2001

“Alone ”

Christmas 2001

By Charles Moon

      Three weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, National Warehouse Systems announced another series of layoffs. When they decided my services were no longer useful, the purging of all the old Cassidy personnel was complete. One month later I received a call from the emergency room at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia telling me that my mother had passed away.

      As Thanksgiving approached, the only things I felt thankful for were the close friends and what was left of my dwindling family who gathered in a small churchyard to bury mom. We laid her ashes to rest next to the all too recent graves of my grandparents.

      I was completely numb through most of the Christmas season. Too much shock, too much loss and too much pretending not to be bothered by what, at this point, totally disgusted me, shut me down so completely that I barely remember anything but Christmas day itself.

      For a snowless December, the weather was good – seasonably cool, but not cold, partly cloudy but neither overcast nor particularly sunny. A faint breeze rustled the few remaining leaves still clinging to empty tree branches. The Christmas tree was setup in the same corner in which it had been placed for the past fifteen years, decorated with the same ornaments we had used, on and off, for as many holidays. It blended into the room along with all the other decorations of a season lacking the joy and merriment it promised. It was an ordinary tree in an ordinary room on an ordinary Christmas. The coffee, my shower, my clothes, the weather, the morning itself … all of it was unnoticeably ordinary.

      The only people who had regularly visited us on Christmas day were all dead now. Elizabeth was intractable when it came to celebrating the holiday and I no longer fought that battle with her. And, Alex, my only son, did not deserve to be the fulcrum upon which my emotions turned. I was alone and empty.

      There were no surprising gifts that made anyone exclaim perfection had been achieved, nor were there any disappointments. All was as it had been expected to be – all that it could ever be for me – survivable.

      By mid-morning, each of us had found our peace with the successful passing of all the proscribed rituals of Christmas. Alex had long disappeared to engross himself in the three video games he had received from the family-approved gift list. Elizabeth isolated herself in the pages of a novel I had bought for her as a winter pastime. I put on my green fishing jacket with the detachable sleeves and stepped outside into the Christmas day air.

      I shoved my hands deeply into the pockets and took a deep breath. The air was dry and flavorless. The low angle of the sun glared through the high haze of wispy clouds and forced me to squint to see across the street. Our neighbor on the opposite side of the street had ended his participation in decorating the block with lights when his wife was hospitalized with severe Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago. His unlit house stood cold and empty while he undoubtedly sat in a chair next to a bed in a distant nursing home and held the hand of a wife who no longer knew who he was.

      I walked to the end of the block, picturing each household’s Christmas as I passed. The people who resided in the darkened houses I imagined had traveled to a large family gathering in another county or state and were at this moment enjoying the company of their extended family. Some houses had their exterior lights lit even though it was almost noon, as a testament to the day and the fact that they were festive and joyous in the comfort of their own homes.

      The house on the corner had taken decorating a step further. Accompanying the normal lights were nine plastic white tail deer lawn ornaments lined up in four rows of two with a single deer replica in the front. They were all connected with strings of white lights that led back to one of the children’s sleds, turned into a sleigh with the help of cardboard and tinfoil. The lone deer in front had been painted entirely red instead of just the nose, in case passing cars couldn’t understand the metaphor. Someone had hung a ring of silver bells around the neck of the red plastic animal with a clever contraption in the middle. An index card was tied to a string with a heavy common nail securely tangled in the line at the halfway point. It was suspended between the bells so when the wind caught the card it would swing the metal nail and ring the bells like a wind chime.

      I stood on the corner and took in the absurdity of this diorama set out on a neighborhood lawn. A single car passed quickly down the cross street, pulling a swirling clutter of leaves in its wake. The turbulent air reached the index card and twisted it in a graceful, aerial pirouette. The dangling nail made the expected contact with the bells, sending its light jingling sound down an empty street to fade into obscurity. That was a sound that I had heard before.

      I turned back sharply to my house and went inside hoping to find the memory that the sound of jingling bells on Christmas morning had dredged up. I pulled open the door to the storage space upstairs to see it had been emptied two years ago when we reorganized all the decorations to cardboard containers in the basement. I ran down the steps two at a time and began rummaging through boxes in the basement.

      “What are you looking for?” Elizabeth called down the steps.

      “Nothing.”

      “Maybe I know where it is, whatever it is.”

      “Never mind. It’s not here.”

      I replaced the boxes that I had pulled away from the wall and went upstairs to my office. I know I had seen it recently if I could only remember where it was. I opened the drawers and cupboards, recalling observing it in a location that didn’t require anything to be moved to see it. Finally, I looked in the closet tucked between the bookcase and the back door and there on top of a stack of old jigsaw puzzles on the top shelf, was the item I had been searching for.

      I gently took it down from its perch and held the old toy reindeer with the little silver bell around his neck that my mother had made me so many years ago. The dust raised from moving it after its long storage sparkled in the sun streaming through the back door. I shook the small figure back and forth for only a second dispersing the glittering particles. The rusted steel bell released a muted clang that was symbolic of the years of decay my own Christmases had suffered.

      I couldn’t fathom why I had saved this broken old toy all these years, but here it was in my hands providing me comfort. It had survived, just as I had, and it still carried with it a little bit of the original Christmas spirit. The more I touched it, the more I touched my past … all the way back to before life had a chance to poison my hope. Perhaps the only antidote to that is going back to before it all began and releasing the bad feelings one memory at a time and keeping the good ones forever.

      That dirty little animal could always bring me back to that first perfect Christmas of family and friends and learning the joy of giving without the feeling of obligation. That was the one thing I would always have to help me survive the rest of it. A small bit of that elusive Christmas spirit found me alone.

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