Hope after, um, whatever that was.
A holiday post. I think.
Well, it’s Christmas Day for a lot of people and I didn’t know if I would commemorate it here, mostly because I had an impossible day yesterday and telling you about it seemed improper or some other thing I generally don’t worry about being. But our family celebrations will take place tomorrow which means that today we’re sitting at home listening to holiday-spirited orchestral music, and that means I have less to do right now and fewer people running around my apartment than anyone I know. No one’s running around this place, actually. Maybe that’ll change later, who knows.
When it comes to sharing life-episodes related to the absolute most brutal aspects of core trauma-healing, it can be difficult to find the line between courageous authorial openness and whoaaaaa there I’m not your therapist, bruh. As someone who historically gave Lena Dunham a run for her money on the practice of “telling people I know to varying degrees personal shit they definitely never asked to know and might be sorry I told them,” I’m going to err on the side of keeping it vague this morning. I will tell you something horribly disgusting, though, so a warning if you want to skip a truly gross gross gross visual. I’ll give you some space so you don’t see it by accident.
Ian was telling me some difficult-to-hear shit about what sorts of ideas formed my ideas of what was normal and expected of loved ones, and I vomited ALL over the damn place, like everywhere, like we couldn’t go on the hike we’d planned because we had to turn the car around so I could go home to shower and change. Oh my god. Now, we had been going on some winding roads for quite some time, but that didn’t explain why the breakfast I had eaten several hours earlier expunged itself from my troubled stomach and the heart so near it as though I had just ingested it ten minutes prior. There’s a lot that had been sitting there in my system, undigested, unconfronted, and I am absolutely convinced that was responsible for yesterday’s sudden interior theatrics. (My dad used to say, in a hilariously hoity-toity voice, “Greetings from the interior!” whenever his stomach rumbled audibly.)
Now a sacred-sounding choral rendition of “Silent Night” has begun to fill the living room, so that’s as welcome a segue as any, I hope. Ian grew up without religion and I did not grow up Christian, but I did grow up thinking about Jesus a lot, and at some point I found myself deeply moved by the story of a scared teen mom under a LOT of sudden pressure, finding warmth and comfort in the company of animals in the one place she and her husband could find shelter. I always found it abhorrent that the couple was shunned so roundly, but that’s probably a large part of the point.
I’ve always loved “Little Drummer Boy” as a story about how music and its communal powers are infinitely more meaningful than material gifts or political hierarchy.
I also just remembered going to one of those live nativity scenes in Albuquerque. Both Albuquerque and New Orleans were cities where it really felt like Christmas, which, to my mind, it hasn’t, to me, anywhere in California. During my annual complaint about this, I reminded myself that for two years we spent Christmas in BOSTON where the holiday as America knows it was essentially invented. “New England was too much!” I declared. “I was like ‘simmer down, everybody!’”
I am impossible to please. Such is my lot. And therefore yours. Sigh.
I will say that I’m grateful to have been able to see the Boston Pops, courtesy of comp tickets from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where I worked. The most wonderful part about this was being able to tell my grandmother that we were going. I announced it by email, her favorite mode of communication later in her life, and she wrote back in rapturous rows of exclamation points telling me she’s been listening to the Boston Pops since the 1930’s! I felt like a part of history, and every new connection I made with my grandmother was sacred even before her death at 99 in July of 2019. Fans of Christmas trivia (would my subscribers be fans of Christmas trivia?) might be interested to know that the well-loved Christmas standard Sleigh Ride originated with the Boston Pops, and that the grandaughter of the guy who wrote it (or maybe older daughter? I forget) is adamant about never donating to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her family has given all that can be expected to the BSO and we should never ask them for anything again.
Wow, I said “we” right there, it just came out like that! Maybe I’m in denial about my relationship to Boston. While it felt to me like a city systemically constructed to make me feel like I don’t exist, because its norms and the rigidity with which it enforced them are entirely alien to me, I have only good things to say about my boss at the BSO and the donors I spoke to on the phone to make my daily bread. I miss those people sometimes.
Breakfast is ready, because it’s always early in the Pacific time zone, so I’ll wrap this up here to go eat the fruits of Ian’s cooking which is grits, eggs, and vegetarian bacon. Grits is not a “Christmas dish” in that sense, but eating anything from home always feels like a celebration, especially because grits was the one dish I managed to ask my grandmother for her magic about: the secret, she told me, is to cook them FOREVER, I mean truly forever and then longer than that, and soak it all in an ungodly (or truly godly) amount of butter. In our case it’s vegan butter because of Ian’s dairy allegy but you get the point.
No images on this post. My dizzy-ish head and not-totally-settled stomach are conspiring to make me not feel like looking one up. May your holiday and the rest of your year and your 2023 be filled with all manner of exquisite visuals as well as other sensory delights, however.
No subscription or share buttons either. Let’s keep this one between us, as a token of how grateful I am for your having helped me build whatever this is turning out to be.