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.

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.

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.

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning"

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”

                        F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Crack-Up

This is something I wrote in a journal I was keeping regularly for four or five years, during the time  that I was home with babies and we were doing our back-to-the-land act on an old Finnish homestead about nine miles east of Mendocino, California.

The evening that inspired these reflections was a great, boozy, and, as I look back on it, rather innocuous New Year’s Eve .  I say “innocuous” although I remember that it was the early 1980’s, a time when my husband was doing a remodel for the counterculture Zelda and F. Scott of the town and coke seemed cool.  The carpenters’ after work gatherings were often more than Miller Time.  As I look back on it, I survived the recreational drug era fairly unscathed.  I had two young children.  I have always fallen back on my own  reliables:  coffee, alcohol, anger and remorse.

This particular evening culminated in my walking home.  Not knowing where the car was; not realizing my husband had gathered the kids and gone home, assuming I would crash on the couch of our friends  in town;  somehow knowing I was too drunk to drive the seven miles of narrow paved road and two miles of dirt lane, even if I did find the car,  I decided to walk.

I arrived at our  white farmhouse in the clearing sometime after daylight, exhausted but sober.  A few months later I wrote this in my journal:

“The memory of walking home New Year’s Eve is starting to fade and it’s a shame.  It felt good to walk it off:  the cigarettes, the coke, the champagne, the last whiskey and soda or was it a half empty Heinekens I  left  on the Seagull bar; the half drunk remarks blurted at people I hardly knew; the completely drunken conversations I carried on with strangers.

I walked off all the restraints of the previous year.   All that fixing of food:  the breakfasts, the lunches, the lunches for school, the dinners for the kids, the second dinner for the tired husband.  Chewing my own way through the day, ruminating on past loves, silently chewing out my husband, nursing grudges, licking wounds, feeling the tension in my jaws.

I walked off the hectic traffic pattern that a year traces on a mother’s brain:  the trips up and down stairs, the dumping of garbage, the trips in the car to the laundromat, the health food store, the grocery store, and the kids saying at every stop, “Can I get out?  Can I get out?”

I walked through the tangle of my relationships with friends; the lifelines that started to kink, to confuse me about where the beginning was and the end, and why I  held on tightly, knowing my friends were my family.

I walked through the late afternoon dreariness that stopped my breath like a yawn and made me  hate myself for standing in the hallway talking on the phone, my two-year-old pulling at my leg while  I threaten her with a raised hand and squinty look as I tell someone, someone I don’t even like very much, how bored I am  and how mean my old man is, and then doubly hating myself for saying "my old man."

I walked long enough and late enough—no coat and high heels, five in the morning, no moon, mist heavy enough to call "rain." especially in the narrow parts where it felt more like a trail than a county road—that I walked out of the stupor and into an alertness that made me aware, not of danger, although a scream for help would have gone unheard, but of separation.  I stopped dead in my tracks and called my daughter’s name, and I was shocked to be so far from home.”

I've Had Better Days

  “I’ve  Had Better Days”

I wish I knew Harry Reid.  There’s a story I’d like to tell him.  It’s about Senator Dean Rhoads and his wife, Sharon.  He knows Dean, who has been in the Nevada State Senate since 1985 and is as firm a Republican as Harry Reid is a Democrat.  You might imagine that each of them stays on his side of a barbed wire fence.  That’s not true.

Just a couple of weeks ago I ran into Dean Rhoads at the Tuscarora post office.  Although there are only eleven fulltime residents in town, if you can call it that, (there are no services),  the post office serves one of the biggest, best, and most authentic ranching communities in the West.  The Independence Valley begins about fifty  miles north of Elko and claims the hay meadows,  private holdings and public  grazing lands  that extend to the Idaho border.

 Two miles south of  Tuscarora is the Rhoads’ ranch, where Dean’s wife Sharon was born and raised.  I’ve heard it said that Dean Rhoads is the only member of the Nevada State Legislature who makes his sole living ranching.  You know, a working  ranch, not some boutique outfit.

When Dean came into the post office, Julie Parks, the current postmistress, and I were talking about Harry Reid’s re-election prospects in 2010.  I had just read an article in the Wall Street Journal claiming Senator Reid  may be in for a tough race.  “What do you think, Dean?” Julie said as she handed him a rolled up bundle of mail.

Before he could answer, I blurted, “It seems to me that Harry Reid forgets he’s from Nevada.”  

 “That’s not true,” Dean said.  “We’ve worked together  over the years on many ranching and mining issues.  He’s a good man.”  He said goodbye to Julie, nodded to me, and climbed stiffly into his dust-covered truck.  I got the message.  He wasn’t going to let me bad-mouth Harry Reid regardless of the barbed wire fence that separates them politically.

