Christmas – scrappy haps

One cold and snowy Monday evening in 1986, my mom laid herself down on the couch in our living room and gave birth, all by herself, to a real live super shiny pink baby. My dad was off somewhere and my other siblings were pretty much toddlers and were crawling around chewing on teething biscuits so they couldn’t help. Also, teething biscuits are very strange. They’re like tiny vanilla flavored pressed logs but I want to eat them because they’re just for babies. Is it just me?

Anyway, Joan, being eighteen months older than me, got to call 911 and I was only a little bit jealous. Ok, I was pretty jealous about that, but only for a little while because there was a lot going on. Well, actually I still wish I could’ve called 911 but I’m nearly over it. I DID help birth the baby, and by help I mean I mostly stayed in the other room to watch Queen Elizabeth have her own baby on a very dramatic made for television biopic. What are the odds that Queen Elizabeth had a baby at the same time and in the same house as my mom!? All I really remember about my mom giving birth in our living room was the utterly unnatural shine on that pink blob as my mom held it up to the light and made sure it was doing all the things newly minted humans are supposed to do.

My mom’s faithful friend Dawn Crowley came over because she was a nurse. The ambulance took a very long time to arrive and in the interim I helped Dawn wash some stuff off the couch cushions. And by helped, I mean I watched while she rinsed an alarming amount of what might have been blood down the tub drain. By the time anyone else stopped by, the baby was no longer shiny (thank God) and the couch was soggy, but blood free. My dad came home and we apprised him of the details of what happened as they loaded my mom into the ambulance to take her to the hospital (teachers had better insurance back then and so could ride to the hospital without thinking about their copay. I’m really thankful for my health insurance and still there’s no way in hell I would ride to the hospital in an ambulance in a non emergency while there’s a perfectly good spouse/car nearby. Once when I was in Costa Rica I got food poisoning and the doctor wanted me to ride in the ambulance to the next town and I said I can’t afford it and he looked at me oddly and said it was free and I said Oh! How novel).

So then the little blob turned into my sister Anne and my parents realized that we didn’t have enough bedrooms (we had three) for all these people (we had eight) and they decided to build an addition onto the house.

My sister Anne holding a bottle of Rolaids and throttling a stuffed cat, December 1986

They decided on two more bedrooms, one more bathroom, and one odd-ish room that was sort of a library and a dance studio and a room to store dirty laundry and a spare bedroom. My sister Joan and I were to share one room and my oldest sister Rachel would take the other room. My parents asked us what amenities we would like in our new space. Joan asked for a ballet bar and a toe shoe friendly area because she was a budding danseuse, having starred in the yearly “Nutcracker” performance for several seasons. I asked for a deep set window that I could put pillows in and curl up like a bagel and read Farmer Boy one hundred more times. They also asked us what color we should paint our bedroom. Joan said lavender and I said camouflage. They said it was a difficult decision and after some long deliberation, they went with the ballerina bar with toe shoe friendly area and lavender. I wasn’t too cross about it. There was a lot going on. I’ve almost gotten over it. Joan quit ballet a year later. But no matter.

Handily enough, they did build a weird closet with a trap door on top that concealed a ventilation fan (to ventilate the dance studio? I’m not sure, I had never seen such a thing and haven’t seen one since either). I would climb up there and open the trap door and smoosh myself in with the fan and read my book. It was pretty quiet and nobody ever knew I was up there, so it was almost like a romantic reading nook with pillows except there were no pillows and I’d have to be careful not to let my mullet get caught in the fan blades.

I loved me some *Drama in Real Life.* 1990?

During those years in our new (lavender) room, Joan and I had a tradition of listening to cassette tapes as we fell asleep. Our favorites were The Andy Williams Christmas Album and a sound recording of Miracle on 34th Street. We listened to them year round because we LOVED Christmas. It was the time of year when we were all together and merry and there were sparkling lights and lots of food and no school for two weeks and beautiful songs to be sung about snow and sleigh rides. It was romantic and Santa and reindeer were involved and life was sweet at Christmastime. I remember sneaking into my Grandparent’s bedroom one Christmas Eve while everyone was finishing up dinner. They had a wooden half moon Christmas light candelabra in their window and I sat on the floor looking out into the darkness through the rainbow bulbs letting Christmas feelings overcome me. It was such a pleasant feeling, I didn’t ever want it to end. And so we kept the thread alive through the nightly cassette tradition.

A Christmas light candelabra from EBay. It’s quite affordable. I may pick it up.

Me in 1988 enjoying a plastic candy cane filled with Hershey kisses a little too much.

Joan and I still bond over Andy Williams Christmas songs and bubble lights (which my Grandmother always put on her tree) every season. I also still cry every time I watch Miracle on 34th street when the postmen (I’ll point out that they were all white postmen, lest you think I’m leaning too far into the nostalgia camp-though I will say the MO34THST was astonishingly female friendly for a movie made in 1947) start bringing in bags and bags of letters to Kris and dump them on the table in the courtroom. Though why they had to make that ginormous mess I can’t fathom. Surely they could’ve just set the bags down on the floor and Kris could’ve gotten to them just as easily. Now some underpaid cleaning staff will have to clean them up.

A bubble light on my Grandmother’s Christmas tree sometime in the 70s or 80s

I still love Christmas like no other holiday. I start listening to Christmas songs a week before a Halloween. I start planning Christmas dinner the day after Thanksgiving. I lie on the floor in front of the glowing Christmas tree and think about that night in my Grandparent’s room, when everything was so quiet and dark except the ever shining fake candle Christmas lights. Christmas is a night of hope and redemption, when we can all be still and remember the past and think ahead to the future.

