Christmas Passed

Originally Posted Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Christmas day felt like a bust though nothing went wrong. It was just that nothing went right.  

I woke up late enough having slept well and long, and the coffee was good and then the Amaretti cookies that a friend had given me for Christmas and the pecan ring that I had bought.  But the morning was hollow and flat.  Later, there was a visit from a friend who had become a new friend of my old friend, and there were the old inevitable lies, and there was the thinking about cooking for mother that was Christmas day, the emails and text messages that came or didn't come and were answered or were not, and there was the hollow empty ringing and the waiting for what I didn't know.  

I made the dinner for mother, a roast in an unglazed clay pot full of meat and potatoes and onions and celery and carrots, and I roasted more vegetables.  In the afternoon which seemed so early my mother came and we ate outside in the perfect air of what was then late afternoon.  I decided that we should drink the wine that was a gift from an old girlfriend against my mother's objections and things became more tolerable.  Groups of people walked by and waved and wished my mother and I a merry Christmas.  Then the air began to cool and my mother said it would be dark soon, so we cleaned up the dishes and just before the day was done she said so long.  Alone, I poured a Hendricks gin telling myself this was wrong at once correcting myself saying that it was Christmas still and that we had already buried a bottle of wine. and then I opened my iPad and began to read until the heaviness overtook me and I closed the cover for a minute and fell asleep.  An hour later, I woke to an incoming text.  A few chatty words, then that was done, and I wanted some cheese and olives, so I cut the cheese but the best way to serve the olives was in the gin, and so I began to read again, but the novel took a wrong turn and I lost some interest though I kept reading and eating olives, so to speak.  

And now the lines are dead.  The cat has taken to the paper that was wrapping for some presents and has eaten some of it before deciding to lie upon the rest.  Maybe it smells of food.  I hear the rustling and see her demure posture and gaze.  She has appropriated something for Christmas, it seems, and is satisfied or at least defiant about that.  It is, I think, the best this Christmas had to offer.  

I do not have much time off from the factory at all, and will soon be back at my "proper" position.  The long, blank days of winter after Christmas will follow.  If I were any good at all, I would go south and get out on the water.  I would fish for tarpon or for snook on the big empty plains of flat blue water that is there.  I would fish all day and then cook up fish for dinner with hush puppies and strong drink, and maybe I'd find a girl who would be a willing co-conspirator in nighttime poker games or worse.  We could listen to music on the transistor radio or the modern version of such and dance closely in the tropical winter for awhile.  I think I might like that.  I think it would be just fine.  

But tonight is Christmas and what I do have is a cat that makes the tissue paper crinkle and a cabinet that has no whiskey.  That was a stupid idea.  I will make some strong tea and read some more of that novel, then maybe I will take a Xanax and put myself to bed.  I must have been bad this year, for Santa's sleigh did not find its way here.  "If you get coal in your stocking this year. . . make a barbecue."  That was one dear friend's Xmas card to me.  

I didn't even get coal.  

Here is what I wrote to one woman's daughter:  I hope that it is true for her.  I believe it, too, though sometimes it just doesn't work out that way.  I hope she will never learn.  

"Tell her that Santa comes down chimneys as a spirit, that he is truly anywhere people have full hearts and great souls.  No belief needed, really.  You just feel the goodness and the warmth.  We are all feeling people, too, so we are the holidays." 

Now we charge into the New Year.  I would quote Fitzgerald's iron plate last paragraph from Gatsby, but I haven't the energy for even that.  Better still, that hideous Elliot's "not with a bang, but a whimper."