Still Muddling Through Somehow

At the park, I walked my dog through the rain this morning— not really proper rain— more like air that has decided to shrug water at you out of habit. It suited my mood well enough.

As I walked, my thoughts kept returning to the same small universe they often do. They are not new thoughts. They orbit the same losses. They consider the same betrayals, the same questions that never resolve. They have been captured, these thoughts,

never to escape, never to be forgotten, never to burn up in the atmosphere. It is simply the gravitational field of my life now. What might seem or feel like self-pity is more like muscle memory, which tells me I need more exercise.

The holidays are here, and Christmas has always been central to my life, atheist that I am. It was stitched into Jenny’s life — the love of Christmas — at least as strongly as it was stitched into mine. We carried that love forward with the kids, year after year, without ever needing to talk about why it mattered; it just did.

In early 1991, back before Jenny and I had children — and back before we had any inkling that we might make a family — we drove out to Westport for a romantic weekend. We were young, I was poor, and Westport seemed like an amazing, extravagant idea. We stayed out near Grayland at a falling-down motel that had been there since at least the late 1950s. Jenny and I were its only guests that weekend. Across the street stood the motel where my family had stayed once with the Roddens in August of 1977. Both motels had seen better days. That was true whether you thought I was referring to 1991 or 1977. 

We went on the cheap that weekend, Jenny and I did. I drove my truck, and Jenny brought our food. She was an RA at the University of Washington and used her RA food stipend to buy our meals for the weekend from the small UW-operated store down below the old Terry and Lander halls. The store sold nothing but terrible frozen food, the kind of food that makes a person question his life choices. To be fair, the store sold food in groups: frozen, microwavable, and junk. I am fairly certain none of these show up on any USDA food chart. Jenny loved Jeno’s frozen pizza rolls, so she bought them and brought them along with Pringles and other things (nothing that resembled a vegetable). The food was hilariously awful, and we ate every bit of it.

We had a lovely time in that decrepit motel room. I was in the bathroom when Jenny burned the pizza rolls and, in a panic, shattered the glass in the window as she tried to open it to let out the smoke. I came out to a room full of smoke and rain blowing in through the broken window, and we both laughed until we could not breathe. I was glad that I had just gone to the bathroom, or I might have peed my pants. When the smoke cleared, I put my chewing gum on the wall, and we made love. When finished, I pulled my gum off the wall, removing a large section of wallpaper with it. “I guess I will not be chewing that anymore,” I laughingly said to Jenny. She found it unbelievably funny, and we laughed until we fell asleep.

Driving through town the next morning, we unexpectedly came across a small Christmas shop. Without hesitation, we looked at each other, I parked the truck, and inside, we went. Behind the counter stood a pudgy, young man, surrounded by Christmas joy, a jolly smile offering us welcome. I could not place why he seemed so happy, given there were no other customers in the store. Jenny and I were so excited to be surrounded by all things Christmas, with ornaments of every imaginable style, that we could not wait to choose one to commemorate our first months together. We chose one ornament and carried it out as if we had agreed to something we were not ready to name. That was the start. Every year after that we bought another, then more for the house, then one for each child. By then the tradition belonged to the family, but the first one belonged to only Jenny and me, a small proof that Christmas sat at the center of both our lives before anything else had formed to surround it.