Christmas day felt like a jail sentence to a Jewish kid growing up in a largely gentile neighborhood in the sixties and seventies. When I was 4, my parents moved the family out to the burbs, away from Brooklyn’s dirt, crime and Jews. It was not their intention to remove us from tribe, but the trade off was a clean newly built blue collar neighborhood in which my mother could build a home. Ours was the lone house on the block without Christmas lights every December, the one with the large bay window sporting an electric menorah with blue light bulbs that turned slightly to the right to light up, each of the 8 nights. I remember both loving and hating the singularity of our tradition on this street in our town on Long Island.
But nothing compared to the boredom of Christmas day when there were no friends to call on, no malls to hang out at, no stores to browse in or anywhere to go really. My folks could not afford to take all 7 of us to the movies and only every once in a while we made it out to a Chinese restaurant. The day seemed endless, especially since I never watched much television and was not much of a reader before age 12. Time made its magic back then, elongating for miles in psychological hyper awareness and mental ticks to routine stuff I was not able to do.
Now, the opportunity to be imprisoned, pajama-clad in front of the fire the entire day, watching movies I did not know even existed, not cooking, cleaning or even eating most of the day winds down the year perfectly, like a day-long vacation. Permission granted, I laze and luxuriate in voluntary house arrest that whizzes by in the magical time of a slow-but-quick winter day. Gone too soon.
Peace.
Surrendering to the Holidays
“Pass the salt, please.”
I look up at her from my veggie quesadilla plate, my eyes suggesting an answer to the question in my expression, but her face shows no comprehension. She wears sunglasses inside the restaurant.
I pass the salt.
Two shakes and she sets the shaker aside to pick at fake cheese melted over corn tortilla chips. Biting the triangle tip of a chip, she glances up–I think–at me, my head recently returned to face her after scooping up random bits of salsa to topple over one of the soft triangles targeted to dissect and devour.
“When do you think you’ll know? I mean going back.” I ask but already know the answer. How can she know?
“I don’t know. You’re asking me something I can’t possibly know. I mean I could recover next week or continue on like this forever or get hit by a bus as soon as we walk out this door.” She waves to some indeterminate place beyond the restaurant walls.
I know what she means. The asking leaps over logic into faith like a ghost limb needing to be scratched. Nothing there but habit and the act of speaking.
The gap of knowing and being spans eons now. We both know it, and yet we dance this ancient witless dance of caretaker and charge. It’s my job to ask the unanswerable questions and hers to stem the flow of fear with uncertainly, freeing and terrifying, reminding us both to surrender and enjoy lunch.
“Can we have a peaceful family Christmas dinner and forget for a few moments? Will we?” I ask uncertain of her answer, the truth of her answer. I fight the terrible urge to cough.
“Before the bus hits? Sure. Might as well.” She laughs, picking up the salt to shake it once more.
Merry, Merry, Merry to one and all!
falalalalalalalala
A therapist once asked me why I gave myself appendicitis. I was supposed to move out of my marital home of 9 years that weekend but ended up moving my appendix out of my body instead. It was ready to burst and so was I, especially after such a farfetched question. I quit her after that session and never went back.
Since then, however, her question returns even after 20 or more years. Not exactly the question but the idea that I could induce a physiological crisis in my body in avoidance or in reaction to a psychological catastrophe. Could repression or stress so powerfully indel, cut, trigger or distress the body to rebel in disease? I know what the scientific literature says, but could I have caused appendicitis?
As I sit here with a flu, I believe such unconscious self-destruction possible. I have resisted this Christmas shopping for as long as possible and now that there is only today to shop, I am sick. I cannot remember a holiday season I have felt less jubilant about, and now layering the whole holiday experience is a Rudolph red nose and the vicious taunting of my own conscience.
The kids will be so disappointed with nothing under the tree. And so, I will trudge through the stores, sharing the sick germs of Christmas spirits past and present. T’is the season to give after all.
I do not love the holidays
I am not going to say I hate the holidays because that would admit to a greater investment in the whole sketchy affair of good cheer and “gratitude” the holidays purportedly promote. I do prize genuine good cheer and gratitude, but enforced holiday spirit not so much.
