24th December, 2010
8:57 pm
I sincerely hope you're not my mother, or anyone else who would be less than pleased to read about less-than-jolly topics, the likes of which I intend on addressing. My holiday note was sent in the mail solely to spread the cheer of the season. My holiday blog is written under the assumption that if you can find my blog, you've probably run into all kinds of depressing news along the way, such as "McDonald Spreads Holiday Magic to Mongolian Children" and "Ken Lay Wins Pulitzer Prize", and so you're probably set to handle just about anything I can dish up.
I spent yesterday at the Veteran's Home. Yes, a bit of an appallingly depressing place, I daresay because all the vets are so serious-looking that anyone with a mind to spread holiday cheer is scared off by their remarkable scowls. However, I've faced down worse in my own refrigerator. They had a plastic Christmas tree, but nobody had gotten around to decorating it yet, and, as nobody seemed to be leaping to the task, I decided it might be a fair bit more pleasant than attempting to engage in conversation with one of the scowls lurking in the hallway, which I promised myself I'd do at a later time. The lights went up quick enough; tasteless mall ornaments next. Their tinsel had never even been opened.
Putting tinsel on the tree was one of those rare set-in-stone holiday traditions that never changed for me until going off to the war. I would spend every ounce of patience I could muster decking the tree with carefully placed bits of crinkled, torn tinsel. And I was always darned proud, even if I couldn't reach but midway up the tree. So this was a nice reprise for me. Even if this tree was fake; even though I smelled antiseptic instead of my mother's Christmas pudding; even though a paraplegic fellow with droopy eyes was staring at me from a few doors down instead of my sister Harry (which was just fine with me), it was still… oh, you know. Harking back to the good old days. Or the old days. I suppose they were pretty good too.
Anyways. I must have spent the better part of eighty years putting up tinsel for those folks yesterday, but it was mesmerizing, in a pleasant, old-timey, vaguely ritualistic sort of way. I asked Sherlock if he would consider coming with me to play his violin for the old folks, but he said no, he'd rather not have defibrillators thrown at his instrument. I'll get him next year, if we're both still alive.
Note: One good reason to go to vet's homes is that for most of the people there, you're still a charming 'young' man. An illusion I'd gladly slip into with the blink of an eye.
This season I am troubled by the thought that all of this is an illusion. Don't leave – I swear I'll try not to get fatalistic on you, or whatever it is they call it when teenagers wonder what it's all for and if anything matters anyways. Of course I don't know what it's all for and of course things matter, and I'm quite at peace with all that. I don't plan on taking a crowbar to the door that holds back all of the mysteries we all encounter – I'd only wrench my back, I'm sure. I'll leave the unraveling of the mysteries to Sherlock, who I'm equally certain will fail. Sherlock, please don't try too hard to prove me wrong, you'll only fail harder.
I knew full well what I was getting into when I went off to war as a medic. My goal, in fact, was to come face-to-face (if the victim was lucky) with all manner of war injuries, which can, as we can all imagine, be quite traumatizing. I thought I might even get injured myself. I knew I wouldn't be able to comprehend the horror of the situation until I got there and actually saw things and did things. I knew there was a high probability of acquiring some sort of mental disorder. And so I went to war, and I treated horrible wounds that traumatized me, got injured, was struck by the real horror of war, did things that I now regret deeply, came home and contracted a strange sort of PTSD, and a slight and periodic tremor in my left hand. Just because I expected all that to happen doesn't mean I was ready for it. Not really.
Everybody knows this. Everybody knows that while they're safe at home, watching TV or grooming their cat or snogging their significant other, nations are at war, people are dying, houses burning and children weeping. That's not something we all think about that often – or at least, most of us don't – and I don't know if that's ok. Sitting in comfort with barely a care in the world, happy, is this an illusion? My home could burn down any moment for any number of reasons. I could die. Sherlock or my landlady could die. Heaven forbid something happens to my sister. Heaven forbid I could have saved somebody today by being at work. Things do happen, and they will happen. With the kind of lifestyle we lead, is it out of line for me to say that I can't, without crossing my fingers, plan more than a year ahead for either Sherlock or I? And don't houses burn and don't people die? Yes. Yes, they do. It's happening as I type this and it's happening as you read this. Somebody's daughter was just killed in a car accident, and somebody is just now finding out that their father suffered a massive stroke and didn't make it. Nobody expects these things. They happen and they shatter illusions of comfort and all-is-well mentalities.
