, cutting off his sun by day, wandering in and out of his bedchamber by night. The presence of the structure and the passing of the trains were by all odds the most pervasive of New York’s influences. Here was a sound that, if it ever got into the conch of your ear, was ineradicable — forever singing, like the sea. It punctuated the morning with brisk tidings of repetitious adventure, and it accompanied the night with sad but reassuring sounds of life-going-on — the sort of threnody that cricket and katydid render for suburban people sitting on screened porches, the sort of lullaby the whippoorwill sends up to the Kentucky farm wife on a summer evening.

(Leaves you wanting more, doesn’t it? So go get a copy of the book!)

Next, a paragraph from "Compost" published in Harper’s Magazine in June 1940, included here because I like both White’s message and (of course) the way he delivers it:

The way to know the shape of things in advance is to listen to seers and mystics instead of economists and tacticians…. Part of the preparation for the perfect world society will be the recognition of seers. It will be required of the President of the United States that he read one poem and one parable or fable a day, in addition to the editorials in the Times. The brotherhood of man can never be achieved till the democracies realize that today’s fantasy is tomorrow’s communiqué.

And, finally, a couple paragraphs that rang (somewhat painfully) true for me this past weekend, as I tried to get a jump on marking catalogs and reading f&g’s in preparation for January and February’s onslaught of appointments with sales reps. These two paragraphs appear at the very start of White’s essay called "Children’s Books" published November 1938 in Harper’s Magazine, seven years before White would write children’s books of his own:

Among the goat feathers that stick to us at this season of the year are some two hundred children’s books. They are review copies, sent to my wife by the publishers. They lie dormant in every room, like November flies.

This inundation of juvenile literature is an annual emergency to which I have gradually become accustomed — the way the people of the Connecticut River valley get used to having the river come into their parlor. The books arrive in the mail by tens and twenties; we live with them for a few crowded, fever-laden weeks and then fumigate. Lacking shelf space, we pile them everywhere — on chairs, beds, davenports, ledges, stair landings. Some of them we tuck away in spidery cupboards, among the crocks and fragments of an older civilization. Turn over a birch log on my hearth and you won’t find a beetle, you’ll find Bumblebuzz, the chronicle of a bee. Throw open the door of our kitchen cabinet, out will fall The Story of Tea. Pick up a sofa cushion and there, mashed to a pulp, will be a definitive work on drums, tomtoms, and rattles. For the past three weeks I have shared my best armchair with the Boyhood Adventures of Our Presidents and a rather heavy book about the valley of the Euphrates. Mine is an uncomfortable, but not uninstructive, existence.

Here’s wishing you a year that’s comfortable, instructive, and filled with wonderful writing.

I was giving a book talk at a school PTO meeting a few weeks ago when I noticed a trend among the many, many books I was discussing — four of the titles included illustrations of characters immigrating (or emigrating) by way of ocean liner. I might be especially keyed in to books related to this subject, having just listened to the audio of Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck (about the development of wireless transatlantic communication and how it enabled Scotland Yard to track down a notorious murder suspect while he was traveling by ocean liner). Whether or not that’s the case, I thought it entertaining that so many of my favorite books from this year would feature some very similar images illustrated in VERY different styles.

Below you’ll see how the vision of a transoceanic voyage would unfold if you chose one spread from each of these (great!) books and then arranged them sequentially.

The first spread below (of boarding the ship) is from The Luck of the Loch Ness Monster: A Tale of Picky Eating written by A.W. Flaherty and illustrated by Scott Magoon (Houghton Mifflin, Sept. 2007).

The second spread below (of life at sea) is from The Castle on Hester Street written by Linda Heller and illustrated by Boris Kulikov (Simon and Schuster, Oct. 2007).

The third spread below (of sighting land) is from The Arrival written and illustrated by Shaun Tan (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine, Oct. 2007).

