PENINSULA DAILY NEWS for Tuesday, December 25, 2012 PAGE
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Our family Christmas, rescinded BY HEATHER HAVRILESKY SEVERAL YEARS AGO, my mother announced that she was spending Christmas in Egypt with friends. I flew home anyway, alone, and spent two days making homemade pierogies and sauerkraut and bread for the traditional CarpathoHavrilesky Rusyn meal we always have on Christmas Eve. At 10 p.m., my sister had an hour off from her rounds at the hospital. She came home, and we ate. Then she left, and I did the dishes. You might say I have a strong sense of tradition, if you didn’t recognize the heavy press of bereavement on these proceedings, the fear that the past is lost forever. “The possible ranks higher than the actual,” Martin Heidegger wrote.
be some misunderstanding. “I’m 70 years old,” she explained. “I don’t have many Christmases left in me. I can’t handle the chaos and the noise anymore.” She offered to pay for me and my family to stay in a hotel instead. “It’s your house,” I said finally of the place I (myopically) consider mine more than any other. I imagined myself under a starched white sheet, listening to strangers come and go in a hotel hallway on Christmas Eve. “You should do whatever you want,” I said. Then I put down the phone and cried.
well up on a last-minute trip to the shopping mall, haunted by the mournful strains of Perry Como’s “White Christmas.” Maybe I just wish I were little again. As a parent, I’m expected to smile serenely as I pour the wine and rush the baked rolls to the table, as I sign “Santa” on every package, then join my children in marveling at his generosity. I’d rather be one of the kids, tearing into presents, then gloating over my loot like a drunken pirate. Perhaps nostalgia is a natural result of being abruptly ushered from the realm of gleeful greed to the less-thrilling arena of sweating the small stuff, then receding into the background until it’s time to crawl across the floor retrieving stray scraps of wrapping paper.
while our families constantly revise their understanding of us like software that updates autocould have protested her matically. ur visions of an ideal holidecision, but I knew that I Instead, traditions crumble day erase our memories of would merely be seen as play- and nostalgia yields to melanthe opposite. ing to type, following the same choly, but our identities, to our Like elephants, we return to pushy emotional script my family families, are as fixed and stagthe place where something disap- has heard so many times before. nant as fossils behind glass. peared long ago, hoping to get Or, as my sister put it years y mom’s insistence on Anxious to demonstrate how that old feeling back. ago when I moved in with yet spending Christmas in mature and flexible we’ve This compulsive pursuit of the another boyfriend: an empty house might become, we return to our birthpast also explains why, when my “Same old story, different places and we’re cut down to size, be her way of finally rejecting mom called to tell me she didn’t this farce. year.” encountered as predictable once want me to stay with her over For decades now, my brother We want our comforting tradi- again. and I have returned home specifChristmas this year, I felt it must tions to stay suspended in sap Disappointment and longing
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Peninsula Voices Semiautomatic When I turned 12 in rural New Hampshire, I thought I wanted to hunt. I had been given a .22-caliber single-shot, boltaction rifle. My favorite uncle had lever-action and pumpaction rifles in his kitchen. I read that no real hunter needs a semiautomatic. As West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” [Dec. 17]: “I’ve never had more than three shells in a clip. “Sometimes you don’t
get more than one shot anyway at a deer. You know, it’s common sense.” Lunatic gun nuts think they need semiautomatic rifles to fight their government. But when a squad of six infantry goes after Joe Tuffguy in house, they can set up two machine guns to cover all ways to exit, then use a mortar to destroy Joe’s house and anyone it. His semiautomatic rifles and pistols will have been worthless. When U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was so terribly wounded, I asked two local gun shops what the largest
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ically to regress, to slouch around in dirty socks, eating Christmas cookies, ignoring my mom’s soliloquies on how little time she has left. Lately, we have dragged our spouses and unruly children along with us. What I perceived as abandonment could be my mom’s attempt to offer an “It’s a Wonderful Life”style tour of what life would look like without her.
