Reconciled

I've said it before. I go to the Tuba Christmas to visit my childhood.

It doesn't matter that horns were not a part of my growing-up. "What instrument would you like to learn to play?" my father said, and I told him trumpet, and there was a little pause before he asked me if I meant cello.

We were a few minutes late for the Tuba Christmas concert on the square downtown. They were already into a deep, majestic rendition of Hark The Herald Angels Sing when we walked up, accompanied by a passing fire truck that cut loose with a baritone blat that only enhanced the performance. Here's the thing about tubas. You hear them through your ears, and you hear them through your feet, and they set up a seismic rumble in your viscera, in the most vital and fundamental part of you, and that's important. Because that's where the small person you once were lives. The small person has never gone away, but she is buried in layers of flesh and time, and she's harder to hear, until the tubas tremble her up again.

The audience is beginning to sing this time, most of us tentative, but the cover of brass makes us braver. A Christmas carol funneled low and slow through a tuba bell is accommodating to a person who no longer sings. I sang in all of Miss Nina's choirs. Miss Nina assembled them all herself, even sewed all the robes, and I started in her baby blue choir. My tryout was family legend. Evidently I got hold of a corner of Jesus Loves Me and let 'er rip. "You broke the sound barrier," the grownups said. That was a new thing at the time. They were just then making aircraft that would break the sound barrier, so people were taking liberties with the phrase. It's doubtful that I had hit speeds of 800 mph, but I was clearly not lacking for enthusiasm.

But the tubas allow even a person who used to be a reliable soprano to push out a few notes in her remaining lower register. My rusty new tenor soared with the herald angels. But with angelic hosts proclaim was one note higher than I now have. My vocal range had compressed and settled into a thin felt, like years of dust on a trunk. My note broke in two, one part bleat and one part sob. It wasn't just the challenge of the note. It was that the note was tied to a string and the small person deep inside was tugging on the other end.

Look! the small person said. Mommy had one hand and Daddy had the other. She was in her little boots and stamping in the snow. Downtown, somewhere, where all the windows had displays. It was snowing inside the windows too, and frost sparkled the corners. Mechanical Santas turned this way and that. Reindeer arced up high. A train chugged by, right at eye level. There was a horse, with jingle bells. A real horse? Maybe. Peace on earth, and mercy mild. Was it possible to be happier? Happier than this? She tugged on the string again. Look!

It wasn't. It isn't. I've had years to make sure.

The Amputree

1958. I would have been wearing a dress, which wasn't ideal. Even if it wasn't scratchy, it limited what you could do, if you were brought up proper. Somersaults were out, and also dirt. Dresses enforced primness. So I would have been perched on the edge of a wingback chair. What Mommy and I were doing was "paying a visit." It probably wasn't longer than a half-hour, an eternity to an indulged little girl on a sunny day, but I was raised to be polite, which included practice in not having everything my way. Yes, I would have preferred being outside in my play clothes, but I understood my obligation to be on display. There would be a pot of weak coffee on and I would sit up straight and say yes ma'am and please and thank you, even for hard candies. This didn't take much effort, but it thrilled adults no end. Especially the really old ones, like this one.

The old lady would beam at me, her face pleating up every which way, and extract basic information from me about age and grade level, and then I would be released to explore the apartment. It was a one-room apartment and it smelled funny: a sour kitchen odor from some kind of food we never had at home, face powder, and underneath it all a suggestion of decay, veiled in rose water. Dark furniture prevailed, bone-fragile, watched over by antimacassars and tatted linens. Porcelain dolls in satin frills stared out from behind glass. I knew these were expected to delight. While I pretended to admire the dolls, Mommy absorbed compliments about me and assured the old lady that I could be quite a handful at times, and when their conversation finally drifted into other areas, I edged over to the tray of captive African violets yearning toward the window light and petted their furry leaves.

"I'm so happy you dropped in, Hazel. My niece and her family are coming by Christmas Eve. They keep asking me what I want, but this is all I want. I don't need a thing!"

"I know just what you mean. There comes a time you just don't want any more stuff," Mommy said. It was incomprehensible. I loved my mom, but her annual answer to "what do you want for Christmas" was useless.  "World peace?" she'd shrug after a moment, and where does that get you? It's not that Christmas was about the gifts, so much. If I got one good stuffed animal I was good to go. But the rest! Stringing the lights on the porch. Hanging paper snowflakes in the window and plugging in the electric candle. Frosting sugar cookies and shaking on the sprinkles. All of it filled me right up. Sometimes there was actual snow. Every year I'd lobby hard for more lights, but ours was not a house of excess. The tree would be paid for early on, but it had to wait propped-up against the outside of the house for a few days, learning how to be polite. Then just before Christmas we'd bring it in and Mommy would put on a record of carols and my sister and I worked on smoothing out the wrinkles from last year's tinsel and Daddy would mutter at the light strings with an abridged dad-gum vocabulary, trying to find the bad bulb.

