Reveries near and far

A photo that was in an idea file for a Christmas card Timm must have been thinking of designing.

Perhaps it's odd to engage in Christmas reverie at this time of year -- in this superheated subtropic September, there is little in the outside world to engage the imagination with visions of sugarplums and high ho-ho-ing sleighs -- but since that holiday most engages the visionary child Timm was and couldn't be, I remember today a reverie we shared from the far ends of our circumstances.

The house in Evanston, IL, where our best family memories still reside. Built in the 1850s by the architect Harvey Hurd, Abraham Lincoln is said to have spent the night there on a campaign stop. A huge structure, my father bought it in the early '60's for around $30 thousand dollars, sold it in '69 for $60 thousand. In the early 1990's we heard the house was on the market for $1.2 million.

My recovery from active alcoholism has been one of the defining roads of my eventual adulthood. I first sobered up in May 1987 when I was 30. Soon after I was engaged to marry a woman with an eight-year-old daughter, was ready to accept professional work, entered therapy, began studying at great depth and took up writing poetry (parking, for good, my loud guitar).

A big part of my recovery was becoming willing to look in the rear view mirror and account for where I had been and what I had done. In the years of my bottomless thirst, there was just too much dark freight behind; the booze kept it drowned down, but it also made my past an ever-more-frightful abyss to look upon.

Freed through God's grace from the compulsion, I sought to clear up the wreckage of my past. I spent several months in Autumn 1987 filling several fat journals with that story. My past began to take shape. I went from being a nice guy with a little drinking problem to a destructive drunk who had been running away from intimacy and pain since high school and had caused much hurt due to self-centeredness, fear, and anger.

As I honestly accounted for that story, its fearful shadows (and their hold over me) began to diminish, too. As I rehabilitated, so did my past.

A photo I've run here before, showing Timm in a saucer sledding down the hill on the side of our Evanston, IL house, ca. 1968.

For Christmas 1987 I wrote a bit of memoir about a family Christmas that represented the best of my upbringing. A "reverie," I called it, telling the myth of the happy family with all of my heart, even if it was only true in such magnitude for one compressed moment. Set in 1969 or so in our house in Evanston, the story recounts an archetypal Christmas Eve in the Cohea family, with us kids spending the afternoon sledding on the side hill, coming in to have dinner and later singing carols together in the parlor before the tree.

Whatever hurts were in our family at that time -- and they were certainly brewing, soon to break forcefully out -- I found it easy to sing of our family's best moments together. And as I was preparing to embark on the adventure of family myself, getting ready to marry Trudy and her daughter Angela, I needed - and found - the nurture and wonder of family inside my past, in a story which was archetypally our own.

My Christmas reverie was the first piece of writing I had created for an audience in ten years, and it gave birth to a confidence in the written word which has been constant in me since (for better and worse!). This is how that reverie ends:

It is dark in the room except for a sliver of hall-light beneath my door. I see cartoon Santas, elves, curious reindeer all peeking into my second-story window. My eyes get heavier. I know that as soon as I fall asleep, the magic begins. I wonder, once more, what's in all those brightly-wrapped packages labeled for me? What will I get? The chemistry set? or maybe a tape recorder! Tommy Holmgren thinks he's getting a set of walkie-talkies. Maybe I'll get a microscope instead, jeez that sure would be great, one with some slides, a-and one of those dissection kits, with dead things in specimen bottles to cut up ... I know that a stocking waits outside my door at the shore of first waking, a stocking stuffed with trinkets and nibbles to busy myself with until the rest of my siblings have risen. Please God, wake Timmy up BEFORE seven-thirty, this year!!!

I hear Mom and Dad murmur downstairs. Christmas music still plays on the stereo. Wind whispers to me, somewhere just outside. I know none of its bitterness. The long night will not come for years. I sink deeper into my warmth, and darkness is a friend.

Finally, all is quiet.

The light is born.

It will soon be morning!

Christmas joy to you all!

Timm and I by the Christmas tree in the Evanston house, ca. 1967

I sent copies of the story out to everyone ahead of Christmas that year. Timm, who was living in Fort Collins finishing up his BA in social work at the University of Colorado, received his copy, and after reading it and wrote the following in his journal. It is clear that the images and memories of family are stirring his own much more problematic ones:

December 24, 1987

Christmas Eve, 1987. Cold, white and beautiful. Firelight lights the page. My tree stands silent, full of the life given to it by the eight kids that created the curios that decorate her limbs. Lights of orange, red, blue, green and white light the window she fills.

An unexpected package has added the 24 years of Christmas past to this night. Dave wrote a story of the last Christmas we spent together as a family -- just before the miles and personal pain separated us. For a short time I was able to relive those years that I can't seem to remember, of Christmas in Evanston .

