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Saturday

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Saturdays at the hospital are filled with empty spaces. It begins outside, in the almost empty parking lots, the same parking lots that on weekday mornings are filled to capacity, now populated by only a handful of cars parked close to the entrances to buildings like scattered leaves blown against a doorstop.

Inside, the emptiness fills hallways and corridors that during the week are consumed by wheeled activity, nurses or attendants pushing gurneys or wheelchairs, doctors and surgeons in lab coats with heads buried in clipboards. Rooms are filled with patients, both out and in. On Saturdays, beyond the walls of the emergency ward, there are no out patients.

In late morning the visitors start trickling in, friends and family, mothers and wives, fathers and husbands, siblings and in-laws. A little bit nervous at first, not knowing what to expect, they cling a little bit closer to each other than they normally would as they walk down the halls, bearing gifts, flowers and balloons or books, peeking into each room at the living story lying in each bed, hoping for a spark of recognition, until they reach the room they came for.  As they enter the doorway they suck in their breath and force a smile on their faces, and finally they are standing face to face with their loved one, broken and hurting and healing.  They make nervous small talk and stand in uncomfortable poses next to the bed.  Time ticks on as they talk about shared interests, while husbands or wives grow impatient and glance at their wristwatches or cell phones, thinking about the game they are missing or the lawn that needs mowing, any of the things that they worked so hard all week for. They feel it all slipping away as their spouse drones on and on, telling the patient how good he looks and how much he is missed at home and how easy he’s going to have to take it after he gets out.

Then, in late afternoon and early evening, the visitors are gone, and the patients are left alone.  The flowers and the cards and the books are all put away, and nurses make their rounds, dispensing meds or serving dinner. This is the time for rest, and as the sun descends, weariness and fatigue set in, and sleep comes.

But just before sleep, in the lengthening shadows cast through the windows by the setting sun, their presence is felt, like a cold shiver down the spine.  This is their time, and for the half hour between daylight and night, they move freely and unapologetically.  You can see them, standing behind opened doors in darkening corners, floating on the air pushed through floor vents by furnaces or air conditioners.  You can hear their murmurs between the rhythmic beeping and humming of monitors and machines, the voices of the others, the ones who came here and never left.

Cruz Control

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Ted “government shutdown” Cruz has had his comeuppance, enduring possibly the worst two weeks in the history of presidential politics.  Consider the following:

  • Desperate to stop Donald Trump, he paired with John Kasich and made a much publicized deal to unite and pool resources against Trump. In another revealing look into the Republican mind, they decided that only Cruz would campaign in Indiana and Kasich in Pennsylvania.  Apparently, they did the math, and concluded that their odds were better with only one weak candidate running against Trump instead of two.  The whole deal fell apart wen Cruz, in true Cruz fashion, changed his tune and said that there was no deal and that the reason Kasich wasn’t campaigning in Indiana was that he’d dropped out of the race (he hadn’t).
  • Cruz, despite the fact that the convention and a nomination was still two months away, decided it was time to name a running mate, selecting maybe the only person in the country less popular than him, Carly Fiorina. In an abnormally uncomfortable press conference, Fiorina sang a song to Cruz’s young daughters, which would have reminded presidential historians of the time that John Tyler sang to William Henry Harrison’s goldfish had that ever happened. While the move did nothing to generate more votes for Cruz, it was successful in adding yet another genuinely weird and head-scratching moment to an epically weird campaign.
  • At least Cruz was able to take comfort from his friends in congress, except that he has no friends in congress. That became clear when former House Speaker John Boehner ripped Cruz apart, calling him “Lucifer in the Flesh,” instantly angering devil worshipers around the world.  It was a telling indictment of Cruz’s likability that he was able to make not only Lucifer but also John Boehner sympathetic figures.
  • Trump, the presumptive Republican nut job, targeted Cruz’s father in his latest wacko conspiracy theory, implying that Raphael Cruz was involved in the JFK assassination.

At the end of all of this, after getting trounced yesterday in Indiana, Cruz finally did the only thing he could do:  he put his campaign out of its misery, all but ensuring that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.  Let me repeat that, and let it sink in for a moment:

Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.

