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“Solitude”

Christmas 1974

By Charles Moon

     School was enrichment. It was expanding my imagination beyond the boundaries of the suburbs of upstate New York. It was socialization and the pleasant delusion that I was one of “them” – the normal people. Home was simply survival. Summer vacations held the promise of escape and freedom in the form of a blue Schwinn ten speed until I was needed at home to help with the domestic tasks that mom was too exhausted to perform. The Christmas break, however, brought nothing but darkness and isolation.

      Contrary to a popular song played on the radio, it was not the most wonderful time of the year for me. I would dread the shortening days of December and being imprisoned by the cold New York winters. I would dread the isolation of the two weeks spent at home when school was dismissed for the holidays. I would dread the coming of Christmas, knowing that our family was so irreparably damaged that any semblance of joyfulness and peace was nearly impossible. Survival was the best we could hope for.

      Joe Trebo had turned sixteen in the summer. He was old enough in the eyes of the state to hold a job and drive an automobile. He abandoned his paper routes the day after he got his driver’s license, in favor of a higher paying job at Auburn Tubing, a local manufacturer of copper pipes and other fittings used in the plumbing trade. Joe worked the maximum hours allowed by law to pay for his car, which to him, was his symbol of freedom. Unfortunately it meant that we saw each other very infrequently and gradually drifted in different directions. Life had taken its toll on our friendship.

      The last day of school before the Christmas break in 1974 was December 20th. It was a Friday. Spirits in Auburn Senior High school were high in anticipation of the long hiatus from classes and homework. The entire tenth grade seemed electrified. The jocks argued which football team was headed to the postseason. The girls assembled in cliques in the hallways and openly exchanged secret greetings in a ritualistic performance of overt exclusion, to anyone who was a witness but not a member. Mixed in the sea of sweaters, t-shirts and blue jeans were the brightly dressed band members, already in uniform for the afternoon Christmas assembly.

      Then there were the oddballs – the outcasts of society. We were the kids who had no specific group to belong to. At 15 years old, a person’s identity is defined by their peer group. Without that group, there was no identity. We wandered aimlessly through the halls in search of anonymity. To be noticed invited torment, so the ability to be invisible to the rest of the student population was imperative. I honed my skills early. I was quiet and withdrawn, yet polite and friendly when confronted. Part of the reason I may have been spared the worst of those who took pleasure in targeting solitary students was the fact that I was a large kid. Although I never could have assaulted a fellow human being, even in defense of myself, I was enough of an imposing figure to prevent anyone taking that chance. The smaller and thinner outcasts in the school did not fare as well.

      I found it ironic that in the season purportedly based on love and generosity and forbearance, it was the kids who behaved the worst toward the weakest, most defenseless students who found the greatest pleasure in Christmas. While the instinctive desire to be part of a group burned as strongly in me as any other teenager, I didn’t want to be part of that crowd. The truth was, the only group I was suited for was with the others who also had no cohesive social sphere.

      At 1:15 the entire school was marshaled into the auditorium for the official start of the Christmas vacation. Dr. Davisson, the Principle, began the assembly with a short speech, thanking the office staff for the wonderful decorations and the students for not destroying them. He relinquished the stage to Mr. Sona, the music director of both the marching band and chorus, who, for this one time during the year, performed together. The chorus belted out a medley of particularly secular Christmas songs while the band, more used to the cacophonous football stadium than an acoustically reflective stage, accompanied the vocals the way thunder accompanies lightning.

      I sat with the rest of the tenth grade, waiting patiently for this din to be over. People seemed to be smiling all around me. It wasn’t for the wonderful music, nor was it for the coming together in the spirit of the holidays. It was for the reprieve from afternoon classes.

      “How shallow and selfish,” I thought. “I wish school would continue right through Christmas.”

      That thought was both selfish and futile.

      By 2:00 p.m., the assembly had ended and the floodgates of Auburn High had released waves of teenagers onto an unsuspecting town. I gathered my personal items, loosely packed all the books I wouldn’t be using into my locker and headed for the busses.

