Fourth Sunday in Advent

I was thinking today about the year when we didn’t think we’d have a Christmas.

We saw my daddy between two and four times a year. One of those visits was always between Thanksgiving and Christmas. He would show up and slam his truck door loud enough for us to hear it, and my sister and I would run outside to greet him. He would stand there, fists on hips, that devious, smiling, lean, dishonest devil of a father, laughing that completely delighted laugh of his, his weather-bronzed face split by an enigmatic smile, and scoop us up in his arms and swing us around as he loped to the front door where my mother would be standing, scowling and watching him the way people watch an unpredictable dog. He would visit for a while, then press a wad of cash or a check into Mother’s hand and try to kiss her on the cheek, an attempt she rebuffed with a hard shove and a “Quit!” And Daddy would always throw his head back and laugh, just as merry as an elf.

That one particular year — I must have been ten — it was three days before Christmas and he hadn’t shown up. Mother was worried, with good cause. I was sure she had bought us at least some presents, because she had done the usual sneaking around and locking her chifferobe, which she only did at Christmastime. But the old refrigerator didn’t have much in it; it certainly didn’t contain anything like a ham or a turkey or anything extra. We had the staples, but nothing that would fashion a holiday meal.

That evening, a car slowed in front of the house, and I ran to the window and peered out. The streetlight spilled a cone of chilled light down onto the dark yard. I could see that the car kept moving, the red church windows of its taillights moving away from our house, and I turned back and called to Mother, “Wasn’t him.”

She said something from the kitchen that I didn’t understand. But she was not in a good mood, and I didn’t ask her to repeat herself. I retreated to the living room, where the stove was glowing, and pulled a book from my library stack. I sprawled in front of the gas heat and began reading by the light of the Christmas tree, which was across the room by the window. Mother was scrambling eggs for our supper, and the buttery smell wafted in to me where I lay on the cold linoleum. When I think back to those years, I am always puzzled/fascinated by the common things that we never had, like throw rugs. Little things that we could have afforded, things that might have made daily life more bearable, but things it never occurred to my mother to obtain for us. She had grown up harsh and spartan and barefooted, and so it’s likely that such things never entered her mind. The Christmas tree was another example of this. I was in my twenties before I realized that there were these things called ornament hangers, and people hooked those things to the ornaments themselves, and then simply hung them to the branches of the tree. Mother didn’t understand this, or if she did, she saw the hangers are a luxury. So we pulled off the tops of our battered collection of ornaments, looped the tiny little wire “U’s over the branches, crimped them together, then poked the wire ends back into the ornaments (or “bulbs,” as we always called them), and pushed them in securely. None of our ornaments ever “dangled” or “hung.” They merely sat there on the ends of the branches, immobile as ice, unmoved by jostling of either child or adult. And they wouldn’t have fallen off if you’d driven a dump truck into the tree.

We didn’t have a stereo in our little house, but we did have Mother’s old black RCA radio/phonograph. During Christmas, the machine would be in constant operation during waking hours. The local AM station played a heavy rotation of Christmas music, and thanks be to Christ that Mariah Carey and Josh Brogan were unborn and unknown. We heard Bing Crosby, Mario Lanza, Nat King Cole, folks like that. And Mother had a small pile of albums, including a Christmas album by the Mike Samms Singers and one by the Living Strings. My favorite Christmastime album was trumpeter Al Hirt’s The Sound of Christmas. I can still remember the cover, with the Sebastian Cabotesque Mr. Hirt cradling his trumpet, an overcoat draped over his beefy shoulders. I also recall Ave Maria from that album, a song that always made me sit still and listen has hard as I could listen, reaching towards the sound, submitting to the tones, sensing the holiness of the music. Had I known it was a Catholic prayer and mentioned this to my mother, I have little doubt that she would have Frisbee’ed the album right out the back door. All I knew was that it was beautiful and that it transfixed me whenever it began playing. And that evening, while Mother was cooking the eggs and the oven toast and my sister was playing with her dolls in the bedroom she shared with Mother and I was reading and listening with my skinny nervous desperation for the sound of our tardy father’s truck’s engine, the Al Hirt album was softening the flinty and flinching atmosphere inside the little house that cost Mother $45.00 in rent each month.

Mother called us to the table and we ate in silence, as we always did, and then my sister went and took her bath in the little yellow-tiled bathroom, and after she took hers, I took mine, and then I put on my pajamas and my corduroy houseshoes and did some more cross-legged reading in the floor in front of the gas stove, and as my eyes grew grainy and my back grew feverish, I did something I did so often back then. I opened the little side door on the gas stove and propped my head in my hand, elbow to the floor, and gazed into the stove from the side. The glowing ceramic elements of the stove were beautiful to me, sculpted into Gothic patterns, arching over the blue and yellow natural gas flames. To this day, when I see certain interiors of certain cathedrals, I am reminded of how it looked, that long hallway of hot ceramic elements, radiating heat into the nose-numbing room with its shabby furnishings and low-wattage bulbs, and how mesmerized I was for so many winter hours. I learned my lessons during those years, learned to escape into pages, learned to make my world very small, learned to savor the quiet hours of hissing gas and hissing pages while troubles spun in other rooms and other minds. I learned to immerse myself without allowing myself to be drowned. I learned to listen while reading, to worry while thinking, to gauge the emotional temperature of the room while staring at the glowing elements. I was an avid student.

And so when the truck door slammed outside, I was absorbed in flames and plotlines and daydreams, and I didn’t react until the hard fist of my daddy was hammering on the twelve-paned door. By the time I lurched upright, my sister was already answering the door, and she gasped out “Daddy” before I could get to the threshold and see that eternally good-humored face as he walked in like lord of the manor. And walk in he did, tall and khaki-clad and flat-stomached, and he gathered us up and kissed us and exclaimed over us and complimented the little tree and its blinking lights, and then he opened his arms to my mother, who narrowed her eyes at him and stood aloof and cross-armed in the kitchen door. He sat down and accepted the cup of instant coffee Mother offered –after an appropriate several minutes of delay — and asked us about school and friends and teeth that had been shed and tears that had been shed and hair that had grown. And then it was time for him to melt back into that world we would never know, and he moved across the room to Mother and took her water-reddened hand and pressed a knot of green/gray paper into it. And before we could even begin to grieve for his absence, he was gone in a jet-stream of laughter left behind him, his truck ferrying him back to his own existence, his “pore, pitiful” children, as our relatives called us, watching after him and gathering the hard surface of the silent street into ourselves before we shut and carefully latched the door.

And the next afternoon, we went to town and did our shopping, and stopped at the grocery store on the way home, piling our bags at the steps of the little office where the kind manager watched over them while we bought food, and the manager called a taxi for Mother so that we could get everything home. And the creaking, spring-sprung cab was there in just a few minutes, and the elderly, cigar-chewing driver helped us load our purchases into the trunk, and Mother paid the fare when when we arrived back at out little house, and I doubt she tipped him because we had no knowledge, no awareness of fancy niceties like tipping, and we lugged everything inside, and when we locked the door behind us and turned on the lights and lit the stove, my sister melted into the bedroom with her own girl-distractions, and I sat in the floor with a book and listened to the scratch of a kitchen match on the side of the box while Mother lit a cigarette, and I listened to her bustling and putting things away and preparing other things, and I listened to her go to the old radio/phonograph and ease the needle down onto the spinning black grooves of Al Hirt and his Christmas brass music, and I pressed the pages down on my lap and fell into the ease and peace of Christmas, because it was going to come, and it was going to be our own normal Christmas, and we would have our own small, compact peace in the chilly Southern air.

~ S.K. Orr