NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP

 

The clock ticks over another minute. Thoughts spin round creakily like a hamster on its squeaky wheel. Fold the pillow, rearrange the blankets. Next to you your spouse sleeps peacefully. 3 a.m. Count sheep, count former lovers, count days left. Doze for a minute or two. 3:20 a.m. Get up. Check Facebook. Open the refrigerator door and peer in. Leftover pizza– ooh, chicken, bacon and spinach on white sauce, your favorite. Put a slice in the microwave. Eat the limp slice of pizza. Drink a glass of water. Brush teeth. Trundle back to bed. 4:16 a.m. Sigh. Turn over on your other side. Practice breathing. Think about your father, the bill you forgot to pay, the thing you said that time. Just as the sky begins to lighten in the east, sleep overtakes you at last. And then it’s time to get up.

We can’t fall asleep. Well, of course we do eventually lose consciousness, having worked until we’re bleary-eyed, or driven in straight-through from San Antonio, or had enough cocktails to fell a small horse. But we aren’t sleeping easily or well. 70 million people in the United States are believed to be afflicted with sleep troubles, generating some 43 million prescriptions for five billion dollars in sleep aids.

In 2006, when Lunesta first appeared on the market, people were so seduced by the lurid green butterfly floating across their television screen (promising them the good night’s sleep they deserved) it more than doubled the amount of money Americans spent on sleeping pills. One physician,David Claman, director of the UCSF sleep disorders center, told the San Francisco Chronicle “In the 12 years I’ve been in practice, this was the only time I’ve had a line of people out the door waiting to try a medicine.”

The National Sleep Foundation estimates that including health care costs we spend $14 billion dollars a year trying to fall asleep. When you add in indirect costs like loss productivity and property damage (i.e. from accidents caused by the sleep impaired) the number shoots to more than $35 billion dollars. Ad Age reports that the current recession has not affected the sales of sleeping pills (or antidepressants.)

43 percent of people aged 13 to 64 report that they rarely or never get “a good night’s sleep,” and 63 percent of American adults believe that their sleep needs are not adequately met during the week.  Between 2000 and 2004, prescriptions for hypnotics for individuals age 20 to 44 doubled and those for children age 10 to 19 increased by 85 percent.

We’re really in a state here, aren’t we?

The ability to transition from a busy day into a state of restful sleep is for many people a lifelong challenge, and trying to get children to fall asleep (and children arriving in your room wanting another story, a drink of water or the eviction of the monster from under the bed) contributes to our bedtime woes.

Nowhere has this been more humorously illustrated than in last year’s smash hit of Go the Fuck to Sleep, a children’s book for adults, written by Adam Mansbach, which reached number one on Amazon.com’s bestseller list  a month before it had even been published. (An email link sent to booksellers in advance of the book went “viral,” because anyone who has ever tried to get a toddler to go to sleep felt resonance with the book. The combined “hits” on YouTube for readings by Samuel L. Jackson or Werner Herzog are at 1.4 million.)

When my own son was an infant, he suffered from colic. Night after night, he wailed. My mother was staying with us and the three adults took turns walking the floor with him. I remember feeling asleep on my feet, it was all so exhausting. Then one night I put on some music and he stopped crying. Within a few minutes he’d settled down and fallen asleep.  It was a Billie Holiday record and over the next few days, we discovered that the child could be soothed and eased into sleep by Billie Holiday and nothing else.

I wonder if it would work now, as that baby boy is 17 years old, and he still doesn’t sleep much. I can hear him moving around in his room, listening to music or talking on the  phone. On mornings where he doesn’t have to get up, we won’t see him until noon at the earliest. At least we don’t have to walk the floor with him anymore.

It’s hard to put away your toys and go to bed. (And conversely, once we do fall asleep, it’s hard to stir out of that cozy and warm bed and face the day.)  But we need the sleep. That suspended sensory activity creates a heightened anabolic state which allows for the growth and rejuvenation of the immune, skeletal, muscular and central nervous systems. Many migraine sufferers find relief in a sleep state, and conversely  numerous studies show that wound healing is significantly slowed in the sleep deprived. A very rare and terrible inherited condition called “Fatal Familial Insomnia” has cruelly demonstrated that  we cannot survive without sleep.

While it is difficult to shift from the constant forward motion of our days to a good night’s sleep, anxiety is one of insidious components of insomnia that plagues us day and night. Not necessarily clinical anxiety, just the regular day-to-day worries can keep you awake. For instance, the number of people seeking assistance with insomnia jumped dramatically after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

When we are asleep we are vulnerable. We are not in control of the situation that surrounds us. We must be willing to let go and let nature take its course. It’s hard to do that if you don’t have faith that you will wake up again. People do die in their sleep. My own mother-in-law sat down for a nap in her recliner after a nice breakfast with her daughter, fell asleep and died so quietly that no one knew until they went to wake her. She was 94, but it can happen to people of any age. Every new parent knows the anxiety that lurks in the spectre of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Or pity the poor man or woman who awakes to find their spouse’s body cooling next to them. Each year 38,000 people die from sleep apnea. No wonder we’re reluctant to let go.

As a child I used to recite a bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Well, honestly, I don’t know what my mother was thinking when she taught me this. We didn’t go to church on Sunday, we went to dog shows. The message I got from this little ritual was not “God will look after me no matter what” but “I could die before I wake up.” (I’ve noticed on a recent recording that the prayer’s been adjusted to the less worrying “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, Thy Love go with me through the night and wake me with the morning light.” ) But it was the prayer she’d been taught as a child and she simply handed it down. I counter-acted this by saying this little five-word spell  to my parents every single night “See you in the morning.”  I didn’t teach the bedtime prayer to my son, but I noticed that after my father died that he added that same promise each night before he went to bed. See you in the morning.

In addition to bedtime prayers, most of us had sleep rituals as children. We would put away our toys and start winding down for the day. We’d have a bath and put on our pajamas. We’d be tucked into bed. Perhaps there would be a story. I started thinking about this one night when the hamster wheel was going around and around in my head while I was struggling to get to sleep.

We pack our days full. An estimated 95 percent of us engage in some kind of electronic stimulation in the hour before bed– television, computer, cell phone, and sometimes we bring that stuff to bed too. We fall into bed exhausted, our brains still feverishly working on whatever dilemmas we faced in our waking hours. No wonder we aren’t falling asleep. Though my husband can fall asleep anywhere, he was game to try the experiment I suggested.

We cleared our bedroom of accumulated junk, books and newspapers stacked next to the bed, clothes left across a chair and never put away, things stuck in the room because we had no other place to put them. I cleared all the surfaces and put a vase of fresh flowers on a dresser. I made a point to actually pull together a complete set of sheets, lovely Egyptian cotton the color of hope. The bed was made up with the precision of hospital staff. (That would be my husband, I’ve never been any good with corners.)

