"Out here the bird don't sing
Out here the field don't blow
Out here the bell don't ring
Out hear the bell don't ring
Out here the good girls die
Now Cinderella don't you go to sleep
It's such a bitter form of refuge
Why, don't you know the kingdom’s under siege,
And everybody needs you?
Is there still magic in the midnight sun?...
The Killers, "A Dustland Fairytale" (PapaChach’s personal #1 song of 2009)...
The kingdom’s always, always, always under siege, I suppose; I just never bothered noticing until my own corner of it caught fire and burned to the ground.
Santa’s coming tonight; at least that’s what my kids think, and yes, it seems Bailey thinks so to, no matter what anyone tells him. He wants to believe, no matter what anyone tells him, and he’s heard plenty from the peanut gallery of late, but he’s doing his best to ignore them.
He believes.
I cooked tonight; first time I cooked a Christmas Eve dinner since way back in the old days, back in ’05.
Which isn’t that long ago.
Then again, it is.
I used to cook every Christmas Eve; I loved how we went from Bailey’s birthday on the 23rd to Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. The first three or four years of Bailey’s life, we’d have a big gathering of family and friends for his birthday; on Christmas Eve I’d cook up something big for just me, Lauren, and her folks; on Christmas Day, the immediate family would assemble at my sister’s house.
&&&&
Tonight, I made a ham and scalloped potatoes and green beans with toasted hazelnuts and browned butter.
Funny what things can knock you down this time of year; I knew I had a recipe for the potatoes somewhere, so I dig through the recipe box, for the first time in awhile, and there it was.
The recipe.
In Lauren’s handwriting.
I felt the breath sucked out of me and I felt the sadness come rushing to the surface, but the kids were running around me in the kitchen, and Lauren’s mother washed some dishes, and Bailey came in for a fresh pair of gloves, so I choked it all down, wrote the recipe down in my own hand, and went back to work.
Choked it back down, like we all do at this time of year, the season of enforced happiness.
Awhile later, with everything in the oven, I took a walk around the neighborhood to compose myself.
This dirty old town may be way more than halfway to dead, but it’s still the kind of town people come home to, from faraway places, for the holidays.
I walked the empty streets, kicking at the dusting of snow lining the cracked, heaving sidewalks, looking at the Christmas lights laid carefully over trees and porch banisters, glancing into the windows of the houses; living rooms and dining rooms well lit and filled with the energy of clans gathering together again.
I know some of these people, and as I walked, as I looked into the windows of houses belonging to families I know, and I counted their losses with my steps: brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and aunts and uncles and friends and lovers and mothers and fathers, all missing, and missed; gunshots and car accidents and cancers and heart attacks leaving ghosts and empty spaces where the living should have stood.
&&&&
I came back inside, dinner nearly done.
"If it was only going to be us I suppose we could have just had leftovers," my mother-in-law said.
"I felt like cooking," I replied.
"Christmas Eve dinner with just your mother-in-law, not too exciting," she said.
"I wanted to cook tonight," I said. "I wanted to."
She wiped a pan clean, put it on the drying rack in silence. The children of her only child ran around between us.
I wanted to cook. I think Lauren would have wanted me to. I took some comfort in the slicing and chopping and baking and sautéing.
&&&&
We ate at the table, the table Lauren and I bought fifteen years ago with money my Nana, still alive at ninety-nine, but barely; when my mother took our family pictures up to her today, in the nursing home, she kept looking at my image, my image, me, her favorite grandchild, we used to joke, she looked at my image and asked, "who is that?"
My mother-in-law and I ate in silence at the table; I don’t know what she thought about, but I know what I did. I thought of eating at that table a few years back, with Lauren and her dad there with us, with baby Bailey fast asleep in a nearby bedroom. Me and Lauren’s dad got drunk on bad wine and retired to the living room, where we made phone calls to my brother and my two sisters, all of us home with very young children, and we talked about the old days, the Christmas Eves past, the ones we spent together, and we talked about the ones we’d spend together once all the kids got older, never dreaming that we wouldn’t.
The kids ran around us while we ate.
My mother-in-law looked up at me and said, simply,
"This is delicious. Really good."
I knew she wished her husband and daughter could have enjoyed it with us. So did I.
Funny, no matter what you believe, or don’t believe, we feel as though this season should tell us something about rebirth, new life, hope, tomorrow; yet for so many of us, it winds up being about yesterday, about what is not and what will never be, about who is missing what.
She ate another forkful and smiled.
"This is delicious," she said, again.
I couldn’t think of anything to say in response, so I said nothing. We simply ate, and tried not to drink too much silence and absence while the kids ran around, around us.
