4. The Story of Christmas: You’re A Loser!
The Year of Paying Attention
I’m working on a strategy to navigate through Christmas, coming up in a few weeks. This magical time of year became interesting, the way a root canal is interesting, after my wife moved out four years ago. Since then I’ve been testing new thought patterns. This past Thanksgiving was the latest experiment, what with Sarah out west falling in love with somebody new, or, as it happened, not.
Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t berate myself for not being with my daughters and their mother, sitting among nieces and nephews in a sister-in-law’s big living room, celebrating a major family holiday. For the past couple of Thanksgivings, I felt that deep ache. Sure, it had been a pain in the ass to hit the road along with every person in America, the car packed tight with holiday family tension, but when the ritual is gone, you forget the unpleasant, and recall only the reassuring, traditional and familiar. The missing car trip for these past couple of Thanksgivings had haunted me, the ghost of my lost American Dream.
That’s just one of the stories I might tell myself. There are other dramatic stories, like, “This is a terrible time of year — a breeding ground for depression and anxiety!” So many variations, like “Who Needs It?” “I’m A Loser,” and “It’s All A Lie.” A holiday trick played by my two-sided brain — one half selling bullshit, the other half buying it. Another less popular style of holiday auto-fiction is the story of, “I’ve done everything that’s expected of me, and it’s boring and unfulfilling.” It’s all fiction, an invention of my mind in anxious unease. I can just as readily recreate a perfectly comfortable memory with the same props and characters, and fashion a story just as plausible, and just as fictional.
The tale of this year’s Thanksgiving started in my kitchen, me preparing a load of jumbo shrimp cocktail, which I packed and and carried to my friends’ apartment in Soho. I met pleasant friends of theirs, and we had a delicious meal, chatted amiably, after which I returned home. I phoned Sarah, who described her traditional Thanksgiving meal in Wyoming. I hadn’t been abandoned by anybody. I wasn’t letting anybody down. I’m pretty sure this is what actually happened, and this pleasant, low-key experience shall serve as the model for how I hope to spend fast-approaching Christmas.
***
This is a very disorienting Christmas week, freezing then unseasonably warm, rainy and snowy then suddenly clear. I look online for news about my cousin Michael, missing for five days now, poorly dressed and off his meds. On Facebook I pass along whatever new information his family posts online. I imagine Michael’s sisters and their children, hustling around New Hampshire trying to find him, handing out and taping up flyers with his picture. You’ve seen such flyers. A picture of someone’s face and name, a complete stranger, somebody’s sister, or father, or brother, now missing. This is where he was last seen. This is the number to call with information. I read those flyers, but never remember the face, one I’ve never seen, and don’t expect to.
Until now, the closest I’ve been to a missing person was when I saw the picture of a neighbor, a gentle, childlike Asian man living in a nearby group home, taped to a wall outside my apartment building with the headline MISSING. I’d see him on the subway platform, where he’d sometimes approach me shyly, mildly agitated, pointing at his wrist, wanting to know what time it was, as if he were late. I’d tell him the time, he’d nod his thanks, and walk to the next person on the platform with the same request. I felt protective of him, I suppose, and the “missing” flyer sent a jolt through me — but what could I do? I was troubled every time I passed the flyer. Then, weeks later, there he was, walking south on Roosevelt Island’s Main Street, with the familiar adults I assume he lives with. He was okay!
Today in the United States, a week before Christmas, there are fifty thousand missing adults, or so says the online statistics. If you’re rich or famous, more people care about it, and resources can be brought to bear to search for you. I can’t bring myself to look further into the data, afraid I’ll find some awful likelihood. I know these statistics have little to do with my cousin, or his frantic sisters, and the family, nieces and nephews worrying about him. I conjure up a vision of a positive future — he’s found, he’s okay, safe, and everyone is so relieved.
Looking for a Facebook update about Michael, I notice instead a post by somebody I “follow,” but don’t know, a man who appears to be a college professor, who has posted pictures of his friend, a young woman, a college student, who’s been missing for a few days. I imagine her family somewhere losing their minds, as we count down the last few days to Christmas.
***
I was on the Roosevelt Island tram, the nicest way to travel between the Upper East Side and my tiny island neighborhood, calmed by the noiseless three-minute trip over the East River, floating parallel to the 59th Street Bridge, when Ellen’s name lit up my cell phone.
“Hi, Dad! Where are you? We’re all at the Grasso’s, and everybody wants to see you! I told them you’re bringing Chinese food to Mom’s, and we’re decorating the tree tonight, but do you want to come over and see everybody, and then we can go to Mom’s?”
When my marriage to Ellen’s mother ended four years ago, I figured I’d permanently lost my Manhattan in-laws: married doctors with a daughter in LA and an expatriate son in China with his own growing Chinese-American family. More than a year ago, both doctors strolled into my hospital room to say hello the day after I had cancer surgery, to see how I was doing. I felt like crying but maintained my composure. Their LA daughter, now a Hollywood hotshot, had been the little flower girl at our wedding. She is Ellen and Lizzie’s favorite cousin, and she’d remained in touch with me through the separation and divorce and eighteen months of the silent treatment by the daughters.
Just after Thanksgiving, Ellen mentioned she and her sister Lizzie were going to put up Christmas decorations at their mother’s apartment, and I winced — I wasn’t part of that picture anymore. A few days later, I took a deep breath and thumbed a text message to my ex Grace, that read, “If you need help placing ornaments on the tree with the girls, I’m available…” I paused — what if she’d rather not include me? Is this putting her in a bad spot? I sent it anyway.
“That is REALLY a nice offer!” she wrote back in a flash. “Are you around this weekend? (I notice you didn’t mention lights.)” I was stunned. A really nice offer? A joke about Christmas tree lights? Without warning I was suddenly invited to a family gathering I would not have imagined a week earlier. Now, on the tram, en route to pick up a couple of bags of Chinese food, I was being invited back into the fold, sort of.
Of course I went. There wasn’t even time to fret. Everyone greeted me as of old, ex-wife included. My ex-sister-in-law showed me around their newly expanded apartment, which had annexed a neighboring apartment to make room for visitors from Los Angeles and Shanghai. “There’s plenty of closet space,” she assured me, opening doors. I gazed in wonder, not at the closet space, but at where I was, and what was happening. Dreams rarely feel like dreams, but this tour did.
“This is Anthony’s office… and this is my office…” I pretended it was just a walk around the place, and not the kind extension of a family pardon. Soon my ex-brother-in-law was showing me pictures on his phone from a recent family wedding. “Look how great these two look,” he said. I wasn’t sure who I was looking at, but they looked great.
It was time to go to the ex’s. Everyone was hungry. The dumplings were coagulating in the bag. As we said goodbye I wondered if I’d ever return to my ex-in-laws’ apartment. I walked Ellen and her mother the two blocks to Grace’s apartment, where my younger daughter, flanked by her affable boyfriend, was frantically taping paper around something. “Don’t look at what I’m doing — look at Dave!” Lizzie ordered. “Hi, Dave,” we obeyed.
Upstairs, we ate room temperature Chinese food, and nobody cared. We unpacked the ornaments the girls had been putting on the tree since they believed in Santa. I found the crowning angel in the box with my mother’s instructions written on it in her cursive handwriting: “Angel for top of tree. Goes on after the lights, before anything else.” I followed the instructions. I started to like Christmas again.
Next week: Manhattan’s Most Exclusive Chicken Fingers