Donald Trump the reality television star.  Donald Trump the conspiracy enthusiast, who believed President Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent and who apparently believes that Raphael Cruz was involved in the JFK assassination. Donald Trump who believes that Japan and South Korea and other countries should be given nuclear weapons. Donald Trump who not only supports a ban on Muslims but also supports the state sponsored public murder of innocent family members of suspected terrorists.  Donald Trump who said that all illegal immigrants from Mexico are rapists and murderers.  Donald Trump who is not only going to build a great wall that runs the length of the Mexico border but will also get Mexico to pay for it.  Donald Trump who said that women who get abortions should be punished.  Donald Trump who enthusiastically supports state sponsored torture.

Never before in American history has such an ill informed and extreme and dangerous candidate been this close to winning the presidency.  And there is no reason to believe he can’t win.  If there’s one thing we should take away from the primaries, where the other sixteen candidates fell, it’s that Trump should never be under estimated.

We could spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how and why Trump’s gotten this far. That would be an interesting and necessary bit of analysis.  But the more immediate concern has to be making sure he doesn’t get any further.  The stakes – the future of the country, and possibly the world – couldn’t be greater.

Kitchen Light

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I’ve been doing a lot of work on my novel, “I Don’t Know Why.”  Here’s a brief excerpt that I wrote tonight)

I turned right on 14th Street, under the glow of the corner streetlight. It was about five o’clock, and some of the houses were beginning to light up, early risers assigned to various morning shifts who’d go to work and unlock and open up the day, preparing the world for the sunlit landscape of the living and sending the ghosts that inhabit the night to hide in the dusty corners of darkened closets and shadowy hallways that the daylight couldn’t reach. And I thought of the ghosts that haunted me – Matt Pollard, Kelly, Gerald, even Sam Richter – and it occurred to me that their exorcism was finally within my reach.

It was still dark out when I turned off of Vicksburg Avenue onto our driveway and walked thru the yellow glow of the yard light and onto the lit-up front porch. I lifted the welcome mat and found the spare key to the front door that my dad always hid there, the subject of one of my mom and dad’s most frequent and ridiculous arguments.

“It’s such a cliché,” my mom would say. “Leaving a key under the front porch matt. It’s so obvious.”

“Exactly,” my dad would reply.

“Exactly what?”

“Tell me, would you hide the spare key under the matt?”

“No! That’s what I’m saying, it’s too obvious of a place.”

“And that’s exactly why it’s the perfect place. Any criminal looking to break in would think like you do, that it’s too obvious a place to hide a key, and they’d look anywhere else. I rest my case.”

“It’s about time,” she’d reply.  “Because your case is pretty tired.”

“You see,” he’d say, pointing at his head, “you’ve got to learn to think outside of the box.”

“So that’s where you’ve been doing your thinking,” she’d say. “I think your box must have been left out in the rain too long.”

I unlocked and opened the front door.  The light over the kitchen sink was left on for me, and it struck me that this is what parents do for their children when they’ve grown up: they leave lights on.  It seemed like a feeble and insubstantial effort to retain some semblance of authority or control over a life that time had stolen control away from.  At the same time, I was genuinely moved by the warmth generated by those lights, by the simple caring evident in the gesture that said, we may no longer be able to protect you from the darkness of the larger outside world, but here, inside our home, inside your home, we can make sure it’s bright and warm and welcoming. I entered and shut the front door behind me and looked across the living room and the dining room and in the dim light from the kitchen, I could see, in the half-light of memory, the three of us, mom and dad in their bathrobes and me, in my two piece pajamas, on a long ago Christmas morning, and at the same time I could see my unconscious twenty year old body stretched out on the floor with mom kneeling at my side, crying, and dad standing over us with the phone in his hand, calling an ambulance. I realized, for the first time, the real cost of my attempted suicide.  It was more, much more than almost ending my life.  It was an unforgivable transgression against the holy covenant of home as a safe harbor that the three of us had spent our lives together forging.

A Happy Anniversary

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Today marks the one-year anniversary of my heart bypass surgery.

I am fully recovered and have made significant changes to my diet and lifestyle. I’m maintaining my weight at about twenty pounds less than before the surgery, and I’m exercising every day.  I’m feeling well enough that without calendars to remind me, I forget that I ever had the procedure.

