A Christmas Reverie (Part Two)

A picture taken by Timm a few years back, found recently on a photo CD in one of the boxes I carted back from Oregon. Timm used this Santa figure on many occasions. I'd say this was a cover photo for a holiday publication put out by Mount Angel Publishing, who hired Timm on many occasions. Is that Timm as a boy in the background? Or every one of us?

This year we celebrated our Christmas Eve at Granny’s (Mom’s) early – on Sunday night, the winter solstice, due to church scheduling conflicts on Wednesday with Molly’s family. Mom’s house was decked out as it has been for this ritual event over the past decade, in the full hope and clarity of the season, candles everywhere, soft Christmas music on the stereo, the crèche laid out on a buffet with all the wood figurines intact after all these years, nuts and sweets in bowls, cards piled in a basket, the tree decked with all the old ornaments, plus a few new ones – a small camera Molly found somewhere which she made into an ornament, adding Timm’s name to the top, and a silver bell inscribed with a seasonal message from the non-profit organization which handled organ donation after Timm died.

Beth and Mom before Molly and her crew arrived.

As usual, a boisterous, quite edible event, (potato-leek soup and salad and sandwiches, Molly’s apple pie and tapioca pudding, in recognition of a celebrated Timm event, back in his high school days, when he furtively spooned ta glob of what he thought was tapioca from a bowl in the fridge, only to discover it was chicken fat. (“I couldn’t understand why Timm refused to eat chicken for a long time back then,” Molly laughed.

Every time Beth and I come down for the event we see a new morphing of Molly’s girls, Sarah at 14 now a cultivated drama queen, Mary-Beth sunnier and looking quite the attractive young woman now, Kathy ever more absorbed than ever in her drawing of comics.

Christmas Eve dinner at Granny's (even when it's on Dec. 21): We've been doing it for so many years now that the seating order at the table should be engraved in stone. From left to right around the table: Mary-Beth (mugging, typically, for the camera), Kathy, Molly, Jim, Sarah, Mom (obscured), Beth. My chair is in the foreground.

Conversation went in new directions as we talked too about Nicholas and Timm, remembering them both at the holidays, their enthusiasm and spirit. Mom produced a few photo albums and a box which I went through, looking for a few more photos for this post. Jim talked at greater length about the accident than I had heard before, struggling to understand how it might have happened (there were recalls that year of the SUV Nicholas was driving) and then accepting it was an accident, still dealing with Nicholas’ big red truck (getting title to it is difficult because Nicholas put a new axle in at one time with different vehicle ID numbers or something). Mom and Molly and I told Timm Christmas stories, his penchant for divining (if not pre-opening) presents, those big blue eyes taking in the Christmas tree.

Oddly, remembering Nicholas and Timm gave new life to our gathering, new depths and smiles—bittersweet perhaps, but the night seemed more intimate. The hugs lasted longer too.

Forty years after the Christmas Eve celebrated in the reverie which now continues, Mom is still doing her best to provide for her kids (and grandkids) a place which is warmest and safest in the glow of Christmas. She’s never lost the gift; it may have been tropically warm outside, but in the dark glow of her house (with a/c at full tilt), the night felt like Christmas Eve 1967 to me all over again.

Before eating, as she always does, Mom said grace before the meal, she prayed for those we love so who were taken to Paradise early, in God’s time, not ours, and prayed for the continual healing of our hearts, and for all of those still with us but not present in that circle (like Dad and Will, Beth’s family, and Jim’s). She concluded with a prayer we all repeated --

"Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, may this food to us be blessed ..."

Amen.

Now for that earlier circle, bounded by a house in Evanston, IL, one Christmas Eve in 1967 …

Timm in 1967 or so. Actually here I think he is just waking up on Christmas Day -- he was notorious for sleeping in -- but here let's set the mood of his anticipation to the night before.

A Christmas Reverie (Part Two)

(David Cohea, 1987)

Inside, it is warm. The air hums with the labors of that big black furnace in the basement. All about the old house it is sere and shadowy, thick carpets everywhere, heavy furniture, pools of lamplight offering patches of warmth, twilight in the windows fading rapidly from blue to black.

Walk around, try to find us in the looming spaces of that century-old house …

Molly and Tim watch “Garfield Goose” on the Motorola in the living room. Molly lies on a big, dusty-wheezing red cushion Raggedy Ann doll under one arm; Timmy sprawls nearby, thumb in mouth, his blue eyes dulled, for the moment, by the cartoons flashing several feet away.

