X. Christmas

X. Christmas

That Christmas vacation was a working vacation; I created about 60 minutes worth of music. It wasn't all original--about half of  it was band arrangements of material I already had  written or arranged in Idaho, but it was still an enormous amount of creative output.  Whenever I am between pieces, I doubt that I can ever write again, and I am always amazed when it turns out I can still do it.   I was kind of relieved to find out that teaching had not made me a non-artist, but it was still a pretty sucky Christmas. Christmas Day was just another day; I don't even think I called anybody.  It was the first time our family had been separated for Christmas since before our children were born. Tina was out of the hospital by that time, and I knew she was spending it in her apartment with her sister who had come up from L.A. to take care  of her.   

Christmas never used to mean that much to me;  when I was in high school, Christmas had come to mean witnessing, as somebody once said, a great orgasm of the American wet dream--a materialistic orgy of my father's  pathetic attempts to try to prove that he loved us.  After I left home, Christmases were generally sad, worn out rituals  performed at somebody's house I didn't like, with people who didn't like me.  The magic had gone out of it when I was seven, and thereafter it was all just one more social situation that my aspergers personality found intensely uncomfortable.  I'll never forget my first Christmas with Tina's family--we had only been dating about a month, but it was obvious to everybody that we were very serious about each other, and that I was to be treated as part of the family.  

Family.  It was a new word to me: people who really liked you, who accepted you, who wanted you to be there and who were unhappy when you weren't.  When I was growing up, family just meant one more way that I was unacceptable, one more way I was going to hell, or to skid row; but Tina's family  redefined the word for me,  and make me regret every day  of my life I had existed without one.  

One of Tina's great talents, I mention parenthetically, was present giving; she gave great presents; she learned it from her mother.  For me, going into a department store is like entering the deepest darkest African jungle, and all I can think about is getting out of there as fast as I can; therefore, every Christmas of my youth I bought my father a tie and/or a tie tack, and my mother, I can't even remember what I got her.   But to Tina's mother, shopping was an art; she delved through the Los Angeles shopping malls like a master archeologist--every gift she bought was like the Holy Grail of all presents, and it was with astonished  delight that, for years, I opened gifts from her which were surprising, thoughtful, and heartwarming. 

One of the great traditions that Tina established right from the beginning, and was the Christmas stocking.  When I was a kid, we never had Christmas stockings because my father liked to display the presents like a department store window under the tree; the stocking was much too small an item for him to deal with. But for us, the stocking was my favorite part, really the best part.  When we had Christmas with Tina's family in Los Angeles,  we would all clamber onto Mr. and Mrs. Freeman's bed, and pour out the goodies  one at a time--the Hershey’s kisses, the cunning little pencil sharpener with Beethoven on it, the obligatory cassette, the yo-yo, the Christmas tree ornament, the stickers.  Each of these 50 cent items meant more to me than all the gold in Pope Paul's basement; each tiny delight  was like a kiss on my eyes  from all the angels in heaven.  When Mrs. Freeman died, the Christmas ritual gradually died out, and we started having Christmas in Idaho by ourselves, and Tina kept the precious stockings coming, every year, no matter how poor we were, mommy and daddy's bed getting more and more crowded by longer and longer teenaged legs--until now.     

Now, I was so lonely and disappointed, all I could do was to hide myself behind  an extravagant barrage of creativity, and to try forget how a psychiatrist's lame advice had ripped me off of my family vacation.  As you can see, another thing I didn't understand was this idea of not being able to travel.  It  took me a long time to figure out that it was really true--that Tina really would have been at desperately out to sea with if she had tried to make it home that Christmas.  One of the consequences of her deep depression  was a mental confusion that I had to see to believe.  Tina told me about a nightmare bus ride she had taken in San Jose: she was on the way to her psychiatrist appointment when she got involved in a book she was reading and missed her stop; then she didn't have enough money for the bus to get back, didn't have proper ID for the bank, her phone wouldn't work, and her watch had stopped.  She spent three hours traveling three miles, failed to meet any of the objectives  of the trip, wound up weeping hysterically on a street corner, and being given a ride home from a compassionate policeman.  I guess this constitutes not being able to travel. Who knew.

Anyway, we all had our we've been separate custom-fucked- up Christmases and  embarked on the new year with some vague sense that the worst was over.  It wasn't.