We chose midnight as our bedtime. It might not be optimum, but it was realistic given our habits. An hour before bed we turned off the television and the computer. (Harder than you might think.) We put the phones on the charger and left them there.

Night-clothes were laid out on the bed. One of us brewed green tea. We had showers and put on our jammies and sat in bed together drinking our tea. We talked, but we agreed that we would not talk about the problems that had beset us during the day, whether in our own household or in the wider world of news and politics. We were gentle and quiet with each other. Occasionally we read, but again, we tried to choose carefully; a biography of John Wooden or a well-loved novel. No controversy, and no despair. Sometimes there was soothing music. Sometimes I had to make a conscious effort to settle my thoughts, but having the hour of bedtime preparation really helped. Occasionally I’d use breathing exercises to relax. The end result? We fell asleep. We slept well. We awoke in the morning refreshed and energized.

Then the inevitable happened. We got busy with other projects. We started using every last minute until the one where we fell into bed. Elmer started dozing off in front of the television. I started staying up all night writing. The room filled up with more stuff. The tea stayed in the cupboard. I was going to bed as my husband was getting up. (And I have to say I’m not beset with insomnia now, but only because I’m exhausted. I’m running on afterburners. When I wake up again, it might be three or four in the afternoon. And that’s no way to live.)

So to ring in the New Year, we are turning off the television at eleven. We are clearing our bedroom of accumulated junk, books and newspapers stacked next to the bed, clothes left across a chair and never put away, things stuck in the room because we had no other place to put them. Surfaces will be cleared and polished and there will be flowers again, and Egyptian cotton sheets the color of– spring. Maybe I’ll buy myself new pajamas. Santa brought a glass teapot and flowering tea with which to close the day. We will make an effort to be kind and gentle with each other for at least that last hour of the day. Thy love go with me through the night and wake me with the morning light.

 

A Letter to Yo-Yo Ma

Six years ago today, my father died. In the years since, I have written this letter in my head many times, as I have wanted to tell you what a profound and lovely part your recording Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone had in the last days of his life, and how it continues to connect us to him even now.

My father, Larry Vonalt, was chairman of the English Department at the University of Missouri at Rolla. I wouldn’t have mentioned that except that teaching was such an intrinsic part of everything he was. He was very interested in film, and loved music, though he himself was not particularly musical.  When my son Julian turned five, Dad suggested that we sign him up for cello lessons, and offered to pay for them. Julian’s father is Chinese American and Dad noted that Julian could look to you as an excellent role model. Surprisingly, we were able to find a cello teacher in Livingston, Montana. We bought our son a half-size cello and he began to learn. He did not turn out to be a virtuoso, or even very disciplined, but he stuck with it for several years.

In the meantime, my father was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. He took an optimistic view and we followed his lead. We should have seen that if the disease didn’t destroy him that the treatment surely would. In January of 2005, they took out the larynx, robbing him of his voice in an attempt to save his life. He went on teaching, using a little box that buzzed when he held it up to his throat to “speak.”

That summer Julian, then age 10,  and I went to spend a few weeks with my Dad and stepmother. Julian dragged along the cello– now three-quarter size. We have dozens of photographs Dad took during that visit of Julian set up in the livingroom, all knees and elbows, glasses sliding down his nose, lost in concentration as he played. He would play until he made a mistake and then he’d say “Wait, I messed up, let me start again.”

In September, Julian turned 11 and among his many presents was a copy of Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, a gift from my mother. I don’t know when Julian started playing it, I don’t even remember hearing it until I finally heard it, if that makes any sense. We had learned just before that there was nothing more to do for Dad’s cancer. I don’t know if they told Dad to get his affairs in order, or if they suggested an amount of time that he might have left. All I know is that one day late in August he’d sent me an email asking if I wanted his poetry books, and when I read that I began to sob.

My husband and I went with Julian out to Seattle one weekend in November. Driving home on a gray Sunday afternoon, through the Bitterroot mountains of western Montana, Julian leaned forward and asked if we could play the CD that my mother had given him for his birthday. I said sure, and he handed it forward. For the next four hours, we listened. We listened to it through the dying light of evening, and we listened through the star-spangled darkness of a Montana winter night. If we spoke at all, it was only a word or two. My husband stopped to put gasoline in the Volvo; Julian and I remained in the car, listening.

When we arrived at our little farm, I got out of the car, unlocked the door, walked into the house and booted up the computer. I did not even take off my coat. When I found the CD on Amazon, I ordered a copy to be sent to my father by next day mail.

By some miracle, they actually got it to him on the next day, and the email I received read “Thanks for the Yo-Yo Ma CD. I like it very much. I’ve always liked the music Morricone did for spaghetti westerns, but I had no idea it could sound like that. The piece from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly reminds me of that t-shirt you sent me when you were in school in Boston. You know, the one that says ‘The Good, the Dad and His Money.’ Thanks again. Love you guys, Dad.”

We drove from Montana to Missouri see my father for the last time that December. When we walked in the door, he was listening to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone.  He listened to it every single day we were there. Sometimes his wife would go to put on something else and he would shake his  head. No, he wanted to hear the Morricone.  He was failing quickly. He went into the hospital briefly to have a feeding tube placed, and he wanted to hear the music in the car as we drove him home. It was on all the time. It was as if that music gave him the courage to accept his own death, which was coming for him, whether he was ready or not.

You’d think we’d all have grown to hate it. You would think that none of us would ever want to hear it again. But we went on listening. On the 17th of December, we went back to Montana, promising to return in a few weeks. The doctors assured us he had at least that much time. Hospice made it possible for him to stay in his home, but on the morning of the day after Christmas, pain management became problematic. The ambulance came to take Dad to the hospital, and when they closed the door, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone was still playing on the stereo.

His wife called early in the afternoon to say that he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. I did my damnedest to find a way to get there. They’d hold the only flight for me leaving Billings, Montana if I could get there in the next 40 minutes. But Billings was 120 miles away. My husband said “Just get in the car, I’ll drive you straight through to Missouri.”  Missouri,  1481 miles away. It might as well have been the moon. Julian put on the CD and we sat together for the rest of the day. When the call came at 8:30 that night to say that my father had slipped away, we were still listening. If we’d gotten in the car to drive there we would have only made it as far as Denver.

I did go back the first week in January. That evening, as we sat down with a glass of wine, my father’s widow put on the CD. Perhaps I looked stricken, because she paused and said “Oh, I’m sorry, wouldn’t you rather not hear this?”

My voice cracked when I answered her. “It’s fine. Please. I’d like to hear it.”

“I just couldn’t bear to lose the music too,” she whispered.

Julian stopped playing the cello. He said that after his Grampa’s death it just made him too sad. I only listened to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone in the car, because hearing it was so intensely painful and so intensely beautiful and it forced me to embrace my grief. Sometimes I cried so hard I just had to pull over to the side of the road until I could regain my composure. It’s a funny thing because even though I was so sad, the music made me feel connected to my father, as if when I listened to it we were still together. Ecstasy of the Gold was particularly difficult because it always reminded me of that dopey t-shirt, and it was the track I listened to the most.