Daddy is in the library reading a novel. His head is half in and out of lamplight. Pipe-smoke drifts, blue, spirituous, winnowing about on lazy eddies of air. From time to time, he lifts a heavy glass to his lips and sips his Scotch. Two walls of books crow the room; hundreds of volumes shout from colorful jackets or whisper from crusty old spines. Daddy is absorbed, but if you walk in and ask him when the next James Bond movie is going to open, he will invite you onto his knee and hold you there, and tell you with a quiet smile exactly when.

In the kitchen, Mom assembles a Christmas Eve feast. She pulls a roast out off the oven, ladles steaming juices over the glistening brown crust. On the counter the little black-and-white TV is on, its tiny screen flashing some Christmas special. Frocked choirboys who look much like the little ceramic ones that gather on the mantle in the parlor sing around a church altar. Mom hums along, smiling.

Next to the television is a cardboard Christmas punch-out calendar we have been attending to every day of this month. Cereal-stained fingers of varying smallness have pried open a door every breakfast, each door grained with gold and silver sparkles, revealing a fresh new room or vault on the way to Christmas: blue angels, tilting bells, candy canes, a sprig of mistletoe, green toy-elves industriously at work, decked trees … Every day is another prophecy of that final, twenty-fifth door. By annual succession it falls to Timmy this year to open this year’s final door, which seems a shame to the rest of us. I mean, he doesn’t understand what’s going on, does he? so why don’t you let ME open it? But Mom only smiles and shakes her head with that mysterious mom-wisdom, and gently tells us that Timmy has as much right as the rest of us. We are silenced, for now, by the simple equality of her love.

Upstairs, Billy is in his room with Shep, playing with his army men, waging war to the sounds of pop music on WLS. Looking young and hungry, Shep curls in the corner, tail up around his nose, observing with quite eyes the advancing military threat.

Walk down a long creaky dark hall and you’ll find me in my room, listening to the “Thunderball” soundtrack on my little record player and stalking agents of SPECTRE with a deadly toy snub-nose .38. I am inches away from disarming a steaming nuclear missile aimed at Washington when I hear my name hollered out from far away, on some distant shore akin to waking: Time For Din-ner …

Downstairs, Daddy puts a Percy Faith orchestra album of Christmas music on the stereo: “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” swells up out of the library, rich and joyous. We all file into the dining room to eat. Among us kids, our excitement begins to swell. We act like skittish horses, erupt in explosive giggles, exchange knowing smiles.

Christmas Eve! The wait is nearly over!

The large dining table fills the room. There are six settings: Daddy and Mom at opposite ends, Billy and I to one side, Molly and Timmy on the other. An Advent wreath of fresh-smelling pine boughs, pine cones and long white candles sits at the center of the table, one purple candle unlit. Candlelight glints on silverware, glows on our faces, glints in our eyes. Mom lays a steaming dinner of roast, mashed potatoes, and green beans and carrots in front of Daddy.

We join hands and pray: “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, may the food to us be blessed.” Daddy prays on, his deep voice thanking our Almighty Father for His many blessings, for the impending birth of His Son, for the coming of the light into our lives … His words disappear into the resonance of his voice, so strong and assured. Just the sound of that deep voice protects our warm-handed circle, forever, it seems on that night …

Amen! Let’s eat! Daddy serves us one by one, carving off slices of hot beet, spooning potatoes, forking carrots, directing the heaped plates down the line to the proper recipients. Kid-talk labors around mouthfuls of food, pondering the vicissitudes of Garfield Goose and how to ice down the sled-hill in the side yard, when a boy might be old enough to go downtown on his own to see “Thunderball,” how much Raggedy Ann needs an Andy for Christmas … Daddy and Mom sip wine from crystal goblets, corral the conflagrations of bickering, speak a few quiet words to each other somehow above or around all the noise of childhood. They both look weary, something beyond just the labors of parents over a holiday – a knowledge of Christmas we kids won’t understand for years …

It is full night outside; only dark shadows of tree-branches are visible. Gusts of wind moan around corners of the house. A ghostly acre of snow weighs on the house, siloing flakes which fall steadily from the sky. The boiler kicks in, causing the lights to flicker. “We Three Kings” plays soft and sad on the stereo in the study.

Dinner evaporates into a torrent of dish-removal; we share clean-up duties tonight so that all may start enjoying the night’s promised events earlier. Even Timmy helps out, carrying a fork through the pantry into the kitchen, offering it to Mom like a precious stone. In no time, the leftovers are wrapped and harbored in the fridge, counters are wiped clean, dishes all stacked in the dishwasher. Mom, ever the Dish Washer, labors alone for a while with pots in the sink.