When one of those significant dates arise, I look back on the events with a vague sense of detachment, like they happened to somebody else, and I have to work hard to remember what it was like falling asleep in the hospital bed the night before, with a nagging fear of never seeing my home or my family again playing in my head.

There are so many important things that we see, feel or touch every day that we don’t appreciate the value of until we are confronted with the real possibility that we may never experience them again.  The night before, when I thought of the things that the last time might have already come and gone for, it quickly became overwhelming.  From the helicopter seeds that take flight from the big maple tree just outside my back door to the sound and smell of bacon frying to the shadows at the end of the hallway that remain just beyond the reach of the midday sunlight, it didn’t take me long to realize that there were far too many things for me to list.

Now I am back to taking all of these things for granted again.  There are so many things that as I was experiencing them I swore I’d never forget that now, only a year later, I’ve already forgotten. And while I lament the loss of the heightened awareness I experienced through my little ordeal, part of me also celebrates the return of preoccupation and blindness to these things, because they are symptomatic of living. To be alive, in the present, is to not have time for such contemplation of the miraculous beauty that is always within our grasp.

Daily routine, the marrow of everyday living, seems trite and trivial compared to the revelatory truths that define the universe until they are taken away from us.  Only then can we see that the mundane is the most profound, and that the mechanics of living a life, the forces that prod us to go to work, to make out grocery lists, to even brush our fucking teeth, are the real things that matter. These are the things that keep a life alive, where dignity and truth reside.

I am so happy and grateful to be alive, for the opportunity to once again obsess over the trivial.

Daily Miracle

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Let me start by describing how a typical day for me begins:

I wake up, stiff and rigid and most mornings sore, but not too bad. I move slowly, and that has nothing to do with being or not being a morning or a night person or how much sleep I did or didn’t get, it’s just the speed I move at.

I’m usually up between 6:30 and 7:00.  I shuffle downstairs, take my morning Parkinson’s meds and my heart meds and my acid reflux pill – it borders on the ridiculous, the desktop in my office looks like a pharmacy – and grab a cup of coffee and see my wife off to work.  Then I go in my office and log on to the computer, checking out e-mail and Facebook and reviewing any writing I may have done the night before.  The point here is to kill enough time, thirty to sixty minutes, to allow my Carbidopa / Levodopa pills to kick in.  Until they do, the rigidity is pretty bad, and I feel pretty crappy, and a little bit nauseous until I eat something.  I’ve found that waiting a half hour to an hour after taking my morning blends of pills and caffeine before eating seems to work best, and I usually have something very light, like a cereal bar or a clementine and a glass of juice.

Then the “dopas” kick in and most of my rigidity goes away, and I’m loose, too loose.  I flop around the house, my head bent over my torso like Groucho Marx, and my legs try to keep up with my head and the more they try to keep up the more they fall behind and the more out of control I become, my momentum finally stopped by  crashing into walls and doorways.  I overshoot targets and narrowly dodge furniture.

Then, at about nine or ten o’clock, I get up and get in my car and drive myself the seven miles to the hospital in Kenosha where, just about a year ago now, I underwent triple bypass surgery.  As a result of being a Cardiac Kid, a member of the heart disease fraternity, I am eligible (for a reduced annual fee) to use the rehab center at Kenosha Memorial Hospital. I go every day and work out for an hour to an hour and a half, and almost every morning, when I get up, I don’t feel like going. But I drag myself up and out of the house five or six days a week, reminding myself how out of shape I was in when my heart issues hit last year, and how much I want to avoid a repeat of that whole experience.

So I get there and I work out.  I still start by loosening up with the same basic stretches and hand weights I learned when I was still recovering from the surgery. I know from a cardio pulmonary standpoint they aren’t required anymore, but they loosen me up and shake off some of the residual Parkinson’s rigidity, and while I can’t quantify it, I believe they’ve helped me increase my range of motion.

Then I do thirty minutes on a treadmill, every now and then graduating to an increased incline and speed. I’ve kind of reached a limit on these settings due to my floppiness – often tines, the first ten minutes or so are dominated by my stooped posture and impaired balance, and it can be a struggle to keep up.