      I sat on the brick wall by the bus platform in front of the school and watched my bus pull away. I was in no hurry to get home. Besides, it was warmer than it should have been for late December so I decided to take advantage of the weather before winter seriously grasped the Finger Lakes.

      A Chevy Nova with chrome wheels, mismatched side exhaust pipes, an unpainted fiber glass hood scoop, and more rust than the battleship Arizona roared past me in the direction of the mall. The occupants were no doubt in a hurry to hang out by the arcade where they could watch girls, brag about their cars and try to figure out where they could find a dollar for a slice of pizza. I turned off Grandvista Boulevard away from the traffic and toward suburbia. The sidewalks were wide and the lawns neatly raked. Rows of houses, devoid of people and different only by details, stood silently guiding me to the end of the development.

      My ears began to throb from the damp wind blowing from the west and I would alternately tilt my head to one side and then the other to try and warm them, one at a time, against the fleece lined collar of my old winter coat. Forty minutes after I had started walking, I crossed the invisible line at the beginning of an old country road that separated the good section of town from where we lived. Butcher’s Road was as “country” as they got, short of being unpaved. There were no sidewalks or gravel to walk on. If you weren’t on the road surface itself, you were walking on the cultivated edge of a cornfield on one side of the western end of St. John’s cemetery. I chose the cemetery side of the road to keep the mud on my canvas sneakers to a minimum.

      The last half-mile was the longest. The road was straight and flat and seemed to go on forever. I shuffled my feet across the gravel-coated grass. One scuff at a time, I approached our house that was surrounded by untrimmed shrubs and adorned with peeling paint. Three cement steps led up to the wooden farmer’s porch on the back of the house. I slid my key into the lock and let myself in. The cavernous silence of our unlit kitchen was an unnecessary reminder that I was the only one home.

      Terry turned eighteen in November and wasn’t around much anymore. He and mom hadn’t seen eye-to-eye on much of anything since he dropped out of school the previous year. Terry was not stupid. His grades were exemplary, when he bothered to apply himself. But Terry did not possess the qualities that kept me relatively safe in school. Where I was big and complacent, Terry was small and belligerent. When Auburn High School found itself presented with a group of teenagers in search of a victim, Terry was a lighthouse. He was loud and argumentative and he never hid his anger, fear or humiliation from his tormentors. Dropping out was his resolution to the problem.

      Terry had been working for a shady salesman since he left school, compounding mom’s disapproval, and rarely got home until well after dark. Andy was at his best friend’s house, as usual. His friend’s mother kept an eye on him until our own mother got home from work, or I came over to get him. Today, I let him stay and play. It was infinitely more fun than what I was planning to do, anyway.

      It was five days before Christmas and the house did not have a single strand of tinsel or sprig of holly anywhere.

      “What is wrong with me? Why am I so empty?”

      The words had been echoing in my head throughout my cold walk home. I felt as if Christmas was excluding me along with all of the popular kids at school. I had learned to survive them, I would survive Christmas, too. The easiest way to do this was to become a chameleon and color myself in the trappings of the season. I would blend into Christmas.

      I was determined to make this place look as jolly as possible, as quickly as I could. Within fifteen minutes I had dragged the five large boxes of Christmas decorations down from the attic, as well as the plastic garbage bag containing the artificial wreath. The last thing to come down was our tree. It was made of a wooden pole that came apart in two sections with color-coded holes drilled into the shaft. The wire ends of the branches were painted and matched to their corresponding holes. It was a big six foot Scotch Pine puzzle.

      The tree went up easily, followed by two strands of lights that miraculously worked right out of the box they had been unceremoniously thrown in the previous year. A few garlands of tinsel and a mix of old, new and hand-made ornaments completed my trimming efforts.

      I hung the wreath on the door, set up the antique wooden nativity scene and sprinkled the remaining decorations around the house. The last item to come out of the boxes was my stuffed toy reindeer, which I placed inconspicuously on the bookcase behind the tree. Just like the old poem, the decorations were hung with the hopes that something would be there. Maybe not St. Nick, but at least a little joy and some good old fashioned Christmas spirit.