The old lady had a tree up too. I measured out my tour of the room, lingering at the sights so that I wouldn't run out before the Visit we were paying was over, and I saved the tree for last. The base of it was at eye level, on a sideboard near the window. It was two feet tall. More of an amputree, really. And it was made out of tin foil or something, a sculpture of scarcity. Mommy was remarking about how nice it was, calling it a "table-top tree" as though that were a real thing, but it was the saddest thing I'd ever seen. Poor old lady. She couldn't move fast enough to disrupt an antimacassar. She could wear a dress all day long and not mess it up. She might really have wanted presents, but there wasn't any room for them under her little tree. "I like old people," Mommy told me later, but it didn't make sense. To be old was to have accepted a life of deprivation. It was sad. And the proof of it was, I was considered some kind of highlight just by showing up.

2012. The season has really merried up since we decided not to exchange presents anymore. We have way too much stuff already, and more would be an anchor on the heart. Dave's making pounds and pounds of almond roca and will spray it all over the neighborhood, and the world. I'll crank up the Messiah soon and see if I can score an invitation to go caroling. I'm sure we'll get a present for the little boy in our life. We're really looking forward to seeing him. All he has to do is show up and be himself and it will fill us right up. We might get a little tree. We might not.

Christmas In Portland

You have to work at it to find Christmas, but it's worth looking for. If it weren't, its absence wouldn't hurt so much. Because what we are looking for has something to do with our childhood advent calendar with the little doors opening one by one, the mechanical store-window displays seen from Daddy's shoulders, the choirs with candles, the green plush dinosaur under the tree, the eyes springing open at dawn and the bounce bounce bounce on Mommy and Daddy's bed. But familiarity robbed us of our anticipation long ago. The sorrow starts younger than you let on, if you're good; you tuck the secret away in your gut, that you aren't as excited as the grownups are counting on you to be, because you already know it's your job to pull them through their own loss. You pretend best you can, you light up your eyes to see theirs shine too. And that tiny, well-meant deception puts you on the road to one of life's most faithful disappointments.

Because what you really want is not the green plush dinosaur, but the heart that can barely contain the joy of it. Because what you really want is to be flanneled and folded and fit in Mommy's lap, knowing her heart can barely contain the joy of it. What you really want is not at the mall, but if you know where to look, you can get enough to go on. Music is a good start. It's why we go to Tuba Christmas.

That's outdoors in the square downtown, the one some child whose joy is gone tried to blow up a few weeks ago. It's December in Portland; it's dumping rain. There are over two hundred tuba players of all ages there, scavenged from all over town and corralled under a canopy. We watch as, with some difficulty, an antique conductor is installed on the dais. He is revered by the musicians, many of whom he has taught, and they smile at him with love and embarrassment. This is the highlight of his year, and he wants to talk. He wants to talk a lot, to teach some more, and to crack wise with comic timing honed in the nineteenth century, the punchline expected later in the month when the stage comes through. And we citizens of Portland stand in the downpour, our shoes filling with water, screaming inside tuba tuba tuba, and we smile in his direction, until finally he totters around to face the players--no--he turns around again, he forgot to mention something--and then, at last, he slowly lifts his arms and releases the tubas. There are virtuosos, but it is not the nimblest of instruments, and a large and democratic volunteer force of them is best reined in at a safer speed. Still, they are magnificent, even while lumbering through Joy To The World, even if Deck The Halls is done as a dirge. Magnificent, I say, the big marching tubas hoonking away in the rear like a troupe of flatulent mastodons; and the crowd politely covers their smiles when the antique conductor's pants fall down and he is assisted by a spectator in the front row.

There's an attempt to get the crowd to sing along, only to our horror it is not "along," but a cappella, our verse framed but not accompanied by tubas. The conductor is under the canopy and hard to see, and the pace the tubas have set for us is glacial. The angels we could hear on high, who couldn't see the conductor at all, had to wing it. Other factions selected their own tempos according to how cold they were, and by the time heav'n and nature sang, the group closest to the conductor had been lapped twice. There was nothing professional about it, any of it, and when the conductor remembered an interesting historical footnote and laboriously turned around to inform us of it, I looked back at the audience: every one of us wet as muskrats, children stomping puddles as quietly and decorously as possible. You could try to think of rain as God's tinsel if you want, but it's cold, and hard to festive it up. Yet everybody is smiling patiently, jiggling for heat, because not one would deny a kindness to an old tuba player at the close of his life; it's the bookend to our first Christmases, and it's what we have to give. And when the tubas break out in the most magnificent hymn of all, a hymn with the majesty to match the tempo, there's a moment in it: the soaring come and adore him, born the king of angels, the measure where your voice and your heart both break at once. That's your childhood shining through the fracture. It's okay to weep for it.

