THE CHRISTMAS TAKEAWAY

 

Over the years I think I wasted a lot of my parent’s money. It wasn’t intentional, in fact I think they enjoyed spending it, but I don’t think I walked away with quite the same appreciation of those gifts as they might have expected.

As my journeys continue to take me along roads I never thought possible, I’m seeing some changes in perspective. Totally normal. It’s what travel and adventures are supposed to do, to make us more aware of ourselves, our lives, and the worlds of others that surround us. It’s exactly why I get in the car and take to the highway, or take a plane to Europe or the Tropics. And back when I was meaningfully employed I enjoyed the everyday excitement of the new and interesting. It was one of those jobs where you accepted when you got up in the morning you didn’t know where you might be sleeping that night. You went where the story gods sent you. And on each adventure you learned, sometimes good things, sometimes bad things, and always you learned about the frailties and failings of humans.

As a kid you never thought of such things, and neither should you have. For most of us Christmas was quite magical. Lights, cameras, action, relatives, family friends, food, alcohol (the source of many families’ grief and funny stories), toys, wrapping paper, hugs, kisses, and at least at our house a minimum of discord. As kids we were protected from such things. Whether by design or unspoken agreement amongst the adults, we went about our childhood Christmas ways never contemplating that the adults who loved us might have some inter-personal issues.

The other day I was archiving some family photos and came across some from those early Christmas’s. Toy’s long since forgotten, the one’s that every other kid might have received, some that helped define the pop culture of the time. I was struck by the innocent acceptance that each picture showed. It was obvious in these pictures that no one in my family really wanted for anything. Except perhaps for kid’s pajamas that fit, and didn’t look like they were going to fall down around your ankles and trip the unwary.

Those candid moments shifted perspective for me. In that moment came an understanding of the Christmas journey that every adult has to face eventually, the one that for some will be uncomfortable, for some profound, for some sad, and for some humourous. A journey that for the most part has already happened, and will continue in the following years. It’s a journey that happens only one day every year, bookmarking a place we would wish to revisit and at the same time go to great lengths to move forward from. The classic human conundrum, torn between the comfort of joy and safety in the past, while at the same time pushing ahead while carrying some baggage and trying to continue the traditions and customs of the past. Humans are notoriously bad at balancing such things. Like I said, a conundrum.

One thing, however struck me as absolute - dinner! Everything else changed, be they toys, clothing sizes, fashion, voices, or height. Dinner was the Christmas constant. Few things changed around dinner. Roast turkey, Potatoes Romanoff, Brussel Sprouts (they still overwhelm my gag reflex), ham, and assorted vegetables. Dessert varied from Black Forest cake to Brandy Alexander Pie. One year the Brandy Alexander pie was a bit too potent after a mis-reading of the recipe doubled the amount of alcohol!

And then there was the year we had no turkey. Our house had a two oven range, and one of them gave up working halfway through cooking the bird. It was a bit of a scramble but the parent’s put their heads together and found enough in the pantry to feed everyone. As I recall it was ham, spam, and canned corned beef. And we always had a houseful to feed. The minimum was 12, the max was 20. It all depended on the year, and who had nowhere else to go. We usually wound up with some holiday orphans.

We didn’t have a kid’s table. From the time we were old enough to feed ourselves it was expected that we would be scattered amongst the adults. We were expected to listen and participate. One pseudo uncle served on the Queen Mary during the Second War and always had a wonderful tale or an outrageous joke. Around that table we learned of politics, show biz (both gossip and history), humour, family history, world history, science (both real and fiction), table manners, current events, business, economics, labour, cars, planes, how to tell a story, ships, and everything else under the sun including how to hang wall paper.

We learned how to be part of the greater whole. During those dinners the morning toys were forgotten. The people mattered. I mentioned before that we were never aware of any family discord. Rightly so, a child should never be aware of such things. In some families discord would dominate the holidays, and we all know someone who suffered as a result. It could be that some of those people were at our Christmas dining table, but it wasn’t apparent.

