OH TANNENBAUM!

 I haven’t had a Christmas tree in years...decades actually. Part of living far from your own family, and far from your adopted family, and of being a hermit by nature is that traditions kind of go out the window.

Virginia, my wife, always spends Christmas with her family in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles from here—here being Northern Patagonia in the Andes Mountains. We never travel together. We have lots of pets and our place to take care of, and we never leave them alone. If I’m gone, she’s home. If she’s gone, I’m home. So I plan my visits back “home” to the US for other times of the year, which is okay by me, because I always rent a car and like to get around while I’m back Stateside and the weather in December in my native Ohio and surrounding states is usually a bitch at that time of the year. It’s not for nothing that the old saying about Ohio’s four seasons is that they include Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter and Construction. Or that the roads in Ohio are always better in winter because the snow fills in the potholes. Where I live now, at the other end of the world, June, July and August are a lot like that...and sometimes September...and sometimes October too.

The last time I was home in Ohio for Christmas was 2005. It was not a happy time. My younger brother had just died. The best gift I got was the bottle of good whiskey my eldest nephew gave me. I finished it in under three days in my hotel room while arranging to have a headstone done for the place where my sister Darla and I scattered our brother’s ashes. But it was still nice to spend the Christmas season with my sister and her family and with my Aunt Marilyn and hers, as well as with all of the other cousins and friends that had time to meet up with me and share a drink or a meal. And their Christmas trees and gift exchanges and special Christmas meals and old traditions reminded me of all the Christmases past from my childhood and youth.

There was a time back in Buenos Aires before Virginia and I moved further south that we always had a Christmas celebration with her family and often with some of our friends as well. When I was first in Argentina, people didn’t put up trees and, in general, Santa Claus wasn’t “a thing”. More fittingly, since it was usually ninety in the shade in Buenos Aires at that time of the year, which is like late June in the States, kids got their gifts on January 6^th from the Three Wise Men, also known as the Magi, to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. This is the Christian holiday that commemorates the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child in Bethlehem and the physical manifestation of God to the Gentiles. 

Instead of leaving out Christmas cookies for Santa, children left out grass or hay and water for the Wise Men’s camels and their shoes instead of stockings in which to receive gifts. Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar—most kids had a favorite among the three and Balthazar seemed to be particularly popular. Christmas itself was more a time for people to get together and feast, drink and make merry and then to go out on their terraces and balconies to toast the birth of Jesus and each other, and watch the skies over the city light up with fireworks and high-floating paper lanterns. Of course, pets all over the city were terrified and the burn and eye hospitals did a swift trade resulting from injuries sustained in the inexpert use of firecrackers and Roman candles, and the ERs always got more than their usual share of gunshot wounds from people who’d forgotten to buy fireworks discharging pistols and rifles into the summer’s night sky over the crowded city while practically everyone was sitting out on the terrace having Christmas Eve dinner al fresco because it was too hot to all be cramped up inside the houses. But it all seemed like fun at the time.

Anyway, through the Global Village process of mass communications, and what Latin American leftists have always referred to as “cultural colonialism” and what Latin American right-wingers have always referred to as “the ‘foreignization’ of national culture”, Santa Claus started coming to town in Buenos Aires and other South American capitals, looking quite hot and sweaty in his Nordic garb, and people started doing what they saw in the Hollywood movies and dubbed TV series—putting up artificial trees, stringing lights (inside rather than out), buying and displaying ornaments and often doing the gift exchange thing on the evening of the twenty-fourth, depending on the family and their economic status. But the traditions of food, drink and fellowship remained intact and local in their tastes and the northern imports always felt a little strained and out of place, if fun too..

This year, due to the COVID pandemic, I won’t he “home alone” for Christmas. Virginia won’t be able to travel to see her brother and sister and nephews and cousins and friends in Buenos Aires. It’ll be nice to have her here and we’ll probably celebrate the way we celebrate every day, grateful for where we live in the forest and everything we have. But I can’t help but feel bad for her because her older sister is aging and very ill and under the constant attention of a live-in nurse and his two assistants and I’m sure that she wishes that she could be there rather than here.