Not too long after we left Montana for good and moved to Ohio so that Julian could attend a performing arts high school. He was admitted to the 8th grade after auditioning for creative writing. One day, though, he stopped to talk to a boy carrying a cello case– and the boy invited him to try out for the orchestra. Julian was pretty rusty– it had been two years since he’d even picked up the bow. But he did try out and they did accept him, and he did make his way up through the ranks. He’s a senior now, and his major area of study is music.  He plays the cello every single day, sometimes I fall asleep hearing him play into the night. He has two private teachers, plus the cello instructor at the school, and daily orchestra practice. I imagine he will play the cello for the rest of his life. We have talked about the music from Ennio Morricone’s films, but of course, the printed score is not available to the public. When I hear him picking out passages by ear, I don’t know if my heart will break or burst, but I know my father would have been very proud of him.

With time, the grief has eased a bit, it’s less ferocious. I can listen to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone now without falling apart, and I do choose to listen to it quite often still. Thank you so much for making this wonderful recording that allowed my father music for his last days with us, a score by which to leave this earth,  and years later, still a way of staying in touch. It has been a most remarkable gift, and we are forever grateful.

Stop in the Name of Love

It’s the Monday of Labor Day weekend. As we approach the intersection of Main and Fifth streets, the light, long yellow, turns red. We stop, but the car behind us in the adjacent lane guns it through the intersection. To our left, on Fifth Street,  is a City of Dayton Police Officer in his patrol car. We chuckle a bit, expecting the cop to pull out (he has the green after all) and pursue the scofflaw. To our consternation, the officer simply drives across the intersection at a leisurely pace and onwards to whatever non-pressing destination awaits him.

In the days that follow, I make several attempts to bring this incident to someone’s attention. Anyone. It is deeply disappointing that an officer of the law cares so little for the enforcement of those laws that he simply does not bother. I cannot find anyone who is interested. I leave messages at several different offices and not one single solitary representative of the Dayton Police Department bothers to return my call.

While the Dayton Police Department’s tendency to turn a blind eye towards traffic misdemeanors is worthy of a column in itself, just looking at the issue of red-light tickets in our fair city should be enough to make you pause. From 2003 (when red-light ticket cameras were installed in ten intersections around the city) until June 2011, 92,900 citations for failure to stop were issued. As of last summer, 46,124 remained unpaid, a staggering $3.9 million dollars worth. The city mulled the possibility of impounding vehicles that belonged to individuals who had racked up more than two traffic camera tickets. 53 percent of the local paper’s readership felt that was “too harsh.”

Typical were public comments like this one from “Loralee.” (Quoted here just as she wrote it, non sequiturs and mangled grammar intact.)

“these red light (and now speeding cameras)are causing more accidents then doing good.People are slamming on thier breaks inorder to not go through a red light causeing fender benders wasting police time with these minor traffic accidents. there is a camera just down the street from where I live so I see it all the time.We are already short staffed with police patroling the neighborhoods.Hate the idea! I think they have been watching too much reality tv! Parking wars????!!!! from Dayton by Loralee “

In Seattle, a reporter from the Post-Intelligencer was snagged violating a red light. He wrote a column about the experience (he had “rolled” the light, turning right on red) and attached a poll to his story, inviting readers to make known their feelings about the cameras. A woeful 52 percent opined that the cameras should be “removed completely,” 14 percent thought they could stay but they should have “much smaller” fines, and 8 percent were spread over a variety of non-favorable responses. Only 25 percent of those polled were in favour of increasing the number of red-light cameras. 1 in 4. You know, that’s  pretty shameful. What earthly reason could there be for not wanting a red light camera unless you make it a regular habit to plow through intersections? (There is a famous red-light camera photo of a guilty-looking platinum blond woman with her hand wrapped around the phallus of her passenger– no doubt she was, is and always will be vehemently opposed to cameras.)

The Seattle writer went on to say that now he stops at yellow lights. In Boston, we used to joke that the light turning yellow meant “speed up.” It’s not such a joke anymore, because the overriding selfish desire of drivers to “make the light” has made that quip a reality. And people die.

People like Barbara Ryan, 44 and her daughter, Joanna, 11, who were killed in Bethpage, NY when a tractor-trailer failed to stop at a red light. The truck driver was not drunk. People like Los Angeles Angels rookie pitcher, Nick Adenhart, who was killed in Riverside, CA when an intoxicated driver failed to stop at an intersection and drove his minivan into the baseball player’s car. An acquaintance of ours, the distinguished and very kind William Dwelly, who was out running errands on a Saturday morning in his hometown of Spartanburg, SC. A woman driving a truck was distracted and “missed the light.” She was not drunk. She was not charged. Bill was killed. The poor sap just trying to cross the street in the photo accompanying this piece. Journalist David Halberstam who was being driven to an interview by a student. The student (not drunk) was anxious to “make the light” and turned left in front of an oncoming car. Think for a minute of two-year-old Morgan Lee Pena, napping in her car seat as her mother drove her home from a play date. A harried businessman, not drunk,  trying to make a call to say he’d be late for a meeting missed a stop sign and smashed broadside into Morgan’s mother’s car. Little Morgan died of fatal head injuries. The man received two tickets and a fifty dollar fine.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)  classifies broadside (or t-bone) collisions as the most dangerous kind of car accident. While these collisions only account for approximately 29 percent of all automobile accidents, they make up 51 percent of all traffic fatalities. Look at it this way: more people are killed by being broadsided than are killed in every other kind of car accident put together.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, cars are not engineered to absorb side-impact force. Though some now have side air-curtains, many still have very little in the way of shock-sustaining forces. Sport utility vehicles are very prone to rollover when hit from the side. The other reason has to do with the way our bodies are engineered. Our necks and backs and brains are built to withstand the motion that we think of as “whiplash,” a violent forward and backward motion. But it doesn’t work as well when the blow is from the side, resulting in head and brain injuries, skull fractures and broken necks.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been very successful in developing an enormous stigma for drinking-and-driving. They take credit for reducing “alcohol-related traffic deaths” since 1982 by nearly one-third. Their lobbying efforts have led to prison sentences for repeat offenders.  They were successful in reducing an actionable blood alcohol level from .12 to .10 to .08 percent. They spearheaded a constitutionally questionable program that allows law enforcement to establish “sobriety check points” where drivers could be stopped without any probable cause and examined as to their ingestion of alcohol.