The fourth spread below (of disembarking) is from Strong Man: The Story of Charles Atlas written and illustrated by Meghan McCarthy (Knopf, June 2007).

A week ago, I was trying to come up with something meaningful to post on or very close to Christmas when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a beautiful message from author Sara Hoagland Hunter that seemed just the thing! Sara wrote wanting me to see that she’d mentioned my blog in the Christmas edition of the semi-regular newsletter she writes "for thought leaders and creative types." I’m pasting the text of said newsletter below, not because it sings my praises, but because I think it conjures up a wonderful medley of images and ideas. I hope one strain of Sara’s song sings for you, whether you treat your Dec. 25th as a religious holiday, a secular celebration, or a day away from the office.

What follows is the text of Sara’s newsletter for December 20, 2007 (thanks, Sara!):

Dear Friends:

No matter how cheap the plastic or how many times I have to retape the darned things to the sill, I find little as satisfying as lighting the white candles in the bedroom windows on these short December afternoons. I’m sure I should rig timers, which would be more efficient, just as I should figure out computer labeling for my Christmas cards, but I don’t. There are myriad reasons for this, including lack of time and skill, but the real reason is I don’t want to be removed from the process. The lamplighting is a time to reflect on the day. It’s a twilight time of “eloquent silence.” The laborious addressing of each card with red flair pen and dubious penmanship serves a similar purpose. It allows me time to think about what each friend has brought to me this year…a lot.

“Eloquent silence” is not my own phrase but it’s one I try to make my own, especially at this time of year. Mary Baker Eddy spoke of it in an article for the Ladies Home Journal a century ago. When the editors asked her to share how she celebrated Christmas, she wrote: “I love to observe Christmas in quietude, humility, benevolence, charity, letting good will towards man, eloquent silence, prayer, and praise express my conception of Truth’s appearing.”

During the same era, another spiritual leader from our Boston area, Phillips Brooks – rector of both Harvard University and Trinity Church – wrote this line in his beautiful Christmas hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem”: “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately (a fact that will no doubt cause my husband great rejoicing). I thought about it when one of you who lives in Norway wrote: “I continue to ride, year round, so we are in the cold, dark period now, the horses have great big studded shoes and we use miners lights attached to our helmets. It is beautiful – crossing snowy fields under a starry sky – trees sparkling white. But also freezing, slippery, and rather dangerous. I love it!”

I thought about silence again while attending the impressive memorial service at Cathedral of St. John the Divine for one of my favorite children’s book writers, Madeleine L’Engle. Author of one of the most formative books for kids in the 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle was also know for her essays on spirituality. Her oversubscribed writers’ retreats often began with her statement, “What a beautiful day for… silence.”

Even those who make noise for a living require stretches of silence to be able to hear the notes amidst the chaos. I loved the stratospherically talented Alicia Keyes’ admission, in an interview with Tyra Banks, that she had to escape the noise and craziness of her success by buying herself a ticket to Egypt. After a while, alone at the peak of a pyramid, music poured out of her, as she sang at the top of her lungs, renewed. I can’t help but think her incredible new album is a direct result of that creative retreat.

Within our own readership, composer/musician/orchestra leader Bill Elliott recently arranged Beyonce’s opener “Over the Rainbow” and Tony Bennett’s closing “White Christmas” for the CBS special “Movies Rock,” a tribute to music in the movies. His Berklee College of Music students were duly impressed but were apparently even more awed by a field trip to a Holiday Pops rehearsal at our own Symphony Hall. Empty of an audience, the venerable building reverberated with the richness of a European cathedral. As if that weren’t enough, the four complete sections of the Tanglewood chorus, rotated separately through the demanding month-long schedule, were rehearsing in unison that day. Bill described his students as “slackjawed” at the surround sound of 260 voices caroling from the first and second balconies.