As I say, it will be good to have her here, but I’ve never been miserable like some people would be if they were left on their own at Christmas time. My Christmases for the past twenty-odd years have always included work, projects, writing and time in the woods. This year is no exception.

But they also include remembering Christmases Past. Not whole days, perhaps, but sparkling flashes.

Christmas trees were a really big deal in our family back then. My Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice lived in a tiny house and since they always had the whole Newland Clan over for Christmas Eve, they had to economize on space. So my grandmother always had a tiny tree—more of a conifer shrub—that sat on a table under the front window, surrounded by a sparkling fake snow sheet, on which all the gifts were laid. Small though it might have been, however, the little tree was always beautifully decorated with glass and metal ornaments, candy canes, brightly colored lights and shiny silver foil “icicles”.

At Grandpa Vern and Grandma Myrt’s place, where the whole Weber family gathered for Christmas lunch on Christmas Day, there was always a very full-size tannenbaum loaded with ornaments, many of which held special significance for my grandmother—some that she’d inherited that were very old, some that we grandkids had made for her growing up, some that her four children had given her over the years and still others that had graced her Christmas trees for decades, from back in the days when her family had been growing up on tenant farms and her now grown kids had been little and helped her string beads and popcorn to flesh out the decorations. It had to be a special kind of tree. Vern insisted. He said he chose the species to make sure it “wasn’t one of those that’ll be nettling the hell out of me while I’m settin’ it up.” So no Scotch pines or Douglas firs for him. He always looked for a nice long-needled spruce or white pine. And he knew where to find them, and just about every other kind of tree, since he was the superintendent of the local cemetery and did all the landscaping himself. They were always full, perfectly conical and quite tall, topped by an antique angel whose story I never knew.

Whitie always claimed he “liked a real tree”, and was disdainful toward people who spent a fortune on expensive, flashy artificial trees. But knowing Whitie, who was about as careful with a dollar as anybody could get, I figure it was more about economy than aesthetics. Reba Mae, however, also always favored a natural tree while we kids were small and it wasn’t until we grew up and moved out that she ignored Whitie’s whining about the expense and bought herself a fake, but quite lovely tree.

If Whitie really “liked a real tree”, however, it was hard to tell it from his attitude about buying them and setting them up. The whole Christmas tree routine seemed to trigger the worst elements of his obsessive-compulsive personality. If Reba Mae bought the tree it was never up to his standards—the “damn thing” was crooked, flat on one side, full of brown needles, too short, too tall, not full enough or just plain ugly. So she started making him go along to pick them out. And that was enough to drive a person crazy because he was perfectly capable of going to wherever the Christmas tree place was on a given year and one by one go through every single tree to ensure that he was getting the most tree for his money. But even then, when he got it home, he would suddenly find that this one was also too tall, too short, too flat, too thin, off-center or whatever.

I recall vividly a year when Reba Mae’d had enough and said she thought it would be “a kind of nice sort of father and son thing” for Whitie and me to go pick out the tree together. I must have been nine or ten at the time and Whitie really didn’t have much use for me since our personalities couldn’t have been more different. So it was a time when my mother was always trying to find ways to push us closer together. But I suspect that, in this case it was because she just couldn’t face another year of Christmas-tree shopping with Whitie and found a guilt-free way of getting me to stand in.

She sprang this on my father during supper as soon as he got home from work and he grumbled that he didn’t really feel like “getting into the goddamn car again and going back uptown.”  So Reba Mae suggested maybe we could “drive over to the fairgrounds and buy one from the Boy Scouts.”

“The Boy Scouts!” Whitie cried, as if my mother had suggested buying a tree from a terrorist organization. “They’re always higher than hell!”