Then, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I hit the weights.  There are seven machines I do twenty reps of differing weights. I only do these every other day to give my muscles a day to rest.  I find my strength has increased since last summer when I started – recently, less dramatically and slower than at first, but still increasing nonetheless.

Then I do one last activity, experimenting on different equipment, recently settling on a rowing machine, which I currently do five minutes on every day, counting in my head the number of strokes I pull.  At first, the five minutes was wiping me out, but now, I set a personal best on the number of strokes almost every day, and even though I’m doing more faster, I’m not nearly as fatigued as I was at first, and soon I will up the number of minutes,

Then I cool down by walking a few laps on the corridor surrounding the facility when it happens.  Every day, at some point, I notice that I’m walking in a straight line, with my arms swinging, my head erect.  None of the stooped posture and flopping around like a fish on the end of a line. For at least an hour, on good days up to two or even three hours after exercising, I move about normally, and while Parkinson’s still annoys me with constant salivation and impaired speech and incomprehensible handwriting, its primary symptom, the impact on moving, is gone.

The really great thing is that every day, at some point, usually while still walking my laps, I become aware of this phenomenon, this daily miracle, and every day, I am truly appreciative and thankful for its occurrence.  I don’t know how long this will continue, if eventually it won’t occur anymore, but for now I could care less.  All I know is that when it does occur, I feel amazed and blessed, and for that moment, I take nothing for granted.

                Don’t it always seem as though /  You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone

–  Joni Mitchell

Parkinson’s disease sucks and I wish I didn’t have it.  I have to confess I ask myself, more often than I should, why me?  Pure bad luck is the best answer I’ve come up with so far.

But then I ask myself, how many other people are made aware of how beautiful and wonderful the ability to simply move freely is, and I realize that luck, good or bad, is a double edged sword, and that curses and blessings are often wrapped in the same package.

Problem Child

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The Republican establishment is beside itself, trying desperately to figure out a way to deny Donald Trump the presidential nomination. Truly mystified, they ask themselves, “How did this happen?”

Are you kidding me?  Even the Republicans can’t be that stupid.

Donald Trump is the love child of the Republican Party and the toxic wack-a-doodles known as the tea party. Having given up what was left of their virtue in return for easy votes, the extremism and radical rhetoric spawned by their unholy union has taken the form of the orange-headed fascist mutant. It’s disingenuous for the Republican leadership to come out now and blast Trump for being too extreme, for inciting violence and hatred, when their entire agenda for the past seven and a half years has been to obstruct and destroy the elected president rather than govern. Even in this past week, as they decry Trump’s unfitness to govern, Mitch McConnell announced that he will not allow a vote on President Obama’s nominee for the supreme court, despite there being no historical precedent for denying a vote in an election year, despite polls showing that by a two to one margin the public thinks a vote should occur, and despite the responsibility spelled out by the constitution of the Legislative branch to advise and consent.  But, hey, not doing his job is nothing new for McConnell.  This is, after all, the same man who said, in 2010, that his “top priority was to make sure Barack Obama is a one term president.” Given his failure in this regard, one has to wonder why he still has a job.

Obama’s approval rating is currently at a three year high.  Therein lies the main problem for both parties.  For the Republicans, it shows that all of their hate filled vendetta against Obama isn’t working, and people who don’t belong to the tea party are tiring of their antics.  This has been the one same shrill note they’ve been sounding for years now – Obama bad.  They’ve even intentionally sabotaged key legislation and then brazenly blamed Obama for is failure. One example of this:  I heard Ted Cruz, one of the most extreme obstructionists, blame Obama for cutting the military, when the cuts were actually mandated by sequesters that were part of the Cruz engineered government shutdown.

Obama’s approval rating also points to the main problem that Trump presents for the Democrats, and that is he’s not running. If he were, I have no doubt he’d sweep the floor with the puffy haired petulant little brat.  It would be the clear contrast between mature adult and spoiled child.  Obama has weathered seven and half  years of vile hatred and lies with grace, dignity and good humor, while Trump has blown his stack over a couple of soft ball questions lobbed at him from a Fox News reporter, resorting to sophomoric and ugly personal attacks.

