God Bless America
God Bless America
There Is No Christmas,There Is No War, You’re Just Like The Rest of Us
December 23, 2018
Christmas Distances
She told me her parents were married in 1963, six months before President John F. Kennedy was killed.
She said her parents told her their first Christmas as a married couple was beautiful but sad in their tiny apartment in Brooklyn.
It was beautiful because they were in love, and it was beautiful because Christmas in Brooklyn is always beautiful.
It was sad because the President was dead.
She said it made her lonely to think about her parents being sad in that little apartment in the snow.
In the many years since she did the math, thinking about her parents, thinking about President Kennedy and thinking about Christmas.
JFK died in 1963.
Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer was on TV for the first time in 1964, so he missed it.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was on TV for the first time in 1965, so he missed it.
How The Grinch Stole Christmas made its TV debut in 1966 so he missed it.
Her older brother, she told me, was born in 1967.
Her mother’s brother, she told me, was killed in Vietnam in 1968.
She still cries, sometimes, a little, when she talks about these things. When she talks about Christmas and time and death and tiny apartments long before she was born in 1971.
Why does it all make her think so much?
Her mother died in 1997.
What can make this her best Christmas ever?
Her father died in 2011.
She says, sometimes, as she taps at her computer and looks at the Christmas lights that there was no President, there was no war, there was no Christmas, there was no Brooklyn and there was no here, now and tomorrow and can’t we see that? Can’t we understand?
Her brother drinks, she says, and she hasn’t seen him since 2012.
She says there is so much she doesn’t want to remember. She says this as Christmas lights shine so bright that it looks as if the trees have hands. Hands that reach up toward the falling snow and roots that sink deep into the dirt, back into the earth, back toward something that was born before all of us.
Something that will live through all of this.
This is what she says. --TK
Sunday, December 23, 2018