It is warm and damp for Christmas after a long run of perfect weather. I wake alone just before dawn, make coffee, drink water, feed the cat. A few emails, cook up some pictures from last night. The comes up but not out. I watch the outlines of solitary runners and walkers pass by the big windows that open to the street. I wonder about them, people I know vaguely, about their being alone. What inner architecture must we accomplish to be happy alone today? Yesterday, having some presents wrapped, the man in front of me and the woman who was wrapping were talking. My ears perked up when he said, "Remember, you are not here alone." The woman was moved by this to an extent that moved me. Differently, of course.
"He didn't tell you the bad news," I said.
"What's that?"
"You're not going to like the people you are here with."
I thought I was being funny, but I might as well have slapped a happy baby.
"They've never built a monument to a cynic," he said.
Now I thought he was being funny. We just weren't on the same page.
I drank with my usual friends until dinner with my mother. It was pleasant, the last of the shoppers hurrying by. Mine is a small village in the larger metropolitan area, quaint, old, moneyed. After dinner, going home, I thought to drive down the Avenue to see the lights. It is very pretty, the entire town done up in simple white bulbs, understated and wonderful. I have lived here a long time and have had many Christmases here. I thought of the ones that were good and the ones that were bad, the ones when I was with someone I loved and when I wasn't. It wasn't nostalgia, exactly, but close. If we grew up with it, we never get over Christmas, I think.
I don't know that this is what I planned to write this morning, but it is what happened. Now I must pack. I am going with my mother to relatives for a hillbilly Christmas. Good Cheer.
Well dang nab it!
ReplyDeleteThey built at least one:
http://rubens.anu.edu.au/htdocs/surveys/portraits.antique/0001/153.JPG
from one dog to nother
Merry Effing Xmas
On a more serious note:
ReplyDeletethe best writing is when one does not know what one sets out to write;
Horace Walpole once wrote:
"This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel."
I think that is why there was a disconnect between your observation and the lady's response.
For those who both think and feel, there is no genre, which gets back to my first point that the best writing comes from not knowing what you set out to write -- the translation of experience into symbol.
Merry Hillbilly Christmas
There taint none better.
cc
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteNot sure you'll believe me but then again why shouldn't you.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I was out getting the last minute preparations for Christmas Eve dinner which I swore was going to be low-key and I thought all about being alone on Christmas. Familial circumstances keep me from being with the one I love today. I love others, of course, and perhaps none more than my two kids and my Ma -- those three, I realized, were the reason I find myself, every December 24th, running around town. You see, I am the provider of the continuation of the Christmas Dream now.
For my kids, despite their age and the current state of domestic issues, Christmas is the stability they deserve in an otherwise mostly unstable world and for my mother, This is a thank you gift for all the years of providing me the dream.
Anyway, out in my car, listening to WMVY broadcast from out on Martha's Vineyard, I let myself take to a different dream. A dream of being alone but with the one I love maybe out on the Vineyard, bracing ourselves from the wind coming off the Sound, sleeping in the hours off the middle of day, giving each other the present of our warm bodies, free of anxiety, wrapped in a down comforter in a small seaside B&B where no one knew anything about us --- I let go and allowed myself to forget Christmas and the sweet pain that iit infects us with.
In a few hours, I would rolling silverware in cloth napkins and tying them with evergreen sprigs and bows, lighting the candles I had set out all over the house, spreading the marble snowman cheeseboard full of sharp cheddar, Hannah would be watching the tree and wishing it was Christmas morning but in this alone moment, I was not free of all that wounding stuff -- that "not quite nostalgia.”
And It is something almost painful -isn't it? A sweet sorrow maybe -- not pure sadness but a grazing of sadness my lover calls it. So I allowed myself a good weep in some grocery store parking lot.
Driving again, I realized, now this is going to sound really cliche and corny, how alone we really are, each and everyone of us. And how in being alone, we grow to know our truest selves and how, the four people I was carrying around most in my heart, really know me and even one step more, really appreciate that Alone-minded Lisa. How blessed I am! Why was I now crying?
Maybe there's some relief to be found in heartache, a sort of homeopathic relief--the homeopathy of sadness.
And so, I dropped off turkey and stuffing to my lover and we kissed and made a pact to do something in the coming weeks, I got home and lit the candles and the fire roared and white lights twinkled and dinner and drink flowed, Christmas Eve had arrived...
P.s.
Hope your Hillbilly Christmas is a goody. I got a wonderful gift --a book titled, Knockemstiff, can hardly put it down.
I hope that the Hillbilly Christmas is a fun one!
ReplyDeletecc,
ReplyDeleteyes, a cynic who was a public masturbator at that!
Lisa,
Knockemstiff is great, but you wouldn't want to live there.
Nikon,
I'd have to have more liquor than I have.
Thanks everybody for being so good and smart. I have some minimal internet connections here, but I will try to post.