To punctuate your eloquent silences, I not only recommend Alicia Keyes’ As I Am album but also Duke Levine’s new instrumental release Beneath the Blue. Modest Boston sideman to the stars, Duke most recently toured with Mary Chapin Carpenter and Aimee Mann. He is one of the most superb string pickers (guitar, mandolin, mandola) I’ve ever witnessed in a session. For upbeat, holiday gift fare, treat someone to YouTube- launched pop star Colby Caillat or the Boyz II Men Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville USA album.

Other creative works I’m giving this year include the newly released DVD The Namesake, a universally acclaimed film directed by the effervescent, articulate, and brilliant world citizen and filmmaker, Mira Nair. I’m also giving the Planet Earth series to all ages. For show-biz fans, I am giving three autobiographies: Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, Michael Palin’s diaries of the Monty Python years (Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years), and the 1997 book The Name Above the Title by It’s a Wonderful Life director Frank Capra. If you ever need children’s book suggestions or information and can’t make it to Wellesley Booksmith, read ShelfTalker by our hometown star, Alison Morris, Publishers Weekly’s children’s book blogger. She’s as charming and informative online as in person.

As for me, I will be re-reading my favorite Christmas story – second only to Linus’s child-voice recitation of Luke’s gospel in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” – Truman Capote’s "A Christmas Memory." In the final autobiographical scene he lies in an Alabama field with his closest childhood friend, an outcast, elderly aunt, flying the beautiful kites they have made each other for Christmas. To me, the scene has always been reminiscent of the Bethlehem shepherds beholding something new and glorious in the midnight sky over the same silent hillsides they’d known their whole lives. As the kites dance and dip in the breeze, the woman has a sudden, joy-filled realization. “I’ve always thought that a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord…But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown himself…just what they’ve always seen was seeing Him. I’d be happy to leave the world with today in my eyes.”

May your today includ
e
eloquent silences, patience in store lines, and a little bit of grace on the roads. As Phillips Brooks said, “Greatness, in spite of its name, appears not to be so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.”

However tiny the wattage, our candles in the window are piercing the night.

Merry Christmas,
Sara

If, like the brilliant but curmudgeonly Raymond Briggs, you would just as soon skip over the coming week as have to deal with any holiday-associated stress, you might want to try dissociating for a few days, slipping into the shoes of, say, the star of your favorite novel! Begin by asking yourself the same question The Washington Post recently posed to several well-known authors: "IF YOU COULD SPEND A HOLIDAY WEEK AS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER, WHICH WOULD YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?"

Just think how entertained your in-laws will be if you start speaking to them in the voice of Huck Finn, Hermione Granger, Despereaux Tilling, or Father Christmas ("blooming Christmas, blooming snow, blooming chimneys, blooming soot")!

Each year at this time we retail folks hear words of sympathy from non-retail folks who imagine we must hate the holiday rush. Truth be told, this is my FAVORITE retail time of year. It’s exhausting, yes. But I love it! Holiday "RUSH" indeed!

Before you send for the men with the white coats, let me to explain myself. During the holiday season, my job as a children’s book buyer/children’s section manager/children’s author events coordinator is considerably less stressful (in that slow burn sort of way…) because I’m not trying to juggle as many things. I don’t have to make time for lengthy visits with sales reps. I don’t have to fret much about author events, as we do scant few (if any) in December and most publicists hold back, knowing we booksellers don’t have time for them at this time of the year. I still fill school orders for teachers with purchase orders to burn, but these tend to come in less frequently during this home stretch, and with a lot less urgency.

During these December days my job consists primarily of three activities: shelving books, selling books, reordering books. Lather, rinse, repeat. I’m still inundated with e-mail, but anyone sending me messages nowadays knows I’ll be even slower than usual to reply. And they understand that. (Or at least they will now…)

In addition to the "less juggling=less stress" reason, I also enjoy the holiday push because it brings an exhilarating sort of energy to the store that simply doesn’t exist during the other months of the year.  Because all of our booksellers are working flat-out these days, tending to the needs of customers, wrapping gifts at the speed of light, tag-teaming one another at the cash register, we all feel very much like we’re part of a team — much more so than on our slower days. It’s gratifying to feel like we’re all working together, and working HARD, to keep the wheels of our beloved machine running, keep people happy, and go home feeling good about what we’ve done.