It is common to hear this complaint–about the obligatory holiday gift buying and cookie baking and niceties that go with. Just look how thrilled most people look in the overcrowded parking lots to impossibly busy malls, stores and roadways. And yes, that seasonal depression thing is real.
Fortunately, I do not get depressed so much as annoyed, fatigued, exasperated and grumpy. And it is much better now that I have grown old and beaten up enough to have far fewer fucks to give (so happy for that current expression). My stress over getting everything done–shopping, baking, wrapping, shopping, cooking, tree-decorating, candle lighting, card-writing (yeah, who am I kidding there?), and shopping–is half of what it used to be when the kids were younger and I had more fuel to burn.
But there is still a lot of shit to do, much more than should be done in a two-week period, one of very few, during which the nation slows down to celebrate and appreciate the goodness of life granted us by a benevolent God or universe or both. We get an entire day off–all together.
But I do not need to mention the obvious–that the consumerist hypocrisy of the holidays exhausts a very noble idea, one of good will and graciousness toward other human beings. The lost message is as much of a shame as the squandered opportunity to wind down and rest, lost to self-induced comatose gift buying and giving many of us can neither afford nor truly relish for the sacrifice of sanity the activity steals.
I am neither a shopper nor a craft maker. Though I am a gracious gift receiver, I want for nothing that can be bought in a store or online. I am a lousy gift buyer, no imagination for it. And perhaps the traditions I have grown up with and created are far too consumer-centric.
I regret not changing the habit in my children, who I did enjoy baking cookies for and eventually with, as well as decorating trees and lighting menorah candles, when those activities were as wondrous as the gifts wrapped in expectation. Then the holidays eked out some cheer, some joy and love, despite the heightened stress of teachers’ gifts and Christmas cards and too many gifts purchased with too little money spent in far too distant and varied places among the too stressed and sick throngs.
So, as I sit here in a momentarily near vacant store two days before Christmas Eve, watching the rain, thinking about the gifts I still have to buy (have not started actually) and the dinner I have to cook in a couple of days that I have not planned yet, and the entertaining I have to do the following day and the day after, I audibly sigh the sound drowned out by the “Happy holidays!” a customer chirps as he walks out the door. Ugh!
I truly want everyone around me near and far, known and unknown, to have a happy holiday and new year, to find peace and love and happiness, but I just have to figure out another way to express it.
A Conversation
“When are you getting your Christmas bonus?”
“This week, like I told you.”
“Do you know which day this week?”
“Can you give me break?!! I’m sick and you’re pressuring me for money!”
“I asked a reasonable question. You need to get a grip. Just say you don’t know if you don’t.”
Dialogues go like this sometimes in long-term relationships. And it is hard to imagine that the speakers still love each other. “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” Strother Martin says in Cool Hand Luke.
Lurking behind this simple conversation lies fear, frustration and comfort. The backstory is the whole story because the front story makes little sense. One world colliding with another, each orbiting a separate sun.
HE awoke sick at a time far too stressful to be sick, the holidays. And SHE asked a simple question at the wrong time, when HE was off to work feeling like shit. SHE asks, unsuspecting of the pending attack awaiting a target, for what gives him a great deal of stress and frustration: not enough money earned from working a demanding job HE detests when so sick.
Her voice–after so many, many years–triggers both irritation and security, a safety net landing when all of the rest of it, everything else dissatisfies, falls down or short. SHE provides both acceptance and provocation. HE depends on her loving him warts and all. And so HE abuses with abandon with cutting words never sliced into another human being. And SHE abides, knowing that tests far greater than this one have passed, their history too deep. Until SHE turns tables on him.
The Pain of Acrobatic (Non) Reason
I want to help her. She needs me. Burrowing in a hole will not make the world disappear, the majority of it anyhow, exclusive of a select few pieces to which she clings dearly, obsessively, as if these things–broken pieces of jewelry, ash, cookie boxes and wood shavings–were life itself.
She makes me love in a circle: the start lost in the end of caring, hurting and discarding. I give up and then cannot let her go. But she must be severed. She demands it, not so much in words as in self-destruction, persistent non-choices that astound anyone with a will to live. Slow suicide.
And yet, instincts hard as granite kick in, mindless protection that deny her death. The inversions and subterfuge she contorts herself to, no yogi or circus acrobat of the soul could compete.
