cskendrick
I write a lot of Christmas diaries. Why? Perhaps because this is the spiritual new year for me. The other day? That's just the day before the day to put up a new calendar in my office.
Perhaps it is because, as a celebration of nativity, Christmas is the day of new beginnings, by definition.
So what have I written about in the past? I suppose, from perusing last year's The Sum of All My Deals, the first topic up is that we must always remember to fill our lives with good choices, good experiences and good people:
I am watching my youngest son munch on an orange wedge in a nearby chair. My older son - I can hear him snapping Lego block pieces together around the corner. In yet another room, my wife is chirping about something Missouri Synod-related with my father-in-law.
These people in my life - all of them. I have chosen their presence, every one. They have their own copes and deals to make. They have their various needs of me, and I of them.
But it's not a sum of deals that binds us.
We're family.
We have chosen this. We have chosen a definition of love and trust and presence for all our days.
Then there is the other aspect of Christmas - redemption. A topic that has drawn me to write on Christmas again, again and again....
The Reverend's Redemption
"I...don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here." Green fell to his knees, sobbing.
"No, not in the least. There's no question at all about that," Gabriel declared, looking down, frowning. Then, as suddenly, he knelt down beside his new protege, and lifted him into a standing position. "The only question is what you will do to make good on the gift."
"It..it would take forever to pay for what I've done on Earth."
Gabriel smiled. "Then perhaps you have come to the right place, after all."
Our prodigal hero-in-training later goes back home to America, to pay it forward:
"Health care reform," Reverend Ake Green snorted as he watched some Fox News in an airport terminal.
"Why, why yes!" the angel Gabriel piped in cheerfully. "Here's your regular drip, venti, no room," he added, handing Ake a big tall cup of Starbuck's coffee.
"Thanks," Green said, taking the cup and sipping it. It was hot. "Bless, that's good," he said.
"Of course, lately this particular vendor has fallen out of vogue with the political left," Gabriel said as he sampled his white chocolate mocha. "Damn this is the good stuff," the angel said and poured some more down.
Green smiled. "I'll drink to that," and the two were quiet for a moment. Green looked about the airport, a small one in the Southeastern part of the country. "I don't think I've ever been here before.. I mean, when I was alive. So... why are we here again?"
Gabriel smiled. "Why, to deliver some health care reform, of course. Gonna make a bona fide liberal socialist out of you today."
Green sighed. "I knew you'd say that."
Then sometimes...it's about family, not the ideal, not the chosen, but the one we're dealt by our choice of parents:
When I was two, my father almost beat me at a Christmas gathering in front of witnesses for defying him. I was told to apologize for hitting my brother (five years older) after my sibling had struck me.
I flat-out refused. Perhaps it was some sense of injustice, perhaps I knew that my father would not dare strike me in front of witnesses, and this was my chance to push back and embarrass him. I don't know.
Older relatives cannot speak to my state of mind, saying only that I was standing there on the carpet, arms folded, stern frown on my faces, quietly saying "No," with my father roaring at me to obey.
He actually had the belt raised, per the accounts, when my uncle interceded. My father looked at him, outraged at the intrusion. "I can't stop you when you are home. But there is no way I am going to allow you to beat your child in front of mine."
It occurs to me that I never bothered to say "Thank you" to my uncle. We're somewhat estranged now. Very different politics. But on that day, he was the best friend I ever had.
Somedays, the "Price is Right" TV show would be on, and (when my parents where married and both working to see each other even less, which was fine by me) the live-in maid, Polly, Polly with her pinch of snuff and gravelly voice, would watch it and coldly tolerate my presence. I loved the travel prizes. Loved seeing the slides of being far away, or on a cruise ship, or flying in a plane to Hawaii or Hong Kong or Hanover.
Or I would peruse my brother's brand-new set of Britannica Junior encyclopedias, nice faux-leather red covers and all, and read all the children's articles in the back of each one. (I would graduate to perusing the various articles on the countries and states, but that would be a bit later.) Anything that took me someway, anyway, elsewhere.
The encyclopedias were a Christmas present for my brother. That was a good Christmas.