A 120-pound woman with an average metabolism can reach a .08 BAC by consuming two six-ounce glasses of wine over a period of two hours, and in fact, people with BAC of .08 to .10 are involved in fewer significant car accidents than individuals with BAC of .01 to .03, which is what you can achieve with a single dose of cough syrup. Eventually the founder of MADD, Candi Lightner, was forced out of the organization by people she describes as “radical prohibitionists” and she herself has joined a DC-area liquor lobby.

“Driving while impaired” may be the only offense that can be prosecuted because a situation exists in which an actual crime might occur. It is a bit like prosecuting a hungry person in a grocery store because they might shoplift a loaf of bread.  I don’t think people should drive while impaired– whether they are impaired by fatigue, low blood sugar, prescription medication, cell phone use or the fact that they had a fight with their boss, kid or significant other. But there is absolutely no certainty that an individual getting into a car after having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer after work will cause any harm to any one.

Yet, the local gendarmes spend considerable effort and expense on questionable “sobriety checkpoints”  every holiday weekend of the year– and all the while allowing any number of drivers to blow through controlled intersections, putting themselves and dozens of others at terrible risk. If a driver makes it a habit to run red lights, how many times do you think that he’ll be able to do so without being involved in a serious accident? One time? Five times? Ten times?  Just counting the intersections where there are red-light cameras, drivers in Dayton have breached the red  light nearly a hundred thousand times in eight years.

Perhaps you’re not one of those people who pushes the yellow light, sliding through as it turns red. Maybe you’re a fine upstanding citizen in that regard. Or are you rolling those right-on-red “stops”?  The law is not that we merge, you know. It’s that we come to a full stop. We once saw a Dayton Regional Transit Authority bus nearly take out a guy that was walking his two dogs . He was crossing a side street, and the walk-light was in his favor, when the bus decided to move. He jumped back and the bus driver slammed on the brakes, but it was a very near thing. Last month one of my son’s classmates was knocked down and knocked out while standing on a corner. A woman in a Chevy Tahoe didn’t see him, didn’t look, and the impact tossed his body twenty feet.  You have to stop, a complete and utter stop.

Here’s the way to make people stop running red lights, blowing through stop signs, rolling around corners without slowing down and otherwise endangering everyone around them:

First offense is a thousand dollar fine.

Second offense is a thousand dollar fine and 3 day mandatory jail sentence.

Third offense is a thousand dollar fine, 7 days mandatory jail sentence, and license suspension until a Driver’s Education course is completed.

Fourth offense is a thousand dollar fine, 30 days mandatory jail sentence, license suspension, driver education and impound of car for six months.

If Dayton had been charging a thousand dollars on all those red-light citations, they could have collected (or at least  been owed) 97 million dollars. Wouldn’t you slow down and stop at the yellows if you knew there was the potential for those kinds of penalties?

Every morning my husband and son travel through 32 controlled intersections downtown on the way to school. My husband goes through all 32 again on his way  home. When school is over, we go through this slalom again. Everyday I worry that the law of averages is going to spell disaster for someone I love. Or someone you love. There’s nothing important enough to go through the red light at that intersection, the life you save may be your own.

A Cop at the Door

The doorbell is ringing. I am deeply asleep and it has rung several times before I surface enough to recognize the sound. It’s still dark outside and I squint at the clock.

“It’s the doorbell,” I say to my husband. “Who would be ringing the doorbell at six o’clock on a Sunday morning?’

“Larkin?” It’s my mother, visiting for the holidays, in the hallway. “It looks like it’s the police.”  The police? What. Why would the police I am confused. My husband starts to sit up and is immediately felled by a leg cramp. Isn’t this what we have husbands for, to handle a cop on the front step? The doorbell rings again.

In the 27 seconds that it takes me to sit upright, get out of bed, walk down the stairs, and turn off the alarm before I open the door, I think of four things. First, I am glad that this is a night I bothered to put on pajamas.  Second, third and fourth: did someone torch one of our cars? Are the neighbors okay? Is there a dead body on the front lawn? I mean, it is six o’clock on a Sunday morning.

It never occurs to me that it might be about my 17-year-old son. Or that something awful might have happened to one of his half-sisters halfway across the country.

When I open the door there is no one there. The Sunday paper’s been delivered though. Could they have rung the doorbell. Nope, a white sedan is backing up. It is . . . .  the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

The driver’s door opens and the trooper bounds out of the car and trots up the walk. He is wearing his Smokey-the-Bear hat, and his tie is flapping in the wind.

“Is this address 944?”

Is that code? I wonder.

“I’m sorry, what did you ask?”

“Is this 944 West . . . “

“Oh, no.” The address. “No, this is 1010.”

“Oh, okay. Well, do you know where 944 is?” He gestures towards the Cochran’s house on the left.  ”Is that 944?”

“No, 944 would be the other way, but on this side of the street. There’s just the red brick house.” I am trying to concentrate, but I am still groggy with sleep. I can’t think. “It could be on the other side of Salem Avenue, down that way.” Even as I say it, I don’t think that’s right, but I think the red brick house has a house number that is higher. I bend to pick up the newspaper and there’s a little black leather wallet under it.

The trooper, who seems young enough to be my son, turns a little pink.

“Well do you know that person?” he asks gesturing towards the wallet in my hand. “She dropped this when she was walking away and I, I was just trying to get it back to her.”  I look at the picture on the license.  It is a 30-something black woman. It’s impossible to tell if she’s attractive or not, the BMV never makes anyone look their best, and I don’t have my reading glasses on. The name isn’t familiar. I shake my head, and hand him the wallet.

“I don’t think so, I’m sorry. You could try that brick house on the corner. It could be 944.”

“Well, okay, thank you. You know, we just wanted to get it back to her, because, you know, she dropped it as she was leaving.”  I nod, though in truth I cannot figure out what he’s talking about. Why is he ringing doorbells in the middle of the night trying to return a wallet?  ”Okay, well thank you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I say and he turns on his heel and disappears down the steps and out to the street. I close the door and turn the lock. My mother is standing in the hall. “That was so weird,” I tell her.

“I wonder what the real story is,” she says.  She heads back to bed and I wander into the kitchen, pour half a glass of milk and bite the head off a leftover gingerbread midget. 944. Was that the brick house? I remember instead something that happened when I lived in Montana. Very early one morning, before light, two sheriff’s deputies drove out to the dairy farm of this nice couple to tell them that their 15-year-old son had been killed in an automobile accident. The couple, bewildered, said no that wasn’t possible. Their son was asleep in his bed. It must be somebody else. Of course, it wasn’t somebody else. Their child’s bed was empty. The boy had snuck out and met up with friends. There’d been a crash and he had not survived.

Before going back to bed, I continue down the hall and peek into my son’s room, and there is the sleeping form of my wild child stretched out across his bed. His iPod is still playing, illuminating the crook of his elbow. Tears well up in my eyes for a second, and I say a little prayer of thanksgiving that it was just a cop on some kind of surreal errand and not there on my threshold to deliver some kind of unbearable news.

