Draws Near

From now on, to the end of this blog, I’m going to try to just put it all down as it comes to me, for good or for ill. All I can do is place my memories and my thoughts on the palette, and daub from there.

***

I went to the landfill today to dump our accumulated week’s worth of trash. It was pleasant to cross over the mountain, down through the pass and into the valley where Daniel Boone labored and fought, all without a 401(k) or a Facebook page. The mountains still have a tinge of green on them, owing to the presence of good conifers, and the day’s light misty rain muted the December colors into something that might be somber for most people, but which lifts my spirits into the chilly air to spin in happy swirls. Hunched and munching cows, tree, river, pasture, rocky crag, diving hawk, ribbon of slick railroad track where we watched Marty Stuart throw toys and candies to local children from the Santa Train a few years ago, historical markers, county signs spattered with buckshot from restless teenagers, drab and dormant drapes of kudzu, waiting for the wizardry of springtime to nudge them back into furious growth, chickens in a pen like rust-colored commas, state trooper texting in his cruiser on the shoulder of the road while making the passing drivers feel guilty just for being there, scrub cedars loping up the hillsides like green bison, and finally the clearing where the dumpsters live, feral cats darting between the massive green metal boxes, looking for that next meal and trying to avoid the cruel hand or tire.

I tossed in my offering and turned to head back up through the pass to where my poor wife was resting,  slightly febrile and sore of throat and weary of body and deprived of sleep, thanks to my night noises and two spotted and brindled creatures who may or may not make it through this night. Turning off the highway onto our road, I saw something I hadn’t noticed on the way out. Our neighbors just off the paved road were standing on the front porch, discussing something, and their porch and yard were fully decked out in Christmas decorations. I waved to them and they waved back, and I moved on, mindful that this will be the first Christmas they’ll observe since the death of their patriarch back in the summer months. I still miss lifting a hand to him as I drive past their place. He was always outside working on some project, and was in fact outside cutting brush on the day when his kindly, wry heart gave out and he moved on to whatever is awaiting the rest of us.

So now I’m thinking of Christmastime and all the things that rush in to fill the space that such thinking opens within me. But no so much the presents and trees and whatnot. Rather, I find myself thinking of that world that I once knew, that world that is gone forever and will never exist again. I suspect that the grandchildren hear me talk of my childhood Christmastime memories with a sort of half-belief, even though I’ve never told them a lie. Could it really have been like that? Was it really that kind of world, that sort of life? Yes, it was, but only I knew that particular eternal-but-fading patch of the early 1960s, the one on which I found myself, and only my sister and I are left to tell the tale, though our tellings would likely stray far one from the other.

We used to have a Christmas parade in my hometown every year, and it was always on a Friday night. It was much more exciting than the annual rodeo parade, which took place on a Friday afternoon in September in the pounding heat and sunlight. The Christmas parade was red and green lights and tinsel ropes and dressed-up horses and big decorations on the lamp posts and strung across the streets on wires. One year they even had an elephant in the parade, and I was so excited and astounded at the sight of the great gray animal that I stepped out into the street, heedless of my mother’s clutching hand and beseeching voice, and I stared at the back of the beast until he was out of sight, way down Main Street, never to be seen by my kind again. I remember that he had some kind of decorations around his feet, like bunting with jingle bells, and he had a big saddle-like blanket on his back with some words on it, perhaps some logo of the Shriners who hosted the parade, and he was wearing some sort of kingly headdress. Where on earth the parade organizers got him, I’ll never know. It was a feather in our town’s cap.

My mother would take us to Sears once each year during Christmastime and let us browse the huge toy section, which for the rest of the year served as the garden/outdoor department. We were realistic children and knew that we would get very few toys, and almost certainly none like the ones we saw stacked before us along the packed aisles. But she understood that we needed to see such things, and that seeing them would not evoke covetousness in us, but rather dreams.