At the beginning of this I put forth that I wasted a lot of my parent’s money on things I can no longer summon forth to matter. As they have both passed on, I can’t ask them, tell them, or thank them. However, I remember most of those dinners and the people who, in their own way, helped my parents to raise three curious and rambunctious boys.

One of the threads first sewn into the fabric of my life was something my parents often said at those times when sibling discord arose, “One day we won’t be here, and you’ll only have each other.” An inevitable prophecy that has come true.

Time continues to pass and those Christmas dinners where once we numbered from 12 to 20 have become smaller. With the exception of our beloved aunt who lives overseas, every one of those childhood dinner guests have passed on. Tonight there will be four of us for dinner, my two brothers and a new face. Yet around that table will be the loving memories of many people, the one’s that took an interest in the curiosity of growing children, and who very gently and wisely overlooked the mistakes of manners and tempers that every child will suffer.

My Christmas Takeaway has nothing to do with toys, and wrapping paper. It’s their gift of the quiet, intelligent, adventurous, humourous, love filled and mildly prosperous life I get to live as a result of those Christmas dinners.

Peace to all, and safe adventures in the New Year.

 

 

The Tick Box Life

It was a late Key Largo afternoon as The Blue Eyed Wonder climbed into the deck chair at Snapper’s Turtle Bar. They’re the ones at the far end of the deck, right against the rail and next to the water. Sitting next to me she looked elfin, and the truth is she’s only about half a head taller than Tinkerbell.

Her thick and therefore uncontrollable dark brown hair had developed red highlights from two weeks of being in the sun. She kicked off the bright pink size 5 flip flops and put her tiny feet onto the chair rail and looked at me over the top of her mirrored prescription Ray-Ban aviators. I call her the Blue Eyed Wonder because of the depth of the shading in her eyes. Ask anyone who meets her what she looks like and they couldn’t say, all they can do is describe the intensity of the colour and focus in her stare. If you stare at them long enough you go straight to your secret inside places and tell her things you wouldn’t tell another soul. More than one person has spent years wondering how she got them to confess.

I’ve known her about thirty years. Off and on we had drifted through the years. Not as a couple, though that had happened once or twice. We had become companions in life. At least as much as someone who trusts no one, can trust anyone else, and that’s how she fit so uniquely into the structure of quietude and contemplation that I have finally achieved in my life.

We both ordered beer, the Sandbar Sunday, a locally brewed wheat ale. The tropical heat began to show in the sweat on the glass. It’s something you get used to, glasses that sweat and you learn to turn your head just slightly so it doesn’t drip on your shirt.

“You changed after the road trip. More withdrawn, even quieter than before, and yet more verbose at the same time. Plus you seem more intimately aware of what’s around you.”

“Whenever you travel for any period of time you become aware of all the tick boxes in your day to day life. All those things you do without thinking or questioning. Your work life has its tick boxes, your social life has its tick boxes, and your internal musings have their own tick boxes.”

I took a swallow of the beer and stared at the low stand of mangroves to my left. A two seat Waverunner went screaming past before I could say more. I’m not a fan of anything whose sole reason for existence is making noise and going fast without any real purpose. The beer was wonderful against the back of my throat.

“People like to have their lives orderly and predictable.” She said.

“Yes, and so did I until I began to notice there was more to it. I’m fortunate in that I travel alone. I get the luxury of time to not only see new things at my own speed, but also have the time to look at how I feel in seeing those new things. That’s when I discovered the idea of tick boxes. On the road across South Dakota I realized I was seeing more, hearing more, smelling more. And it made sense to me, because I was in a mode of being that demanded I be aware of everything. Everything had changed. I was alone in an unknown place and space. I had no infrastructure to support me in case of a problem. I had to seek out food, shelter, and even water. I had to be present in the moment at all times, in order to just survive that moment.”

Our deluxe cheeseburgers arrived, hers with Sharp Ceddar, mine with Provolone. She added Ketchup and nothing else. I have a fair sized infrastructure to support, so I added Ketchup, Mayo, and mustard.

“Do you eat a lot of this stuff when travelling?”

