Christmas Eve In The Year Of Covid
Christmas Eve In The Year Of Covid
Thin Floors
December 24, 2020
Christmas Eve
We held the funeral luncheon at an Irish bar where Mom liked to go. She loved the sandwiches, the music, the beer, so much of it, and so it was the most fitting place to say goodbye to her though we have never said goodbye to her, despite so many years, and far too many Christmases, having come and gone since she died.
It took more than a year after the funeral for any of us to go back into the bar and it was a relief to at last return, knowing that we cannot avoid memories forever. Don’t hold onto the dead, they say, let them gently walk with you. They say that even more on Christmas, don’t they?
Eventually we all went back to the bar many times, always thinking of Mom, comforted to know that the place where we bid farewell would always be there. Until one day it wasn’t. Its doors were closed for months and then it reopened under a new name. It was another Irish name but it wasn’t the same as before and so we didn’t like going in there nearly as much and after a year under the new name it closed again and this time it did not reopen.
Then there was a day with a wrecking ball and the four walls that held the bar and apartments upstairs where people who once owned the bar lived, a building that had been there since before Mom was even born was taken down to dust, and it stayed a rubble of aching recollection for what seemed like a very, very long time until another building started going up.
They dug, they built, it rained, it snowed, they stopped, there was a strike, a recession, someone stole a bunch of the bricks, construction started again and, following far too much time and tedium, the building rose high, much higher than the bar had ever stood. Four stories with condominiums and apartments, new, modern, beautiful, and too expensive for that neighborhood but maybe not because all the units sold and in the summer you could see the young couples on the balconies sipping coffee, drinking beer, and looking immortal.
In the fall the balconies were home to pumpkins and cornstalks, then there would be Christmas lights, then St. Patrick’s Day flags, then American flags, then the cycle spun around on itself and each year the bar that once lived beneath the building retreated deeper into the minds of those who rarely even went by the building anymore though they always thought of Mom, we always dreamt of Mom, when we did.
Many years had melted away before one day the building became our home. There was a unit on the top floor with a balcony facing north onto the busy street and from the balcony you could look to the east and see the church were Mom was baptized and the hospital where you were born and to the west, on a clear day, the cemetery where Mom is resting floats into view.
On Christmas Eve it all comes crashing against itself with the snow, the cold, the lights, the cigar smoke, the laughter, and the Irish music that still lodges in the soil, the dust, and the molecules of a million souls popping about trying to find their place of endless rest and guiltless joy.
Rescind, one piece of paper says. It is written in an old journal with an ink pen and the journal has dust and crude drawings of saints and ghosts and you have learned to write words with your right hand and scribble awful pictures with your left hand, the journal overflowing with the crude drawings on the left side of the page and rambling missives on the right side, a distraught picture book for the aged and the defeated but a beautiful book you say because Mom gave you the pen and bought you the journal and her voice is in it as you scribble and try to remember just how she looked the last time the Irish bar saw her shadow.
You end up drawing many parallel lines. Like a very long street that starts in front of the condominium building that once was the bar and unfurls toward the cemetery, the church, the hospital, the school, the other bars, the river, to Christmas, to Christmas, to Christmas, to Christmas, to Christmas, to Christmas, and now the journal has run out of pages and the pen is dry and you are scratching on the walls and the floor, drawing words in a cup of sugar in the kitchen, lining up carrots and old pencils trying to spell a word that you cannot pronounce.
And the neighbors say damn it, it’s Christmas Eve, old man, can you please let the quiet overtake you? --TK
Thursday, December 24, 2020