blahg, blahg, blahg…

“In the early days of 1943, as men died one after another, every man dealt with the losses in a different way. Somewhere along the way, a ritual sprang up. If a man didn’t return, the others would open his footlocker, take out his liquor, and have a drink in his honor. In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do.” Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Laura Hillenbrand (p. 90)

My therapist tells me I don’t seem to have many rituals in my life. She says they can serve a very good purpose; they give one a sense of grounding and/or a foundation, something to come back to in difficult times, something to look forward to in times of uncertainty. I do have some rituals, though I didn’t share them at the time, mostly because I didn’t want to sound argumentative. Plus, I didn’t remember them. But since she said this last week – and since reading that passage in Hillenbrand’s latest book (another terrific work by a woman with a gift of writing history so engaging and fascinating, one wonders how the stories went unknown for so long) I’ve been thinking of them.

I ate black-eyed peas and collard greens yesterday, a New Year’s Day ritual that I can’t remember ever missing. I get up early every Christmas morning. I iron my clothes every working day. So yes, I have a few.

I also thought more of ritual as Lynn was in New Hampshire earlier in the week, packing up the studio space we’ve rented there for the past 6 years. My schedule didn’t allow me to go with her to help, and thus I was unable to see the “happy box” one last time. I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to it and to thank it for being a such a special space for us over the years. It was an experience that caused me to remember another.

I thought about how my dad moved from 2234 Fort Rice Street in the summer of 1987. He packed up the only house I could remember living in, the items that he’d not sold off in his fit of blind grief, and moved to a different house, several miles away. I was living in Louisville, Kentucky that year and working at the Grand Canyon in Arizona that summer, way too far away to get back to Virginia to see my bedroom one last time. In September, when I returned to my apartment in Kentucky, there in the living room was furniture from my old home, the couch from our family room now in my one bedroom apartment. The end table that was the very first piece of furniture my parents bought together was now mine. Familiar things now in a familiar setting, just not the same. It was a very odd experience. I’ve driven by my old house a few times in the years since, always feeling a strange sense of something unfinished, something left hanging. I wish I could have closed the door and sat in my bedroom one last time. I wish I could have slept there one more night, knowing it was the last. I wish I could have said a proper goodbye.

The packing up of the studio wasn’t quite on par with the feelings of that move from Petersburg, still it makes me think of how we say goodbye to people and places and things when we don’t really have the opportunity for formal closure. It’s important, mentally and emotionally. Bruce Springsteen parodies glory days in his song of the same title, describing what becomes of those who live their present-day lives on the high school baseball diamonds of their teenage years. It’s fun to reunite for an evening with old friends and relive old times, but for the ones who can’t seem to leave them behind, we kind of give a sad look and think “I’m glad I’ve moved on”.

Yet it’s hard to move on without closure. It’s hard to put the past in its place, to live in the present, and to look to the future when we feel as if we were simply tossed from one place in time to the next, like the sofa that suddenly appeared in my living room. It can throw you for a loop. Like the WWII soldiers in Hillenbrand’s book who needed a way to cope with the surreal fact that whole groups of people they shared a beer with one night were the next day simply gone, we grapple for something to help us make sense of things.

Fortunately, if we work at it, we can find ways. Make ways. We establish rituals to tie events up, even if we’re forced to use the most clumsy of knots. They help and they work.

It’s a good lesson to remember at the beginning of a new year. Make a toast, kiss your partner, clean out some closets, clean off your desk, work through the piles of loose ends, break in a new calendar, and get ready to start anew. Say goodbye to the past, hello to the present, and look forward to the open beginnings that await.

Happy New Year!

I love Christmas. I love the holiday season. I love the lights, the music (listen to some of the funniest annoying holiday music here). I love the cold weather. I hope for snow. And for 45+ years or so, I’ve gotten up very early on Christmas morning, excited to see what’s under the tree. Even as an adult, I get up before the sun rises, put on the coffee pot, turn on the stereo and the lights on the tree and settle in for a morning of opening presents.

This year though, like a lot of folks, we’re facing a budget deficit in our household and so what might usually appear under the tree and in our stockings is likely going to be on the short side. Funny though, for some reason, this isn’t bothering me nearly as much as I might have expected. Here’s why…

Driving back from Thanksgiving at my mother-in-law’s house in Connecticut, my spouse said to me that she felt we’d grown a bit distant over the past months. Truthfully, this came as a surprise to me. I didn’t feel the same way at all. But couples don’t live happily together for years without every now and then being honest with one another like this, and so I listened to what she had to say and I thought about it a lot. It’s true that we’ve sprouted and developed lots of interests over the past years. Some of these have been mutual, but many are unique, resulting in time apart to pursue the things that individually make us happy. And that’s all good.

But also like many people nowadays, the daily stress of trying to make ends meet has taken a toll. We don’t get any extended vacation time together. We can’t afford to take trips away, just for ourselves. We both work multiple jobs and balance full work schedules with weekend chores and errands and maybe an occasional movie. But not much. There’s just not much left for much more. Not much time. Not much money. It can be stressful without one even realizing the stress.

So when Lynn shared this thought with me over Thanksgiving, I brought up this line of thinking. She said, “We have to think more creatively then” and she’s right. The other day, when wondering what and/or how I was going to manage Christmas presents this year, I realized that what Lynn really wants – and surprisingly, me too – is nothing at all. No thing. What she wants for Christmas and always is for us to be close, to do things together, to make time for one another. I wish for that, too. Like those hypocritical MasterCard commercials, what we both want is priceless.

Truth be told though, I’m gonna cry if there’s not a THING I can give Lynn for Christmas. (Okay… I’m gonna cry if there’s not a THING for me on Christmas morning, too.) I keep thinking about Lynn’s comment that we need to do is be creative (something that fortunately we’re both pretty good at) and the other day I thought of just the thing – the thing that combines both noTHING and someTHING. I’d write it here, but Lynn reads this blog and there are still a couple of weeks or so ’til Christmas, so it will remain a secret.

But the real message I think I’m writing about in this muse can still be shared – it’s that somewhat hokey message that the gift is in the giving. For those who believe in the Christian part of Christmas, that message is seen in the gift of Jesus. For others who believe in Santa, he brings gifts, too. For those who believe in the hope of a season of giving and the chance for peace in the world, well it’s certainly there as well. Give what you have the most to give, and that is yourself. Give yourself to those you love, to those in need, to those who you share space with in the world. It’s nothing and it’s everything.

All I want for Christmas this year is another year of a loving relationship with my bunny, another year of warmth in my home, another year of good humor and good friends, another year to grow in myself, and a way overdue visit with my Aunt Sheran. None of these will cost anything but my time and myself, and I’ll be all the richer for them.

Plus, I did just buy that 1914 A-4 Gibson mandolin that I’ve wanted forever. Money could buy me that. 🙂