And just what have we done that’s so gratifying? Sent people home with wonderful books! Hand-picked titles for Milo and Suzy, Hector and Lola, Great-Aunt Stephanie and Grandpa Dave, anonymous kids receiving charitable donations. And oh the praise! Oh, the countless thank-you’s and "Wow! You really know your stuff" and "What would we do without your store? You guys are the BEST!" (my personal favorite).

Of course, there are the handful of folks who make us feel like our time would be better spent, say, shoveling coal than selling literature. These are the people who reject each of the 20 books you show them, either because they feel a general dissatisfaction with everything or because they have something specific and nonexistent in mind. By this point in the holiday season, though, most of the shoppers fitting this description have already flown south (i.e. to the malls). In their place come the frantic but friendly souls who will buy almost ANYTHING (making for swift, satisfying transactions) and their seemingly evil counterparts, the kind who are simply NOT going to be happy with you. The latter adopt attitudes like the one I was met with on the phone this morning, when I told a women that, sorry, we were out of a book she wanted and therefore couldn’t get a copy to her today, the date by which she apparently needed it. In a very unfriendly tone she snipped, "You’re going to force me to go to Barnes and Noble, aren’t you?" which is a weirdly nasty statement to which I wasn’t really sure how to reply…

For the most part, though, exhausting customers are in short supply at our store these days (thank goodness). What’s NOT in short supply is snow. Flakes and mounds and mountains of it. Last week we got slammed with a snowstorm that turned my usual 40-minute drive home into a 4-hour ordeal. Over the weekend, when Gareth and I were out of town, we got hit with snow again. Then with sleet. Then with the detritus of passing snowplows, the accumulation of which formed semi-solid ice hill at the end of our driveway. The ice-encrusted sight that greeted us upon our return from the Southland (stay tuned to find out just where…) made for a back-breaking adventure when we dug out on Tuesday morning. We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves until Mother Nature decided to dump on us again yesterday, leaving us with still more inches of the inescapable white stuff, and leaving the parking lot behind our bookstore in absolute turmoil, as no one could see the lines that create the boundary around a parking space.

For we New England booksellers, pre-Christmas snow can function as both friend and foe. In small doses it puts everyone into the festive, holiday, spend-like-there’s-no-tomorrow spirit. But in large doses like the ones we’ve had this past week, it can keep customers away and considerably limit a store’s available parking space, which tends already to be at a premium. When this happens, leaving us with slower traffic levels at the store, we catch up on our shelving, find time to relax a bit, fortify ourselves with Christmas cookies, and try not to imagine that our gift-panicked customers might be curled up at their home computers, giving their business to online retailers not affiliated with our bricks and mortar. (Sigh…)

But we beat on, boats against the current. Or shovels against the snowdrifts, I should say. As we do, I treasure the moments when our customers hobble out of the store, their arms laden with text-filled treasures, their faces sporting "I just checked every name off my list!" expressions. It’s satisfying to imagine the worlds their kids are about to discover, to know the stories that will flare up to consume their school-free afternoons (but probably only after they’ve run down the batteries in their other gifts from Santa).

It’s satisfying, too, to reenact your own childhood fantasies — your sleuthing dreams, let’s say — as part of your daily bookselling routine. Here’s how it happens: A shifty-eyed mother sidles up to you, slips a book and credit card into your hand, and glances at you out of the corner of her eye. Her lips barely moving, she whispers, "I don’t want my son to see this…" then walks purposefully in the opposite direction, her face betraying no hint of your (non)conversation, her son oblivious to the exchange. Five minutes later you watch as she leaves your store, a Wellesley Booksmith bag in one hand, her still-believes-in-Santa son in the other.