“Depends on the local menu. I prefer a salad option with burgers anywhere I go, but here it doesn’t seem to register with anyone. It’s always fries, like in England it’s chips. I once saw a menu there that offered lasagna with chips. Certain foods define a culture. In Greece I found yogurt, or something yogurt based was served with most everything. Mostly I eat whatever I feel is appropriate. The road trip featured a lot of pork and beef ribs. They were a signature theme and I wanted to experience them in different cities and environments. I am always glad to see fresh vegetables on a menu, especially steamed ones.”

Watching the Blue Eyed Wonder eat is an experience. Her delicate features and small mouth belie a ravenous appetite that she indulges with a surprising amount of ladylike grace in the face of its feral ferocity. It’s like watching a professional butcher, all economy of motion with no wasted effort. For me a successful meal is one that I don’t share with my shirt front.

She swallowed and asked “You still didn’t tell me why you changed?”

I had to think for a minute to try and phrase it, without wanting to sound pedantic or trite. So I finished the beer and signaled for another round before launching forth.

“It had to do with the tick boxes. I didn’t have them anymore. Somewhere on the road they disappeared and when I came home it worried me, a lot. I could no longer just lollygag through my day to day life with that blanket of emotional and intellectual certainty that everything would be what it was before. I started to ask myself questions that had to with relevance and reason. What I had was a greater awareness of what was going on around me. All the little things I had ignored or deemed irrelevant. The incompetence’s, the bickering, the negligence’s. Every little petty thing that I had written off as the background noise of my life became a major point of intellectual and emotional contention. And I saw others doing as I had done, ignoring or rationalizing a huge part of their lives, and that bothered me too. I kept flashing back to points on the road, a second of experience, a flavor or taste, a smell of Gulf air or the colour of the Great Plains sky. The feeling of belonging to the land of the Black Hills, all without ever being able to define why or how. It was all happening under the surface, and I couldn’t put a finger on what was happening to me or my life. I didn’t have the emotional or intellectual vocabulary to have that conversation with myself, and so my frustrations grew and grew.”

She took off her sunglasses and gave me the full force of those deep blue irises, the left one with a small fleck of gold at the outer edge, the right one with a fleck of jade green, square on the dot of midnight. She put her chin in the palm of a hand, elbow resting on the arm of the chair, and said, “Like a kind of PTSD?”

“Such a clinical term for something that in the end turned out to be beneficial, and that induced the kind of change that made possible a new way of thinking and living. So no, not PTSD. It was a wakeup call that I could no longer just tick boxes for the rest of my life. I had to find a way to excite and stimulate all of those senses, all of the time. Life fully open has become an addictive experience.”

“Is that why you are so annoying in re-phrasing every question to have a positive spin?”

“Yes!! Because if you ask every question, or make a statement as a given and predictable entity you miss the point of actually questioning. My former employment life is now filled with such language and it’s become boring and predictable. So, like many others I’ve tuned out. I realized if I was going to learn about a place and its people I needed to open up to the locals, including the locals at home. The Chamber of Commerce is full of glossy tourist brochures, but really light on any actual colour of a place. Visiting a new place is only part of travel to me. Getting behind the lives of the people who live there tells me what I really travel for, to understand a way of life. And the only way to do that is to ask positive questions, and to be fully open to the answers and building on that, not steering it in a chosen direction. I had to eliminate the tick boxes around ‘Nice weather we’re having’ and actually put meaning into asking ‘How’s your day?’ and really wanting to know the answer and build a conversation around it.”

She put her glasses back on and nodded very slowly as if trying to grasp the niggly edges of what I’d said. I knew exactly how she felt, unexpected changes were far harder to accept than the ones planned and executed. And when those changes don’t happen to you, they are mostly impossible to grasp.

The sun was in its waning phase behind us. The clouds out over Hawk Channel were starting to turn a light pink that was deepening by the minute. The server removed the plates with the obligatory “Anything else?” We agreed to not go beyond the two beers without saying a word. She climbed down from the stool like a child from a dining room chair, slid back into the pink flip flops, and we walked through the bar holding hands, without a word.

She would muse over this conversation for a few days. I could tell in the long periods of silence and the way she would look at the water off the house deck at the two mangrove islands that sit in the channel. Whatever was going on in her head stayed there, at least for now.