Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: A Christmas Reverie (1)

A winter wilderness scene shot by Timm in Oregon several years ago. This image was scanned from a slide among unlabeled thousands found in box in Timm's apartment after he died last April. My father-in-law Wade is patiently scanning them all; t his image is from his most recent batch of scans, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago. Timm often would take off by himself on Christmas Day, heading into the woods to hike. Perhaps this is from such a Christmas Day for Timm. In an email Timm told a friend last year he might be making the "trek home" for Christmas. I like to think that he would have.

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In the Christmas season of 1987, twenty-one years ago, I was getting ready to marry for the first time and become a father (OK, a step-dad) to boot. I was thirty years old, six months sober, and felt deeply that I was turning a page, leaving behind one life for the uncertain vagaries of a responsible adult life, the overlong adolescent become the family man.

Over the fall I had journalled at great length about my history, telling my story from start to present for the first time, opening doors which had long been closed, accounting all of my hurts and wrongs. In Alcoholics Anonymous it’s called a Fourth Step -- “made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our selves” -- though, like so many things I foolishly did the first time around in a sobriety which did not last – it was my own way of doing it.

Surprisingly I felt a sweep of nostalgia in the remembering. My former recollections had been too black and white in locking things away; there was much in the past to treasure. Maybe it was because I was becoming a dad that I looked at my own family history through a different lens, that of looking for help rather than to criticize.

Molly’s wedding in the previous summer was the occasion of our first family re-union since Mom and Dad separated for the last time in 1974. Surprising to most of us I think was how happy the occasion was – and how happy we were to be together, if only for that moment. For me and many of the rest of us the hard hurt had faded over time. Was if possible to be a family once again, albeit at many miles remove from each other?

As Christmas approached in 1987, I began writing a remembrance of a family holiday, summing the best of all our Christmasses as a family on a single day, Christmas Eve 1967. It was also one of the first extended pieces of writing I had done since leaving college a decade before. (Sobriety for some reason re-awakened my pen.) I completed the piece and Fed-X’d copies to Mom, Dad, Will, Molly and Timm, with instructions to read on Christmas Eve.

In the spirit of that gift now 20 years old, I reprint it here in three sections, in these days leading up to Christmas, in memory of that family and that day. Some moments last a lifetime, and some of them are the happiest of our lives; the day which I now account is one of them, and glows still in my memory like a bright bulb on a tree.

I hope you enjoy.

The Evanston house of our childhood in the the 1960s. Built in the mid-19th century (in the picture you can see one of two iron horse-hitching posts down by the street) and located on the corner of Church Street and Wesley Avenue, most of the buzz you still hear about our childhood years originates in that house. Now distant, it remains magical in memory.

This Christmas Eve is cold yet bright and cloudless, the sky a regal blue. Sunlight dazzles off fresh-fallen snow. Trees that ring our back yard bend down with it, their dark arms dropping clumps of it in random falls.

Bill and I shovel the sidewalks, he on Church Street, me on Wesley Avenue. My shovel breaks into the white crust, crunches down and scrapes along concrete. It is a sudden, rasping sound that echoes all over the neighborhood. Small puffy breaths form, dissipate around my face. I grunt and snivel and sweat. Soon – never soon enough! – the big green bushes that mark the beginning of our neighbor the Davis’ yard approach. With triumph I shovel the last sidewalk square.

I walk back, ignoring the white spots I missed (I was never good at mechanical tasks). My black rubber boots rattle on the raw concrete. Cars work slowly up the Church Street hill, their tires caked with dirty snow. In our front yard, down by Wesley Avenue, two black hitching-posts rise from the snow like exclamation points. their iron horse-heads peer down opposite ends of the street; they are silent sentries, protecting all who live at 1632 Wesley.

Billy comes up around the corner, shovel over shoulder. He springs when he walks, cocky, coiled, a loud energy at work in him that makes him frequently bite his lower lip. He has finished the longer, more trampled stretch of sidewalk along Church Street in the same time it took me to shovel the shorter. His face glows with the cold as surely does my own. We smile, because we both know what we are now free to do.