Later in the morning I check the paper and online for mention of car accidents or anything else that might have involved the name of the woman on the license, but find nothing. She’s not listed among the inmates at the county jail. Why would she drop her wallet walking away? That was what he said, wasn’t in?  I check the address. Oh, it is the red brick house on the corner. I wonder if it is the woman with the Chevy Suburban, which rests in its regular spot this morning.  Why would she have dropped her wallet, was she running? Why wouldn’t she notice, and why would the state patrol have it? Why would they leave it under my newspaper if they were trying to return it to her? We don’t know her, really. Her ex-boyfriend used to wave in passing, he was always pretty friendly, peddling marijuana from a bicycle. But she’s always been a bit, well, aloof, for want of a better word. The neighbor across the street said she works as a stripper. Sometimes the dots just don’t connect.  I hope she got her wallet back.

CRASH

I knew this day was coming. I knew even before I started this project that I would reach a point where I would want to just to blow off the writing and crash. This is that night.

First comes the bargaining: it’s okay, you can go to bed and get up early and write, who will know the difference? Then comes the crankiness: why even bother, who even cares, why do you write this crap?  Then there’s the worst: the whining. I am so tired. I just want to lay my head down, I just want someone to rock me to sleep, I just want . . .

The truth is that I’m tired because I’ve been cleaning my house. How lame is that? The house is not that bad– it’s not like we’re in the running for an episode of Hoarders or anything. But there is a lot of stuff to sort through, and in the past I’ve just stuffed it in that closet or stowed it in those boxes or put it in the corner and thrown a festive tablecloth over it. It’s time to finally figure out where everything goes and put it there. We’ve been here for four years after all.

To compound my to-do list, Christmas is around the corner. And we’ve invited folks over. What is it about humans that makes us decide to replace the front door glass, paint the back door, install a new kitchen island and sort out the dresser drawers (underwear with holes to the trash, underwear with shot elastic to the trash. Hell, put it all in the trash) when we have an absolute no-fail, no wiggle-room deadline.  We must be nuts.

And I am tired. My back is a little achy, I have a paper cut, I need to do something with my hair and good God, it’s nearly two in the morning again? I am peering up over the edge of fifty and I guess it’s okay to be tired.

But before I can ramp up a full-fledged pity fest, I remember. One of my friends was just diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. She’s optimistic, her doctors are optimistic, she’s going to do her best to beat this. Still, one of our mutual friends was already spinning out a eulogy over dinner.

Eulogies are being written for the sister of one of my high school classmates. She drowned last week while on vacation in Mexico, and my friend struggles daily with authorities in another country  to have her sister’s remains brought back to Canada.

Last week, another friend joyfully announced her remission from leukemia and in the next breath said she was going in for more chemotherapy to keep it that way, and the way she said it  made it sound like she’d decided to go to Michigan for the weekend or something. She must be so very tired, but she is determined.

The near constant severe headaches plaguing yet another friend turned out to not be Lyme Disease (her original diagnosis, which would have been bad enough) but a godawful thing called Fahr’s Syndrome. When she told me in an email that this was what she was facing, I had to look it up. When I saw what it said, I wept. There is no treatment for this progressive neurological disease. Unlike my friends with cancer, she cannot get better. She and her husband have two daughters not yet in high school.

So who am I to even feel weary? My friends are the most amazing people, and I am humbled by their strength. If they want to pitch a fit sixteen ways to Sunday  surely that’s their prerogative, because life really is so damn unfair. It is not for me to whine about having all this to do, and wishing I had another week to spin my wheels. It’s not for me to complain that I can’t fall into bed because I will not be dissuaded from this relatively modest project of writing something everyday. I didn’t even say that I had to write something good.

Dear readers, please say a prayer for Audrey and Marilyn, for Stacy and for Sue.  Know, too,  that I am counting my weariness and minor aches and pains like blessings. Tomorrow is another day, and one of those tomorrows I am going to sort out my schedule to get the writing done first.

But for tonight, I really do have to crawl into bed. I am so sleepy I don’t think I can write one more

 

 

 

(word.) 

 

BABY TONY IN HEAVEN

Even with the air-conditioning going full blast, the truck is hot and the drive along I-20 out of northern Louisiana monotonous. It’s the end of Labor day weekend, and evacuees from the gulf coast are traveling north to escape Hurricane Gustav. When I left the motel in Monroe, a number of families have already set up camp in the parking lot.

We turn north out of Vicksburg on Highway 61. It runs along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Minnesota. From the 1920s through the fifties, it was an important trail for blacks leaving the deep south for better prospects in Chicago.  The New York Times‘ music critic Robert Shelton wrote: “Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river.”

We went up  Highway 61 as far as Greenville, noting the first legal liquor store in Mississippi (the Jigger and Jug Package Store, which opened in 1966) and stopping for a hamburger. We’re on the west side of Greenville now, so we just meander over to State Highway 1, heading north through miles of cotton fields and sleepy little towns like Rosedale, Gunnison, Alligator.

Just north of Round Lake, a roadside shrine catches my attention. There is a life-size painted plywood silhouette of a little boy waving, and a little red chair. In the ten seconds it takes me to decide to stop, I’ve traveled another 800 feet. I find a place to turn the truck around.

“What’s going on,” my 13-year-old son asks sleepily, awakened by the change in momentum.

“Nothing, I just want to look at something.” He sighs and closes his eyes again. The roadside memorial consists of a large cross, a couple of concrete angels, the little red chair painted with the words “Baby Tony,” a hand-lettered sign that says “Pray for My Mama” and about a hundred red and white bicycle reflectors.

I am interested in roadside shrines. It seems strange to say that I admire them, given that they are landmarks to someone’s heartbreak, but the impulse to erect them feels entirely right to me. One mother said that she felt closer to her daughter on the narrow median strip where the girl died than in the cemetery where her body was laid to rest. “This is where her spirit left this earth,” she explained, and that is explanation enough.

My husband has no patience for such things. He is a champion of getting from point a to point b in the most efficient way possible and we would never stop, let alone turn around and go back for a pile of stuff on the side of the road. But when I am traveling alone (or with my kid) I often stop. I’ve photographed dozens of them, but the results are always flat. The energy that’s there can’t be captured by the camera, I suppose. I go on trying, though and I am composing a photo when an SUV stops alongside the truck.

A woman gets out of the vehicle and hurries towards me. There’s a twinge of anxiety– have I trespassed? Have I done something to offend?

“Hello! Hello!” she calls. “This is my grandson’s shrine, Baby Tony. I made this for him.”  She is standing in front of me now, a woman in late middle-age, her salt and pepper hair pulled off her face into a tidy bun, still in her denim dress and flat shoes from church this morning. “I am so glad you stopped!”

We chat a little about the shrine, and she asks if I have time to come back to her house for a minute. It would be easy to say no, I really have to get on the road. It would be prudent to say no, wouldn’t it? My husband would be stunned that I would even consider saying yes. But she looks so hopeful I find myself saying “Sure, you lead the way.”

