Monday, November 23, 2009

What Christmas Means to Me, Now That It's Over

What Christmas Means to Me, Now That It Is Over


I don’t know what your mother was doing two days before Christmas, but mine was sitting at our kitchen counter sewing hand-crocheted dreadlocks onto  baseball caps she bought  for a dollar each at a True Value hardware store.  When my husband asked what she was doing, I listened as she told him the whole story, which had to do with her fall cruise to the Caribbean with her friend Louise.  My husband, leaning over her shoulder and frowning, didn’t have a chance to say a word before she said,” Believe it or not, I have requests for these.”  We believe it, having been through recent projects like dust gloves with red felt fingernails and oversized t-shirts decorated with  rhinestone studs. 

She worked in silence while I made a salad for dinner.  She did ask me if I would tie a knot in her thread.  Our hands are similar:  long, square-tipped fingers, liver spots and strong veins, knobby joints predicting a tendency to arthritis.

The miracle was that she was there, in my kitchen, spending the holidays with us.  The year she turned seventy-five, feeling old and alone, she wanted to move into our house.  I said no.  Now, two years later, I was trying not to be so abrupt and territorial.  I’m not sure what she was trying not to be.

.  “Did you enjoy the holidays?,” the checker at Safeway  asked me two days after Christmas.  Seven days  before,  she pleasantly asked, “Are you ready for the holidays?”

I would like to tell you about wonderful moments that occurred in the interim between putting  up the tree and taking it down, between getting ready for it and getting it over with.  The truth is that I am depressed about the holidays.  I was on edge with my mother.  I didn’t feel light-hearted about her presence.  It was more like an emphysema patient’s relationship with an oxygen tank.  I needed her for emotional survival, but her presence was a burden.  I know.  What an awful image.  What an awful way to feel.

Furthermore,  my relationship with my sister is in a state right now.  She called the Monday before Christmas in tears and fury:  “I don’t like him.  He’s too hard.  I don’t like the way he talks on the phone to his tenants.  He says I have alienated his children from him.  He has done that himself.  I can’t stand to be here another minute.  I hope I have the courage to leave him.”

I tell her not to run away; that she has to face him; to make lists; call three friends; call me if she needs me.  She never called.  I waited a week.  When I finally got her on the phone she said, “Christmas Day was low-key but pleasant.  We took a walk.”  There was silence from my end.  She finally said, “I’m so embarrassed about my outburst.  I must have been suffering from depression.  That’s all I have to say about it.”

I didn’t know how to respond to her; still don’t.  I feel shut out and tired of the pretense, yet afraid that without it we will have nothing, not even a pretend-Santa world.  Just the wind blowing down a cold chimney.

A few days before Christmas, I was giving my daughter’s friend, Sephra, a ride home, and I asked her if Larissa, her younger sister, still believed in Santa.  It seemed unlikely since Larissa is in the fourth grade.  Sephra, who is sixteen, said, “Nah, when Larissa was in first grade, my brother—the jerk—told her the truth.

Sephra’s father is a Lutheran minister and, as I drove past the stone church and pulled into their driveway, I wondered what, in this instance, the truth was.  For the world I grew up in, the truth was this:  there is not a literal Santa and everyone conspired to create and sustain the belief in this great collective lie.  There came a time when someone, a brother or a stranger, told us the truth, and we went from belief in a lie:  there is a Santa; to belief in a truth; there isn’t a Santa.   We were expected not only to survive this process but also to perpetuate it.

I remember the strength of my own belief.  When I was in first grade in a small rural school in northeastern Nevada, my father talked one of the ranch hands into playing Santa for our school Christmas party.  A fake white beard didn’t hide the familiar hare lip and nasal voice saying, “Well, little dirl, what do you want for Christmas?”

I blurted, “You’re not Santa.  You’re Cliff!”  But that was not the end of my belief.  The collusion was so deep that I was ready to accept  the party line:  The real Santa is at the North Pole getting ready for Christmas and Cliff is just Santa’s helper.”

It works. until the moment it doesn’t work

For me, Christmas is a psychological place that I enter, experience, and emerge from saying, “I’m glad it’s over,” just like you might say, “I’m over my cold now,” or “It’s finished.    I’m over him.”  I am glad it’s over.  I’m finished cooking and spending money and finished being in that place of memories, yearning, and the agony of belief and disbelief.

This is the most important part. Time and time again, we will have to alter our sense of what is true and what is real.  We will give ourselves over to belief and then we will withstand its destruction.

I use “we” and I should only be talking about myself. Like my belief that everything will be okay for my children. That just because Vallejo has one of the highest crime rates in the Bay Area, my son, who lives there, will be safe.  That when my daughter leaves the house in the rain and I say, “How will you get home?” and she replies, “Hitchhike,” that she is kidding.  Belief that our modest financial security can be sustained.  That when my husband says the  small company that he manages has been bought by a large corporation from Southern California and the specter of joblessness hovers in the room, I can't begin  to describe the sudden pull of disaster, the fear of loss of income, illness, powerlessness and death.

In one way or another, that’s what Christmas does to me every year.  Going through the process of affirmation of family ties, friendship, community, wholeness and harmony is an ordeal to be experienced and endured.  I am on the other side of it now, thumbing through seed catalogs, as a matter of fact.

Although it is only January, I know it won’t be long until I’m hearing the countdown of shopping days til Christmas.  The thought makes me anxious.  There’s no use planning a trip to Oaxaca or Squaw Valley for the holidays or even planning on donating more time to the Food Bank.  It’s my mother and my sister and my brother-in-law and my niece that I have to come to terms with.  What a skimpy little tribe.  How hard it is to make peace.




