Two Days Before Christmas

Two days before Christmas, driving through town. Town being Portsmouth, Ohio. It could just as easily be any other small town in America. Traffic is beginning to thicken, just after noon. A beat-up Blazer, champagne in color, blows through the red light in front of me. A white sedan accelerates aggressively through the intersection, as if the call was closer than it was. Warm for December, windows halfway down, the sun still partially hidden behind a curtain of gray sky. The light like spent dishwater. Snow melt and a predawn sprinkling have left the asphalt mottled, dark and light. Mounds of moldy snow still linger in the corners of parking lots.

The breeze through the window smells of fast food. I pass them all. Wendy’s. Taco Bell. McDonald’s. It’s a scent that reminds me of traveling when I was younger. When I thought seeing other places was the only way to gain an intimate knowledge of the world, ignoring the one at arm’s reach. The holiday excitement seems to have burst early. Everyone I pass looks deflated, only husks sulking about. Most of them picking up last minutes gift. Which is what I’m doing.

I enjoy the idea of the holidays. Of hearing an abundance of typical Christmas jazz. Of hot coffee next to the woodstove, watching as the world dissolves into whiteness beyond the windows. But there’s an emptiness, cold and prescriptive, when it comes time to go through the motions. This, perhaps, is a defect, an operator’s error. It might be there’s still an old wound festering at my core. A laceration caused, not by an unhappy childhood, but a complicated one.

I find the gift I’m looking for. A flannel shirt. Stripes of navy, rust, and cream. I’m buying it for an older friend who has no family left. Who is alone. I imagine it, the giving of a simple gift, as I walk to the front of the store to pay. For a moment I’m there, inside the dark living room. A continually buzzing heater, perched on the table, warms the room. Tobacco pipes hang from the wooden shelf on the wall beside his recliner. Birds he’s carved and painted are mounted around the living room, caught in that moment just before flight. Through the window behind me, a row of pines stand, wind-mangled sentries overlooking the brick house. From the couch, I’ll watch him open the shirt. A shirt that looks like other shirts he’s owned for years. For decades. As he opens the gift, smiling, the old man who is alone realizes for a moment he isn’t.