The Secular and The Religious

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
 
In my early childhood days the Christmas Eve parties had been in someone's apartment with quite a lot of drinking and dancing. The men in their white shirts with skinny ties; the women in heels they slipped off before jitterbugging. They were young after all, in their 20s---brothers, wives, cousins, friends, work buddies. They played the stereo: "Mack the Knife" "Blueberry Hill" "Rock Around the Clock" It felt like wild and crazy times, which probably had more to do with everyone's age and capacity for alcohol than with it being the end of the Eisenhower era. And Christmas parties weren't about the children, our time was Christmas morning. I remember being tired one Christmas Eve at an uncle's apartment and falling asleep on a pile of coats that everyone had tossed on the bed, kind of the way in which a cat or dog will fall asleep on your clothes. It's almost impossible to describe that feeling of warmth and comfort.


My parents bought a house before I turned five. Most but not all of the family Christmas parties from that time forward took place there, a stretch of about 25 years from the late 50s to the early 80s. By my late teens the Night Before Christmas had become more of a happy lark and the WPIX Yule Log set the mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMjTD7c6TCo&feature=related

The adults took the televised yule log more seriously but my generation found humor and absurdity in the yule log and yet still enjoyed it, perhaps even more so. The Christmas Eve parties were still mainly for the adults and "the kids" needed to create our own entertainment. A few of my cousins, my brother and I, and maybe a couple friends would leave the house early in the evening, and we would drive around or walk around to look at Christmas lights and smoke a joint or two, so that by the time we returned to an adult party in full swing, we'd sit together in the combined den and dining area and fire up the Yule Log on WPIX. By now we were all in a peaceful, bonhomie, holiday mood, meditating on The Yule Log, laughing for no apparent reason which puzzled some of our parents, drinking a little wine, or a beer, or maybe a cup of tea as a buffet table was being prepared with turkey and ham and cold-cuts and potato salad and pies, and cakes and Christmas cookies. My mother and her mother knew how to create a spread. The guests varied over the years but mainly comprised my father and his brothers, their wives and kids, my grandmothers, and great aunts, but also neighbors and friends of my parents, and as we got older, friends of mine and my brother's and our girlfriends, and maybe the friends' girlfriends.

Some years, when I wasn't stoned and sitting in front of the TV mesmerized by the Yule Log, I attended Midnight Mass at the Episcopal church a few blocks away. By my late 20s I became more ambitious, and with a couple of friends would head over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral or Saint Thomas's for Midnight Mass.

And there were always people left at the house when we returned, folks to sit with and enjoy a turkey sandwich and meatballs and a little pie and coffee, and a glass of wine or brandy. It was a feeling not unlike falling asleep on that pile of coats many years before.

Have chores to do before the big day, and tomorrow I'm going to pay a visit to "The Two of Us" blog and maybe enjoy a little spice wine.

Kathleen Shaw and The Great Leap Backward and Forward

At one point (or the first of several points) where my life had crashed and burned, I found myself living once again in the town where I had grown up, reluctantly back home after having managed to escape for seven years.

Not only was it a down period in my life, it didn't seem to be a particularly auspicious epoch in the collective life as well. In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president of the U.S. and John Lennon was assassinated. I  walked through a huge shopping mall, Christmas shopping with my father the day after Lennon was murdered, and the usual manifest depression of the season, and the end of the Carter years, coupled with this tragedy, was palpable. The malaise washed over you in soul-numbing waves. It was the end of an era and no one seemed to have any idea of where things were headed. Instead of the usual holiday tunes, the muzak speakers were cranking out "Imagine" and "Instant Karma" and "A Day in the Life" and "In My Life" and "Revolution" and "Mind games" and "Across the Universe"and (Goddamn) "So this is Christmas", and it felt bloody awful amid all the glitter and merchandising and material craving of the holiday season. It felt like the end of the world.

