Set the Controls

There is a magic to innocence, the type of quality that makes childhood at once powerful and fragile. Perhaps that is why those adults who don’t quite arrive at the place in life they envisioned for themselves often revert back to the simpler things in existence: pleasure, security, comfort.

Christmas time can be most difficult for those around us whose life is weighted by sorrow. Be it the devastation of a sudden loss, the redundant sting of humiliation or a mere vague uneasiness about the state of being – whether it is caused by financial constraints, isolation or an even worse character flaw that prevents one from identifying with the veneer of happiness so many shroud themselves in beginning the day after Thanksgiving and lasting until the dawn of a New Year’s Day when all chances are seen reborn.

But even the worst off among us cling to a memory – surely floating somewhere amidst the debris and flotsam of a wrecked life – that can kindle a spark of joy, a sense of noel, a warm feeling of wonder and excitement, the type of feeling that bridges the chasm between failure and hope.

For me that memory lies in the front yard and living room of a simple brick ranch house about one-quarter of the way down a residential street named Clifwood Drive in a working class suburb on the edge of Kernersville in 1975.

This is the Christmas memory that swells to the forefront each year. It’s the childhood innocence and wonder I recall – no matter how briefly – when that sense of magic hits me when I see the excitement of a child or even in the bountiful happiness of actors on television in holiday specials or commercial messages for Target or Zales.

The reality of that time seems ever so far away from present circumstances, but truly the wonder of it all is but a memory away.

I don’t know what made this Christmas stand out to me so. Was it a certain toy I was to receive or was it the emerging curiosity of a five year old child who just had to know if it was all really true? Did I ask my parents over and over for a month “Is Santa Claus really real?” Did I write a letter and place it in the mail in complete expectation that it would be received by a jolly old man somewhere far away in his snowbound home? Did I hear “Twas the Night Before Christmas” for the first time that year and lay in bed every night for two weeks wondering what the sound of reindeer hooves on my gabled roof would actually sound like?

I’m certain these many questions and images ran through my mind as I lay in my bed, warm in my pajamas, in the back bedroom on Christmas Eve that year. My parents knew I was an anxious child and even from the earliest days I remember they used music to calm me and to give them some breathing room. My dad had one of those stereos from the sixties that was like an old wooden trunk, with a lid that opened up and a record player and AM/FM radio on the inside.

As I lay in bed restless wondering where Santa was at that very moment, with my parents hoping I was asleep, or at least drifting off enough so that the music could cover the rustle and flurry going on in the front of the house, they somehow transformed our living room into a scene straight out of a Macy’s catalog. Boxes with bows and misshapen packages wrapped in colorful paper spread out across one wall beneath a broad and full six- foot Christmas tree laden with ornaments and tinsel and lights and topped with a star or an angel. Plastic white electric candles in the windows and on the mantle amidst large red stockings stuffed full with oranges and candy canes and nuts and chocolates. Still more packages in front of the hearth and beside the chair, each one with a name on a tag.

Before I had gone to bed I took one last look at that tree – a tree my father would plant in the yard the next week and one we would decorate the next two Christmases before moving back to Winston-Salem – and took a deep breath, breathing in the light, sweet evergreen smell and placed the glass of milk and plate of cookies in my hands on the brick hearth. I took one last look at the tree and the treats I laid out and wondered if he actually would bring presents down the chimney and if he would find the cookies and milk I left for him.

As I drifted off to sleep to the sounds of Christmas carols on the radio – a tradition we would keep until I was about 14 – I couldn’t know that so many decades later that memories of that very night could be so powerful. I had no way to predict the flood of emotions that would wash over me as I recalled that yes, even I was once innocent and had the right to dream of pleasure, security and comfort. I could not predict that a man so full of hopelessness and failure could look back on that small boy and wish for him to make different choices, to say no to this but yes to that. Or even just to simply continue to believe.

After my mother died so suddenly two years ago I cried every day for at least three months. Sometimes I would cry at my desk or in the middle of a business phone call. I would have to ask the customer to hold on and pretend I had a pressing office matter to attend to. Or I would take a break and walk outside the dirty warehouse I found myself working in. I would walk out to the edge of the parking lot and as the tears began to fall I would look at the large trucks passing by on the highway out front and think of the line from the Smith’s song “throw your white body down.”

But I survived that. I withstood it for 10 months until while finally cleaning out the last bit of stuff – junk really, plastic Chinese made possessions that amounted to the sum total of my mother’s throw away existence – my sister let slip the secrets of my mother’s heart. Secrets I can’t even repeat without sending other family members into a frenzy of rage that I would dare speak of them. Secrets that involve two lives I know nothing about and likely account for the emptiness of my mother’s brief life on earth – an emptiness she put into me with the expectation that I could account for three and succeed beyond the possibility of just one.