The darkness under the bridge comforts her, dims the white light of panic, the incessant static of electrified fear. Those who love her may only bear witness, cannot be the net to her fall. She of scissor mind makes it impossible.
And yet, she is my very own hunger artist, living on trapezes, flying from dumpster to dumpster’s refuse treasure. She refuses a hand. She believes she has her own, enough for her. But her hands shake and hold nothing but fairy tales of embroidered delusion.
And though she drives me to pound my head on the wall to relieve the pain of reason, the crisis of choice and chaos and cold winter nights, I love her still.
credit: mentalfloss.com
Wet Thoughts
And so I sit before you, father-mother missing moon sheltered from the rain above the clouds, intuiting the vacant stare observant.
Though core-less we two, you cold, me warm, a higher vantage point edges your sight supreme at such a remove.
Like you, I borrowed neighboring light lent unwittingly, beneficial excess of the mindlessly ebullient glow of splashing smiles.
Sprayed sunshine at the concert last night in a stranger eye-lock and motionless high five link, praise to musical gods enchanting.
Leaked light of courtesy in rote rhythm of seasonal cheer upon all us retailers and commerce night keepers: “Happy holidays!”
And idle conversation in endless express lines as I count the water meat drops in frosty plastic packages while checkers chat up customers.
Reflect now, we two lunatic hollow grims of burnt out starry stories–so many–whirring past like molten lead dripping burnt passion burst.
For we watch the rain the same, you above, me below, cool companions invisible neon in the night, filtering nothing, just bouncing rays.
Watch “24 Little Things To Be Grateful For” on YouTube
Funereal Funk for a Friend
And the farewell letter went something like this:
I started the day with an affirmation, a term resoundingly kitsch in an age of everything packaged for the spiritualist or recovering something or other in all of us. I could call it an intention, a wish or a note to self to suit my more cynical needs. I will not call it a resolution. First, it is too early for resolutions, the new year still a couple of weeks away, and second, I am not waiting two weeks to act. I have already decided in whole or in part this goal in action.
Soon I will disappear. My aim for today and tomorrow until fully accomplished, is to become invisible. The process started a couple of years ago when I toppled from the pinnacle of respectability only to land flat on my ass on the untouchables’ cement floor of society’s seething underclass. Thereafter, they started slowly, one by one by two and more, to forget me, the people who wanted to be near me before the fall, those self-proclaimed humanists. Turns out selective humanists crave less unsavory humans.
It only took a bit of ignoring and then some looking away for me to begin to disappear. From there, my reflex to shun the shunners lightened my shades of skin, hair, bone and eyes even more. But then the nose grind to recovery, the working endless hours with my head bent over my body, over my computer, over myself, kept me from seeing the rest of them, the strangers and people never met in person nor online, the unfriending and closing up shop, prevented me from knowing anyone existed but my inner circle.
And finally, to date, my love affair with those discreet few who have refused my refusal, love me despite the growing imperfections wrinkling with age–like me–and worn for use and abuse, as well as my continued affair with the word, a lifetime infatuation, the one true love that has never waned, never left and never judged, has nearly obliterated my presence among the living. Seclusion, surrendered suction into the recesses of imagination and thought, a comfortable den, affirms by the ease with which I slip ever more into that n’other world that I will one day be invisible. And I am glad. So I affirm to continue as I am, ever strengthening inside my own germinating vine climbing the walled off society I peer at occasionally from over the ledge.
GeminiÂ
Gemini’s bloom, neither starry aster nor royal poinsettia
seasons too late for the rose of summer skies.
One dies brightly, late fall’s supernova, while another paints icy lips ruby.
Your velvet blush pairs story-eyed girls with breathless boys re-enacting everlasting joy;
unrevealed how your Bristly Roseslug Cladius difformis and red spider mite underside,
laced and aching,
cache closes the thin divine like children threading hearts to paper clips in kinder class.
Honored sister, pour your swooning sorrow into my hands and let your brave face die.
No man, beast or garden silk delivered so much to so many for so long.
Release the weight of your beatific crown, heavy with curved care, and sink.
Another June will call your name in vein-flow some day soon.
credit: flikr.com
In the gaze of the other 