One day in this lost season, I had gone to the local Channels or Lumberama which, along with Rickels, were the "Big" hardware stores in the decades preceding Home Depot and Lowes. I bought some widget and headed to the register to check out . . . and there she was . . . Kathleen Shaw . . . I was 28 and it was nearly half a lifetime since I'd seen her. She had been my girlfriend---the only girlfriend I'd gone out with and broken up with twice---first at age 14 and then again at age 15. She may have been the only girlfriend from those early adolescent years that I'd actually loved, although I didn't know it back then. Kathleen recognized me with my long hair and beard. She'd always been shy. She rung up my purchase and we made small talk. I may have mentioned that I was back in the area for awhile, the Prodigal Son returned. I don't recall if she had worn an engagement or wedding ring, and it didn't seem important. I had no desire to rekindle anything with her. I could easily see Kathleen Shaw and I were worlds apart.

Later I mentally traveled back with Kathleen to the Spring of '67, to a Sunday in late March when the ground was starting to thaw, and there were a few blossoms and a thin wrapper of early warmth around our winter jackets. We were pressed against the brick wall of a public building, kissing, making out, smiling into each others eyes.

 Kathleen:
      "What does your father do?"
Me:
     "He works in a paper mill."

      "A paper mill?"
      "Yeah, where they make paper. Boxboard. What does your father do?"
      "He's a bus driver."
      "Like Jackie Gleason on the Honeymooners?"
      "Yeah, like Jackie Gleason . . . Sooooo?
      "Nothing . . . You're sister still lives at home. What does she do?"
      "She has a job at the bank . . . We have to stop kissing. My lips are chapped."
      "So let's get some chap-stick at the drugstore. I wanna buy some licorice."
      "I'm not going to kiss you if you eat licorice and the drugstore is far away."
      "You said you were gonna stop kissing me anyway, and we can make it to the drugstore. It's a five-minute walk."
       "Ten . . ."
      "Okay, 'ten.'"
      "By the time we get back I'll have to be home for Sunday dinner."
      "So we're just gonna stand here and not kiss? Maybe I should start walking you home now. We can walk slow."
      "You're rude . . . We can talk."
      "But we're already talking!"
      "You call this talking?"
      "One more kiss?"
      "Well, alright . . ."

I said goodbye to Kathleen Shaw and left the Channels or Lumberama and started walking across the mall parking lot, which was only two blocks from my parents house where I was living. Kathleen had been one of several people I'd run into that apocalyptic Fall of 1980 whom I hadn't seen in years, and I was suffering from a sense of dislocation. Things really had changed in Wayward the past seven years, and though I'd returned every now and then for Christmas or the 4th of July, I really hadn't noticed the scope of the change until I'd planted myself for a time. So it wasn't just a strange time ("strange days indeed" as John Lennon had sung) it was a strange place too, because as even a mediocre or novice student of physics knows, time and space are interchangeable, or not interchangeable---they're the same. Time is an illusion.

A cinder block wall roughly 7-foot high ran the perimeter of the mall parking lot along one of the avenues. The wall had been there since I was a kid (when "the mall" hadn't been an enclosed mall) and the wall had a hole in it, and on the side was the street that I'd often traveled to get home. The hole was made from a missing half of a cinder block roughly three-and-a-half feet from the ground, and it had come in handy starting around age 9 or 10, because without having to go around the wall by a hundred yards or more and walk along busy Wayward Avenue, you could instead scale the wall by securing your foot in the hole---quite convenient. Later, in my early teens, the hole was sometimes used as a place to stash cigarettes or other contraband.

I was 28 and wayward in Wayward, but the hole in the wall drew me toward it like an astronomical black hole. Already ignoring the civilized and adult path across the parking lot that would have led me around the wall, I instead reached the hole, maybe wishing for a minute or two that I could somehow shrink myself and disappear inside. But I jumped up, clutched the cinder block with my arms, leveraged my ascent by placing one foot in the still correct place, and leaped over.