December 22, 2022

If You Can Play a Fiddle

Annalee Birdcount is not surprised by Chicago’s sudden frozen trance. It had been in the forecast for more than a week and now here it is, three days before Christmas, and several inches of snow hide the ground from the sky and the howling winds have little mercy, sending the thermometer miles below zero.

It’s lovely, isn’t, it? Annalee thinks. The snow swirling in its lovely danger.

She watches the snow and thinks of last Christmas, last year, her last drink.

She drops a record on the turntable and it crackles and pauses and then plays. Straight To Hell, by the Clash. It’s the perfect Christmas song without really being about Christmas at all. Annalee sips her diet Coke.

Joe Strummer died twenty years ago today. He was only fifty. Annalee doesn’t really remember him. The Clash stopped playing before she was even born.

But Annalee remembers reading the words years ago that someone else said to her… “I had no one to cry with the day Joe Strummer died.”

She takes out her journal and scribbles the words, The Christmas Clash, and draws a Christmas tree with an electric guitar under it and listens to Joe Strummer sing “…go straight to hell, boy” and she sings along, quietly.

“There ain’t no asylum here…there ain’t no asylum, here…the snow swirls in its lovely danger.” –TK