After a point my dad virtually disappeared. I can recall the fights between my parents getting much, much worse, my brother's moods and persecutions more menacing. Suddenly, it all stopped.
Suddenly, there was no live-in maid, no big house with the basement and the laundry nook and the TWA posters, and no father, either. It wasn't just the aggression; my parents were both very strong-willed, competitive people who refused to give up, even on loving/hating one another. It was something significantly more dangerous; my father's business ventures had collapsed; he had leveraged himself, and ourselves, way out of his weight class, to get a piece of the really good life, and the move failed. It wasn't his business partner's fault; he just didn't have $750,000 to cover his losses, back when three quarters of a million dollars was some serious coin (early-mid 1970s).
I was drawing pictures in earnest by then, using a big, low round lamp table to sit near and copy pictures out of the encyclopedias. Or draw maps.
Then one morning the table was gone, too. Some division of assets had occurred. That was not a good Christmas. I missed that table.
...I was at the hospital; diagnosis: concussion and observation for head injury. I would be at the hospital for four days. It would also be the first and last time that my parents would share a room with anything but enmity after their divorce. They took shifts watching over me, which meant in many cases watching television. I remember watching "Kung Fu" one night with my father there. I remember the two of them talking for fairly extended periods as they made their parental rotations. There was real concern, I think, that I might die.
All I know is that of my early childhood memories, perhaps my fondest one was being in that hospital, and seeing something that I had been too young all my life to witness: My parents sharing experiences and love, albeit for me, together.
Then I learned true disappointment: I asked if they were going to get back together and we could move back to the big house again. My father just looked at my mother and removed himself to the hall, just in sight of the door. First my mother talked to me, about how things were and would never change, then my father returned and my mother left, and he said much the same thing, impressing upon me that I was going to have to learn to accept how things were now, but that no matter where he was or where he lived, that he would love me. Somehow, that did not help very much.
He would move to another city after that -- Charlotte, if you must know. He did it before Christmas. That was a very bad Christmas for me...for my having such high expectations, then nothing.
[from 2006] I look at my own two boys, emulations of my brother and I in so many ways. I talk about my older boy more, in part because he can actually say and do a wider range of things, yet also because I identify far more strongly with the littlest Kendrick. My youngest son, for better or worse, is a clone of yours truly in his basic nature...what, I think, I might have been had even moderately less fearsome times prevailed in my early childhood.
Oh, you should see him, my fellow Kossacks. He is so irrepressibly happy, and optimistic, and not the least bit tentative or discouraged by life. He knows no fear, some but perhaps insufficient caution, finds cause for laughter and curiosity in everything. He loves to be with people, and sometimes to simply do the higher-function activities that only sub-two-year olds can derive from the rolling of plastic cars on tabletops. He's starting to talk, and make jokes, and shows a very strong aptitude for music and writing right out of the gate -- he can hold a pencil exactly like an adult, it comes perfectly natural for him.
And that his two, three, four and five-year Christmases are all coming up.
It brings me to tears to think on just how not like my own four-top of Christmases his are going to be.
And those are good tears to have.
This is a very good Christmas, after all.
All of those Christmases have passed for my littlest one now, even his sixth - today.
And not a single one was like the ones I had growing through the past five of his years. He has had the same home. The same parents. He has grown up to be comfortable sitting near his parents, to feel no need to find places low or high, locked or far away, to seek protection from members of his own household. Rather, he likes coming close sometimes, as we watch movies together, or build things or...like last night, he was just looking up as I sang Christmas songs at church service. That, and drew cartoons together.
This is my family. This is where my Christmases are and what they have come to mean to me.
We can rise above our origins, if we choose to do so, and chance rolls us a few good dice. And I have lived to see two infants grow to toddlers grow to small boys on the verge of becoming small men.
And to feel the greatest of pride that I had something to do with this...and the utmost humility that I have been given this gift of family, three times at least.
Once, the choice of marriage. Twice, the grace of fine sons. Thrice, the strength to let go of ancient bitterness at long long last.
I am writing this from my mother's new home. Tomorrow we will return to ours - and if the graces are kind, we will see many more Christmases together.
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