Christmas, Again

During the holiday season it seems to me that loneliness becomes a bridge. In the grocery store, on the street, even at stoplights, I feel like people who endure a sense of being alone in the world are looking for one another. As if we are one to the other beacons, shaking what remains (or what we’ve swallowed) of our light against every lens. May we see past the charade.

Dear Santa: about being “lonesome for a [boy] who could pin me down.” May he come with the smell of horses and hay. May he have perfected the art of cooking bacon. May he forgive the flaws I’ll cling to, pretending I hope he goes away. Tell him I’m not all broken bottles, but he should still step lightly.

Tell my sister that I’m sorry for all she’s been through these past years. As she leaves one home and moves forward into everything unknown, let her smile at the smallest things again. Tell her to call me more. Tell her I’ll try to stop talking. I can listen.

Tell my sons that even when I’m grumpy, it’s (usually) not them. There’s a world inside me I try hard to keep quiet. I’ll try harder.

The next time Channer, who is only thirteen, says that we (humans) are plotting our own demise, let him see a girl, her head flung back in laughter, her hair a color he never knew until that moment. Let him know that hope may not be every second, but it’s never far away. Tell him love and anger are a pair, and even that’s okay.

Tell Cody, who is sixteen, that I miss him. That I do like teaching him to drive, even if he thinks he knows it all and wants to blare 90’s rap while learning to parallel park. Tell him the freedom he’s starving for is now, under this roof, close to these arms that only seem to be holding him back. That I hope he isn’t missing me, too.

Perhaps this is the point where I should make a joke or try to say something happy. What I can do? The perfectionist in me just wants everything to be tidy all the time. I look at the distance among everyone in my house like it's a scratch to be buffed from an otherwise perfect surface. Recently, Cody made me this (below) lovely cutting board. You can’t really see it in the picture, but along the top edge, there’s an imperfection that he was sure to point out—“I almost sanded it out,” he said. “It was difficult to keep it there, but I thought it was important. I thought you’d like it.”

Damn. I do. I love it all. The dirty city in which I live. The double sunsets in this crazy mountain-surrounded valley, where the east often falls further into pink than the west. And the days are getting longer now. They really are.

I keep thinking of that bridge as something we can carry because we each carry it at some point (maybe always), and we know it in each other. Hell, I can’t say it better than Jack Gilbert, so I’ll just turn it over to him:

Michiko Dead

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm which is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

*****

It may seem like a grim poem to post on Christmas Eve, but I don't see it that way. I believe it when I say that I hope my sons can understand that it's okay to admit that love & anger walk together, that they each have their place, that one will never entirely overpower the other. This is how we keep moving. At least, that's how I see it (perhaps I am a damn Modernist...so it goes), and I think that's okay.

What I meant to say was Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year, everyone!

All my love.

–LF