I am not sorry I am a little emotional about this holiday, and I am not going to bludgeon you with another recap of the news. We are either way too engaged in the circus act, or we are blissfully unaware that the elephants and donkeys are passing by in chaotic review.
There have been big tragedies this year and some good things, very good things. I don’t know what to think about it all- I lived it, of course, but it was all such a blur that only scattered highlights remain. The Christmas letters that were stacked up in my in-basket accounted for the bight moments in the lives of families across the country.
I did not send cards this year, and have generally been trying to wean myself of the habit, but I confess I do like to get them. I resolved to make a list of those impetuous households and send them a real letter in a real envelope. Maybe after the holidays to say “thanks for the thoughts.”
I spent the afternoon cleaning up the office. It is year’s end, and the end of the old contract and the start of the new one. I had a gentle hint from my Boss that it was time to thin out the trash of the last five years of program management, and having a late meeting with the Other Russian, I was pinned down at the work location as my co-workers drifted off, one by one to do seasonal things.
Going through the documents was mechanical. I decided anything that dealt with the intricacies of a dead program could be safely discarded. I took down flow charts of proposals long past that were pinned to the walls. I added “January, 2013” to the row of calendars that I keep with each quarter of the coming year in a row.
Intermingled with the office stuff were the estate papers. One of the credenzas is full of the stuff- obituaries, bank and attorney statements, house and real estate expenses- you know the stuff. Amid the claim forms were short notes from the Dead, kept for no particular reason except that the shaky words on the papers came from a hand that is gone forever, except in memory.
It made me sort of blue in a general way. I should be on the road some place. Winter Storm Draco was sweeping across the Midwest, and I was thinking that every year for the last ten this season would have meant either begin stranded in an airport or slipping and sliding across the central plateau of Pennsylvania, or the arrow-straight plains of NE Ohio and SE Michigan, heading west then north.
Rolling toward the land of snow banks and dementia. It is a long drive: twelve and a half hours was my best time, but naturally much longer if you look down at the speedometer and realize you are only making good about twenty miles an hour and the wiper fluid was long gone and the windshield streaked with salt residue and road crud.
I am not doing it this year, because Mom and Dad left us in that magical amazing passing on the 3rd of January, so early early in this strange new year that is now so old.
(Alert Reader Rob Fickling posted the aftermath of Winter Storm Draco Up North in Michigan. Photo Fickling.)
I was traveling north on this very day a year past. Big Mama had misplaced the precise location of the Holiday, but that was fine. It made all the timing less critical. Raven was safe in his new home at the Bluffs. I was going to have a little ceremony with both, and watch an old movie or three with Big Mama in the hot-house apartment in the Potemkin Village assisted living facility.
I stayed for a week, and the last time I kissed them was on the 28th. They left on January 3rd, within hours of one another.
This year there is no compelling reason to be in Michigan. I looked out the window from the eighth-floor office. There was a brief fleeting flurry of white as the gray skies transitioned to black. I should be on the road, I thought, that awful snow-covered stretch across Pennsylvania, and the boring numbness of NE Ohio. I should be driving.
My son lives there now, not Up North, and he and his wife are making a home in the suburbs where I grew up. That is among the very good things in this year, that and recovering the ability to walk.
I feel good about it, all in all, since the big things I have cared about so much have been revealed to be what they are: smoke and bombast, signifying nothing. The small things are the largest. The love of family, and the ability to rise and stride out into a magical world.
As I turned off the lights in the office, I felt the tug of the road, and a sudden emptiness in the realization I did not know where I was going or the first time in a decade. I think it is going to be interesting to find out where the new road leads.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com.