Colby's train

On a recent Saturday night, Dave and I had the honor of being invited to Linda and Pete's family Christmas party, even though we were not in that particular gene pool. The house sparkled. There were little lights everywhere, robotic Santas, greenery, candles, creches, figurines both holy and not, and, in short, the halls had the living hell decked out of them. There's a point at which such decoration is said to be overdone. Turns out that if you go a little past that point, it's all good again. I loved it. At our house, we hadn't even managed to put up a tree. We had Christmas dinner for twelve without bothering to locate so much as a sprig of holly. I adore Christmas and had always assumed that, when I retired, I would do it up fine, but instead I've discovered that I really prefer to visit it elsewhere and leave all that crap in boxes in the basement at home. I like to think of this as being efficient with my time, but there's probably a better name for it.

Linda and Pete's tree was set up on a round table, and a small train set encircled it, the choo-choo chugging gamely around three or four times a minute. The entire set-up was resting on the chin of a wide-eyed, four-year-old boy. Or so it seemed: his lower lip was planted firmly on the edge of the table, and his eyes followed the train around the tree, unblinking. He was not a remarkable boy in any way, save for his spiffy cowboy boots, which were on the wrong feet. "They're the only feet I have," he protested a little irritably, loathe to be drawn away from his vantage point an inch from the tracks. Later in the evening, the boots had been transposed, so someone must have been looking after him. He briefly volunteered his name as Colby, without taking eyes from the train or lip from the table.

The small house was fizzy with excited but well-behaved children, all apparently cousins of some stripe. Wrapped presents surrounded the tree, except for the space excavated by the train-watcher. After a few hours, what began to seem remarkable about him was the intensity of his devotion to the little train. He stopped it from time to time to add or subtract cars, and tinkered with the station-house. Then suddenly there was a derailment, and the panic was on. He tried to fix it, but was suspected of worsening things, and he was prevailed upon to fetch Uncle Petey, whose train it was. First thing, he ran up to Dave in a cold sweat. "Are you Uncle Petey?" he hollered, and repeated his question to most every male in sight, rocketing around the house. He flew into the kitchen and out the back door, his anxiety increasing by the minute.

"What child is this?" I asked Joe in the spirit of the season. Joe was sitting next to me, and had the most seniority in the family. "I don't think I've ever seen a kid so single-minded. Is he your grandson?"

Joe furrowed his brow. "I don't think so," he allowed after a while. "I think," --here he pointed at a young man hoovering fondue in the dining room--"I think that fellow there, before he made my daughter pregnant--well, they both did that together I guess--I think the kid comes with him. But I'm not sure. Well, it's complicated," he wound up. I asked around. Nobody knew who the hell the kid was.

Meanwhile, Uncle Petey had been summoned and was calmly making repairs to the tracks when Colby shot back into the room, his relief as profound as his panic. Everything was back in working order, and the lip was reinstalled on the table. Pete deflected my admiration of the decor to Linda. "She does it all," he said. "All I have to do is get the boxes out of the attic. And this isn't half of what she usually does. I left most of my track up there, too." I don't know why, but girls rarely show this kind of appreciation for a train set, though many boys carry it well into adulthood. We had bookends of railway fanaticism on display right here; Pete was comfortably into his sixties.

Linda wasn't sure who Colby belonged to, either. But it was a concern for her, because he was the only kid who didn't have a gift under the tree. Before long she'd corralled Pete and sent him up to the attic to get the box for the train set. It was spirited out to the shop and wrapped up and topped with a bow. Colby was going to leave with that train.

Finally the time came to pass out the gifts, and Colby was persuaded to the sofa and presented with his package. I told him he had to wait for all the gifts to be distributed to the other kids before he could open his. He gripped it fit to strangle, eyes darting to the train and back to his gift, clearly on the last thread of his abilitiy to hold on. Should he just start ripping? Go back and stick his lip on the table? Pee? What? Three seconds before he was set to detonate, the word came that the kids could open their presents. Ripping ensued. As soon as he saw sections of track behind the cellophane of the box, Colby started shrieking. 'I KNOWED IT! I KNOWED IT! I KNOWED IT!" he informed citizens several blocks away. There was a momentary look of horror when he saw the box contained only track, but Linda was there to prevent his untimely coronary. "You get the train that's under the tree," she explained. "You can take that home!" Colby vaulted over piles of wrapping paper and extracted the train, tracks and station in Olympic time, slotting it all into his box, and then clutched the box to his chest as though he was holding his heart in.

How in the world had he knowed it? It wasn't even knowable until about a half-hour before he opened it. Now, I'm a happy person. It's all a matter of not knowing what to expect, but being content with what I get. I think that's called sanity. But sanity's got nothing on Santa.