Well, I’ll tell you the story about Sharon and Dean.  Maybe you know Harry Reid. I think it would do him some good to hear it.

This happened a few years back.  After unpacking the car and getting settled in for the summer  in Tuscarora, I went to the post office to see my high school friend, Sharon Packer Rhoads, who was postmistress and well as  running the ranch by herself on the alternate years that the Nevada legislature was in session and most of the year Dean was in Carson City, the state capitol.

As always, I started the conversation by saying , “What’s new around Tuscarora?” 

She said, “Not much.”  Then, as an afterthought, she said, “Well, last August Dean was thrown from a horse and broke his leg pretty bad.”  She handed me the contents of my box: a stack of sale advertisements, a special hunting supplement of the Elko Daily Free Press, and a wad of papers addressed to Boxholder.   “He was out in the sagebrush nine hours before we found him.” She could tell by the look on my face that she better  tell me the story. 

She said they were gathering steers on the Wilson allotment. By midday, she and the two cowboys had brought in the strays and figured Dean would be coming along any time.

          “We didn’t know he was in trouble because his horse didn’t come back to the ranch.”  She               p        paused,  ”You know, like they do in the movies. It    just  stood by the horse trailer, up in    the          o         foothills, waiting for   a ride. “

What had happened, she said, was that Dean’s horse stumbled and pitched him into a scree slope.  His leg got wedged between two rocks, and, as the horse scrambled to get upright, it came down on Dean’s leg and broke it in two places.  This happened about nine or ten in the morning.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that somebody stopped by the ranch and said, “There’s a horse about eight miles back just standing by a trailer.”

Sharon said,   “We knew we better go look for him. I don’t know if you know that country or not.  The Wilson allotment is a stretch of land about twenty by twenty-five square miles.  We finally found him,” she said, “but it was very rocky and slow going.”

They got him back to the ranch and she headed for town in a big old  Suburban owned by a young couple living on the ranch, thinking her husband would be   more comfortable “because we could lay him out flat in the back.”

All the time Sharon was talking in a matter-of-fact way, she was occupied at the big work table where she sorts mail.  At this point she did pause, look at me, and said, “And then I got a flat tire.

         I’ve changed plenty of flat tires in plenty of vehicles, “ Sharon continued, “but I could not get that               hood open to get the jack.  I tried and tried and finally said to myself, ‘I’m just going to have to  r        drive it to Lone Mountain on the rim.’  Finally, about a mile and a half this side of Lone Mountain    s         some bow hunters came along, stopped, and changed the tire for me.”

I breathed a sigh.  She had gone the  twenty-seven  miles from the ranch to Lone Mountain.   She only had another twenty-five to the Elko General Hospital.  Imagining  poor Dean in the back of this big old ranch vehicle, I listened for the conclusion. 

Sharon continued:  “We get to the Emergency Room at Elko General and there aren’t any bone doctors.  They tell me that Dr. Wright is on maternity leave and that the other doctor won’t be in until Monday. We just ended up flying him down to Reno.  There were some more complications,” she said, clearly uninterested in turning this into anybody’s episode of General Hospital, western-style. “He has three pins in his leg, but he’s doin’ pretty good now. ”  That was the end of the story.  Sharon gave me a smile that said, “Gotta get back to work.”

          I went back  to the post office the next day, which was Saturday, to say hello to Julie Parks, who was, at that time, the part time postmistress,.  Julie was sorting mail, folding the canvas mailbags that go to  the fourteen mailboxes   of the ranches on this  particular rural route.  After we exchanged greetings I told her about hearing Sharon’s story the day before..  I shook  my head in wonder and admiration at their  toughness—no complaining, no dramatics

 Julie nodded.  “That happened on a weekday.  I think it was a Thursday.  Anyway, about 6:30 the next morning Sharon called me from Reno.  She wanted to know if I would work for her.”

“Hi Julie,” she said.  “How are you doin’?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “ How are you doing?”

“Well,” Sharon said, “I've had better days.”

I thought of Sharon's story after my conversation with Dean Rhoads and as I watched the way he grabbed the steering wheel of his pickup to hoist himself stiff-legged into his truck.

It seems to me it's a mess back in Washington right now.  Although we hear talk from Washington about"working across the aisle,"  when  compromise happens,  it's often portrayed as a defeat or a defection.


I think Harry Reid probably is proud to be a Nevadan.  When I read his official biography on the Congressional website, I was reminded of how much he has in common with Nevadans like Dean and Sharon.   I like to think that he would understand the essence of Sharon's story:  in the hard scrabble, high desert ranch life of northeastern Nevada, you toughen up; you don't complain, and true grit is not a cliche, it's a character trait you develop to survive.  You speak well of your neighbors and you are proud of what you have in common, not what separates you.

