There's a last time for everything

Day 1:
Listening to the minutia of directions coming through the phone, I already felt the rage coming on. Nothing is where she says it is. She really hasn’t the first idea where anything really is in this entire house unless she wanders around it talking to her “angels”. It’s a mess that can’t be fixed. Everything one needs to use gets ‘safely’ tucked away in some mysterious location before you’re really done using it while the counters and corners of each room explode with garbage like plastic bags, six month old church missals, old penny saver magazines, tattered shoes and broken shit.

My luggage got lost. United Airlines has made sure I showed up for this holiday completely unprepared. Everything I sent ahead that I might give anyone for Christmas is lost somewhere in this house and I am really loosing it.

“Where’s the box from See’s?” I ask her.

“Oh!…” she proceeds to give me several locations of possible search for the various items, all of which prove to be false. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing on top of that refrigerator in the basement (where I specifically told her NOT to put the chocolate) except a pineapple. There’s nothing on those shelves in the freezer, where my cooking ingredients were supposed to have been stored, but butter and venison. There’s nothing anywhere but shit wrapped in plastic bags. If I see one more plastic grocery bag wrapped around some item I’m going to…

“ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!” snap and scream.

I begin pulling items from the chest freezer (this is the third freezer in the house) and throwing whatever I grab with all of my might. Frozen pork roasts sail across the cluttered basement and crash into the washer and dryer that haven’t worked since I was in high school. A chicken bangs into the side of the furnace. A $2 pound cake, packed in a plastic deli container and two plastic grocery bags, goes for a sail and crashes against the wall. I spy that pound cake. You’d think this was some sort of delicacy the way she has it so carefully stored for future use. It’s just a cheap fucking pound cake! These things taste like sweetened foam! Its container has already shattered from the force of throw and impact. So, I jump on it. I jump on the cake and stamp on its slippery, gross larva form as it squirms around the cement yelling “NO MORE CHEAP SHIT WRAPPED IN PLASTIC!!”

For a moment I calm down and attempt to reassemble the freezer, only hesitating to beat the $1.99 a pound pork roast into the floor a few times before returning it to the chest. I throw the smashed remnants of the pound cake into the snow in the back yard with as much force as I can muster. It lands somewhere out there in the field of white between the house and the woods.

But the rage isn’t passed. Just looking for tape, and I can’t close a kitchen cupboard for all of the crap in there. Seconds later a plastic container of crap flies from the kitchen into the living room, spilling it’s contents all over the red rug: replacement staples for a stapler probably long gone, zippers taken off pants before they were tossed, a bit of string, and nameless and formless –

“PILES OF USELESS CRAP!!”

In the living room, hovering over the landing sight of my latest rage victim, I look around. A display of fall gourds has been left to rot in the basket on the coffee table – the coffee table which has a broken leg and which will fall over if leaned on in just the wrong way. This room, this was the room we were not supposed to ever ever enter as it was full of all those items so precious: picture windows, wall mural, hardwood floor, nice sofa, red carpet. I grab the rotted gourds and heave them at each of these features.

“I’M SICK OF THIS! I’M SICK OF EVERY THING LEFT TO SIT AND COVERED WITH DIRT AND DUST AND ROT UNTIL IT’S CRAP! I’M SICK OF EVERY NICE THING BEING LEFT TO SIT UNTIL ITS USELESS! WHY DO YOU DO IT? WHY DO YOU REJECT EVERY NICE THING? I’M SICK OF ALL OF YOU! YOU’RE FULL OF SHIT! NEVER COULD SAY A NICE THING AND WHO THE FUCK WERE YOU? IT’S NEVER BEEN NICE BEING HERE! IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A PLACE WEHERE NICE THINGS COME TO BREAK AND DIE!”

Gourds crack and bounce off the picture windows. Gourds smash into the red carpet and break open against the floor.

“YOU CAN’T MAKE ME EAT THIS! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME CHEW IT AND TAKE IT IN! I REJECT THIS! I’M DONE! THE WINDOWS DON’T MATTER! THE CARPETS AND THE HARDWOOD FLOORS DON’T MATTER! WE WERE THE LIFE IN THIS PLACE AND WE SHOULD HAVE MATTERED MORE!!”

When I finally run out of squash to throw I come to a rest, face pressed against the cold glass of the picture windows. My throat is hoarse from shouting against the dusty air. Years of expectation and disappointment pour out of my eyes. So this is Christmas.

This is “getting together to trim the tree” degrading into an upset argument over strings of lights that don’t work. “They worked last year!!” Dad would bellow. The first time in my adult life that I bought a string of lights and read on the box that these were ‘not intended to last more than one season’ I seriously thought I was going to hit something. Why the fuck couldn’t you people just go out and drop $10 on a couple new strings of lights each year?

This is sitting down to decorate Christmas cookies and getting yelled at for making all the cookies the wrong colors. I had made a green Santa, and as an even worse sin, my stars were red! Red stars were communist (never mind that they tasted better). Stars were blue or yellow, Santa wore red, neither creativity nor communism in colored sugar were appreciated.

This is people sitting around the tree making conversation while mom bangs pots and pans in the kitchen. She’s spied something none of the rest of us sees yet. A diamond ring on a finger.

So this is the living room, the stage of so many moments around the tree, around girls going off to prom or around a bride. This was setting of many a smiling photo and much tacit animosity.

I get up and start cleaning the living room of crushed and smashed bits of squash. I start to put the tree together, using the two strings of lights that work, the antique ornaments and the new tinsel I found last January (finally allowing us to throw away the crinkled tinsel which has been in use since the late 60’s… not joking).

As I plug the works in and tidy the room I think “there’s a last time for everything”.