      I pulled the rocking chair into the middle of the room, now growing dark from the sun’s afternoon decline. Three of my mother’s Christmas records were stacked on the turntable so I turned the stereo on and set the needle on track one. The voices of a choir sang praises to our lord and proclaimed the joy of the season as I sat alone in an empty house, illuminated only by the twinkling lights on a plastic pine tree.

      Everything was missing from Christmas or maybe it was just me who was missing from Christmas. I sat in the odd light of 100 2-watt bulbs, soothed by the strains of recorded angels, and thought about everything from Christmas to our family to my future. Maybe Terry was right and I should just accept that we are misfits and I should give up any hope. This time of year was not for us – it was for “them”.

      The second side of the third album had just begun “The Holly and the Ivy” when I heard my mother’s car in the driveway.

      “Hello?”

      I didn’t answer her right away.

      “Hello? Is anybody home?”

      “Hi, Mom.”

      “David? Where are you?”

      “In the living room.”

      “In the dark? What are you doing?”

      “I just finished decorating for Christmas. I was enjoying it for a few minutes.”

      “That’s nice, is Andy home?”

      “No, he’s still over at Matt’s house.”

      The truth was I wasn’t enjoying the decorations, even though I thought I should be. Mom nodded and picked up the phone to let Andy know it was time to come home. I turned on the ceiling light and unplugged the tree. The only thing I discovered was that decorating didn’t fill me with that elusive Christmas spirit everyone else seemed to have.

      Five days later Christmas came. Nothing had changed. Terry handed each of us a box wrapped in newspapers containing a trinket or two. I had bought similar items earlier in the week with the few dollars I had saved from my allowance. Andy was still too young to understand the obligation of gifting. There was no joy or generosity in it. The gift itself didn't matter as long as there was something to unwrap. Its presence added nothing, but its absence would have been a blaring affront. So we each gave the other our presents, wished each other a merry Christmas and called it a day. By 11:00 a.m. Terry had left to join his friends, mom was preparing the turkey she had once again received from her job as her only Christmas bonus. Andy fell back to sleep and I began working on the 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle I had received as a gift from my mother.

      The puzzle was a small church surrounded by the golden autumn foliage of any one of a hundred New England towns. I worked diligently on that puzzle, confirming and reconfirming that each piece fit flawlessly into its socket before moving on to the next. I work for hours building first the outer frame where at least one side of the piece was flat. Then I assembled the more distinguishable shapes of the architecture before moving on to the random patterns of the clouds and leaves.

      No one called or stopped by to visit. No one complained about the television being turned off while I listened to the radio play a mixture of top 40 music interspersed with carols. I worked all day, all alone.

      Mom announced dinner shortly before 6:00 p.m. so I slid the partially completed puzzle off the dining room table and onto a sheet of cardboard. We set out the good china flanked by my Great-grandmother’s best silver and the four of us sat down to turkey and dressing.

      “Did you have a good Christmas?” Mom asked as she began passing plates of food around the table. I was the first to respond.

      “Okay, I guess.”

      Terry shrugged his shoulders and Andy didn’t understand the question.

      “Did you get everything you wanted?”

      If a gold plated, diamond-encrusted Porsche had been under the tree, I don’t think it would have made a difference. There was no thing I wanted especially. What I wanted was to find Christmas itself and have that deep fulfillment that was always promised in songs, stories and television commercials. I didn’t get it.

      “I guess so.”

      Yes, it was a lie, but my mother could not give me what I could not find myself. There was no reason to make her feel responsible for my inability to grasp the Christmas spirit.

      “You seem to be enjoying your puzzle.”

      “Yeah, it’s neat. Thanks.”

      Dinner ended and I helped relocate the dirty dishes into the sink. Mom began the long process of stripping every last digestible piece of meat from the remaining turkey carcass while I washed. The last utensil from great-grandma’s silver slid back into its cloth pouch for another year of rest and I slid my jigsaw puzzle back into the center of the dining room table.

      I was back to being alone. Just me, the decorations and a beautiful representation of someplace else cut into 1,000 pieces for my amusement.

      Then Christmas was over. Just like a cheap firecracker with a long fuse, the brief pop of Christmas erased the prolonged fizzle of anticipation.

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