Baby Tony’s grandmother’s home is a tidy one-story house I’d passed a mile or so back.  Other than the marquee in the neighbor’s yard (“Have you robbed God? You robbed him of tithes and offerings. Repent for Grace”) it seems entirely unremarkable.

“Come this way,” she says, “I want to show you something.” She sounds quite urgent and I hurry after her around the side of the house. There, in a grove of trees is a trampoline and around the trampoline are dozens and dozens of red tricycles.

“After Baby Tony died,” she says, “people just started bringing them to me.”  There are  67 tricycles arranged  one after the other in a large rectangle. Some face left, others face right. There’s no significance to the number, Janice says. Sometimes there are more, sometimes there are less. When she’s been given a particularly nice tricycle, she has passed it on to a child that didn’t have a trike. “That’s the way Baby Tony would have wanted it.”

One of the tricycles is cream-colored and quite old; the others are all red and white in various states of repair. Some are entirely covered in rust. An orphaned tricycle tire hangs on the handlebar of a neighboring trike. Her daughter and grandson had been over to the house the night before the accident, she tells me. Baby Tony was three years old.

“I was sitting in my chair and he was sitting in my lap. He was such a sweet little boy. His mama said to him, ‘Come on Baby Tony, we got to get home to make some supper for your Daddy.’  He leaned up next to me like this and he said “Gramma, I’m going to see God tomorrow.’ I just didn’t know what to say to that, but my hair just raised up like this on my neck, see. When Baby Tony and my daughter were about to go out the door, he ran over and held his arms up for me to pick him up. When I did he put his little arms around my neck and he said ‘Pray for my Mama.’”

And on the next day, there was an accident. Just a single car, just a little ways up the road. Her daughter drifted to one side, overcorrected, left the road, and rolled. She spent weeks in the hospital, but Baby Tony was killed immediately. The first tricycle was there in Janice’s yard when she got home from the hospital that night.

It wasn’t every day, but at least every week, that another tricycle would appear. Some old, some brand new. She knows the details about some of the trikes, but others are more obscure, arriving in the night, or when she is away. She started lining them up along the edge of her yard, and as the line grew, she had to turn a corner and then again, until the never-ending parade of tricycles was complete.

“It’s very peaceful out here,” she says. “And if I feel sad, I come out here and it feels like Baby Tony is still with me.” She excuses herself and goes into the house, returning a few minutes later with a much-larger-than-life painting of a little boy in a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like an old soul, I think. “This is Baby Tony!,” she says, and her voice is full of joy.

I’m astonished to see that I’ve been there for an hour, and I still have to get on up the road to Memphis. I give her my address and promise to send her a copy of the photograph of she and Tony in the garden of tricycles.

“Oh, please. Wait just a minute,” she says and runs into the house. When she returns she puts a golden pear in my hand. It’s heavy– plaster, I think. “You are supposed to have this,” she says. Pears– the symbol of motherhood and immortality. I thank her for the pear and for taking the time  to tell me about Baby Tony.

“Oh no,” she says, “thank you. Thank you so much for stopping.”

I climb into the truck, waving at her as I back out into the road.

“What was all that about?” my son asks, awake now. We are passing the spot where Baby Tony left this earth and I explain that the lady was the little boy’s grandmother. “Oh, that’s so sad,” my son says. He picks up the pear. “I can’t eat this, can I?”

“No, it’s not real.” If I didn’t have the photographs, it might all have been a dream.

O Time in Your Flight

Here we are again, nearly one in the morning and I am face to face with what I feared. Well, fear’s not the right word. I do believe I’ve finally arrived at a place in my life where I am not afraid of anything. But this is my Achilles’ heel, and I am sitting here looking at it, just as if there’s an arrow buried there.

Before me lies The Assignment. But along with the wool shawl draped around my shoulders is the very real and heavy cloak of fatigue. I wrote until three a.m. I had day chock full of other responsibilities and the promise to myself that I will write everyday hangs over me. And I have written everyday– not just 500 word blog entries, but 2000-word pieces set out in some kind of halfway thoughtful and coherent manner.  But here we are, almost too tired to focus, with dawn racing up on the other side.

I should have started earlier in the day, but in all fairness, I didn’t always start on time when I had deadlines. More than one night I wrote through the night, all night. One morning the editor came in and found me asleep with my head on the desk, long columns of paper hanging from the ceiling around me. It had been a very complicated story and the outline was twenty-seven feet long.  I was nearly 15 years younger then, and I had better stamina– and I still had the same problem that plagues me now– time  management.

One of those years that I was at the paper I made a Christmas card that featured a photograph of  me at age 5, with a too-small bathrobe and wild hair, standing in front of our Christmas tree. Around the border of the card read the opening two lines from Elizabeth Akers Allen’s (1832-1911) poem, Rock Me to Sleep: “Backward, turn backward, O Time in your flight; Make me a child again just for tonight!”

While it isn’t a literary masterpiece, it is a remarkably forthright and sentimental song about aging, loss, and how in some ways we are eternally children longing for the comfort of our mothers. (You can read it if you like, it is linked above.)  I am extraordinarily lucky to still have my mother with me on this side of the abyss, as sharp and wonderful and difficult as she ever was– and still one of my very best friends.

She’s much more disciplined than I ever was. Over the years, she’s written a number of novels and a couple of those novels a number of times. I don’t seem to be able to crank out anything more than about 2000 words. Or less either. I say that half in jest, but I just don’t know if I really have a book-length project in me. And book-length projects are about the only thing that gives you any  breathing room in the writing game. Writing magazine-length pieces is sort of like trying to breathe through a snorkeling tube.

My father and I once had a terrible misunderstanding about self-discipline. We were in a restaurant in Livingston, Montana. It no longer exists, but while it existed, it was one of the finest restaurants in the world. A white-linen tablecloth place with Malpeque oysters and well-aged beef and a fantastic wine list in a dusty cow-town. In the summer the place is full of tourists and movie-stars, but in the off-season, it was our own kind of Shangri-La. You could close your eyes and imagine that you were somewhere else– until you struggled out the door into the wind.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving. The day before we had organized a community Thanksgiving dinner for 700 people, built entirely on donations and sheer hard work, and it was the best kind of magic. Those were the days when I felt that my very being was knit into that community. My father and his wife had flown in for the holiday and Dad was a big fan of Russell Chatham’s Livingston Bar and Grille, and we went there for a fine dinner, along with my husband,  Dad’s wife and my mother.  We weren’t quite to dessert when Dad suggested that Julian, then six years old, should take martial arts lessons.

