I don’t do those Christmas cards that document the family’s year in
review but a couple of late Christmas cards from old friends prompted me to sit
down and write this Christmas in Review message to them.
I tend to think of the holiday season metaphorically kicking my ass on
an annual basis. Christmas is 11-0-0 with home field in the playoffs already locked up and I'm the Cleveland Browns. I’m always late with shopping for presents and
getting cards out. I used to make my own Christmas cards but that went by the
boards more than a decade ago. Every year I concede defeat; usually
around the 20th. I can’t find the presents that show how much I love my wife
and kids and resort to acquiring more junk that will eventually make its way to
the basement unless it joins the tchotchkes crowded onto shelves already packed with books, DVDs, Lego models of Serenity and Spongebob's Pineapple Under the Sea and all the other tchotchkes of Christmas past.
I find myself counterpunching when it comes to Christmas cards. As they arrive,
I copy the return address to the envelope and scribble something heartfelt in
the card. You know; something like “All the best to you and yours for this
Holiday Season and the New Year.” (I’ll wait while you wipe away a tear.) This
year I relied on the pre-packaged sentiment in the cards and simply signed,
“The Smiths.”
If there was a Santa, my stocking would be filled with coal.
I could rationalize this in part by way of the fact that this year,
Christmas literally kicked my ass.
The Monday before Christmas, I was gingerly walking our overfilled garbage can
down our ice-slicked driveway when I fell. On my ass. Hard. It still hurts.
It’s a revelation how much time modern man spends sitting down. Okay, maybe
that’s just me. (I should’ve been a pair of ragged claws… Or a lumberjack, I
guess.) At first I said my pride was hurt worse than my rear end but that
turned out to be a gross miscalculation. As it turns out, my pride is feeling just fine today but as I
sit here writing this, I can still feel the pain in my ass. It’s probably down
from an 11 to a 2-3 on a scale of 10. Needless to say, this pain in my ass has
been the objective correlative for Christmas 2013.
I should’ve had my cards mailed and presents bought and wrapped (by
Amazon) before I took my ill-fated trip to the curb with the garbage, of
course, but events (as they sometime do) had conspired against me.
Thanksgiving and the trip to visit my mother, now living in the Fox
Nursing Home in Oneonta, NY had come late this year. Dealing with everything
that comes with my mom’s eighth decade on this planet has been stressful to say
the least (and there are still so many more things to be taken care of). Seeing
her was great but also poignant as she is starting to fade. Memory, hearing,
mobility are all growing issues. Visiting the nursing home was reassuring as
the facility is clean and well lit and the staff there is wonderful. I don’t
know how they do it. But it was also indelibly sad. Walking through the common
room where residents were parked in beds or wheelchairs like potted plants
soaking up the sunlight on the way to my mom’s room left me feeling helpless in
the face of the unavoidable confrontation with mortality. Will there come a day
when sunlight on my face will be the best that can be done? And if that’s the
case, will there be someone so kind as to wheel me out to room with a picture
window and a view to the sky? There hasn’t been a day since we returned to New
Hampshire that I haven’t thought about my mom and her sisters and Medicaid and
the cost of health care and the challenges of selling a mobile home in the
winter and whether I’ve done any better for Vickie than my dad did for my
mother.
Maybe that last paragraph is reason enough for me to never indulge in
one of those “year in review” Christmas cards.
Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire…
Our front room is heated by a gas fireplace. It had taken to making a
loud and disconcerting whoomping noise when it came on. I had put off dealing
with it but one night I made the mistake of promising Vickie I would call about
it the next day. I called Martell as we'd had good luck with them and the great water heater disaster last summer. A guy came out the next day. He asked if
it was making a whooshing noise because gas fireplaces make a whooshing noise and I said no, it was a whoomping noise and
demonstrated this, using the thermostat to turn the fireplace off and on. When
he finally got it taken apart he found a golf ball-sized hole in the manifold.
This, he told me, was bad. Bad enough that he couldn’t put it back together.
We’ve been heating our front-room with an electric space-heater since then. No
Christmas miracle when it came to finding a replacement manifold (recently
found, for $200). We’re still running up our electric bill as I write this,
hoping the part has shipped, grateful that we weren’t one of those tragic holiday
season stories on CNN.com where people are eaten alive by reindeer or blown up
by their gas fireplace.
We arranged for Rachael to fly home for Christmas. We had thought we
might fly out to Hawaii for Christmas for her delayed graduation. She had
missed her opportunity to walk in the May graduation ceremonies due to some
administrative glitch in certification (ultimately resolved/diploma in hand) but
with everything going on with my mom we asked if she’d be up for coming home
for the holidays and walking in graduation next May. She quickly agreed – we
later learned she was more than happy to change plans because her new boyfriend
will be graduating from the master’s program this spring – and I bought her a
round-trip ticket, splurging on a one stop itinerary. I screwed up the first
ticket somehow, leaving Rachael with a one-day layover in Newark on the return
leg. How is that even possible? I mean, why is that an actual itinerary someone would buy? Well, except accidentally. Anyway, I got that fixed easily enough but as
it turned out, it was only the beginning of the story of Rachael’s Long Layover
in Newark.
