The More We Grow

With the holidays falling upon us like a pack of ravenous boars, tusks glinting in the sun—our emotional selves exposed and unprotected—I find myself thinking of moments long since passed: days of innocence, comfortable shelter against the merciless beasts of reality and of Christmas Present.

This picture is not the best in quality (this was, after all, 1978, era of the Kodak Instamatic in all it’s grainy glory). It is, however, one that warms my heart each time I drag it up from the dusty folders of digital scans mostly forgotten. This was my family, not too long before we moved to Big Wonderful Wyoming. For me, this frozen moment was deep in the belly of “growing up”, that time we recall with fondness: a time before the imperfect water of the decades—water with unseen organisms like failure, myocardial infarctions, autoimmune disease, divorce, age, and death—seeped between the cracks of family, froze solid, and burst apart what in younger years felt impenetrable and impervious to such common laws of physics.

I don’t dread the holidays. Even though I complain endlessly when the ladders and blow-up snowmen come out a week earlier each season (soon the official-unofficial start of the holiday season will be just after the Independence Day fireworks stop smoldering), I still secretly love it all. The lights, when not ghetto, are mostly beautiful. The perpetual bell-tinkling outside the grocery store, while at times like a tiny rock hammer to the brain, is still just a well-intentioned reminder to give more than ye receive. I do all my shopping online, so I could not care less about the crowds: the mean-spirited and selfish masses that swarm the shopping malls, willing to mortgage their humanity for a parking space. In all honesty, I do feel the spirit of Christmas, much as I might claim otherwise—it is and should be a time of reflection.

Okay, I am definitely a little jaded about the commercial and selfish aspects of the season, but my heart still warms at the sight of the Nativity scene and Barry Manilow singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas still makes me cry like a pussy (to use an Eddie Murphy dichotomous reference that shamelessly balms the previous admission and boosts my otherwise suffering male ego).

Still, the fact remains that I miss my old family—I miss those Wyoming Christmases with the semi-naked but all-the-more-charming-because-of-it tree from the Bridger Wilderness and the wood stove cranking so much heat that who the hell needed Sweatin’ to the Oldies to work off that holiday fudge and pumpkin pie? I miss that family that used to care about each other, even if we were bickering and making fun of the clothing under the tree or wrestling until someone got hurt and went crying to Mom or Dad. These were the days of All American Family, the calm before the intensity of future storms.

And no, it's not crying over proverbial spilt milk. The facts of present are no more controllable than the trade winds or the elliptical movement of the planets around the sun. I don’t expect that things are any different for any of us, when you get right down to it. And maybe that is all the holiday was ever meant to be: a celebration of birth; a rejoicing for the good times (even if those are actually at any given point the better times). Perhaps it's okay that it is really a mostly empty promise we make each year. You know the one—it’s where we decide to make everything a little better every day of the year instead of just one.

This last picture was taken in Wyoming at one of the last Christmases we spent as a family. Even then, if you listened carefully, you could hear the water running between the solid granite, trickling maybe, but still working its way into the core of what once seemed perfect and indestructible.

It is still a good memory, being together, enjoying the cameraderie that only really ever comes—if you are incredibly fortunate—a few times over the course of a lifetime. I felt it so strongly then, and it allowed me to love and to laugh from the very center of my being. All clichés aside, there honestly is no better medicine. In so many ways I never felt stronger or more alive than when I was swaddled in the love and company of family.

My life now is wonderful in its own ways, different from then maybe, but in some inextricable sense the same. What is gone is the family of my youth, and this will each year be the season in which I remember it fondly.

Merry Christmas.

The back seat is quiet.