So Dad and I climbed into his ’52 Chevy and drove uptown to the grocery store of his friend and fellow local merchant Elwood Chesbrough. It was a nice grocery store on the far east end of the main drag over the B&O Railroad tracks. This year Mr. Chesbrough had a truckload of pines leaning against the building outside. Winter days are short in Ohio and it was already dark out, but Mr. Chesbrough had the outside lights on and there was a streetlamp that illuminated the side of the building. “See there, Danny,” Whitie said. “Boy Scouts my ass, Elwood’s got some real nice trees here.”

We went in and Whitie and Elwood shot the breeze for almost half an hour, before Mr. Chesbrough finally said, “So what can I do ya for, Whitie?” and my father told him we wanted a Christmas tree. “Take your pick!” he said. And out we went.

It was bitter cold out, and now there were snow flurries in the air. I right away looked at the first tree in line and said, “This is a nice one!” To which Whitie said, “Nice?  Damn thing looks like it died of blight.”

“How ‘bout this one?” I said, grabbing a needly bough and giving it a squeeze. But Whitie was ignoring me since my first choice had demonstrated me to be lacking in Christmas tree criteria. So for the next forty minutes or so, I mostly looked up at the streetlamp to watch the flurries drift down and jigged around to try and keep from freezing while Whitie meticulously went through every tree against the wall, standing each up and inspecting it from all sides, then discarding it before moving on to the next one until he’d been through them all and then going back to some that he’d discarded before. Eventually, Mr. Chesbrough came out and said, “So’d ya find one?”

“Hell, Elwood, I dunno. How’s this one?”

“Why don’t we ask the expert?” Mr. Chesbrough said.

“Huh?”

“Your boy.”

“Danny?”

The grocery store owner looked at him like, “Hell, I don’t know. Is that his name?”

“It’s really pretty, Dad!” I said making myself sound enthused so we could get out of there before frostbite set in.

“What do you think, Elwood?”

“I’m with the boy, Whitie. Best tree out here.”

So after a bit of wrangling over the price, Whitie finally shelled out and we were off for home with our beautiful pine.

Of course, when he and my mother got it screwed into the tree-stand...it was too tall, flat on one side, sitting skewed, etc., etc., etc...

But one of the Ohio Christmases I remember best was the year I turned eighteen and my sister Darla was home for Christmas break from college and she and I did our Christmas shopping together. Once we’d finished, we went together to what was a great bar back then in our small Ohio town of Wapakoneta, a watering-hole called Meinerding’s. The place with the wonderful name was only open for twelve years but in that time it and its owner, Ralph Meinerding, developed an almost legendary reputation. In a town where the bars tended to be male, Ralph’s place attracted the middle-aged to younger set of both sexes and combined cheap draft with delicious bar food.

Ralph himself was a small, gentle guy who usually had the stub of a cigar chomped in his jaw. A good family man who was known to like gardening, wood-working, making intricate doll-houses and a good game of euchre or sheephead if he could find one, Ralph was always kind and friendly. But he kept a bruiser of a Viking-looking heavyweight called Sam Fullenkamp on hand as his bartender and part-time (whenever needed) bouncer and if Meinerding’s was a nice, friendly, fun kind of a bar, Sam made sure it stayed that way.

Although his gargantuan deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwiches were the cuisine de rigueur that Ralph was best known for, he had the art of deep-frying just about anything down pat. In a facetious piece a long time ago, I once joked that “Ralph was the king of fry...Ralph fried mushrooms and fried onions and fried beefsteak potatoes and just about anything else you could fry. Hell, if a fight broke out and the bouncer, Sam Fullencamp, knocked somebody's ear off the side of their head, you had to get it off the counter quick before Ralph breaded it an tossed it into the fryer.”  But the truth is, you would have had to go a long way to find bar food as good as Meinerding’s.