She was scheduled to leave on the night of Friday the 13th
(I know! What was I thinking?). Hours before she was scheduled to board in
Honolulu, United cancelled the flights out of Newark to Portland as the eastern
seaboard began hunkering down for a winter nor’easter that would ultimately
dump more than 12” of snow on New England. (Ultimately being the operative word as none of that snow fell
until well after Rachael’s flight was scheduled to arrive in Portland. I’m just
saying.) United’s solution was to fly Rachael into Newark as scheduled on
Saturday, and leave her there till Tuesday. Seriously. A three-day layover in
Newark! Apologies to my friends who live in New Jersey but... a three-day layover! In Newark! I got on the phone and after more than an hour of listening to a
modern jazz version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a song I once loved, I’m
speaking to somebody in Mumbai. The best I can work out with Reggie is bumping Rachael’s
departure from Honolulu to the following Monday, reasoning that Tuesday was the
earliest they were going to fly her out of Newark anyway and a three day
layover at home in Honolulu was much better than hoping she could get a stand
by ticket out of Newark.
I would soon learn that had I delayed her departure to Sunday instead
of Monday, everything would’ve been fine. Instead, another storm (this one of
the 6-8” variety) would once again leave Rachael in Newark with all flights to
Portland cancelled and the only flight to Manchester booked up full. (Again,
none of the snow started falling until after Rachael’s scheduled flight
would’ve touched down in Portland. And again, just saying.) After nearly two hours on the phone I was
able to get her on a flight to Logan that would put her on the ground around
10:30pm that night. That is if things were suddenly going to go right from there on out.
I’ve been to Logan maybe fifty times for business travel but I had
never driven to Logan myself before. I had always ridden shotgun with
co-workers or shared a car service. I hate driving into Boston (I hate driving
into Portsmouth) but I had to get my daughter home! We’d already lost three
days of her visit and I wasn’t going to leave her in Newark for a day long
layover if I could get her home any sooner. So, I made my first drive to Logan
at night in a snow storm. It was a brutal drive with swirling, icy snow, the
usual crazies on 95 plus phalanxes of snow plows, their blades throwing sparks
in the white/black night. I appreciated the plows getting out and keeping
things clear but we almost got taken out twice by trucks along the way.
Somehow, my memory of all those business trips kicked in and I got us to
the airport without getting lost along the way. We picked up Rachael and thanks
to Vickie’s terrific navigation skills, we managed the trip back without
incident. The storm had ended by the time we were heading back but the roads
were still slick with patches of packed and frozen snow. We got home at 2:30am.
I went to work the next day because there were meetings I just couldn’t miss.
Is that the definition of work-life balance? When both your work and your life
are miserable?
Hold on while I shift my weight. Did I mention my butt still hurts?
Rachael’s shortened visit was hectic but good. We Skyped briefly with her
boyfriend Ray. We went to see The Hobbit:
The Desolation of Smaug as a family. We had Chinese food for Christmas Eve.
We watched A Christmas Story, wrapped
presents and stuffed stockings. We watched Die
Hard and Donovan’s Reef and Vickie and I drank
mimosas on Christmas Day. We had Alex’s shmoopy in love girlfriend Genine
over for Christmas dinner. Vickie had forgotten to pick up one of those large
foil pans for the 20lb Butterball but we improvised with a baking dish and a
cookie sheet and it worked out just fine. We’re still eating leftovers. We have
managed to knock off the mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy (there’s never
enough gravy!). There’s still a few sandwiches worth of turkey, some squash and
– in an upset – two slices of pumpkin pie left. And candy. Lots of candy. The
nonpareils are gone but I’ve got my eye on some M&Ms that Rachael left
behind. Yes, I ate all the nonpareils but not all in one sitting.
Rachael flew back on the 28th and is once again safe and
sound in Honolulu. She’s working and while she needs a little help now and then
she seems to be making her way in the world, managing one of the University of
Hawaii’s theaters. We got to see a recording of one of the shows she stage
managed while she was here. It’s strange in a way to see her living a life in
the theater as Vickie and I both might’ve gone down that road almost forty
years ago (and yes, it hurts writing “forty years ago” even with almost in
front of it).
Alex is off with Genine to NYC for New Year’s. Having the house to
ourselves has left Vickie and me the opportunity for some quality time. Some most
excellent quality time. I haven’t
looked forward to a New Year’s Eve as much as tonight for a long, long time.
They say more snow is on the way but what else should we expect during winter
in New England?
A few nights ago – it might’ve been Christmas Eve – we caught a little
bit of a documentary film on Woody Allen. We caught one of the scenes from Annie Hall, Woody’s
horrible/miserable speech:
I feel that life
is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The
horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people,
crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the
miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable,
because that's very lucky, to be miserable.
I was reminded of how lucky I
was to be miserable when your card arrived the day after Christmas. After
almost forty years I’m still married to the woman I love; I have two children
who have grown into good and decent human beings, a nice house, an ice-covered
driveway that reminds me to be humble, a white-collar job and a built in excuse
to make a trip to Hawaii sometime in the not too distant future. And I have
long-time friends who cared enough to send me a Christmas card whether I sent
them one or not.
I’ve found it’s good to have
friends who are better people than you are. That is very lucky, indeed.
-December 31, 2013
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