Merry Christmas to all my disciples!
It has been a busy, joyful day. Of course, I was up until 3:30 this morning, wrapping presents and eating Christmas cookies. My son got me up around 8:30 a.m., which was later than I expected. So, I got a full five hours of sleep.
Present opening at my house in the morning, my mom's house late morning, and my wife's cousin's house at 4 p.m. It was a lovely day, filled with goodwill. The only thing that would have made it better would have been a nap.
It's now 10:20 in the evening, and I just discovered that the sewer line to my toilet is blocked. Every time it's flushed, it bubbles up in the bathtub. This continues another holiday tradition. Last year, the water lines in my house froze Christmas night, initiating several days of dealing with plumbers. Looks like the tradition continues this year.
Speaking of traditions, Saint Marty always shares his annual Christmas essay on this night. Here it is:
A Charlie Brown Advent
by: Martin Achatz
1.
Would you believe me if I told you that I
am haunted by Charlie Brown this December?
That, before I went to bed last
night, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a nine-year-old girl’s therapist voice
in the dark kitchen say “Do you think you have pantophobia?” as if all the
fears of the world—hunger and homelessness and isolation and abandonment and poverty
and war—were lined up outside the bathroom door like second graders at recess?
2.
“The early bird gets the worm, but the
late bird doesn’t even get the late worm.”
--Charles M. Schulz
3.
My dad had to be first. Always.
He woke at 4:30 in the morning to get the first coffee. At supper, his plate was full before anyone
else sat down at the table, and he was forking meatloaf into his mouth before
my mother intoned, “Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts . . .” First to rake leaves in the fall, snowblow
after a blizzard, mow his lawn come April.
The trees in his yard were the tallest in the neighborhood. Grass, the greenest. This past February, as he lay dying in a
hospital bed, he kept kicking off his blankets, trying to pull himself upright,
as if he wanted to be the first at the door to meet what was coming. A tunnel of light. Black hole of oblivion. Saint Peter, surrounded by a cloud of cosmic dust. Perhaps the soil of ancient Babylon, trod
upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar.
4.
“Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more
interesting than it really is.”
--Charles M. Schulz.
5.
It’s all about spreading and
fluffing. Making piles of branches on
the floor, shortest to longest. They
used to be color-coded, their tips shades of blue jay blue, parakeet green,
Woodstock yellow, snow bunting white.
The map of these colors has disappeared, so we navigate the process now
like dirt roads in the woods. Take Blue
Branch Trail to where it forks at Brown Branch Gully. Turn left.
Follow the two-rut until it intersects Gold Branch Pass and Black Branch
Canyon. Keep straight. Follow the star up ahead all the way to
County Road Tree Top.
6. In
the photo, Sparky Schulz stands in the backyard of his Minneapolis home. It’s 1926, and he is four years old. His dog, Snooky, sniffs at his feet. Beside them squats a barrel of a snowman with
a wide mouth and eyes like ink spots.
It’s three years before the Stock Market Crash. Seventeen years before his mother, terminal with
cancer, looked up at him from her bed when he was leaving for Army boot camp
and said, “Well, good-bye, Sparky. We’ll
probably never see each other again.”
Twenty-four years before a boy with a barrel body and ink spot eyes
first appeared in a comic strip with Shermy and Patty, Shermy remarking, “Good
ol’ Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!”
7. “I
have a new philosophy. I’m only going to
dread one day at a time.”
--Charles. M. Schulz
8.
Darkness is a thing now. It pushes morning back to eight or
eight-thirty. Rushes afternoon out the
door by four-thirty or five o’clock. That’s
about eight to nine hours of sunlight a day, most of it sweatered in clouds and
snow. In a week, the longest night of
the year, when the dead can visit the living, when animals can speak. Cows tell jokes to pigs: What do
you see when a duck bends over? Butt
quack. Nuthatches and waxwings sing
hosannas to a smirk of moon. Beagles do
impressions of sheep and penguins.
9. My
father died one week before Valentine’s Day, my mother—his little red-haired
girl of 64 years—sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. For several hours, his body had been playing
a game of crack the whip, drifting one way, shifting suddenly in the opposite
direction, then back again, as if trying to send him spinning off into a
snowbank where he’d be swallowed in powder.
My mother rubbed her fingers against his knuckles, saying over and over,
“You’ve been a good husband . . . a good father . . . Yes, you have . . .” I watched his face crumple like an old lunch
bag.
10. Charlie
Brown lamenting to Linus about never seeing the little red-haired girl again: “. . . I thought I had plenty of time . . . I
thought I could wait until the sixth grade swim party or the seventh grade
class party . . . Or I thought I could ask her to the senior prom or lots of
other things when we got older. But now
she’s moving away and it’s too late!