So anyway, although I had misspent huge blocks of my junior high and high school days in a billiard and card saloon called The Brunswick, which was also a famous Wapakoneta institution, that Christmas shopping evening with my sister was the first time I’d ever set foot in Meinerding’s—though my sister and her friends knew it well. That’s one of the Christmases I remember best from my adolescence, because sitting there with my sister, no longer Big Sis and Little Brother, but two almost adult friends, enjoying a draft beer and a bite together a few days before Christmas, there was a kind of realization that this was the first night of the rest of my life and that there lay a youthful future before me to do with what I might. And because that awareness was so powerful, I still have the warm, friendly fragrance of that barroom in my head. I can still taste the ice cold beer with its slightly bitter froth, a taste I’ve tried to recreate in every one of the thousands of beers I’ve guzzled since, but to no avail. Because it wasn’t the flavor of the beer but the flavor of life that I was drinking in. It was a moment of almost perfect happiness.

And so, although I may no longer decorate a Christmas tree, my head and heart are yet still full of the light and joy of the Christmas season, because it’s a time of year that also helps me take stock and realize just how good life has been to me, if for no other reason because I discovered early on that light and joy are precisely what not only Christmas, but also life itself, are all about.

May the Christmas and New Year season bring all of you a sense of joy and gratitude as well, and may this be the first day of one of the best times in your life.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you all!    

 

 

 

 

 

 

A TIMELESS MOMENT OR A MOMENT IN TIME

Sometimes in dreams I will go back to a particular moment in time when the world seemed so perfect and beautiful that it brought a smile to my lips and tears to my eyes. These might be actual dreams, from which I awaken sad to have come out of the trance and desperately wanting to close my eyes and go back. Or they might simply be waking daydreams, where, for a moment I lose track of current reality and time-travel back to that exact instant and place.

What’s important about this is that the moment itself isn’t a dream. It is very real. It existed in real life, and exists still, if only in my mind. I consider myself fortunate that there have been more than one. Although, at the same time, it makes me sad that I haven’t been able to maintain a level of self-awareness that might have provided me with many more of these special moments, which are the only real definition of complete happiness.

These were times when I was momentarily blind to the crime, violence and dirt of the streets, and to the major problems of the world. They were moments in which all I was aware of was myself and my commitment to the path that I was choosing. It still happened to me, very occasionally, in my early years as a journalist, despite my job’s leading me to witness harsh, often even brutal realities on a daily basis. Perhaps back then I was more able to compartmentalize, to keep the reality that I was reporting separate from my own. Maybe it was even a survival mechanism. Who knows?

That’s probably why as I’ve gotten older and, hopefully, world-wiser, these moments have become, sadly, ever more rare. It’s that I no longer seem able to separate myself from the world I live in. And, search for them though I might, those moments of pure joy and self-realization are rendered practically unattainable, or at least they are no longer unadulterated.

I recall these special moments as timeless instances in which there came a sensation that everything around me was mere scenery that could be just as beautiful as I wanted to make it, and that, just beyond it, in a place I couldn’t quite touch or see, only sense, there was something else. Something more.   

Epiphany. I think that’s probably the word for it. A moment of lightning-bolt realization. An instant stripped of doubt, sorrow, regret, rage or cynicism. A moment of simply being, and knowing that that, in itself, is enough. That it’s a miracle. Life is. Being alive, breathing in and out, seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, loving, that it’s all cause for indescribable joy. For a fleeting moment in time, you might capture it. You hold it in your heart and mind and it fills you. And then it’s gone. But not forgotten. It is branded on your heart and brain and, if you’re lucky, from time to time, it will come back and let you recall it as if it were a snapshot or a video that plays over in your mind, but one that includes more than image. Emotion, feeling, state of mind, all just like they were right then. It’s primitive, unbridled, so simple

Henry Miller -- literary epiphany

and pure that it’s an enigma.