The problem for the Democrats is they are running two politically flawed candidates, both of whom will be easy targets for attacks from the right. Fair or not, Hillary Clinton is going to have to fend off attacks against her character, as she’s already been branded as “untrustworthy.” For Bernie Sanders it will be how he’s embraced the term “socialism.”  And trust me, I know, there’s nothing really to fear in the term; that “democratic socialism” really refers to a return to a fairer economic model, where the distribution of wealth isn’t tipped to the top one percent to the degree it is today. That doesn’t matter. Any kind of nuanced discussion always loses out to the Pavlovian fear-inducing emotional responses triggered by the sound bite definitions assigned to such words.  Just as “liberal” has come to mean “weak,” “socialism” is code for “communism” and “untrustworthy” means, well, “untrustworthy.”  These one word character assassinations are extremely effective and easy, especially when relentlessly hammered into our brains.

A friend of mine posted “If voting really mattered, they’d make it illegal” on Facebook yesterday. If ever there were a year to prove that sentiment wrong, this is it. The stakes were high enough with an on-going health care crisis, global unrest, environmental disasters, assaults on individual rights to privacy, and the potential for another economic collapse hanging in the balance.  Throw in the front running candidacy of Trump and his growing fascist following, the racism and misogyny of his rhetoric, and his advocacy for violence and his followers’ willingness to engage, you have the greatest threat to American democracy in my lifetime.

Above all, Trump must be stopped.

So it turns out I agree with Republicans on something.

 

 

 

Vindication

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(I’ve recently taken the first draft of my second novel, “I Don’t Know Why,” off of the shelf and started working on re-writing the second half.  Thanks to my wife for the idea that might just save the whole thing from the trash can. What follows is a brief excerpt:)

Vindication had been a long time coming.. It’d been something I dreamed of for so long that at some time, I stopped believing it’d ever occur, and  in the lowest depths of my despair I’d even joined in with the chorus of the non-believers in questioning the veracity of my recollection.

Now that it was here, in the form of the fading and weathered image of the rail thin kid with the wavy black hair and the bright blue eyes, the same eyes that were missing, that had been taken from him on that first day we met, the moment I’d so eagerly anticipated for so long filled me with an overwhelmingly heavy sense of sorrow.

Sorrow for the kid, for Sam Richter, for my parents, for Kathy Harris and Tom Musgrave and the people we all would have, should have become. Nine years came to a head and culminated in that moment on the entrance to the Orchard Depot Public Library.

I tried to speak to answer Angela, but I couldn’t. Instead I started choking on the tears that were forming in my eyes and throat. I looked at Angela, and I knew from the expression on her face that even though I hadn’t said a word I’d answered her question, and I knew this was the end of a long journey for her, too, and while the moment may have represented vindication for me, for her it was the realization of her deepest fears, and the destruction of her last and fragile frayed threads of hope.

I looked at the photo again and I looked at her, and I recognized the same high cheekbones, the same nose and chin, and the same color hair.

‘Your brother?” I asked.

She was wiping tears away from her eyes with the back of her hand, “Yeah,” she said,

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Heroes

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Late last year, I was selected to the Board of Directors of Society’s Assets, a company that was formed in 1974 in Racine, Wisconsin by and for people with disabilities. The mission of Society’s Assets is “to ensure the rights of all persons with disabilities to live and function as independently as possible in the community of their choice, through supporting individual’s efforts to achieve control over their lives and become integrated into community life.”  They are governed and operated by a board and staff comprised of a majority of people with disabilities.

I attended a couple of hours long orientation session for myself and the other new board members late last year. It was very interesting and filled in several gaps in my knowledge about the company.  I met the management team and was very impressed with their levels of expertise, their ability to clearly articulate the company’s mission, and mostly with the passion they displayed for their work and their clients.

Then I received in the mail an invitation to a reception to honor the organization’s award winning aides. I figured an award ceremony in one of the company’s conference rooms might be a good opportunity to fill in any blanks I may have still had in my understanding of what this organization is all about. Never mind that I didn’t know a soul there – I put aside my inherent social awkwardness and shy nature and sucked it up for a couple of hours.

