Another Christmas

Feeling pretty certain that no one loved me but my mother, I declined all invitations to Christmas dinners. I even refused to go with her, who, as I said, I suspect still loves me, to some seldom seen relatives house for a late afternoon meal. Christmas, I thought. Alone.

I dawdled through the morning, then took a long walk in the warm and humid air that did not speak of Christmas, the streets quiet, the houses looking worn. Where were the kids with their new bicycles and outdoor toys? No one was about. I walked and walked peering into the grey and colorless day.

Morning gave way to afternoon, and following a shower, I dawdled some more. Then, realizing with a start that my mother would soon be leaving for dinner, I hurried to her house to set up the new iMac computer I bought her for Christmas. But the afternoon hurried by, and she had to leave before I was finished, so I poured myself a glass of wine and continued updating programs and setting up accounts, and then I watched a good portion of an episode from "The Outer Limits" on Hulu.com.

I noticed that the light coming through the window had begun to fade, and I was hollow and empty the way you can get from drinking without eating on a day that simply drifts by, so I decided to eat an early dinner alone. But little was open on Christmas day in my sleepy southern hamlet. Decent people gathered with families and friends carrying out the long tradition of cooking meals and watching football and basketball and holiday movies on T.V. The Avenue empty, nobody about, I stopped at the one hive of activity among the shuttered shops, a good Turkish restaurant where you could sit and smoke a bowl of rich, dark tobacco from large, ornate nargiles. It looked inviting.

I took the last of the sidewalk tables, and the waiter brought me a Turkish beer that left a faint but not unpleasant taste of tar on the back part of my tongue. "I'll have the Doner Kebab," I told him, a typical dish of sliced lamb flavored with a tomato and yogurt sauce served over rice, with shaved carrots and chopped red cabbage and onion and baked tomatoes and peppers. Christmas dinner, I thought, remembering holidays spent in other places, other countries, when I still made the most of my vacation days.

All around me, the cafe was full of people from anywhere but here speaking everything but English. Asians, and Indians, Arabs, Persians, and Turks. A swarthy man with a scar like a lightening bolt cut into the side of his face walked by my table, paused a moment, then turned to look my way. I felt a shock of disbelief as if I were making him up, like something from a novel I may have read by Bartle Bull, "The Devil's Oasis," or "The White Rhino Hotel," or "A Cafe on the Nile." Behind me, I could hear a conversation carried on in double consonants and pharangeals and reduced of vowels. A family stepped in front of my table, two men with thick beards followed by a woman in the traditional tunic and hijab, two boys and a girl at her side. The little girl turned to me, as had the man with the scar, and stared as children do, straight and deliberately. She was heartbreakingly beautiful with those dramatically dark eyes that are so startling, the ones you see in those photos of school girls by Vanessa Winship. My camera!, I thought, but I knew it was useless. I was a foreigner, an Orientalist with a hunger for exoticism, an American alone. Right here in my own hometown.

I ate my dinner as the sun fell from the sky, the temperature falling with it, and suddenly I was huddled against myself in my shirt sleeves beginning to shiver slightly. Now it was time to go home. All I desired were my pajamas, a tall glass of scotch, the big, overstuffed couch, and a good book.

And thusly did my day pass. It was done. Another Christmas.