“Let’s go to St. Martin!” Johnny O exclaims as he enters the Breakfast Club shaking off the cold.
Whitley agrees having already cursed the bitter 25 mile wind whipping off of the water. From the sky the ocean looks like a steaming vat of hot chocolate with masses of sea foam looking like melting marsh mellows. From the ground it is a bitter windstorm.
We take our normal seats at the counter and during this time of year our friends who work there have time to talk. So we tell stories and in no time at all we are laughing to begin our day.
“Anymore panties” Nick asks?
I shake my head, “Nope just the one pair that is still hanging on the door knob.”
“Chelsea’s art showing looked impressive,” I am told. Yesterday my youngest child had an exhibition of her art on the island. Included were a number of nudes. Her mother said, “Can you turn the nudes around?” as though the paintings would show the body’s backside rather than frontal nudity. We laughed.
Then Whitley and Johnny O leave and I remain behind sipping coffee. Patti sits next to me and reads the paper. Franklin and I chat about his grandmother, my friend, Tommi who was taken to the hospital yesterday. It is warm inside because of the heat from the grills. There are no customers at the moment and I just sit with members of my extended family watching the flags be blown from the flagpoles atop the Ocean Plaza hotel.
I linger because I’m wearing running shorts and a couple of long sleeve tee shirts. I know that I’m not going to run in this wind. My entire body would be chaffed.
It grows quiet and I look at my friends.
If Christmas is for friends and family I am more immersed than I ever remember being. At Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel and at Union Mission is was all about others. Family and friends got squeezed in. This year there is plenty of time to just … enjoy what is around me.
Why did I give so many Christmases away?
I know why; so many don’t have them. I have this flare of doing things on a grand scale so I orchestrated grand celebrations. Hundreds of people had stuff. I had great partners pulling it off but the standard was set by me. Everyone would have joy in their stockings and if they didn’t have stockings then they’d get two.
But everything has a cost to it and while hundreds got through a Christmas day because of these efforts, my wife, children and friends didn’t get very much of me.
I look at Goddess lying on the beloved back deck with the wind blowing through her fur coat and my promise plants blowing over. This Christmas there are no hundreds to care for, no parties that I must attend, no one in this house that I must do anything for aside from a dog who loves the outdoors as much as I do.
“Loved the story of the half decorated Christmas tree,” Johnny O told me the other day. “I can just see you talking to Goddess and say “Let’s just decorate half’ because the other half is gone anyway.”
Then he explained how it happened to him when his Dad died. Other people have told me the same thing since I wrote about lighting the tree with only half the lights working and it represented the reality of living alone and no longer a part of the couple that was. A few have explained how they have drug out Christmas trees for the first time in years and while it may have taken them a while to get them decorated, they are up. Because I did it!
And the only reason I did it is that a mother has the ability to make a 54 year old son feel guilty. There’s nothing under the tree other than three manager scenes that were left behind.
Then last night Goddess got up and walked over to the tree. She sniffed a new ornament that my friend Shirley had given me which used to belong to someone very special in her life. Then Goddess curled up under the tree and went to sleep.
And I was filled with more emotion at Christmas time than I’ve ever felt in my life.
