The neighbor’s driveway was getting plowed at six a.m. so that’s when it was decided that I’d be up, even though I’d asked my alarm to snooze. The rev of the engine and the echo of the plow banging down was too much of an errant rhythm for me to slip away from and so I instead slipped out of bed and into the shower.
So now I’m downstairs enjoying the darkness, the cats, the new quiet just outside my glowing windows. Jen has lit candles and turned on our various sets of lights and the two trees. I love these days leading up to Christmas where you can steal just a few moments each morning in the darkness and enjoy the magical lights of the trees. This year I got some strings of the bigger bulbs that have that old-school encased pine cone look to them. Blue, green, orange, yellow and red on one tree and just blue on the white tree. Across the room they are very bright and look like glowing pieces of bright candy.
I’m listening to the sweet voice of Phoebe Bridgers sharing Christmas on her EP “So Much Wine.” Therefore I’m reminded of “old Rockfordtown” that she sings of and the “old Oregontown” that I often write of. I’m enjoying the best part of coffee -- when it’s almost-too-hot-but-notquite and at its most aromatic -- the heat is rising off the cup like smoke, pushing grandma-melmac-cup vibes up into my mustache and around my eyes. The lights on the tree blur a bit and it’s not too much of a stretch to think of slot car tracks under the tree. I’m glad my parents were never that into trains (nothing against a good train set, but slot cars were fast). Like Stompers, the wheels collected more cat hair and people hair than you’d think existed on the floor. They found it and wound it up tighter than any pocket knife you were allowed to have would be sharp enough to free them back to their original speed. That didn’t diminish their coolness.
For a while though, you could get em going so fast that they’d launch themselves off the banked curves. TYCO… man, what a brilliant marketing scheme for future driver’s license owners. The step up from Matchbox and Hot Wheels that couldn’t have been conceived any better right out of the freeze frames of my full-color dreams. It was hard to race yourself though, and I got mine when my sister was still a baby. Between my need for speed and my cat Midnight’s hair, my stint on the electric track was relegated to the pits.
I remember cleaning everything up and getting them running years later but most of the time they lived in the closet in their original box. When we moved to the log cabin when I was 10, I think they became a casualty of the basement. I don’t know. They reside, packed away, in my dreams. Sometimes around the three or four a.m. hours these years, I wake from a dream where I’m looking through old closets, old boxes and old houses where I haven’t lived for years. I lie awake quiet, thinking of slot cars, wind-up mini-robots (the kind whose plastic gears winge away), comic books, parts for Johnny West toys, steel marbles, cap guns, my cheat book for the original Rubix cube and all the pages and pages of little illustrated stories I’ve lost.
Now, gazing at the lit tree across the room, I remember crawling back in behind ours after dinner and hiding there behind my mom’s old sled and wooden cutout of 1930s Santa Claus. I remember wishing that Christmas break would never end and we’d get snowed in and the bus wouldn’t be able to make it down Daysville Road.
I remember wishing that the three or four television channels we got would get stuck on Saturday morning cartoons and the stop-motion Christmas cartoons, and there would be no news, no football bowl games and no soaps.
I remember looking up at the star and wondering how baby Jesus, God and Santa Claus all worked together and all that Trinity stuff that was unclear to me. I remember that the only thing I was conclusive about was that this all was magical and that however unexplainable, or unrealistic it might be, that the magic present in the Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit and perhaps the Star Trek episodes that I loved to watch with Dad, that magic, was every bit as true as most people said it wasn’t. I hold the same view today.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