And am I glad I did. The people I met were all friendly and personable, unpretentious and real.  They made me feel instantly comfortable as I sat with them, the only male in a room full of women, and I  helped myself to cake and snacks.  During our conversations I learned several important facts about the awards that were being presented, that they were granted by an independent, state wide organization, The Wisconsin Long Term Care Workforce Alliance.  In other words, these were much more than employee recognition awards – these awards are given to caregivers from any organization who went above and beyond in meeting the needs of people of all ages with disabilities.  The  Alliance has been giving these awards since 2005, and every year Society’s Assets has had at least one winner (out of only four state-wide winners).  In fact, as I sat there, I met the first two winners, from 2005 and 2006 – how cool is that?

The time for the awards presentation came and we moved to another room, the board room, where this year, with two new award categories having been added, four of the six awards went to caregivers from Society’s Assets. As each award was presented, part of the story behind the nominations was read, and I got an idea for just how special these people and this organization are.  As I listened to the stories of personal sacrifice, energy and enthusiasm, passion and commitment,  I thought of the recent passing of the great rock and roll icon David Bowie and my favorite Bowie song, “Heroes,” and it occurred to me that’s what each of these and the countless other caregivers out there truly are.  Whether it’s running a simple errand or providing intimate personal care, helping those who need help the most and preserving their sense of dignity and self-worth strikes me as the noblest of gestures.

We find ourselves in the beginning of an election year, with the television and radio constantly telling us how divided we’ve become, and how great the distance and irreconcilable the differences between us are. But in the unconditional love and respect they display for their fellow human beings, caregivers shatter these divisions and instead celebrate the core humanity that we all share. They demonstrate through their actions that we’re all in this thing together, and I can’t think of anything more inspirational or heroic.

While I’m still learning exactly what my role as a board member is, I look forward to humbly serving these great people and their indomitable spirit in any way I can.

 

 

And So This is Christmas

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What are we to make of Christmas in the year 2015?

There are those who’d like us to believe that a war of political correctness is being waged against Christmas, with shots being fired every time someone says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

I’d argue that if anyone is fighting a war against Christmas, it’d be the marketing departments of the businesses that trot out the Christmas displays earlier and earlier (this year I saw it occur as early as mid-August). It’d be the luxury car companies that have those obnoxious year-end sales events, the “December to Remember” commercials featuring $50,000 dollar cars with festive red ribbons tied to their tops.

It’d be any company that perpetuates the “black Friday” nonsense and greed-fest that not only cheapens Christmas but also that other sacred holiday, Thanksgiving.

It’d be the weather, and the climate change deniers.  As I write this, I can hear the wind howling outside. Not the wintry wind you’d expect in Wisconsin in late December, but rather the warm wind that you’d normally associate with a late summer or early autumn thunderstorm. It’s pushing 60 degrees out, and it’s been a warm and wet and muddy December so far, the temperature above freezing all month, with an almost steady soft and warm rain, and not a trace of snow to be found.  It’s not the absence of a snowflake on a Starbuck’s cup that threatens Christmas, it’s the absence of real snowflakes falling from the sky. I know, I know, one month of local weather does not make climate change real, but with melting ice caps and snow-less mountain tops becoming common place, the trends are indisputable.

But that’s okay – who needs the North Pole anyway? By now, Santa Claus has probably taken advantage of the shrinking globe and moved his corporate headquarters to a Grand Caymans tax shelter, and outsourced his manufacturing to a Southeast Asia sweat shop.  By now, Rudolph has traded in his red nose for a couple of right wings, and Santa is packing heat with his very own concealed carry. One can’t be too careful these days.

Any supposed war on Christmas would be carried out by be the radical Islamists who carried out the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, and by the radical Christians of the Planned Parenthood attack.  It’d be waged by any terrorist of any creed or color who uses violence to inspire feelings of fear and hatred, and by any corrupt politician or leader who attempts to exploit fear and hatred for personal gain.

It’d be waged by anyone who blames the victims of economic hardship, racial intolerance or sexual violence for their circumstance.

I don’t, in my lifetime, remember a more cynical time than right now. People have never seemed so divided or afraid.  The world feels like a very dangerous place.

Christmas was always about our shared humanity and the ideals that represent the best part of ourselves. These things were always able to rise above the crass commercialization and even the religious icons the holiday was founded on, because Christmas was able to get inside of us, get past our self-interests, and make us look directly into the eyes of another human being and see our own reflection.