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aybe my mother’s growing acceptance of her mortality has emancipated her from old obligations. Or maybe she’s just eager to shock us out of our childish selfishness. Either way, it worked. We can see now that without her, we are greedy babies surrounded by other greedy babies, waiting expectantly for the dinner bell to ring. We want to deny that there’s an end to this story, so we remain trapped. My mother, though, is free to forge a new path, unburdened by the decay of history. But we’ll all come together again on Christmas Eve, the trapped and the free, to endure the noise and the chaos. The possible ranks higher than the actual. I’m really looking forward to it.
________ Heather Havrilesky is the author of a memoir, Disaster Preparedness. Her article first appeared in The New York Times.
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pistol and long gun magazines they sold were, and what percentage of long guns they sold were semiautomatic. One owner answered calmly, politely and completely. The other totally lost his cool and followed me out of his store to ask if I wanted to fight. I now favor banning all private ownership of any semiautomatic handguns or long guns and of any bullet clips at all. Maybe some will disagree. Bill Marsh, Port Angeles
The little lost puppy who came to stay BY MITCH LUCKETT
“I’ve got a couple days work in Forks. Just take care of him until I get back and can find him a Her cell reception suddenly good home.” cut out. She handed over a little black Edna is a modern-day nomad bundle of bark, squeal and wiggle on the job, staying in motels — with traces of dog biscuit in his no permanent address, no way to whiskers. take care of a puppy. “I call him ‘Milo’,” she said, My hackles shot up. I stood, then propelled off in the general arms folded tight across my chest direction of the setting sun. as she pulled into my driveway. “Well, hellllll . . . lo, Milo,” I “Let’s get something straight,” I said, with the unctuous tone of said to the 10-pound terrier tot. He had eyes crazed with the one who knows a thing or two about the righteous and the mul- rapture of unbounded energy — basically the opposite of mine. ish, “in case you’re thinking I Milo sprayed my sandaled foot might want another dog, Mim is with pee, yammering gleefully, as all the dog I can handle.” if he’d anointed my toes with Mim, my Westie, gives me golden nectar. unconditional love. Lately, she Mim growled at this frontal likes to nose her way under my attack upon her pack boss. She bed covers, becoming a warm was not easily seduced by puppy lump of comfort on cold nights. puffery. “Perish the thought.” Edna’s But Milo proceeded to cajole, eyeballs puckered in a blue sea of halcyon purity. entreat, nip, and yip, making life
POINT OF VIEW
“I WAS AFRAID he’d get eaten by a coyote or the highway,” my friend, Edna, explained over her cellphone. “A little, lost puppy in the middle of the road. No collar, scared, starved.” “Did you look for the owner?” I asked. “For two Luckett hours,” she said, “then, I took him to a vet in Chimacum. “The poor thing has flaky skin, tapeworm and an ear infection. I got these treated plus his puppy shots. Now, I’m heading for the Duckabush Valley and your place.”
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so annoying that Mim’s tough topdog superiority cracked. Games of rough and tumble ensued. I found it effortless to avoid attachment to the mutt, content to merely take care of his feeding and cleaning, while counting the hours until my two days in puppy purgatory were over. Edna called. “I’m tied up in Forks another week. If Milo is too much trouble, take him to the Center Valley Animal Rescue.” Aha! A great solution. I retrieved Mim’s dog crate from my Vanagon, then went to get Milo. He and Mim slept on the sofa — matronly Mim’s head draped over bad-boy Milo’s neck, instinctively sheltering him from a cruel world: i.e., me. Mim’s white fur glistened these past few madcap days, and she’d lost 2 pounds of
excess weight. Perhaps the puppy could stay another day or two. Edna finally returned and Mim — and Milo — ran to greet her. We never mentioned taking the pup to animal rescue again. Milo was home. That night I lifted him into bed with Mim. She showed him how to nose under the covers. I now have two lumps of comfort — one big, one small — to cozy up to this winter. Mim and me and Milo makes three.
_______ Mitch Luckett is a Brinnon musician, storyteller and occasional Point of View contributor. See “Have Your Say” below on writing a Point of View column on Peninsula lifestyles for the PDN.
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