For author Henry Miller, for instance, that sort of moment was eminently literary. In Black Spring, Miller writes:

“And then one day, as if suddenly the flesh came undone and  the blood beneath the flesh had coalesced with the air, suddenly the whole world roars again and the very skeleton of the body melts like wax. Such a day it may be when first you encounter Dostoievski. You remember the smell of the tablecloth on which the book rests; you look at the clock and it is only five minutes from eternity, you count the objects on the mantelpiece because the sound of numbers is a totally new sound in your mouth, because everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism. Now every door of the cage is open and whichever way you walk is a straight line toward infinity...It was exactly five minutes past seven, at the corner of Broadway and Kosciusko Street, when Dostoievski first flashed across my horizon...”

Harper Lee -- a new angle

For Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, that moment of epiphany is experiencing something that causes you to view a world you’ve known all your life from a different angle, and as if seeing it for the first time. She paints that instant through the words of her child protagonist, Scout Finch, when the little girl, as narrator, says, “I turned to go home. Street lights winked down the street all the way to town. I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle. There were Miss Maudie's, Miss Stephanie's—there was our house, I could see the porch swing—Miss Rachel's house was beyond us, plainly visible. I could even see Mrs. Dubose's... Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

Scout --the world from the Radley porch

My moments of wonder have been much more pedestrian, if just as epiphanous. The first one I can recall happened when I was still a boy, an adolescent of sixteen. It was Christmas-time. I was from Wapakoneta, but nearby Lima, Ohio, had become “my town”. In our rural area, Lima was what passed for “the city”, a big industrial town back then, with an urban feel to it.

No one could have told me even a few months earlier that I would be where I was right then. I had been a drummer in a couple of “kid bands” that played in teen centers for a small cut of the meager cover charge. But then I got a part-time job working in Lima’s biggest music store and my whole life changed. Suddenly, I was in daily contact with all of the professional jazz musicians in the area and at sixteen, was playing as a relief drummer every Friday and Saturday night for at least union scale. It was a dream come true to still be in high school and to be working as a professional musician, a percussion instructor and a respected member of the staff at the music store. I knew every bar and nightclub with live music in the area. And I knew all of the best area musicians by name and was treated like one of them. I had my own car. I had my own money. I had my own life, even though I was still in high school.

The Lima Square by night

It was around Christmas-time of that first wonderful year of dreams come true. The changes had opened up a whole new view of the year ahead. I was inspired to not only play every gig I could but also to give free rein to my other artistic endeavor by starting to take my writing seriously. And, therefore, to also take my reading seriously.  By the end of that year, the future I foresaw was as writer by day, musician by night, in a dream world that couldn’t get any better.

The special moment in time came one night when I was working at the store until nine. I had just been on my supper break. I had walked up Main across the Lima square and half a block up to Gregg’s Department Store, where they had a restaurant I liked on the upper floor. I’d had the ham steak with mashed potatoes with sides of green beans and slaw, washed down with iced tea. And while I ate, I finished reading, for the first time, what was to become one of my favorite short stories of all time—J.D. Salinger’s For Esmé With Love and Squalor.

When I came out, with Salinger’s words still ringing in my ears, the cold had turned sharp as a knife and the sky was mostly clear. Still, snow flurries were falling from some unseen cloud, since, overhead, the sky was infinity-black and dotted with glittering stars. The square was dressed for the holidays, with twinkling colored lights, wreaths, fantasy candy canes and bright red, green and gold ribbons everywhere. And in the middle there was a huge tree with magical lights, silver icicles and oversized ornaments to delight shoppers. Woolworth’s, Penney’s,  Sears, The Leader, Gregg’s and other downtown department stores glistened with holiday cheer, and on the corner, out in front of George Anthony’s Sweetland candy store, coffee shop and restaurant, a group of my newfound colleagues had formed a brass choir and were playing Christmas carols with that sweet, clear, harmonic brass sound that is like no other.

