Christmas Eve So Quickly

And suddenly. . . it was Christmas Eve.

It seems to have come out of nowhere, really.  I've been busy.  And now the rain comes down and everything must be done.  There are presents to buy and cards to send and people with whom to have a drink.  And, of course, there is Christmas Eve with mother.  But somehow early this morning, the freaking house repairman is coming.  My lovely little home is a wreck of ladders and boards, paint and caulking tubes.  I have been taken advantage of, I know.  He is making the last holiday buck he can and using me to do it.  Who else would let him bang around the house on Christmas Eve?  Not even my Jewish friends would do that. 

But I finished up my last day of work for the year yesterday and walked out a free man.  And immediately I began to feel better.  It was like something let go, like something I'd been carrying was suddenly gone.  I honestly and truly hadn't realized that it was so heavy, that it was so much.  But there it was.  I left early in the afternoon and ran some errands then went to the studio to run the printer and sleeve some pictures.  I looked around and knew that I would spend a day cleaning--and I thought that it would be fun.  It was three o'clock and I was on my way to the beautician's.  That is always a long and scary process.  I looked at the bottle of vodka sitting on the table.  Fuck it.  I sippy cup to go. 

"Wow!  I forgot we cut your hair so short last time," said the little Russian Jew when I walked in.  This caught me by surprise.

"You don't love me."

"Yes I do.  Sit down.  Let me look at you." 

And so the afternoon.  Began.  As predicted, she told me about her dating life.  She likes a certain kind of man--young.  Maybe.  She likes them but doesn't.  She wants a young man with an older guy's brain.  Money doesn't matter, she says, but then she complained about a guy she quit seeing after he said she was an expensive date. 

"Can you believe that?  I'd only ordered twenty dollars worth of sushi!"

"What!?!" I said in mock horror.  "You've been seeing this guy for awhile, right?"

"Yes!"

"And you've been sleeping with him?"

"No. . . not all the way. . . . "

"What are you, in junior high school?  Fuck it, then, he's right," I grinned. 

She laughed.  "I haven't been like that with anybody for a long time," she said. 

I never know what she means, really.  "Long time" could be anything.  She acts the minx and talks a game.  She loves to flirt.  She says she likes women now, but she has never dated one.  I decided right then to start my research into something I've been thinking about of late.  Men and women think very differently about sex.  There have been many studies done showing the difference.  But what I don't know is how women decide who to sleep with and when.  They are barraged by offers every moment of their lives whether it is verbally or visually or hormonally, so much so that they must not be consciously aware of it any longer.  But I've decided to ask a thousand women the question.  I started with her. 

"I don't know." 

"You don't know!?!?!?  What do you mean 'I don't know?'"

I could tell I wasn't going to get much insight into this even if I asked the question a thousand times.  I guess I could live with the mystery, but I didn't want to.  I wanted to be the Louis Pasteur of desire. 

It was getting dark when she put the final touches on me, but she seemed reluctant to let me go.  I had a call from a buddy as we were finishing up, and he was going to meet me at my favorite bar for some sophisticated drinking.  I was determined to live this way through the holidays. 

"We should meet up for a drink there sometime," she said. 

"Sure," I said vaguely.  I thought her idea was just a friendly one.  She is fun and we've been out to dinner before, and I think we are both clear on that, but what the fuck do I know about anything, really.  I had told her about my own wrecked holiday love life and she had given me the same advice I had gotten from everyone else on the matter.  The advice was eerily always the same without variation or nuance without regard to gender or age.  There seems to be some rulebook that I have never seen let alone read. 

And so it goes.  I finished off the night with cocktails and dinner at the bar.  Good talk over cocktails in a good bar.  As some people like to say, good enough.  I was feeling fine. 

I don't want to jinx myself in any way by talking about it, but I believe I feel health returning.  It has been a rough month and a half. . . but I will save that talk for after Christmas during the dull lull that follows.  I'll just say I've had the fear.

I may be chatty over the next few days.  There will be at least one more post tonight after the late afternoon party and going to my mother's house when I am back home alone and the emotions of the year begin to descend and sort themselves in whatever ways they will.  The temperature will drop thirty degrees today and Christmas will be clear and cool.  Outside my window the gray shadows of the old oak trees jump and bounce in the wind as bands of pressure move through.  The cloudy sky is gray and thick and refuses to let the sunrise appear.  It is a day of transition here, one thing giving over to another as is the cosmic plan.  I must get hopping and cram my holiday activity into the next few hours.  Ho-ho-ho.  I think I am content. 

Here is the song my mother must have been listening to the Christmas before she gave birth to me.  It is one of my favorites.