I said we were concerned that Julian wouldn’t understand the philosophy behind the craft and would just use it as an excuse to kick people. I can still hear myself saying this. I remember thinking it was a fairly clever dodge, a foil for the real reasons that I didn’t want Julian, my half-Chinese son to sign up for Tae-Kwon Do or Kung Fu or the like. (What those reasons really are don’t require enumeration here.)

My father leaned across the table and hissed “It would give him something you’ve never had– self-discipline.” Had he hauled off and physically slapped me I wouldn’t have been any more shocked. I hadn’t lived with my father since I was 10– his responsibilities as a father had been taken up by someone else. I regarded him as my friend and since I was a little girl I had put him on a kind of pedestal. In the way that girl-children often do, I had been his protector.

“Dad, I write more than 5000 words each and every week for publication– that takes some self-discipline,” I offered up, a kind of half-hearted self-defense.

“I want some respect!” he roared  back.

Heads turned in the restaurant. The wait staff stayed in the shadows. I backed up in my chair, set my linen napkin on the table and walked out. I was out the door into the cold before I began to sob.

A friend who lived nearby drove me out to the farm, and my husband and mother and son arrived a little while later, Julian fetched from the sitter and still sleepy in my husband’s arms. My mother took a glass down from the cupboard and poured in a couple of fingers of Maker’s Mark and said without the slightest hint of irony- “You know how your father gets when he’s drinking. He thought you were ridiculing him.”

“What?!  Well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what he thought. I don’t care if I ever see him again,” I said, the sob rising in my throat.

“Remember the year that your father took off to write the Berryman book?” Of course I did. I was 9 years old. My father was working on a book about the poet, John Berryman, when Berryman fell (“leapt” being far too active a verb) from a Minneapolis bridge. While the death was shocking, it also made the timing of Dad’s project exquisite. If he had only finished the book.

“Well, because he didn’t finish the book, he wasn’t qualified to apply for tenure at Wesleyan. He’s never really finished anything.”

When I said that I wrote 5000 words for publication every week he heard “I write 5000 words for publication every week, unlike you.” Except that of course, I never said that. I wouldn’t have said it. I didn’t even think of it. My father was an accomplished  man in many respects, and an extraordinary English professor. I adored him. And when he was dying, I came to understand why he didn’t finish the Berryman book.

It fell to me to pack up his office at the university. In his office filing cabinet, there was an inch-thick file for every Berryman poem. Every one of them, and Dad had analyzed and researched each poem until there was nothing left there but dust. This writing business takes more of a delicate hand than that and once you have overworked the research, the magic isn’t there anymore. There is simply nothing left to write.

The brutal treatment for laryngeal cancer had robbed my father of his speech, and he communicated by way of a half-size yellow legal pad. When I went up to the hospital to ask him what he wanted me to do with those files, he scribbled “Pitch them.” I didn’t pitch them. I packed them up in cartons and dragged them home to Montana, along with the yellow note, my own cautionary tale.

You know the part of this riddle I still have not figured out? What made him so mean to me that night, anyway? Was there some reason he thought it was okay to attack his grown-up daughter in a nice restaurant? I tried to address this with him before he died, but by then it was too late to work it out. My father has been dead for nearly six years and I am still doing my damnedest to forgive him this. I’ve gotten close, but his behavior is still as inexplicable to me as if he’d been kicking a friendly dog.

So there’s a fair bit of baggage for me on this self-discipline stuff, at least a steamer trunk or two. Tonight I didn’t have it in me to write about any of the subjects I’ve made notes about (why obituaries should be more frank, the importance of stopping at stoplights, why I live where I live) and though I did glance at a web-site with writer prompts (Oh my God, no wonder there’s so much dreck out there) those too were discarded without a moment’s consideration.

Instead what we have here is really the whole raison d’être for this exercise: keep moving, keep writing, don’t let my dreams get stuffed into filing cabinet drawers. There are stories out there that still desperately need to be told.

LET EVERY BELL RING

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Last Christmas was the very worst one ever. I couldn’t quite figure it out. There had been Christmases past that were poorer, lonelier, more bizarre. There was the year I knocked over a 100-year-old Chinese man with my mother’s cast-off Chevy Citation. (He lived.) Or that first Christmas in Montana when I only knew six people and none of them invited me over. Though I had no decorations, I picked up a bedraggled fir tree from an abandoned lot on Christmas eve (the sign said free) and set it up in a bucket of water in my apartment, festooning it with snowflakes cut from typing paper. Or that Christmas six years ago, when my father slipped away from us, unmooring me in ways I could not even fathom.

But since then there have been holidays full of joy, surprise, and adventure. I’d reclaimed the holiday I love best. I only had to look back through the photographs of grinning children, exquisite lights, Christmas cupcakes to remember.

But not last year. I went through the motions. My mother came to visit. I made cookies for friends and neighbors. We had a lovely tree and nice presents and the whole time I just felt dead inside. I did not keep Christmas in my heart. Hell, I couldn’t find it with both hands. I was as cold inside as icy rain. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t snap out of it. No matter what I did to kindle it, there was simply no joy.  When the season blessedly shuddered to a stop, it was with relief that I packed away each ornament, every strand of lights, the singing reindeer. I couldn’t wait to be done.

This autumn they seemed to be cranking up Christmas even sooner. I understand that with the economy teetering that merchants must wring every penny they can out of holiday shoppers. I understand that for many this is what keeps their doors open the rest of the year. But still, I resented Christmas rushing in before Halloween pumpkins had even been carved, let alone extinguished. The sight of people skipping autumn for glitter and tinsel foretold that grim drumbeat. I muttered and grumbled about the commercialization of the holiday until the  middle of November, when I turned up the Christmas music on the radio and gave in.

I am determined to make this Christmas different. I can’t survive another one like last year.

I’ve started really looking at decorations, not just seeing them. Santa perched atop a Columbus, OH candy factory, a life-size nativity scene, or a crazy mess of mismatched twinkling lights and plastic reindeer that still manage to look beautiful glowing in the night. I’m humming along to every schmaltzy Christmas song on the radio. (Except for “Home for the Holidays,” I still can’t stand that one. I said to my son the other night that Frank Sinatra must have stopped mid-phrase during recording and said “What is this slop?”) If I’m alone in the car, I’ll actually sing.  I took a donation to the soup kitchen around the corner, along with three bags of children’s books, because they said they needed them.  Though I have a dozen rolls of wrapping paper left from previous years, I bought some new rolls, and threw the old wrinkled stuff away.

There’s been a particular kind of pleasure in finding gifts. Not extravagant gifts perhaps, or even particularly expensive ones, but the sort of thing that one might open on Christmas morning  feeling surprise and delight. (And if one doesn’t, one should keep it to one’s self. And no, I’m not going to tell one where I got it so one can return it for cash.) When we were first married I was so taken with having a ready-made family of a husband and his two young daughters that I produced literally a small mountain of gifts for them. If they weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of presents, which took days to open, they were certainly stifled by my insistence that everyone take turns to open their gifts. That was a tradition in my childhood, but I think I must have terrified the girls, who had only previously known the rip-and-shred model.