I’m not going to say that my sister Anne was like Jesus that snowy night when my mom had to give birth by herself in a house full of unhelpful animals and the wise Dawn Crowley brought gifts of medical expertise and cleaning the schmutz off the couch. And then the world opened up to a joyful time of expansive (reading nookless) rooms where the holiday celebrations were honored year round. I’ll just let you come to that on your own. But one thing I will say: this year, like all the years before it, I am settling in for a season of Andy Williams and quiet reflection and growth and hope for the future and remembering the past. Things, though they are complicated and sometimes heartbreaking and hard, are better than they’ve ever been and love is on the rise.

Today is my birthday. I’m forty-four years old. I’m a huge fan of event days like Christmas and last days of school and birthdays, BUT I prefer the weeks leading up to those days, because during those times I can still look forward to them, imagine what’s going to happen, dream about the good food, and picture the people all gathered together. I always say that the worst thing about Christmas is that it’s the absolute furthest point away from the next Christmas that you can get. So I’ve been looking forward to my birthday for days and now it’s almost over and tomorrow will be back to the old mundane, which stresses me out. The minutes keep relentlessly marching forward, never to stop, no matter what.

I remember some time, maybe ten years back, I read an article that said that Brad Pitt was forty-five or something like that years old and I felt surprised that he was so old. I felt a small gratification that, even though I’m not rich and don’t have a vineyard in France, at least I wasn’t old yet. Linear time is funny like that. Because now that I’m the same age I judged Brad for being, now he’s fifty-six (I just checked)! No Benjamin Buttons for this guy. He just can’t beat me in the age category.

I’ve been thinking a lot about linear time lately, partly because of my birthday approach but also partly because of my alarm clock. Several nights ago I couldn’t sleep and I noticed the clock was blinking from when I turned off the electricity. As I stared at the numbers, I realized that I could compare the time that was blinking on the alarm clock (2:42) and compare it to the actual time it was (4:06 via my smartphone) and find out exactly what time I turned the power back on after I finished hooking up the grounding clamp in the backyard, because the clock starts at 12 when the power goes out and comes back on. A little mental math told me I finished that job at exactly 1:24 pm.

I started wondering how I could use this newly discovered tool for something useful. For example, when I’m cooking and I need to time something, I could unplug the clock and plug it back in to measure how long it’s been in for (perhaps not as efficient as other time measuring devices widely available). Or if someone sneaks into the house to murder me, I could reach down and unplug the clock and plug it back in to give the police an accurate time of death (much more promising for marketing appeal.)

Mulling this over made me remember how Sipsey stopped the Grandfather clock when Ruth died in Fried Green Tomatoes. When someone dies it’s like shutting off the power. If you believe in reincarnation, when they come back, when the power comes back on for them, they are inextricably mathematically linked in linear time to any other person they’ve ever met, in any lifetime, just like my alarm clock and my smartphone.

Incidentally, this thought process also made me want to watch Fried Green Tomatoes again, which is my birthday request for tonight, along with apple crisp and vanilla AND chocolate ice cream and pho soup with double noodles. I’m still looking forward to that, I’ll admit.

There’s a theory that in the fourth dimension there is no linear time and everything is happening all at once. It’s like if you think of your life as a giant sweet potato. At the pointy left end is your birth and at the pointy right end is your death. If you were to slice the sweet potato into rounds, going from left to right, you could pull out each individual moment—when you were born, your first day of high school, the day you retired, the day you died. That’s the way we experience time in this dimension, one split second at a time. I like to think that right now my sweet potato rounds are at the juiciest part. But in the fourth dimension, I’m a baby and I’m dead at the same time, because there are no singular moments there. Just a bunch of fat, blobby sweet potatoes, where one pointy end exists at the same time as the other pointy end forever and ever. Brad Pitt could beat me in the fourth dimension. Please don’t tell him I said that.

As an aside, I recently read an article that said since we, in the third dimension, throw two dimensional shadows, if you’re in the fourth dimension, you’d throw a three dimensional shadow. I think that’s terrifying. Can you imagine a three dimensional shadow? And you know that it ain’t no sweet potato throwing that thing. It would be some sort of outrageous looking thing, with its insides on the outside, no skin maybe, some crazy looking fourth dimension eyeballs, but they wouldn’t be balls at all because balls are three dimensional. Maybe we couldn’t even see it, because our eyeballs are built to collect three dimensional images. There would just be this creepy three dimensional shadow that’s a baby and dead all at once. Outrageous.

So to wrap up this weird birthday writing, I’ll say that while linear time forces us to experience Brad Pitt getting older and birthdays passing and Christmas being over again and again, one relentless second after another until we die, I also have to admit that it allows for a very specific human experience. Without it, we can’t reflect back or dream forward. We can’t see how far we’ve come or wonder where we’ll end up. We wouldn’t get to feel the growing anticipation that leads up to important events in our life. We wouldn’t feel the connections pinning us to all of those who came before us and those who are still to come, late at night, while watching a blinking alarm clock.

Therefore, I’ve decided that tonight after I slurp up my double rice noodles and watch Sipsey stop that grandfather clock when Ruth dies, and my birthday comes to a close, I’m going to try to feel both the bitter and the sweet sides of time passing and the world continuing its trajectory, rather than mourning the long distance between now and the next fun thing. Someday, when I’ve reached the dry hard point to the right side of my sweet potato, I’ll be able to look back on ALL the slices and feel content.

Tag: Christmas

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