Smitty, Who Died in His Car Somewhere in Arizona

Smitty, Who Died in His Car Somewhere in Arizona

In Tuscarora, everyone has stories about characters who lived there. In Tuscarora everyone is a character. One evening last summer my friend James told me this story about a man who lived in the small stone building visible from the road as you drive into Tuscarora.

“Smitty was filthy and he was huge. He weighed at least three hundred pounds. He wasn’t educated, but sayings about life poured from him. He was one of the wisest men I have ever known,” said James.

“The stone house had no plumbing, no electricity. He used an old gas stove for cooking. The shelves on one wall of the room were filled with Duncan Hines cake mixes, at least fifty of them. Clint, who had the mail route, brought him jugs of red wine and cake mixes. Smitty baked them in 9 x 11 aluminum pans. When I went over there, even in the mornings, he offered me wine and cake.”

James smiled, unable to resist the effect of his story. Then he leaned forward. “You have to understand. He was remarkable. He was never mean-spirited. He was tolerant, accepting. I loved talking with him.”

I wanted to ask, “What were Smitty’s words of wisdom? What did he say?” However, I could tell by the way James shifted in his chair that all was not going to go well for Smitty. He couldn’t sit forever in that stone house drinking jug wine, eating cake, and saying wise things.

James continued. “One day he said he was going back East to visit his mother who was seriously ill. He did it. He got on a plane and flew back East.”

“Do you think he took a bath first?” I asked. “You know, got cleaned up?”

James thought a moment. “I doubt it,” he said.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He returned, but he wasn’t well. He was having a difficult time getting through the winters. So he took his two dogs and left, drove to Arizona, where he lived out of his car. He died in his car somewhere in Arizona.”

In the Business Office Chatting about Dying

In the Business Office Chatting about Dying

When I went into the business office to get the phone number of a potential part time instructor, I took time to visit with Betty. She handles our faculty insurance claims, among other things. She said, “I talked with Tom today. Actually, he called me twice. His voice was very weak. But he sounded sharp as a tack. He was worried about a medical bill that the insurance company hadn’t paid.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Still taking care of business.”

“I know,” Betty said. “Anyway, I called Managing Underwriters and said, ‘Look, this guy is on his deathbed. Just pay the bill.’ Well, evidently they called him, and then he called me back to tell me it was straightened out.”

I don’t know what people are supposed to be doing with their dying breaths—contemplating mortality, reviewing their lives like Marley confronting the ghosts of Christmases past, or taking care of business, like Tom, my dear friend and colleague in the English Department.

I didn’t say any of that to Betty. What I said was, “Did you know Bill ?” Betty had finished making a copy of the applicant’s file, and we just stood leaning against the duplicating machine talking in lowered voices. It was a quiet morning. She had time to visit and so did I.

She knew exactly who I was talking about. “Yes, but not well ,” she said.

“I didn’t think I saw you at the funeral.”

“How was it?”

I could tell by her tone that she had heard about it and was interested in my version.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful...” I had already commented to my husband that when you go to somebody’s funeral you shouldn’t rate it like a movie. It’s not entertainment. “…and I think that they must have planned it together, down to every last detail. I suppose that’s one of the only advantages of dying a long slow death.” I’m pretty sure Betty could see right through my pseudo piety, especially when I said, “including the widow wearing red.”

“No!” she whispered.

“That’s what I mean about getting to plan your own funeral. Those two definitely had their own sense of style. I’ll bet that Bill said to her, ‘Now I don’t want to see you in black.’ It was a handsome coat, red wool felt with fringe on the bottom. She wore a black hat and black boots. I’ll have to say that I was a little worried about the brakes on the wagon. You know that cemetery in Willits is on a hillside. She was sitting up with the driver, holding a single white rose and she had her little black dog in her lap. Two brown mules pulled the wagon. Bill was laid out in a simple pine box. Anyway, when the driver helped her out of the wagon and before the pall bearers lifted the casket from the wagon bed, I just hoped there were good brakes and that nothing spooked those mules.” Betty didn’t say anything but she was clearly enjoying visualizing the details.

I changed the subject—sort of—by saying, “And then there’s poor Yvonne. Betty nodded in reference to the college librarian who, like Tom, is suffering the final stages of cancer. The past few weeks she has still been coming to work, pale skin and bones and quiet dignity. “Do you know what Tonia did?” I said, raising my voice a little. “ She announced to everybody that she had a get well card for Yvonne and to be sure to stop by her office to sign it. A get well card, “ I said. “Can you believe it?”

“Well Tonia doesn’t have a clue," Betty said as she handed me the copies I was waiting for, "and that’s all I have to say about that.”

The conversations around the duplicating machines, in the hallways, over coffee, they are often about death these days. That’s just the way it is.