War will teach you that. Even if you knew it before. It'll change how you think and twist how you see things in ways I'd never wish on anybody.
Sitting around a roaring fire with the stockings hung and the tree lit up and the tinsel painstakingly draped and the presents all ready to be torn to smithereens much too early Christmas morning, about the last thing anybody wants to hear is the tragic news report over the radio. It really does rip through the magic of the holidays.
And yet… And I must pause right now to apologize, because I hate 'and yet's, with the elipses pregnant with philosophical mumbo-jumbo. And yet, without magic times flashing the sadness right out of your holiday-stricken eyes, without the gnashing smiles of children ravenous for wrapping-paper flesh, without the warm smells of Christmas cooking and woodsmoke, wouldn't we be left with a barren, depressing sort of existence?
For, alternatively, I most certainly don't live for the day when I get to amputate Trevor Grengham's mangled left arm on the battlefield. I don't live for the day when the serial killer escapes from under our noses and promptly murders a young woman named Stevie Jamison, or for the night when my neighbor's dog gets hit in the dead of night and I, having woken from a nightmare, watch wide-eyed at the window as it drags itself to the side of the road and collapses, twitching. If that's all there was to life, I do believe I would have dispatched myself by now, and nobody would have thought less of me.
I live for the time when I place the last piece of damned tangled tinsel on the tree at the vet's home, turn around, come face-to-face with a wrinkled, battle-scarred stranger, who puts his hand on my arm and says with irrevocable sincerity, 'Bless you, young man'. For the time the new mother reaches for her baffled-looking baby and cradles the most precious thing in the world to her chest. For the times I spend smiling with what little family I have, for the times I spend smiling with my few and dear friends, and for the times I spend smiling with those who are both. Obviously those are the times I live for. If not those, then what?
Put simply, just because one person has their tongue stuck to a street pole doesn't mean you've got to go and stick your tongue on there as well, though you wouldn't know it by watching kids these days. Yes, I just made light of those darkest and direst of times. Here and now is not the time or place to grieve. If you are to live at all, yes, acknowledge that you are lucky, if you are indeed lucky, enough to have a home, to have a family, to know what the magic of the holidays feels like. Acknowledge that some of us are homeless, have no family, and have never known the joy of spending so much time tinseling a tree that their eyeballs start to bug out a little bit. But don't dwell, either way. Things can and do turn themselves around. Dark places are all eventually illuminated, and shadows are cast on bright places.
On a nicely-placed sidenote that I swear I didn't plan, this is, after all, what the holidays are all about. Without delving into any particular religion/spirituality/belief, in the most basic sense, the celebrations that occur at this time of year are all about the return of the sun. The Festival of Lights. Having hope even though the nights seem like they'll go on forever and the cold seeps into your marrow. People across the northern hemisphere, without even one conference call to coordinate everything, have been celebrating with food, drink, laughter (oftentimes induced by drink), gifts, and as much light as they can manage, and they've been doing it for thousands of years. Celebrating the re-turn of the sun and illuminating the deepest darkness they experience.
If that's not a thing to live for… well, it is. It is.
Now, as this is, after all, my Personal Blog, I'll let you know where I'm at. Despite living with a man who isn't quite sure what eggnog is and thinks tinsel is for fancy dress coats, despite the unfortunate distance between myself and my family, and despite all of the dark places I have passed through up to this point, I currently exist in a very well-illuminated sort of reality, or illusion, or whatever. Things could be better; they could be much worse.
My most sincere wish is that you are in a bright place, and that the warmth of the holidays makes a beeline to your soul, rather like a benevolent, jingling, heat-seeking missile. Don't try to dodge it; trust me, it'll get you sooner or later. Unless you're Sherlock. I'm not so sure about him. I'm never sure about him. I think he likes it that way.
And I've just remembered I have things to wrap. Always sneaks up on me. Good night.