My most powerful memory of Sears back then (which the old timers still called Sears & Roebuck) was the smell of the store. There were three entrances. The front entrance faced Sixth Avenue and was almost never used except by people who managed to find a parking spot up there near the front. The back entrance, which opened into the usual garden/outdoor department but into the toy section during November-January. This back entrance was also next to the small luncheon counter there, a place where my friends and I, before we were encumbered with battered old used cars in our junior and senior years, used to eat on schooldays when in high school. An extremely tasty hamburger, grilled right there in front of you on the griddle inside the U-shaped bar of stools, along with a large fruit punch dispensed from the perpetually-streaming punch fountain, cost exactly one dollar, including tax. It tasted better than anything Ray Kroc ever conjured, and I can still smell the sizzling onions and the mustard and the beef patties and the buttered buns browning on the dark, hot surface of that griddle. And the Lucky Strikes and Camels curling from fists of the lunching businessmen and clerks.

And then there was the side entrance. It was dead center of the large parking lot where large cars, all unique in color and shape and power, parked and disgorged shoppers. Double heavy glass tinted doors, unassisted by any automatic opening gadgetry, swung in, bathing you in blissful air conditioned air in summer, and almost too-warm furnaced air in the wintertime. Right there in front of the side entrance was the candy and nut counter, an octagonal enclosure of glass counters full of cashews and pecans and Spanish peanuts and filberts and butterscotch and pecan divinity and marzipan and fudge and chocolate buttercreams and cherry cordials. The counters were topped with heavy scales with large white-faced dials and teardrop-shaped bins large enough to hold a basketball. The candy and nut department was run by women who looked like school cafeteria lunch ladies, of whom my mother was one, and they wielded these delightful heavy pewter triangular scoops which they dug into whatever treat the customer requested, and then dumped the contents into the metal bins on the scales for weighing and pricing, and then lifted the teardrop-shaped bins and slid the treats into pink, white, and gold-decorated paper bags bearing the Sears logo. The bags were folded over once and handed to the customer, who forked over the money (never a credit card), received the change, and began digging into the bags before three steps had been taken across the polished floor.

I sat in the Sears Santa’s lap once in my span of days. I think I just have been about two or three. What I remember is that Santa sat on a large wooden throne, the sort of chair that might have been borrowed from dais furnishings in the nearby First Baptist Church, which occupied an entire city block and was always pastored by Doctor Someone. Santa had glued-on white cotton caterpillar eyebrows. Santa had cigarettes on his breath. Santa had a deep, portentous voice. Santa gripped my sharp shoulders through his faux gauntlets a little harder than I liked. And Santa frowned like he’d stepped in dogshit when I began bawling and wailing to the full extent of my little lungs. Mother stepped forward from the velour ropes and whisked me off Santa’s lap. She and my sister and I walked home through the safe, chilled streets to our clean rental house. I marvel that I can remember the tears almost freezing on my red cheeks. And I marvel that I still believed in that red-suited old coot even after he terrified me atop his nicotined knee in the Sears store.