&&&&
As some of you know, I have not done so well of late. I won’t get into the details now; I will just say that thanks to my indefatigable sister Deb’s efforts, we’ve established a concrete action plan going that seems to have me on the road to better times. Keep your fingers crossed...
Yesterday, of course, was Bailey’s birthday.
He turned eleven.
He originally wanted me to make cupcakes for him to bring into school yesterday, but somewhere along the way, he changed his mind, and he decided that he wanted Deb to bring in frosted brownies, with sprinkles on top. The sprinkles seemed very important to him. More important than the brownies. He obsessed about the sprinkles. Maybe obsessed is too strong a word, but we both had the feeling that had we just given him one of those little boxes of sprinkles to bring in to school, he would have been satisfied.
Tuesday, I went out and did all the shopping, all not being all that much, just for the kids. I never liked shopping, and especially Christmas shopping; it just rubbed me the wrong way. Though Lauren and I managed to keep a pretty even division of household labor going through the thirteen years of our marriage, I bailed from the Christmas stuff almost Day One.
The only shopping I ever enjoyed – other than food shopping in its various guises, but that’s a whole other category, isn’t it? – was shopping for Lauren’s Christmas gift. I’d always go out on Christmas Eve morn’ and get it done.
She was so easy to shop for; she liked a certain sort of funky jewelry, not the kind you’d get at a mall diamond factory, but the kind you’d find at an out-of-the-way shop in some downtown or other. I loved venturing into such a shop, with nothing more than a notion and a few hundred dollars cash in my front left pants pocket.
I’d always wind up finding something that would put a smile on her face, the secret lay in knowing that there was always something sitting out there in a display case that would play just right off her cornflower blue eyes and auburn hair.
And she’d wear it on Christmas Day and everyone would admire it and she’d smile deeply, strongly, safe in the knowledge no matter what, she had married a man who knew exactly what she liked.
&&&&
Yesterday the shopping was purely utilitarian; based on the list that Bailey had sent my sister and my sister-in-law, and on their on target suggestions for the little ones.
I got it all done in a few hours, and reflected on the distance I’ve traveled; the first Christmas alone, I couldn’t shop at all, and the only reason my children got anything was because my family and the folks in my brother’s office joined forces to get them gifts. Last year, I went out alone and got the job done, but by the time I finished I had to park my car in a far-away corner of a lot to cry alone, in peace, for a long time.
This year, I did it without thinking about it, and when the cashiers said, "have a great holiday," instead of saying, "I doubt it," I said, "same to you," and I sorta meant it.
When I finished, for good, I got into my car, parked in a mall parking lot, and I exhaled, and I felt oddly exuberant, and I turned the key on the ignition, and I turned on the radio, and I heard an old favorite song, unexpectedly, "Thunder Road," and I felt I’d won some sort of battle.
&&&&
The next day, Bailey’s birthday, the exuberance had faded, and I felt on the verge of tears from the moment I woke up.
I showed Bailey some pictures, of his mother, on the day he was born, sitting on a chair in our first house, in labor, a smile on her face.
"That’s your mom," I said, "on the day you were born. The day you came out of her."
He just smiled at the picture.
"C’mon, Dad. I gotta get to school on time. If I get in on time I get to do the announcements ‘cause its my birthday."
I choked back the tears. I thought of his mother, once upon a time, waking me up in the middle of a late December night, telling me, "I think my water just broke," I think of her giving birth to him, I think of a younger and way more innocent version of myself, cradling him at the moment of his birth, and cutting the chord, and his mother saying, "Bailey!" and me saying, "Christopher!," in honor of my beloved brother, and her saying, "John!" in honor of her beloved grandfather, and that’s how he wound up with two middle names.
&&&&
We got to school on time.
And there was my sister, at the front door, with two trays of brownies, with sprinkles on top, of course.
He smiled, and ran inside.
And me and my sister tried not to look at each other, and we went inside and hugged the teacher he had back in the year Lauren died, we hugged her in gratitude, I suppose, for the untold mercy and kindness and love she bestowed upon my son in the face of that loss, and we listened to Bailey read the announcements, and he looked at us with the biggest smile I’d ever seen, happy and proud that his father and aunt had watched him mouth those words into that microphone.
&&&&
We had a little party for him later that day, a lot of food, some family, some friends.
We might have something more, for his friends at school, next month, who knows.
Last night, he seemed happy enough.
His face lit up when we sang Happy Birthday to him.
Later that night, I got a message from my sister.
It read, simply,
"bailey seemed very happy and I know it is a tough day...
I did find some solace in seeing bailey hop out of the car today
in anticipation of celebrating and relishing his day...
as the killers say...
‘we are gonna turn this thing around’..."
And as I read those words, I thought,
His mother would be proud of us tonight.