Christmas day comma two thousand nine

Christmas was a beautiful day. Except when the girl was puking from food poisoning and when Z called and had me assist like a goon with the latest drama between the ex-wife and the boy and the ex-wife’s bo, Cletus. It started however in church and church was good. It was as usual filled with memories and the icons rested like heavy granite in a much heavier structure surrounded by the light hot weight of history. I thought of my grandfathers, both of them but each knowing more, watching and trying or watching and hoping across the river Styx, then across the clouds, faithful and full of love, full of peace. From this spot in history I wanted the night to extend on. The chorus sang and the bells rang. The people of the village were well dressed and white and well-to-do. I watched them, I watched the row of boys behind us and the woman with the long legs and black lace stockings and red silk smock. Above her the ceramic Stations of the Cross mounted on the one hundred fifty year old brick, women singing, men in robes raising hands above the Eucharist, the Christmas offerings, the first. From here there’s a beginning but I think two thoughts that contradict these desires. One, an ex-wife and a marriage on a mountain and a lost thought and a better time and two, a small church in a small town from a year ago after driving through deep snow, so absurd and so deep that I kept the car travelling fast enough to prevent it from stalling. I made it within 100 yards of my destination and called the girl where I lay, stuck along the road in a shit house car, red and stained and already gone because the worst of the worst place got the best of me and kept me low and the best of the worst place was actually not true. The season past, the summer came and God pulled me west by the ear to the land of answered prayers. So fucking answered that I could proclaim it as certainty. Direct action without lip service – the way I had demanded it so pompous. All this could happen in a blink and even the opposite travelling behind in an instant, an afterimage. So this is Christmas, I thought, so lucky and rich with love that I was alone by nightfall in a house that didn’t belong to me, in a space that I didn’t choose, in a time that I’d have been glad to escape, in love and safe, because I had wished for it and there it was - thankful, alive, angry, in love, in peace, in stupid honest report (dear god, oh boy), listening to the bells and holding the hand of the one certain one on Christmas day 2009.