Mother bought us a little Christmas tree every year from the Optimists Club tree lot a block from home, up until we moved to another rental house when I was 13. At that point, my aunt gave us a ride to the Magic Mart out on the highway, and Mother paid a few dollars for a fake tree, which lasted us until I left to join the Marine Corps. I don’t know how long Mother kept it after that. But from my birth until my adolescence, we got a little three-footer from the Optimists Club lot on the corner of Fourth, next to the railroad tracks. The lot was run by elderly volunteers and was lit by an X of white light bulbs strung criss-cross across the half-acre of Scotch pines and balsams (“Them balsams!” sneered the man to Darren McGavin) and firs and spruce. We always got a Scotch pine, nailed to a wooden X-shaped base, and I always felt highly favored to tote it the block to our house on my rail-like shoulders. We had two strings of lights, the large old bulbs that were actually clear glass painted in red, blue, green, and yellow. Many of our bulbs had the paint chipped off the bulbs, so the bright light would shine through the little specks, creating a starlike effect. We enjoyed it.. We would string the lights and then begin hanging our ornaments, which we called Christmas balls. My sister and I have often discussed how little we knew of how things were supposed to work, and hicks like us had never been taught that those hooked wire hangers really are essential to hanging ornaments. We knew nothing of this technique, and had no hangers, so we would scrunch the tips of the branches down as small as we could and then hook the wire loop of the ornament across the top, then squeeze the ends of the wire loop together inside the little metal collar, and hope to get the squeezed ends into the narrow and fragile sleeve of the Christmas ball itself. It usually worked, and when it did, those Christmas balls could have withstood a tornado before they would have moved around, much less fallen and broken. They didn’t dangle; they abided. Some of the Christmas balls we had were quite pretty in my memory. Green onion-shaped ones, blue and silver round ones with recessed areas where a Star of Bethlehem or a creche might be painted in there. We had a simple silver-glittered star as the tree topper, and it was my other annual honor to be asked to stand on the red kitchen step-stool and place it atop the tree. Then we draped icicles (what Yankees call “tinsel”) in thick strands all over the tree until any whiff of breeze or breath or the warm air from the little gas stove in the living room would set the entire tree shimmering and moving in the silvery nighttime undulation of our little Christmastime, as if we were beneath the Pacific and watching argent seaweed moving with the low currents above oyster beds.

Then, in the coming days while my sister and I were in school, Mother would climb that same step-stool and hang an X of garland, this corner to that corner, using thumbtacks in the sheetrock corner up near the ceiling, and then drape this gold and silver X with icicles as well. When we came home on that particular afternoon, we would see the icicles dancing in the air above our heads, and it felt like Christmas and it looked like Christmas and we didn’t think about what we wanted; we thought about what we had.

Mother displayed a certain limited prodigal tendency with the wrapping paper and would cover our entire front door with it, using ribbon and three bows to make the door look like a gift box. Of course, she reused this same paper, ribbon, and bows every year until they wore out, as she reused the large sheet of wrapping paper with which she covered the thin little coffee table. On the coffee table, she would place the thorn branch in its cypress wood base, painted white, the tips of which we would stud with gum drops. A bowl of pine cones we gathered back at Taylor’s field behind the house.  Sometimes we had a sprig of mistletoe gifted to us by our drunk-ass uncle (Mother’s brother-in-law, not her brother), who would sometimes shoot some out of an oak with a shotgun. A little Santa in his sleigh with Rudolph in his harness was the centerpiece. Either my sister or I had received the Santa/Rudolph as a gift from someone when we were very young. Santa’s arm was crooked and there was a hole there, and the hole had originally been filled with suckers. We left it empty, but we did refresh Rudolphs’s nose every year with a dab of Mother’s red nail polish. There was also a large brown crockery bowl willed with filberts (my family called them nigger toes, and I still do) and pecans, with the set of nut cracker and pick poked down in there as well. A coconut was placed on top, along with a foot-long peppermint candy cane as big around as a tube of cookie dough. I have no idea how the tradition got started, but we had that bowl out every year, and as Christmas Eve approached, the bowl was moved beneath the tree where it would remain until Christmas Day. Our grandmother, whom we called Nanny, always visited us on Christmas Day along with my mother’s sister, and it was the tradition that Nanny would puncture the coconut in its three “eyes” with an icepick, then drain the milk into a glass and offer it to us kids. Then she would break the shell into pieces and scrape the meat from them and present this sweet, exotic treat to us. Finally, she would use that hammer to break the peppermint stick into chunks and put it in a glass candy dish my mother kept up in the cabinet for this annual ritual.

And right now, it’s time to turn the lights on the little tree on the hearth and to light the candles and the battery-powered lights all through the house and in the windows and to let this particular December Saturday night flow into our home here in the mountains. And I will think some more and bring up some more memories from down there where they live, hidden and much-loved, for now.

Blessings and sweet rest to each of you, my friends.

~ S.K. Orr