Opinion/Brown: What we want more than anything
The things we first wanted can burn in us for the rest of our lives.
This is the text of my Christmas story.
My dog used to wait for me outside the gym and we’d walk home from school together. After daylight savings, it would get dark early. There was a lot of love in my house, but so much of it missed its targets that the tension was palpable. Because Christmas raised my parents’ hopes higher than usual, one could feel the air growing thicker, starting around daylight savings time. I remember walking home anticipating what explosive form the thickness might take.
Somehow, I had accepted the job of making sure that everybody in my house was all right. It required a level of alertness impossible to explain to anyone not raised to it … the ability to detect a tear falling down the side of a face turned away from you. I don’t remember being good at much else at that age. School was mostly a place I went to feel inept at almost everything. I was ADD but nobody knew what that was back then.
One year, my mother brought home a 45 recording from Santa Claus. It had a spiral around the hole in the middle that had a hypnotic quality as the record went round and round. Santa boomed a jovial hello, then began to worry out loud about my forgetfulness and tardiness. Could I possibly be known next year as “Speedy Brown of Germantown?” What local outfit made the records I can only guess.
My mother went all out at Christmas. She made elegant decorations that transformed the first floor of the house into a wonderland. Later, my father would bring in an enormous tree that required the tops cut off and guy wires to hold it upright. It was trimmed after my brother and I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve. What a frenetic night it must have been. The huge tree would be hung with lights and then decorated. Meanwhile, all the presents came out of hiding. Things requiring assembly had to be figured out, too. And all this in voices too soft to be heard upstairs.
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The morning would be magic. What we’d all hoped for became possible — and it lasted for hours: material bounty and peace on Earth. My parents wanted it too but didn’t know how to make it last. Instead, the effort of trying — and I think of other, older disappointments — always erupted. After that, there was nothing but toys, played with upstairs out of earshot. I remember this in my late 70s as the way I first learned the world was tragic, that wonderful people could live in the same house with each other and still not be happy.
Then on Christmas night many years later, we helped my wife’s mother die. She had cancer and didn’t want to die alone, staring up at a hospital ceiling. She had everybody all around, and she fought like a tigress to stay. The hours of her struggle dragged into the night, and I watched her turn the clock back over and over — willing to endure any agony but separation. Never in my life am I likely to see love so palpably expressed. It was her gift.
There are moments of exceptional clarity when all that is unreal turns to gossamer-like smoke and what is actually solid stands out clearly. And I, who has been privileged to see this — however briefly — can tell you now that only love is real. We give our hearts to things that are ephemeral and will pass away — but that in us which loves and that in others which is the beloved are the imperishable parts. To see this clearly and to act accordingly is our life’s task.
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Before my mother died, she and my father worked something out. That was a gift they gave each other while they still had time. There is something wistful about all this. We know in our heart of hearts that right next to this life — better yet, right inside of this life — is this sweeter, more illumined life. I believe that for many of us, that vision comes closest at Christmas. It’s like a planet that now and then swings near to Earth and exerts an almost tidal pull of hope.
What is that hope? That we can begin to live a life whose contours we can almost trace — like the blind might do — with our fingers. I think, even when we get distracted from it, we want that more than anything.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Christmas brings feelings of hope and love that we all seek