As if we have been watched – the heavy front door of the house swings open, and in one single motion Molly, Timmy and the family dog Shep bound out. Shep, a mixed collie-German Shepherd, clears the pack and attacks a snowbank, diving in and then leaping up to prance away, his tail furious in pent-up joy, his snout now white. Molly and Timmy follow, wobbly wonders encased in sweaters, snow suits, boots, mittens and scarves. All decked in blue and red, Molly is a chattering blueberry muffin, Timmy a beaming cherry. Pulling Americian Flyer sleds and a plastic saucer from the porch, we dash for the side yard, hooting with ear-to-ear smiles …

The hill! I point my sled, take a few running steps, and fall heavily, grunting upon impact. The sled crunches, jostles, slides faster downhill. Snow sprays up into my nose and ears … my cold fingers grip the wood sled-runners, trying to steer, though the only true direction is down, down, down. I feel a smile crease my face like the sun out of a cloudbank; a giggle shakes out, funny-stacatto with every bump the sled encounters. Sep barks and chases me, dipping his snout into the snow, sneezing out another shower of flakes, barking at my yard-long glissade. Finally reaching the bushes at the western edge,
far downhill from the beginning of all delight, the sled crunches to as top. I rise heavily, as if from sleep, awakened almost hurtfully from every sledder’s reverie. I beat the snow from my legs and turn, wondering why no one applauds so majestic a ride. I trudge back up the hill, head down, trailing my sled by its rope. Close to the top I see Mom standing in the window of the sunroom. She waves, her breath fogging the window. I wave back, my smile awakened by hers. My steps become light.

The day is not too cold – in the upper 20’s. The weatherman on WLS promised more snow to come on this Eve. A white Christmas! And so we throw ourselves intently at the hill, our four faces each with grandmother Nana’s chipmunk-cheeks, all glowing the color of a Bell’s red delicious apple. Kids from the neighborhood arrive, bearing sleds or begging rides from ours. There’s Kevin and Margaret McHugh, and my buddy Tommy Holmgren, and others whose names are long lost to me – boys who look hideous in ski-masks, girls wearing white mufflers, gleefully clutching at their sleds with mom-knitted mittens.

Molly surfs her sled, she’s standing up on it, slowly passing down the hill in silent, stock-still on her mount. Timmy hurtles by on the blur of a red saucer, turning this-way then that, his blue eyes wide. Time gets lost; minutes, hours, a full lifetime passes. Frozen brown tufts of grass peek up through the sled-ruts. Clouds thicken in the sky, turning to a churlish grey chowder. All gets quiet and muffled, our yodels and hoots pushed back in our faces by the advancing storm.

Timmy launched down the hill on his saucer.

Billy launches his sled, boots kicking up a fury of snow, blasting down the hill. He runs back up and announces to us his plan to ice the hill with a garden hose, making the sledding a terrifying jolt of a thrill. Shep returns from his foray of the neighborhood with tail at half-mast (he’s tired), snout white, ears still pointed and alert, panting in the cold.

Big flakes begin to fall, silently as a baby’s breath. In a few minutes mothers begin calling their children’s names from every compass-point of the block. Our sled-mates trudge reluctantly off, making fading promises to return the next day after opening all of their presents.

It is nearly dark, but Molly begs for one last ride, just one more … She settles down on a battered American Flyer and Billy takes hold form behind, rocking the sled back and forth a few times like some bobsled racer getting ready to launch. One, he huffs, two … and shouts THREE!, hurtling with his trademark hot energy for four or five steps, then releases her.

Timmy and Billy and I watch the sled-girl shape make the final descent of the day down the hill in some sort of ballet which carves the complete shape of a childhood, swishing and skating and gliding down the hill, coming at last to silent rest, almost invisible now in the heavily falling snow, fading at last into a certain darkness.

(continued tomorrow)

In January 2007 Timm took a series of shots for a snow day in Silverton, Oregon. I see the kids playing here and remember all of us kids building snow-forts after the Big Snow of '67, when three feet of snow fell.