Michele asks:
What was your best holiday memory. or What is is like not having any family (besides your kids) make you a priorty on christmas.
I'm not sure whether I have a single distinct memory of a Christmas holiday, or whether it's a few of them mixed together in my memory. I suppose I have favorite scenes from Christmases past that I like to revisit.
My Grandma and Grandpa McBee had the tree with the bubble lights, and I was absolutely fascinated by those. I deliberately sought them out and bought some a few years ago when I lived in Seattle. I still have them, much to Michele's dismay. One of these years, I'm even going to get to put them on the tree, no matter how tacky she thinks they look.
My Grandma and Grandpa Schreiner always had a beautiful tree and a fireplace and all the trimmings of Christmas that we didn't have at home. But the best part was always how much we could laugh. Grandpa and Uncle Hank were funny to the point where I thought I would never be able to breathe again from laughing so hard. I wish I had inherited Grandpa's knack for telling funny stories and jokes.
Oddly, my favorite memory is not exactly the happiest one. We were returning from Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa McBee. It was a good Christmas, both in terms of the overall experience and the booty. The only items I definitely remember getting were Disney comic books, and a ViewMaster. I'm sure we got more, but can't place anything else in this memory.
So, as I said, we were returning home. This would be the Christmas when I was in fourth grade, so I would be ... nine? Yes (I checked), nine. We lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas (home of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks in the northwest corner of Arkansas), but Grandma and Grandpa lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The trip back is about three and half to four hours in good weather (which, by the way, is nearly FOR-EVER in a nine-year-old boy's mind), because we have to go through Fort Smith, Arkansas. It's 1978, folks. The new highway between Tulsa and Fayetteville has not yet been built.
In case you missed the two minutes in high school geography class where they mentioned this, or don't happen to live near there, the Ozark mountains cover the northwest corner of Arkansas. Not a problem for you, because you are one of the billions of Americans that has an SUV that is four times as much car as you need and you drive like you own the damn road and, since you have a SPORTS Utility Vehicle, you can also pretty much ignore weather conditions and road curves because SPORTS Utility Vehicle is virtually synonymous with Can't Touch This and also with I Am Mr./Ms. Indestructible. So what do you care about mountainous roads in the middle of winter at nighttime? You don't. So go back to your SUV already and run more people off the road because you have enough money to pay for God's insurance deductible, and get off my blog, because this is a NO-SUVs-ALLOWED blog.
Where was I? Oh. Right. Mountain roads. Winter. Night time. And not an SUV, but a ten-year old Plymouth Valiant. Or a Fury. Or something. I was not into cars.
So, we were coming back, and had already been delayed for several hours because there was too much snow on the road and we didn't have chains for the car. Or we had chains and it didn't matter. Whatever. We had to wait at some restaurant with hundreds of other people who were also delayed and Not Happy At All Mister With This. Now it was dark, and we were tired and worn out from Juvenile Christmas Exhaustion, but we couldn't sleep because of something which had happened on the trip out to Tulsa.
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We were probably an hour away from Grandma and Grandpa's house, and although we had seen the signs saying Watch For Ice several times, we had not seen any. Nevertheless, as we made a turn on a nearly flat but curving section of the interstate hightway, every one of us immediately noticed the sudden and unexpected absence of centrifugal force that normally pulled us to the outer edge of each turn. I think we were all a little stunned into silence as the car kept turning to face the side of the road, and kept turning to face backwards, all while we kept our 50 MPH pace along the highway. I want to say we made three rotations while slipping on the ice, but perhaps it was only three-fourths of a rotation. It was, regardless, too much rotation for any car to make. We hit nothing, but slowly came to a halt on the side of the road. A fellow traveler stopped to make sure we were all right. We were shaken, but exhilirated that no harm had come to us, and, after all, it was almost as fun as any amusement park ride. None of us, however, felt lucky enough to think that another slip like that would end so pleasantly.
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So we were dead tired but unable to sleep on the return trip, for we knew that the ice in the mountains was much more treacherous than ice on the flat interstate highway. For one thing, ice in the mountains would be surrounded by actual mountains, which tend to have a lot of height to them, and darkness actually increases this height by making it much harder to see how far away the height ends. So, unlike our little spin on the interstate which ended with us thinking we would do it again if we could just be sure that it would end the same way, this time we were filled with silent dread as we watched the dark gray shadows of trees and towns float past the car. I think I prayed a lot that night.
Finally, Mom needed a rest. Frankly, so did we. Unfortunately, so did everyone else. No one was open, and we needed a place where we could go inside and get warmed up. We trudged on. I was beyond exhausted, but I was even more worried that Mom would tucker out and fall asleep at the wheel, or at least wouldn't be alert enough to avoid the treacherous mountain ice. Then we saw it. Lights on, inside the window of a building. It was an all-night laundromat. We didn't care. Mom stopped the car, and we brought some of our Christmas stash with us. I brought my comic books. Mom tried to get a little rest. I tried to rest also, but was thwarted in my attempt by a savage industrial chair designer, who had, with clear reckless abandon for the comforts of mere nine-year-old boys, designed a fiberglass chair molded so as to contour a seated body. This might have been all right by most standards, but my body did want to be seated. My body would much rather have been prostrate across several chairs. If the side of my body were designed with large soft scallops along it (so that it would dovetail neatly into several molded fiberglass chair seats) then, again, this might have been all right.
Forever, in my mind, I will have a haunted feeling whenever I see large, boxy, corrugated steel buildings in the middle of nowhere, illuminated by cheap mercury vapor lights outside and cheap flourescent lamps inside. We weren't even in a town, or, if we were, there was no way to tell. The laundromat smelled of detergent, bleach, and mildew.
What makes this my favorite memory? For once, we were actually all alive, together, as a family. Sure, I still didn't want to share my new banana-scented Pickles® Brand soap with my brothers. But there weren't many other times when we were closer. Yeah, it was an "adversity brings you together" kind of thing. But what the hell. I would take any kind of way to have a family that felt like it belonged together.
I don't know whether that thought occurred to me at the time. I think it did not. But I did know that we were in a really lonely place, at a lonely time of night, and Christmas was over. Maybe I didn't really feel very thankful for having my family right then. But I most certainly did have my family then, and now, when I look back, I'm really, really glad I had my family back there in a lonely laundromat at the lonely hours of the night on the lonely side of a mountain.
We got home okay. We had to leave the car at the bottom of the steep road that climbed the mile-and-a-half to our house, and walked up, because our car wouldn't make it up the snow and ice that covered it. But at least we were home, and we were all safe. Well, I was safe. And I'm glad, now, that we were safe.
How do I feel now, with a family that is still barely there? About the same, I suppose. It's not a family that I count on for happy family memories. But it is my family, and all my wishing for a happy-family-memory-making family has not yet yielded one, as such, so I'll take the family I have.
I do love my family. And I love my new family. If I could have a Christmas wish really come true, it would be that I could have both families together, both happy, both thankful that none of us are cursing ignorant chair designers.
: 11:13 AM