Later we assemble in the parlor. We kids have changed into our pajamas. Daddy builds a roaring fire in the fireplace. There is a solid feel to the room, anchored by the weight and age of its contents – the green oriental carpet, that heavy, gothic-backed chair Mom sits in, the old pump-organ, Daddy’s brown leather chair with the bird-headed armrests, that big red loveseat that Timmy disappears behind with his faithful companions Bum-Bum, his teddy bear and King-King, the tattered remnant of his infant blanket. Shep curls by the fire.

The Christmas tree is in the back of the parlor and fills most of the sunroom. Tall and proud, its branches are showered with ornaments and blinking lights, something on every bough. I remember the feel of cold pitch and bark-roughness on my hands as three of us carried the tree from some snowy lot to our station wagon and then into our house, prickly branches protesting passage, raining a trail of needles, the house suddenly filling with the smell of pine forests as wide as Canada.

Here it stands, dazzling and decked with all we treasure and will remember. Lights blink on and off from the recesses of branches, carefully wound by Daddy and Billy ... There are strands of cranberries and popcorn, chains of colored construction paper, candy canes, cards, from distant relatives, sprays of tinsel. And ornaments, each an epistle from some Christmas of old: Fragile gold balls dating back to Pittsburgh where Billy and I were born; an elfin band of trumpeters and piccolo-players and a drummer, all curled shoes; brush-tailed songbirds; velvet guitars; blue bells. a couple slightly chipped from handling by little hands; home-concocted ornaments of Styrofoam pinned and glittered according to the age and sloppiness of their diverse Cohea kid creator; a carved ivory dove on a string; a blue ball with my name write in gold glitter; a Howdy-Doody smiling elfin skates; and shining red, blue and silver balls of every size, picked out of old boxes lines with crepe paper, shining from the tree-lights as well as from the flickering fire, reflecting back the eye of childhood’s awe …

And the presents! They are packed around the base of the tree, large and small packages wrapped in bright foil paper, festooned with a rainbow of ribbons and bows. Had anyone guessed what I was giving them? And what was inside that big red package with my name on it? Or in that one sticking out from the pile to the left? Or that one? Secrets and mysteries, the elusive grail of wishes whispered into my pillow at night. Christmas Eve is the fullness of that mystery, a cusp which will break, come morning, into Revelation and Joy, all that is latent coming to birth at last. We will know, come morning … but first, this fullness, this pregnant expectation at high tide …

Daddy gets up to put on the Barbara Streisand album and the parlor fills with late-Sixties, downtown Yule, Daddy’s urban carol. He picks Molly up by the waist and whirls her around the room. She holds on for dear life, her eyes wider than her smile, for she is Dancing with Daddy! The rest of us take turns after her, grabbing on to our dancing papa-bear, trying to match his huge strides, his wild happy waltz around the room. It’s a mad carousel, everything aswirl, pierced by shrieks of laughter. Daddy’s eyes crease with delight as he sings along with Streisand, his voice at turns basso and alto and creaky falsetto, loud and then whisper-quiet. He really only knows the first couple lines of the song and then ad-libs the rest, carving-each-word-till-it-falls, something about homiletics he learned from the debate team at Princeton years ago.

Molly dances for Daddy.

When the song ends the dance crashes to a halt, a sled at the bottom of its hill. Daddy disengages, wheezes, giggles, coughs, finds his chair and pipe. Whew! Knocking his pipe against an ashtray he empties the bowl and then refills it with fresh, moist tobacco from a zippered black leather pouch, tamps it down with a finger and then strikes a match and holds it to the bowl while he puffs, working the tobacco into a glowing coal. His grey eyes are amused and his feet still tap at the refrain of the last song. The room fills with scented smoke – Borkum Riff., his brand, the way Cutty Sark was his Scotch back then.

Soon the album side finishes and Mom takes a seat at the pump-organ. It is very old, refinished an antique white. She adjusts tuber-shaped stops that are labeled in a Germanic-looking script; then begins to work the pedals with her feet. The bellows labor and wheeze and begin to emit the sounds of the carol Mom plays, reading from an opened hymnal. She plays carefully, picking out the notes as one who never gets any time to practice. Deck the halls with boughs of holly … The rest of us gather around her, Daddy with arms over two of us, our faces solemn in candlelight.

(The reverie concludes tomorrow.)

A house Timm shot last Christmas, decked and merry like the Evanston House which Timm recalled from years and years ago.