As I read his account of the Christmas, long since past, I can't help but long for those that are to come. A time with a family of my own. I guess this is one of my greatest desires since the last Christmas I had was at the age of five.

The rest of the family are gathered in two different groupings, Will with Dad in Pennsylvania and Dave, Mom, Molly, Nicholas and Jim in Florida. I don't think they've known this loss like I have - even though they have their own losses that are beyond me. They now try to pull together a family that I never knew. I guess I've decided to separate myself from this - I'm not exactly sure why though. Perhaps because of past pain or because of anger or bitterness - or what I tend to believe - that it represents something I never had and can't accept.

Anyways, Christmas '87 is but hours away - I'll be spending it with Wendy and her family - a Swedish celebration of sorts.

A Christmas card featuring a self-portrait of Timm -- alone, atop a mountain -- from 2002 or so.

As I read that journal passage today -- home early from work with a monster migraine, kitten Hugo curled in my lap, the day warm and breezy, carrying distant messages from TS Hannah and Hurricane Ike -- I see Timm in that distant, solitary room, wanting to believe in that reverie, hoping to write it himself one future day with a family of his own. As a Christian, Timm believed God was healing him for that eventual destiny, to make a home of a healed heart.

I think of Timm alone on that Christmas 1987, when I was working into the role of a husband and father, roles which I had not thought possible for myself. Deep in the winter of my last year of drinking, I had dreamed of trudging through some Siberian waste of darkness and snow to come upon a farmhouse with bright windows shining in the night. I pressed my face to the window to see a bearded man throwing logs on the fire while a woman sat in a rocker next to the fire nursing a baby. How much I yearned to be in there ... yet I knew I belonged outside in the frozen wastes of night, that I had to turn around and head back out into the wind and cold and darkness.

I too had Christmasses far from any semblance of family, eking my way in frozen Spokane, wholly alone, with quart of beer on the table and Bach harp partitas on the stereo as snow piled up against the window. I thought of how distant I was from my family back then, how good it felt to be alone. My family Christmas memories were years back and ahead me, down a road Timm also traveled. At age 23 I was ready to come home, flying south to Florida to re-connect with my mother, (taking up the suggestion of a counselor). Twenty years further down that road Timm was just starting to consider moving back East; he was also moving toward the sort of family Christmas with Christmas that he had dreamed of.

I think of Timm reading my Christmas reverie the way I dreamed of that farmhouse -- as a myth I so needed to enter. At the end of that bad winter I did sober up after getting a DUI, and began the work of coming home. Timm entered AA about the same time I did, and he had about 16 years of continuous sobriety when he died. (In my story, sobriety has been less consistent, owing, I believe, to a crucial failure in understanding the nature of surrender). It was another strange parallel we had despite histories that were largely separate.

Timm and I both had failed first marriages; I went on to a second and Timm rounded the possibility for the rest of his years. Did I believe that reverie more than Timm, enough so to try again in a marriage now in its 13th year? Perhaps. It is the nature of all writing that writer and reader engage the same words from distant worlds; it is a fiction that we ever share the same experience, whether in the flesh (as in growing up together in the same family) or in the imagination. Timm connected so far with my reverie and then came up short. Maybe he would have gone on to complete it himself, but on that that day he turned his thoughts from times past to current realities and distant possibilities – his tree, his apartment, a Christmas celebration with friends in lieu of family.

Over our few visits together, Timm and I never celebrated Christmas together, but we did attend some AA meetings together. Our future hope was always more surely founded than the difficulties of our past. Had Timm survived his heart attack last April, I believe he would now be working hard to enter that glowing farmhouse with its dream of domestic happiness. Who knows - maybe there would be a Timmy in the works, a child for Timm to father in every way he dreamed was possible. And perhaps found a way to retrieve that saucer he used to ride down the snowy hill next to our house in Evanston and offer berth and birth to a son. Maybe his photography was that gift, images of milky pure wonder at the world, reveries of communion and union in the home of the heart.

I look at those images as if reading his reverie, then look around my house with its well-lived-in, married look, kitten Hugo now snoozing under the writing desk that perched on my lap as I sit here on the couch, the tall Mexican petunias blowing in the garden from the far sighs of Hannah, Timm’s life ever more distant though cherished, remembered: celebrated here.

This photo was from the same idea file for Christmas cards: Present but not here, like Timm was and wasn't for Christmas.

Two portraits of Santa Claus from the same file, showing perhaps Timm's ambivalence about the holiday.

And finally, these pictures from a folder titled "Silver falls Snow Day," which Timm took a year or so ago. I can't help but look at these and think of Timm's joy of playing in the snow as a child.