It’s too late! . . . I’ve never even said hello to her!!”
11. Later
in life, Sparky Schulz became obsessed with the movie Citizen Kane, especially the scene where Kane’s mother prepares to
send her little boy away, never to see him again, saying, “I’ve got his trunk
all packed. I’ve had it packed for a
week now.”
12. In
my mind, I see Charlie Brown inside the snow globe from Citizen Kane, standing beside the tiny Alpine-looking cabin,
snowflake dander drifting around him like radioactive fallout. He stares up at the convex glass heavens,
whispers, “Rosebud?”
13. “My
life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. What am I doing right?”
--Charles M. Schulz.
14.
My father was a chronic rearranger of
lights and ornaments. No bare
spots. No dark holes. Everything full of sequin and incandescence
and spark. More Snoopy than Charlie
Brown. Maybe it was a grasping for
perfection, something that reflected beginning more than ending. Genesis over Revelations. Big Bang over T. S. Eliot whimper. Birth over death. Christmas over Easter.
15. Am
I haunted or obsessed? In my dreams, I’m
an India-ink sketch, with words and sounds written above my head in thick, bold
letters. This morning, I turned on my car
radio and heard Vince Guaraldi playing jazz piano, tripping across the keys
like a parade of fat snowflakes, the bass line a steady plow. It was still dark. Down the street, my neighbor’s house was
garish against the ice and stars, a spotlight of Yuletide attention that
blinked like an “Open” sign at a gas station:
Christmas Here, Christmas Here, Christmas Here. Over and over. My father would have loved this.
16. “I
gave up trying to understand people long ago.
Now I let them try to understand me!”
--Charles M. Schulz
17.
Sparky Schulz was a religious guy who
didn’t make his kids go to church. They
went horseback riding while he sat in his yellow chair and read the
Scriptures. In his house at Christmas
time, a wooden crèche sat on a coffee table without explanation, as if its
presence was significant enough without a Sunday school lesson. In his Bible, scribbled across Matthew’s
gospel narrative of Christ’s birth, were these words: “The Christmas story is a story of purity and
can be appreciated only by the pure mind.”
Cue music: “Hark the Herald
Angels Sing” with looing.
18. My
father would cut out Charlie Brown comic strips from the newspaper, scratch the
name of one of his kids above Linus or Lucy or Sally, and magnet it to the
refrigerator. It would stay posted there
for months. He would use them for
bookmarks, along with holy cards of Saint Francis and Saint John Vianney. One of his favorites: Charlie
Brown sitting on a curb as it starts to rain.
Charlie looks up as the rain gets stronger, harder. In the final panel, he’s nearly obscured by
thick lines of downpour, and he comments, “It always rains on the unloved!” My father wrote my name in wide blue letters
over Charlie Brown’s head. M. A. R. T.
Y.
19. “Get
the biggest aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown, maybe painted pink.”
Lucy Van Pelt
20.
Near the top of my tree, a crystal Snoopy
on a sled. It catches the pink bulb
behind it, refracts tiny prisms into the needles and branches. At night, when the living room is dark, an
arc of Snoopy light sits on the ceiling like a raised eyebrow or crescent of
scar.
21. My
mother’s memory is an impermanent thing now.
Her days are a series of questions and observations. “Is it cold outside?” and “How was your day?”
and “I guess I should be heading home” (she is always home) and “Drive safe”
(as I am going out the front door). Most
recent additions: ‘Your father has been
gone all day” and “Where is your father?” and “Your father never tells me where
he’s going.” She paces, shakes her head,
pushes her walker back and forth, kitchen to living room to bathroom to
bedroom, as if she’s Linus and her blanket is missing.
22. A
few months after Charlie Brown first learned the true meaning of Christmas,
Sparky’s father died of a massive heart attack while visiting his son. Sparky didn’t attend the wake or memorial
service, claiming he was afraid to fly.
Much later, he said, “It’s so complicated. I suppose I’ve always felt that
way—apprehensive, anxious, that sort of thing.
I’ve compared it sometimes to the feeling that you have when you get up
on the morning of a funeral.”
23. Sitting
in her chair one night a month or so ago, my mother looked over at my father’s
empty seat and said, “There you are.
Where have you been?” For the
next 20 minutes, she spoke with my father about chicken noodle soup and car
troubles and taxes. How time was moving
so fast from Great Pumpkin to Christmas.
At the end, she nodded, said, “I miss you, too,” then put her head back
and closed her eyes.
24. Linus
to Charlie Brown: “Sure, Charlie
Brown. I can tell you what Christmas is
all about . . .”
25. It’s
about finding love when you’re lost.