Alex Rider, eat your heart out.

And have a happy holiday.

I generally like seeing the words "Read More" printed almost anywhere — a reminder to all of us to pick up more printed material, to make time for text. If you’ve been visiting any of the PW blogs this week, you may have noticed "Read More" popping up a lot more often, and may or may not have welcomed the repetition of this short command.

On the primary page for ShelfTalker, where you could previously see my most recent posts in their entirety, you now see only the first paragraph or so of my lengthier missives, followed by the words "Read More." Clicking on those two magic words will take you to a new page where you can read the entire post. If you’ve been enjoying the option of scrolling through the entire text of my posts, in reverse chronological order, you may find this change a bit frustrating. On the other hand, if you prefer being able to catch up on my posts by picking and choosing from an abridged menu of sorts, the "Read More" alteration might be working for you.

Whatever your thoughts on this change (and I’d like to hear what they are!), please know that its adoption did allow for one very significant improvement in the lives of we bloggers. Over lo these many months I have been limited to a total of 7,000 characters per post. This character count includes not just the characters in the sentences themselves, though, but also the characters in the embedded links, the photos in the posts, and all the html language that goes along with the formatting . In other words, a post might not be all that lengthy, word-wise, but if it contains a lot of links or photos it can hit 7,000 characters in no time flat. This is why I’ve had to split some of what were intended to be single posts into two separate ones.

The most frustrating element of that previous arrangement has been the fact that the blog tool we use on this site has no character count feature. So, as I’ve been writing my posts I’ve had to PRAY, PRAY, PRAY that when I finally finished typing and hit "save" I wouldn’t then be greeted by a "posts must be 7,000 characters or less" error message, which would prevent me from saving my work until I’d somehow cut out enough characters to bring the number under the acceptable limit.

Here’s what that looked like: Finish typing post. Hit save. Get the error message. SWEAR LOUDLY. Look over post and consider splitting it in two. Decide that this particular post reads as one complete thought and therefore shouldn’t be divided into multiple posts. Sigh deeply. Take out a sentence. Hit save again. Get the error message. Whimper. Find a couple sentences that probably shouldn’t be cut but are worth expelling just to escape the nightmare of the $*&!*^% character count. Hit save. Get the error message. SWEAR AGAIN and utter LOUD, WHINY sound of exasperation. Get sympathy from boyfriend who rushes into room and says, "AGAIN?? That stupid $*&!*^% character count!!" Copy entire post and paste it into a Word document. Run character count in Word. See that the text itself is under the character count, so the problem is the characters added by the links and/or photos and/or formatting. Decide what’s more expendable: another section of text, another link, another photo. Cut out some of each. Hit save. (You get the idea…)

Eventually I would hit save and the post window I was typing in would disappear, taking me back to a menu on which I could see my post and know that it had inded been saved. In other words, by then my problem was solved — usually about an hour after I *should* have been done blogging.

The scene dramatized above has played out SO MANY TIMES in my household this year that I shudder to think how many hours I’ve lost to the senseless back and forth of this EVIL, EVIL blog tool feature. Therefore I am THRILLED that the lovely folks who manage this site have found a way to spare me and my fellow bloggers from this problem in the future.

That having been said, no one at RBI wants this blog (or any other on their sites) to be less enticing for its readers. And I certainly don’t want you to stop reading my posts! So, please, fill the comments field with your feedback on the switch to truncated posts with the "Read More" invitation. And while you’re at it, feel free to comment on anything else you do or don’t like about the set up or appearance of this blog and/or others on PW. I’ll be sure your comments are seen by the people who care most about them. (And I’m certainly one of those people!)

Booksellers: tired of playing holiday carols hour after hour, day after day this holiday season? Why not play this song in your store instead! It’s got a book-related theme, it’s sung by a celebrity, and BOY is it catchy! Nothing says "Buy, buy, buy," like the voice of Leonard Nimoy.

