The First Christmas After the Last Christmas
For those mourning a loved one during the holidays
I had set Kara's memoir aside to focus on her celebration of life. The book had hit a major snag anyway, so it was good to take a break from it and channel my grief into producing a worthy memorial service. At the time, I was seething with righteous sorrow. If I'd been a movie character, I would have been Octavian in Cleopatra when he fulminates about the death of Mark Antony: "The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed! It must echo back from the corners of the universe!"
Three months into the agonies of what C.S. Lewis called "an amputation," and I knew this tribute to my wife must be a scream of Antonian magnitude. My problem was I had only twenty-eight days to crank the volume so high I could shake the universe with it.
As if that task wasn't daunting enough, the season had seeped into my plans like a damp rag. You can't accomplish much when everyone you know is gathered around a tree in their house tearing up glittery paper and ribbons the cat will inevitably try to ingest afterward. I knew this because I used to number among the salivating revelers acting out the same old scripts of the retail and entertainment industries.
Only the year before, for the thirty-first or thirty-second time, my wife and I had donned ludicrous sweaters and exchanged colorful packages beside a three-foot neon sign of a tree (we'd converted to tinsel toward the end of our Cat Era) like millions of other hedonists basking in the glow of future household clutter from one end of the planet's geomagnetic field to the other.
As a recovering Christmas addict, I knew that Hallmark, not time, posed the greatest threat to my funerary ambitions: A mass hallucination so severe that the more advanced cases would reroute their entire social calendar for twenty-four days just to avoid hearing Wham's "Last Christmas" song.
(Of which, I will double down and say that the "Whamageddon" game, self-aware or not, is every bit as corny as any Hallmark holiday movie. Wham Humbug.)
Such was my predicament as I trudged home last year on the early evening of Christmas Eve, hugging my double-bagged repast of Bota Box red blend and Banquet frozen dinners. What I didn't realize, however, until it hit me near the pillar clock on Milwaukie Avenue, was that with little to do until the collective Christmas hangover set in, I now had to face the feelings that awaited me in the coming hours while cats eyed tatters of ribbon and Wham seized the ears of distracted multitudes tearing through glittery paper wrappings in living rooms all over the world.
The ramifications of that hung on the icy air like a storm warning.
This close to dinner time, the neighborhood streets lay bare. Retail stores, restaurants, even bars stood empty on the most popular shopping corner in a half-mile radius. As the shadows deepened, my steps carried me closer and closer toward a room full of medical supplies and the one companion I had left--Ruby Sue, a pit lab named after the bad-mouthed little girl in Christmas Vacation, one of my favorite holiday movies.
One half-block to go and so would begin one of the eerier journeys of my life: The first Christmas after the last Christmas... the one that is not a Wham song.
Just as I passed the pillar clock, I heard someone clear their throat. To my left, a man stood at the meeting point of two buildings, a jeweler's store that had closed after seventy-odd years and a still-thriving, equally historic restaurant bar. Thin and pale and dressed in jeans and a dark coat, he had ice blue eyes and a heart-shaped face and chin stubble as white as fresh snow.
But lest you conclude this personage must be an elf in contemporary guise--at least in my desperate imagination--he was drinking from a tall boy of some sort of piss water with one boot propped on the bench of a wooden picnic table. For a moment, I thought he might be a short-order cook or dishwasher winding down after a shift... but the store-bought beer and brown, midsized dog sitting by his heel suggested a different story.
The man met my eye briefly, then sipped his beer. He looked familiar--I had often seen him hanging around outside the neighborhood grocery store. The impulse to greet him just then with some insincere holiday sentiment died in my throat.
The French philosopher Albert Camus once made a famous statement about the smile being the finest gesture an individual can wield against the futility of existence. But I submit that the sound of someone sighing after a long pull on a cold beverage far surpasses the Absurdist's smirk in capturing the appropriate response to the perception of human struggle. There is something eloquent about it, like a dirge. Or so it struck me as I watched the man lower his drink and turn his gaze to the sidewalk, as if everything that could be said about life had been summed up in that exhale after his sip of piss water.
I wondered if he had been widowed recently, like me. He certainly appeared to have lived beyond every joy this day might have brought him.
Half-swallowed in shadow, he looked like a haphazard arrangement of amputations trapped in a portal between dimensions. As I turned the corner, drawing ever closer to the first Christmas after the last Christmas, I could think of no better usher to light the darkness than this fragmented being and the dirge of his thirst hanging above a bar behind me on an empty street.
The next morning, I woke and went downstairs to see if Santa had given me my wife back.
Sigh.
Way Back Machine Activate: The annual appearance of Christmas Picante-Corn
And now for a pick-me-up! Because there's no rule (in my book) that says you can't watch Christmassy things after Christmas:
And speaking of Christmassy things after Christmas
My friend Hypes and I made this holiday greeting when I went to San Francisco a few weeks ago. Part of my ongoing attempt to continue the adventures by doing the things that Kara loved.
I hope you enjoy. Stay safe as we count down to an insane New Year!
Until next time.
--Charles Austin Muir
Comentarios