They didn’t get what they wanted either. The daughter (with the word processor she’d asked for) eyed with naked envy her sister’s American Girl doll. The worst flop though was Jingle, the Welsh pony mare that I bought for my younger stepdaughter, who was horse-crazy. Except that somehow I’d failed to notice that the horses she was crazy for were the ones in her story books and lining her shelves. She didn’t really want a real pony– that was probably my leftover Christmas fantasy– and the cocktail of her dismay and my disappointment made for a grim time.

My husband is a wonderful man in many ways, but gift-giving is not one of them. The first year we were married he went to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve and bought a huge stack of  well, stuff. A copy of National Enquirer, a polyester nightgown four sizes too big, a colander, a VHS movie we’d already bought a few weeks before.  Last year, when pressed, he came up with one thing, a grape-colored cotton turtleneck. I’ve tried a general list of things he might choose from. I’ve tried a specific list of the very thing I wanted and that didn’t work either. After nearly two decades, I’ve given up. He is a generous man at heart and I can help him choose. Surprise is highly overrated anyway.

I know some people get really hung up on what they get from their spouse, which may explain why Lexus has the audacity to suggest that you might not screw it up if you give your wife a $40,000 car. My old friend Kate spent every Christmas and birthday in tears because her husband Jeff  had screwed it up again. Though I never said it, I often wished she’d just cut him a break. If the only way you can validate your marriage is by the measure of what swell gifts you’ve been given, that’s a little pathetic.  I did once love a man who gave quite magical gifts. The only problem is that he was a total narcissistic ass. Once I told him that I thought it would be wonderful to have the last words of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“Yes, I said. Yes, I will. Yes.”) engraved on the inside of a wedding ring. That Christmas he gave me that very sentiment embroidered on a  . . . wait for it . . . bath towel.

Which reminds me of the Christmas that my mother really wanted a guitar and my father gave her a recorder. My father got better at Christmas, even though for most of my life “Christmas with my father” was represented by an enormous cardboard carton of gifts that arrived one day in December. My parents divorced when I was 10 and my mother and I moved to England. That Christmas the carton contained the boxed set of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” and all manner of other stuff one might send across the Atlantic ocean to your only child. Over the years the box contained a transistor radio, ice skates, horse books, cashmere sweaters, a Sony Walkman, a check for a Thoroughbred mare.  One year it held the wedding ring my mother had given him in 1960. I wore it on the middle finger of my left hand for fifteen years– until the day I married my husband and now he wears it.

In November of every year, my father would ask me for a list of what I wanted for Christmas. Over the years, with the addition of husband and stepchildren and our son, the lists became more elaborate, and I looked forward to making them. It wasn’t a matter of asking for something I wanted– though that was part of it. It was more like drafting a road map to Larkinland, full of clues and ciphers. It didn’t always work, because we are human, but it had its magic.  My mother would interject here, a little archly, that it did not make for much magic for the rest of my actual real-life family who sat around for hours watching me unwrap the things my father sent.

Then one Christmas Dad died. I don’t know if he hung on until the 26th on purpose or if it just worked out that way. It didn’t matter. We had been with him through the 17th, and went home to Montana because Julian was supposed to be in a school play and we expected Dad to live through January. The Doctors said he would. Was there a Christmas that year? I don’t remember. I’m sure we did something for Julian and his sisters. I remember that I absolutely could not stomach the idea of killing a living tree for something as superficial as Christmas, so we put up a little tree made of tinsel. When the call came on St. Stephen’s Day that he wasn’t going to make it, I couldn’t get to Missouri in time. The one flight was leaving in 40  minutes from an airport 120  miles away, and as it happened, even if I’d been on the plane I wouldn’t have made it in time.

I didn’t get over it. Yes, there had been holidays ”full of joy, surprise, and adventure.” I’d struggled for those, reaching up through a deep sea of melancholy.  But my grief stained so many things I’d loved about Christmas. And there was never another cardboard carton full of oddly shaped gifts wrapped with too much tape and witty clues written in Dad’s angular hand about the mysteries within.

The thing is that his death was really the last straw. My stepfather, HCB– the man who taught me to drive, gave me my first pony, my first pair of earrings, my first Martini– had died unexpectedly far, far away seven years before. When people die halfway round the world, it never feels like they’re really dead. They just feel gone. Though he’d never given me a cardboard carton full of stuff I thought I wanted, he’d given me self-confidence, determination, the art of debate, a well-honed sense of social justice and a trial run in grief. Christmas with HCB meant a houseful of people, a joint of  beef, the town brass-band playing “My Old Kentucky Home” in the kitchen, and the kind of gift you never knew you wanted because you did not know that it existed. And the very last time I saw him was at Christmastime, just before he went back to England, three years before he died. He and my mother came out to Montana to see us, and our brand new baby boy. He slipped me a hundred-dollar bill over dinner on Christmas eve. I had no pockets, so he suggested that I fold it up and put in my shoe.  He had long discussions with three-month-old Julian. He exclaimed over the square spot on the back of our hound dog. He sang bawdy English songs and Christmas carols and got on an airplane and went away forever.

Over Thanksgiving this year, a friend wrote that she’d enjoyed the best holiday she’d had in years, going out to NASA with a friend. She said that she’d felt down on every holiday since 1995 when her father died. 16 years.  A pet psychic once told me that my father  (in heaven,presumably) was so distressed by  my sadness– and that my dog was consumed by my grief, which the dog couldn’t  comprehend or understand. How large did I need this to be written?  It is, was, is time to get on with things.

So we go pick out a Christmas tree, one that touches the ceiling. I’m not sure I’d ever bring myself to cut down another tree, but when they’re standing outside the grocery store, they’re somewhat past saving. I’ve commandeered the guest room (which smells oddly like fruitcake– could that be a ghost?) for wrapping presents. I’m filling up a cardboard carton full of stuff for (as HCB would say) my “chosen” daughter and her children– that’s what he called me. Not his stepdaughter, but his chosen daughter, like he’d plucked me off a tree, or out of a lineup.

There are menus to be planned, Christmas cards to be written, school programs, carillon concerts, a trip to see the University of Dayton’s huge collection of crèches, even though I’ve seen them all twice before. There are photographs to take, of family and Christmas lights and friends, and scores of dogs with Santa Claus, a fundraiser for dog rescue. I think this is the year that we will turn our collection of plastic milk jugs into luminaria ringing the edges of the property.

I have learned something from my sorrow. Last Christmas was my fork in the road. I am not going to mourn for years to come. I choose life! I choose happiness. I am going to dance and sing (sometimes out loud even) and remember all the joy and sorrow in the past and look forward to both sweetness and tears in the days ahead. Let all the bells ring!  I am going to celebrate Christmas, falling open armed into the light.