Monday, November 16, 2009

A Short Meditation on Going Gray

I'm sixty-eight today and this morning I considered, for about sixty seconds, letting my hair go gray.  Let's call it a Dorian Gray moment.

 If I were to go gray, I would have to start wearing inexpensive jeans bagging in the butt, organic cotton turtle necks (turtle neck.  I'm creeping myself out) in mauve or pea green;    a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon; a woven Fair Trade handbag from Peru, and dangly earrings from Zimbabwe made from recycled aluminum cans .  In a moment of joie d vivre I might be tempted to purchase a pair of R. Crumb slide-on Vans.

Fuck!  I'm not ready.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Notes on My Fiftieth High School Reunion: The Labor Day Parade


August 4, 2009
Elko, Nevada

“That was a quick fifty years, wasn’t it?”  Who said that?  We were standing in the parking lot across the street from the Crystal Theater, right where we were supposed to be, waiting to load up for the parade.  I think it was Fran Miller. 

“You were my first girlfriend,” said Frank Scott.  We weren’t wearing name tags, so we had to peer at one another and wait for the 68 or 69 year old person to announce him or herself.    Frank is about my height, thickened in the middle, just like me.

“You were sure a skinny runt,’ someone said to him, taking the attention from me.  Frank was not to be deterred.

  “Didn’t you come to one of the reunions in a black leather jacket?” Frank said.

“I don’t remember that,” I said.

“Did you ever have a black leather jacket?”  Frank Scott was and is what you would call a pest.

“Well, I had a black leather coat once.”  I wasn’t going to give him an inch, although it is quite likely that during my beatnik period I could have come to a reunion  with  long, straight brown hair, eyes heavily lined with kohl, and a black leather something.

At lunch at Machi’s, when I invited myself to sit with Arlene, her husband, R.J. Demale; Fran, and Lyndia Dodd, I told them about the cotillions in seventh and eighth grade, upstairs in the Elks Hall, where we were supposed to learn to dance.  “I remember them,” Fran said.  “I was such a country bumpkin.”  

 If you were at the next table and heard Fran say that, you might think She still is.  You would see a stout woman with a bad haircut, not a stitch of make-up, still wearing the XL maroon t-shirt over her blouse, the ones that Ann Moren handed out before we got on the float so we would be in Elko High School colors.  You would have no idea of what a beautiful girl she was.

 On Saturday night at the banquet at the Red Lion,  Bernice McClendon brought a poster board collage of black and white photos from high school.  There is one of Fran in a short sleeved plaid shirt and jeans rolled up the way we did in the Fifties.  She smiles into the camera and she is magnificent.  I kid you not.  “Franny,”  I said.  I was standing next to her.  “See what a beautiful girl you were.”  She squinted at the photo, gave a nod of recognition to her strong, healthy young  self, smiled at me, and then turned to talk to someone else.

I continued at lunch with my recollection of the junior high dances.  “Well, at one of those dances, they paired us up and each  boy was to bring a box lunch.  Frank Scott picked me and he brought tuna fish sandwiches.  Everybody  could smell them.  I was so embarrassed.”

“Now when I see him, I’ll think of tuna fish,” said Lyndia, whose eyesight is so compromised that she probably does have a strong sense of smell.

“It was fun, being in the parade,” Fran said.  Lyndia and I agreed.  About twenty of us sat close together on hay bales, chatting and throwing candy to the kids lining the streets, most of them bringing plastic bags as if it were Halloween.   We felt like kids, too, as the truck and trailer slowly made its way down the length of Idaho Street.

I saw Ted Blohm smiling in front of his jewelry store and then recognized his wife, Lena, wearing a mocha-colored gauzy dress, still glamorous.  If you didn’t go to Elko High in the Fifties, you wouldn’t remember the year they married and how everyone talked about Lena marrying a man twenty years older than she—even though everyone liked Ted Blohm.

When we passed the court house, Lorrie Gilbert was on the reviewing stand, announcing for KELK.  “…and here comes the class of ’59.  It’s their  Fiftieth reunion weekend.  Let’s give them a big hand.”  She spotted me waving at her.  “Hi, Nancy!” she said into the mike.  That was fun.

Lunch at Machi’s was perfect.  “Divine order,” said Lyndia, who had worked for several years as a telephone psychic in Hawaii, when she was in the first stages of macular degeneration.  “That’s the way this day is.  Everything is just as it’s supposed to be.”  We were walking to my car.  I was taking them up to the Elko County Fair, apologizing for barging  in on their lunch.

Divine order.  I know there’s no way I will capture all the stories and anecdotes that will comprise our conversations over the next couple of days, let along begin to get more than bits and pieces of my schoolmates lives, fifty years after the fact.

During the parade, John Sala, on the hay bale next to me, casually mentioned that his son is brain damaged from a motorcycle accident.  I don’t know what John does for a living.  Maybe he is a mechanic.  He lives in the Bay Area.  I do know he has a rock and roll band.  His black hair (“Hell, it’s a dye job,” he said when someone complimented him) is combed exactly the same way as in his yearbook picture.

“Sold my last Harley in 2001,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“At sixty five I figured I was too old.”  He paused, “But I’m going to buy another one.”

“Good for you,” I said, not really meaning it.

I don’t think I had occasion to visit again with John during the weekend.  It was like that.  One or two serious conversations.  Mostly brief encounters.  We weren’t  Holocaust survivors or Viet Nam vets getting together.  Just the class of '59, marking the occasion, quietly honoring ourselves, each other, and the cowtown we came from and still love.