As the emptiness of my early adult life grew and grew I found myself at 20 writing poetry about abuse and abandonment and the isolation that many suffer in late capitalist consumer culture. Unable to connect and move with the flow I found myself refusing to succumb to the simple mindset that demands you stay focused on the price and just ignore the cost.

Soon after that my parents divorced when my father was downsized from a major corporation and lost all sense of meaning because all he ever knew was that company and he gave it 26 of his 45 years at that point and what else could he possibly do at that age besides mow grass or work as a courier when he wasn’t drowning his sorrows in juice or worse still looking for his own easy button. And my mother? My poor, suffering mother? I found some pictures of her recently from that time and the dazed look of sorrow on her face is as bad as anything I had ever seen until the day I saw her face contorted in a dozen directions and her eyes spinning around in her head as she lay there hooked up to the machines for a few hours until she finally found the peace she hoped for for so long.

I can’t think of any way to explain how much it hurts to learn your loved one’s secrets – the secrets that are the key to unlocking the mystery that separates you from understanding – and learning them just as you are beginning to process their death and move on with what’s left of your life. It’s a numbing feeling of guilt and shame that neither Jesus, drugs or exercise has been thus far successful in abating.

But that night, that blessed, holy and peaceful night 36 Christmas seasons ago I was a child. I had the weightless possibility of innocence as my guide and when I woke up in the middle of the night not sure what time it was I had a sense of wonder I’ll bet millions of people in this world would give anything to relive again.

I peeled back the covers and put my feet on the floor. I poked my head out of my bedroom door and heard silence but saw a warm glow of light from the living room. I walked slowly down the hall, creeping along the wall with a tip toe step my grandfather taught me while walking in the woods like the Indians did so many centuries ago trying to creep up on your prey. As I grew closer to the entryway to the living room I half expected to see a jolly fat man in a red suit with a white beard standing full bore in the middle of my living room with a giant sack of toys.

But what I saw was light and glitter and I stare in amazement at the scene before me. The soft glow of electric candles bounced from the reflective silver and green tinsel on the tree. Golden bells hanging from wreaths on the doorways and hanging from the walls sparkled with a type of magic light that lit my eyes as my mouth stood open. The room was filled with a sense of wonder and delight and if you asked me then I would have sworn up and down that Santa Claus had just left up the chimney.

As I gathered myself I thought to look at the plate of cookies. The glass of milk was half empty and only crumbs remained on the plate. I was filled with a joy of belief, buyout at the knowledge that Santa Claus was real and that he came to bring joy to children and warm their hearts with his saintly benevolence.

There are two things I took from my mother’s house that help me to cling to some sense of this childlike hope amidst the bitterness of my middle age. One is a rectangular wooden picture frame with three locket sized pictures of me as a child. One as a baby, one as a toddler and one as a preschooler. I hung it near my dresser so that each day and night I try to remember that even though I am lost and at times feel like the sound of my own breath is the last thing I have to hope for I was once a child. I had the innocence of expectation and no matter how bitter and hollow I feel now, somewhere deep inside that little boy remains.

The other is a football sized ceramic Santa Claus my mother made that year. She took a ceramics class somewhere – I can remember the excitement with which she told friends and relatives about it – and painted it a vibrant red and white with black boots and gloves. It was one of her most prized possessions and the source of much joy each season as he came out of his box and was placed on the mantle. His hands are clasped across his belly, his cap askew to one side as he winks at you playfully.

I’ve tried to explain to my small child how important it is to me that he keeps this Santa forever. It’s one of the few earthly possessions I have that could be a family heirloom and I hope that one day he understands how important it is to me that he cherish it. It’s marked on the bottom with my mother’s initials in golden brown paint “MRS 12-75″. I’ll try my best not to give him any of the weighty things my mother gave me. But this one possession can connect us seamlessly across the generations.

Each year at some point between December 10 and December 25 I will have a very sad moment. Most often it comes at random, like it did in the coffee shop last year. I’ll hear Judy Garland or some other golden voiced singer crooning the soft lines of “Merry Little Christmas”. It will start so blissfully. So comforting. By the time she reaches “through the years we all will be together …” I will be in tears and hoping no one sees me. I’ll think of the many opportunities I had and the many times I failed to rise to the occasion and make a choice that led somewhere besides ruin.

But by the end of that song I will be filled again with hope and as I continue to focus on the sound of my breath each night as I try and quiet my mind and find a pathway into the peace that comes with slumber I will continue to long for that hope that bridges failure. I will keep searching for that child deep within me and cling to some sense of that magical night when I lastly believed.