December 25, 2004

• What a marvelous night…
      and a pretty good day, too.

  When I was a little girl, for the six Christmases before my father
  died, the holiday was always joyous.  There was a tree and
  decorations, always a few presents even though my parents never had
  much money to spare, the music of the season — both the upbeat and
  happy tunes and the moving old carols — and most of all there was
  love.  The profile pic I’ve had up here for a couple of weeks
  shows me on my second Xmas, at fifteen months of age, playing with my
  new alphabet blocks in front of the Christmas tree, at the wicker table
  and chair my father had salvaged from the dump.   My parents’ love
  for each other and for me gave our little house furnished with things
  other people had discarded an atmosphere of peace and security I would
  never experience again in this lifetime.

  I recall nothing of
  the Christmas of 1951, just a bit over three weeks after my father
  died.  Maybe we had a tree and presents, or maybe my mother wasn’t
  up to that.  She was an emotional basket case for years after his
  death, and my lack of recall of that time speaks eloquently of my own
  mental state then.  There were days that Mama was doing well to
  open some canned soup for supper.  I learned to “cook” then,
  opening the cans and heating the soup and serving us both.

  Even after Mama began adjusting to life without Daddy, December would
  plunge her back into deep depressions every year.  The Christmas
  blues was a simple fact of my adolescence, something Mama and I shared
  and got through somehow, leaning on each other, the blind leading the
  blind.  Even after I was out of her house and on my own or in one
  of my marriages, Christmas blues usually found me.  It was an
  insecure life I led and I was scared much of the time.  Seeing
  tinsel and lights, the warmth showing from out of other people’s
  windows and the happiness in their eyes made me that much more aware of
  how much less I had than I had had in those idyllic years of childhood.

  I learned to cope with the blues the way my mother did, by getting
  loaded.  After I stopped doing that, I realized that it had never
  really helped.  It just made things worse in the long run. 
  So, yesterday evening after Doug went to bed, while I was baking my
  wheatless, gluten-free, sugar-free, pumpkin-free squash pies, for just
  a moment when a tinge of lonely blue hit me, I didn’t quite know what
  to do.  Getting loaded was not an option.  I’d need to wait
  until 9 PM when cell minutes lost their cost before I could call
  Greyfox, and being up to my elbows in pie fixings made getting online
  and tracking down any other friends impractical.

  For “company”
  and diversion, I turned on the radio, public radio, and caught the last
  part of All Things Considered followed by an Anglican Festival of 9
  Lessons in Carols as I finished up my work, just background sound to
  dispel that feeling of being all alone in the world.  About the
  time I got the pies done and sat down at the PS2, they segued into an
  hour of Jonathan Winters reading Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  It was ending when Greyfox called, and by then my mood had swung from blue to pink, from down to up.

  We talked a while, caught each other up on the day’s events and
  discussed plans for today, then said good night.  The game wasn’t
  engaging my attention so, leaving the radio on, I got into bed and
  started reading.  It was much too early to sleep, but the bed is a
  warm spot and last night’s weather was COLD.  A brisk wind was
  sucking the heat out of the house and I had reason through the night to
  be glad that this time while Doug’s “diurnal rhythm”, asynchronous as
  it is to that of this planet, took him around to being wakeful in the
  daytime, my own sleep irregularities had brought me around to being
  awake at night to stoke the stove while he sleeps.

  [aside:  Recently, when I had persuaded Doug to stay up later than
  he liked, so we could make a run to the spring for water during
  daylight, he complained that it had screwed up his diurnal
  rhythm.  I remarked that his "rhythm" was more like brownian
  motion.  It got a laugh, which was what I was going for, but
  there's some truth in it, too.  Although for the most part he runs
  on a daily cycle that's around 26 hours long, occasionally he will
  either stay awake for up to 36 hours or sleep up to 14 hours and throw
  the whole cycle into a different phase.]

  My book is very
  absorbing.  The Camulod Chronicles series is so absorbing for me
  that after I’d gone through the first few volumes I stopped in the
  middle of Uther because it was too intense and was monopolizing my
  consciousness.  I was reading long into the night as I’m back to
  doing again now, and dreaming in the Dark Ages British culture after I
  put the books down at night.  Following a break of a few months, I
  got back into Uther and finished it and now I’m off and running again
  with Merlyn.  It’s an addiction.

  Last night, my attention
  was divided between the book and the Christmas music on the
  radio.  I listened to carols from various times and in many
  languages, and to little Christmas stories.  Then around 2 AM, it
  switched to piano jazz.  Jazz is my music.  Last night the
  Japanes pianist Harumi was asked what jazz means to her.  She
  answered, “freedom.”  Nailed it in one word!

  We were in
  the second hour of the jazz when Doug got up, and I went on reading and
  listening into the beginning of Weekend Edition, finally putting out my
  light and settling down about 5 AM.

  Greyfox got here before
  noon, and I had been up for a few hours by then.  He brought some
  groceries and a gift:  a 2-DVD set of old Western movies.  He
  shared some news stories, we had a few laughs, and he took Koji, who
  was ecstatic to have his whole pack together again, out for a short
  walk in the brisk subzero breezes.  As I was cooking the steak for
  our lunch Charley, my ex, called for an exchange of holiday
  wishes.  A little later, Charley’s mother, the only grandparent of
  Doug’s who lived long enough to get to know him, called.

  The
  subject of age came up, as Greyfox and I were talking about arthritis
  and fibro.  Then he said that one of the worst parts of getting
  old is his never-ending case of sticker shock.  He reminisced for
  a moment about how cheap this thing and that USED TO be, and I said
  that my mother used to tell me about when eggs were a dime a dozen and
  you could get bread for two cents a loaf.  Doug chimed in to say
  that the scariest thing about getting old was turning into your
  parents.  At that Greyfox said his sister, scary old Alyce, is
  turning into their dad:  She’s crazy, in active alcoholism and
  drug addiction, her kids are afraid of her….

  At one point earlier this afternoon, I reminded Greyfox of last Christmas
  – the one he said, “didn’t suck.”  From all indications, his
  holiday memories are even more painful than my own.  I asked him
  how this Christmas is for him.  He said, “It’s great! 
  …doesn’t seem like Christmas at all.” 
  

  • 8:05 pm
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