It’s the one day of the year we set aside to celebrate being human.  And when I doubt its ability to survive in times like this, I’m reminded of the true story of the Christmas of 1914, one hundred and one years ago, on the front lines of the bloodiest war in human history, World War One.

That was the day French and German soldiers both laid down their weapons and left their trenches, some of which were only forty yards apart, to celebrate Christmas together.  They played football and exchanged food and tobacco. They told stories about their wives and children and their homes. They talked about what Christmas meant to them, and for a day, the gunfire fell silent.

Christmas was tough enough to survive the horror of those trenches, and when my sons make it home tonight and walk through my front door, we’ll all be together, and Christmas will be Christmas, undefeated and invincible, again.

The Highest Bough

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There are few things in this life that are as annoying as Christmas music. It’s difficult not to be a Scrooge when radio stations convert to an all Christmas format as early as October. Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas and Ho, Ho, the Mistletoe are annoying enough the first time you hear them; by the seven hundredth time, a clear alibi for murder would be accepted by any rational court.

Despite the plethora of annoying melodies and jingles and jangles, there have been a handful of great songs inspired by the season.  These songs find real and heartfelt sentiment in the season’s unabashed sentimentality, and walk the tightrope of emotional honesty without a net, never falling to the pit of sappiness most holiday songs never rise above.  So it is I present my (drumroll, please – and please, no Little Drummer Boy) three favorite Christmas songs.

The first is Silver Bells, written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans in 1950. Silver Bells was my mom’s favorite Christmas song.  With its lovely melody and phrasing, it paints an incredibly romantic view of “Christmas time in the city.”  Given that my mom was from a very small town in northwestern Wisconsin, it might seem like an odd choice for her favorite, until you remember that when she was in her early twenties, about the time the song first came out, she and a group of close friends lived and worked in Milwaukee.  Every time I hear the song I think about her, and how much I wish I’d asked her what images and memories the song conjured up for  her.

The second is I’ll be Home for Christmas, written in 1943 by Walter Kent and Kim Gannon and recorded first by Bing Crosby. Written as a tribute to servicemen stationed overseas and their families at home, the song touched an emotional nerve and quickly became a Christmas standard in the United States. Despite this, in Great Britain the song was banned from the airwaves, due to fears that the lyric “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams” was too depressing and would destroy morale. It’s the evocation of “home,” one of the most powerful words in the English language, and its association with Christmas that makes the song so powerful.

My favorite Christmas song is Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine for the 1944 film, Meet Me in St, Louis, where it was sung by Judy Garland.  In the film, Garland’s five year old sister, played by Margaret O’Brien, is despondent because their father has just taken a new job in New York City.  It’s Christmas Eve, and Garland sings the song to O’Brien to cheer her up. The lyrics, which are perfection, didn’t start out that way. Garland criticized the song as depressing, and asked Martin to change lines like:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas / it may be your last  / Next year we may all be living in the past

and:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas / Pop that champagne cork / Next year we may all be living in New York.

Although he initially resisted, Martin re-wrote some of the lyrics, and the song soon became a standard. Like I’ll be Home for Christmas, it resonated with families separated from loved ones by the war.

What chokes me up every time I hear the song is its fatalistic view of the passing of time. Even as it celebrates the years “we all will be together,” it remains conscious of the temporal nature of time and the inevitability of separation with the devastating line, “if the fates allow.”  The optimistic sentiment expressed in the song (“from now on our troubles will be” either “out of sight” or “miles away”) can’t hide the fact that troubles are with us now.

The fatalism expressed in the song could be considered depressing, but I find it real and touching.  Unlike most popular songs, it not only acknowledges the inevitability of trouble and separation, but it serves as a touching and beautiful appreciation for how wonderful friends and family are, and how brief and precious our time with them is.

With a gorgeously heartbreaking melody and poignant lyrics Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is both a work of art and an evocation of the very real emotional pull Christmas exerts on us all.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on
Our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yuletide gay
From now on
Our troubles will be miles away

Here we are as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more

Through the years
We all will be together
If the Fates allow
Hang a shining star
Upon the highest bough
And have yourself
A merry little Christmas right now