Between tunes they were passing a flask to keep warm and as I went by, one of them called out, “Hey kid!” and held up the flask offering me a snort. I laughed, thanked them and politely refused. And then, as I reached the other side of the square and headed south toward the store, I suddenly felt tears well up in my eyes and the thought that came to me was, “This might well be the happiest moment of my life.”  

As an adult, I remember a New Year’s in Buenos Aires. Virginia and I had invited a number of people to our Mid-town apartment to ring in the New Year. We’d held the celebration at home. I was off from the paper, since the next day was one of only a handful of non-publishing days each year, so I was completely relaxed. Lots of friends and some of Virginia’s relatives showed up, many after they had started bidding the old year farewell elsewhere. There was a surfeit of food and drink and good music on the stereo, and it had been a really fun time, capped by all of us standing together on our eighth-floor terrace, watching a plethora of fireworks burst in dazzling colors above the rooftops.

Then about two or three in the morning, people started peeling off a person or a couple at a time and heading for home. At last, it was just us with a couple with whom we had become intimate friends. They lived upstairs then, and we saw each other several times a week, sometimes daily, and dined together and went out together and took vacations together. We had become like family. Or like something more than family. We truly loved each other.

When everyone else had gone, our friends suggested we go downtown and get a nightcap—champagne, he was buying. So I got my car out of the parking lot around the corner and off we went, east toward the river and downtown along Avenida Corrientes. Partying was still underway in a lot of private homes, but from Mid-town to Downtown, traffic was sparse and many places were already closed, closing or had never opened. It was a rare thing, something almost magical to see the city so abandoned on a warm South American summer’s night.

New Year's fireworks in Buenos Aires...a few hours later the

streets were deserted.

Stranger still was to see the ever busy Avenida Nueve de Julio, the city’s main north-south downtown thoroughfare, practically bereft of traffic. There along that main drag, we found a place that was still open. The refuse of year-end revelers was everywhere, but the fireworks were over with. The place looked jaded and its weary owners less than happy to see us. A little way down the street, a couple were sitting on the pavement, their backs to the front wall of a building, a liter bottle of beer on the sidewalk between them. She was leaning against his shoulder, looking a little the worse for wear, but he was still going strong, strumming the hell out of a box guitar and bellowing out the lyrics of every folk tune he could remember, his voice echoing in the deep canyon of Nueve de Julio where it cleaved a broad swath through the midst of towering buildings. There was no traffic to drown the singer out and he was making the most of this improvised amphitheater.

Inside the bar they were already cleaning up, but our friend talked the owner into letting us sit at one of the tables outside on the sidewalk, and into sending out a bottle of chilled champagne. Suddenly, what might have been the sordid scene of celebration’s end seemed mystical. As if the city were ours alone, with only the scraping guitar and rasping voice to entertain us, as we sipped ice-cold champagne under cones of light from the street lamps, in the grey glint of a sultry summer’s dawn. For perhaps an hour, the four of us sat there joking and laughing and just enjoying being together, putting aside our individual and collective worries and letting trust, love and cold champagne set the mood. By the time we drove back to Mid-town, we had the shimmering streets of Buenos Aires practically to ourselves.

Back home again, I dropped Virginia and our friends at the door of our building. I left the motor running and got out of the car with them. We all hugged and truly meant and felt it, warm as only love can be. Then I went alone to take the car back to the parking lot. It was as I was coming out of the lot that the sun suddenly broke above the horizon and flooded the street around me with the golden-orange first light of a summer day.

I turned to face it, closed my eyes and felt its warmth on my eyelids. My breath caught and a knot formed in my throat. I was completely, unequivocally grateful. It was a new year. I was writing daily for a living, I was married to the woman I loved, I was in the company of friends with whom we shared an almost passionate relationship, and a whole future of promise seemed to be stretching before me. A future that was mine for the taking.

It was a moment of almost uncontainable joy, and one that I would remember forever, even in the hardest of times.