Holiday Reminiscences

A note to new writers: It’s not a good practice to make things up when writing essays.

At first, making stuff up seems the easy way to flood the rice paddies of the mind with impressive images and really neat things that didn’t happen to you. But as time goes on, inflation seeps in, and you’ll find yourself using most of your creativity trying to top your last lie.

Eventually, there’ll be a we-need-to-talk phone call from your teacher or editor: “Uh, yes, in one of your previous essays, you wrote that your father’s death was an awakening for you. Your latest says each fishing trip with your father is a ‘new awakening’ for you.”

So, dad dead or just smells of fish?

My father is long dead, but he figured in a long ago essay about how we anticipate Christmas. The essay asked, “Does anticipation diminish with age or only the belief that anticipation will amount to anything?”

Mind, we’re talking about writing non-fiction. If you must tell mostly untrue stories about your father, write short stories or novels. Write for television. Put dad in a movie. If you’re good, you’ll be better known and richer than the average essay scribbler.

Writing essays for newspapers, magazines, and NPR, I’ve never made up anything—though I might remember things differently from the way other people remember them. That’s what’s so wonderful about late night porch conversations. It’s also what’s sad about losing the only people with whom we share certain stories.

When my friend Harry disappeared and was presumed dead years ago, I lost a whole book of stories from our high school and college years. We laughed until tears came at how stupid we’d been and how lucky we were to have survived profound dumbness. We could talk about first loves. Brilliant successes and spectacular failures were grist for our late night telephone calls.

In college, Harry spit-shined his shoes for R.O.T.C. He polished brass belt buckles and buttons in our dorm room as I looked on.

“You do know R.O.T.C. is a feeder school for the Army?” I’d say. “You will almost certainly go to Vietnam where you may be killed or have body parts blown off.”

Care to guess who went to Vietnam while the other never served a day in the military after college? Irony figured in a lot of our chats.

If the phone rang tonight and it was Harry saying he’d been hit over the head at the time of his disappearance and just woken up in Anchorage, Alaska, working as an Arctic guide, I’d be so happy. We’d talk about all the things we always talked about, guiding each other back to what actually happened in “the real” version of our stories.

The conversation would turn to home and Christmas before we hung up the phones. Harry had many homes, moving around as an oil company geologist. He spent Christmases in some mighty bleak places. The worst was on an oil rig off the coast of South America. He was the only English speaker.

 “I came close to losing my mind. Really,” he said.

My two Vietnam tours in the Gulf of Tonkin included two blah Christmases. The second one, I came on watch in the main radio room of an aircraft carrier, to see a Christmas tree hung with unmentionable “ornaments.” I put away any Christmas thoughts until I took leave in July to find the family tree still up in the living room.

If I talked to Harry tonight, I’d say shopping by computer isn’t what bothers me about Christmas. I’d say Christmas lost much of its anticipation and fun when my children stopped believing in You-Know-Who.

If I go to church on Christmas Eve, it’s hard to watch the altar and listen to the priest for watching the children who are as distracted as I. Their earthly faith will be proven in a few hours.

What I miss about old Christmas is the women store clerks in their red vests and festive hair. I miss bumping into people I’ve known a long time. I miss another friend, Milford, with whom I’d Christmas shop for an hour or two before settling onto a bar stool to talk about the other Christmases we’d shopped for an hour or two before finding stools in a favorite bar.

We didn’t drink to the point of drunkenness though the police were never consulted to verify our state of holiday cheer. We played at Christmas shopping because that was our tradition, for a few years.

Writers, I leave you with this: Don’t drink or ingest anything illegal before driving. Shop online as I know you will, but make it a point to go to a store with a door to buy a gift for someone. Breathe deeply the smell of the place, taking special note of the sales staff’s cologne or perfume.

Wish them a Merry Christmas before they wish you one. Or “Happy Holidays”. That works, too.