Two quick reports from my many hours spent on the sales floor this week, catering to many, many holiday shoppers:

1.) Yesterday a nine-year-old dissolved into tears when I told his mom that we were currently out of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and are eagerly awaiting the reprint’s arrival. His mom eventually calmed him down and convinced him to try reading something else in the meantime. Wow. Disappointment rolled off him in waves.

2.) Today a mom came in looking for a copy of The Invention of Hugo Cabret to give to her second grader (age eight) for Christmas. She said he’s normally a pretty reluctant reader but came home yesterday from the school library, excitedly talking about the book. He read for an hour last night — twice as long as the 30 minutes he’s "required" to read each day for his reading journal, and this morning he apparently woke up about 5:30 am to read some more, as he was already up and reading when his mom got up at 6.

When I asked what other books this kid really enjoyed she said he loves reading the Tashi books by Anna Fienberg (one of our bestselling series). This was intriguing, because the Tashi books are, reading-level-wise, complexity-wise, and maturity-wise, a big step down from Hugo Cabret. They are, in other words, right where most second and third graders tend to be reading. Like Hugo, the books do feature lots of illustrations, though, and wonderful touches of whimsy, but…? In the end I suggested that this kid try reading the first book in The Far Flung Adventures series by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Also fantasy, also peppered with illustrations, it was the closest "middle ground" I could come up with between Tashi and Hugo, which isn’t saying much!

In the meantime this mother is going to suss out whether or not her son is really understanding the text of Hugo Cabret or is mostly just swept up by the pictures. Hopefully she’ll also sort out what it is he likes most about the story, so that we can figure out just what things are likely to keep him glued to the pages like this!

With a nod to the beloved "star charts" that often graced the walls of my elementary school classrooms, I think I’ll start giving out (virtual) gold stars to people, publishers, books, experiences — anything that wows me in a given week or on a particular day. I’d like to give the first of these to author Mary Amato, whom I’ve never met, never corresponded with, and whose novels I’ve (sorry, Mary!) never read, though I can boast that I’ve read the f&g of her forthcoming picture book The Chicken of the Family and found it to be very funny. Here’s why Mary gets ShelfTalker’s first gold star….

One recent afternoon a mother and her daughter (approximately age 10) came into the store looking for a copy of Mary’s middle grade novel The Naked Mole Rat Letters. As I escorted them over to our Intermediate Fiction section the woman explained that her daughter (and she) had actually already read the book and were hoping maybe the author had written others. I showed them the only other (sorry again, Mary!) title we had in stock but then looked up Mary’s others, many of which we’d carried previously, and asked if the woman would like me to order any of them for her. "I think we’d like to order one of each!" she said enthusiastically. As her daughter turned away to browse she explained sotto voce, "I’ve got a reluctant reader who’s excited about reading someone’s books. I want to do what I can to keep her going here!" As her daughter returned to the desk and our conversation the mother went on to explain that they’d read The Naked Mole Rat Letters together. In fact, her daughter had read most of it aloud to her.

This whole conversation made me want to hug these two customers AND hug Mary Amato for turning a hesitant reader on to at least one book, with the prospect of more to follow. And it’s made this not-the-least-bit-reluctant reader that much more eager to pick up The Naked Mole Rat Letters too.

So, here it is, Mary. Your own gold star. Earn enough of them (from me and others) and perhaps you can have a pizza party at the end of the year, or take the hamster home for the weekend.

The good news: Threadless has printed a gem of a shirt for devoted library patrons and their favorite librarians! The bad news: too many book lovers managed to beat you (and me) to the punch, buying up the first print run of these beauties before I could alert you to their existence. If you’re as sad about this as I am, click on the photos above, then (on the page listing the details of this shirt) click on the "Reprint me" link beside the size you covet most. If enough people do this, they’ll reprint the shirt and we’ll all be in the red. Or rather, we’ll all be in the black, but wearing red. Or… You know what I mean.