64 HUB FOR THE HOLIDAYS

received at a time in my life that, for years, I would’ve rather forgotten, is now a
precious artifact of a time and place that I can never visit again. FATHER CHRISTMAS
The baseball serves now as a totem, guiding me to the boy I once was.
It reminds me always that we are not granted second chances, so we had
better make good with the first. Sooner than we often think, memory will
be all that’s left of a present we may now, out of stubborn pride, forget to
treasure. There will come a time when the stress and anxieties of holidays
present becomes the wistfulness and aching loss of holidays past, when
today’s animosities become tomorrow’s regrets. I know now that time
together with family is life at its most precious, and that Christmas is a time
for honoring the bonds I share with those I love, a time for remembering that
my life is not just my own but also belongs, in some way, to every person

I
t was the solstice. We were three days removed from Christmas up in
I touch. Albany, New York, miles and miles away from what I still called—and call—
home, Spartanburg County, Upcountry South Carolina. Snowed under
in Albany, our then-”home,” I was staring through a window, star-crossed
with constellations of frost, at the snow falling and falling without haste.
Albany, from the Latin alba for white: the name fit squarely. The frozen swells
of ground in the backyard were whitewashed in hard streaks of late light,
under a sun white as bone. Out past the backyard, the power lines massed
with icicles, and, farther, a clump of dead cedars nailed to the hillside—gray
candles, blown out, as bleak as the skeleton crews of black crows strung in the
trees’ thin rigging. Cold as hell.
I’d spent five years in psychological exile from my native state,
living with my wife and two young sons while teaching at Siena College, sort
of a Wofford North, waaaaaay North, thronged with sack-clothed Franciscan
friars meandering the grounds. We’d whiteknuckled it through five years of
winter wasteland. Eighteen years growing up in Spartanburg and not one
white Christmas, a sentence overturned in that half-decade stretch of nothing
but whiteness on the 25th of December. Our youngest boy, suddenly up from
his afternoon nap, broke the monotony of my gazing daze at the snowfall. He
exclaimed, “Snow! Snow!” What I heard was, “No! No!” I agreed. It was time to
come back home. And so we did, returning to South Carolina in 2010.
In regard to cold aversion, I am surely my father’s son. My father, Noel,
died in 2011 after a seven-year war with lung cancer. He loved Christmas but
hated wintertime. It derived from his tour as commander of a tank platoon
during the Korean War. He would be out on patrol in all that cold and all that
66 HUB FOR THE HOLIDAYS HUB FOR THE HOLIDAYS 67

dark of 38th Parallel winters. Back to camp, he’d warm himself by the fire. The Each Christmas dinner would conclude with Dad’s proclamation: “I do believe
blood warming in his legs was “like somebody takin’ a crowbar and whappin’ that was the best meal I ev’r et, in the United States or abroad. Meal like that
it good a time or two or three cross ya shinbones.” He spent nearly every cost ya fifteen dolla’ at the fines’ rest’raunt in Spartanburg County.”
one of his living days in Spartanburg, a town he inhabited three score and Christmas was the time of year that my father sported his favorite
eight years. of his trademark fedoras: a wonderful, lush, green Tyrolean, sueded fur felt
Dad visited Albany only once in winter, at Christmastime. The high replete with a silver hat brush pinned to the side, made from boar-hair
one day was zero degrees. Fahrenheit. We decided to go out for a meal on bristles. I wear fedoras too. This puts me out of my time but connects me
Christmas Eve, since the all-day cook-a-thon was set for the Day itself. Light to his. My father ordered me a green felt Tyrolean, replica of his own, for
trickled along the branches of the front yard maple, silvered and brittle Christmas one year. I now wear it with something more than pride.
with ice. Crosswinds blasted the limbs in time to the winter’s hollow song, Dad had an innate craftsmanship, particularly with woodworking.
sheering the top layer of snow in great sweeping whirls, an icy Dustbowl. Out- He could design and build any number of things: a wood bridge across the
side, my dad’s cheeks immediately bloomed with cold, wind whipping like backyard creek, a playhouse for my sister with homemade oven and fridge,
thin wires. It took a few seconds of tense and tenuous negotiation with the a dog pen with eight-by-eight posts for a dog who never ran away anyhow.
concrete steps descending to street level before we were driven back into When Doomsday comes, it will start with a lightning strike to one of those
the house. We ordered in dinner. I built a fire, and Dad spent the rest of the deep-sunk posts—such divine sound-and-fury is the only force likely to
evening with his wool-felt homburg and heavy overcoat standing next to what shake those pilings for five hundred years. These things were solid as stone,
warmth and light it gave. This echoed the yearly ritual of my dad making a fire all of them rough-hewn but with a primitive grace. Dad would often craft
every Christmas morning at home that would blaze all day long, no matter if Christmas gifts for us too, such as a table for electric train tracks as big as a
it were sixty-five degrees outside. I distinctly remember sweating through pool table. He painted it forest green and even glued down—with epoxy, an
Spartanburg Christmases in the living room by the fire, down to shorts and a adhesive that leaves little to chance—some sawed-and-whittled little green
t-shirt. Dad believed in tradition at Christmas, and having a fire to light up the trees to complete the rural ambiance. One Christmas, he constructed two
festivities was one thing he abided by. wooden castles—one for my brother, one for me—with crenellated walls,
My dad was made for Christmas. Even his name was Noel. At Yule- archways into and out of each of the towers at the four edges, and doors with
tide, Dad was most certainly a joyous Noel, his natural vigor and good cheer tiny brass deadbolts. So sturdy my sons delight in them now.
working overtime. As a child, I used to look with wonder at the bright green During our adolescence, it was Dad’s custom to stock my brother’s and
pennants Mom would hang up that spelled out “Noël” in red script, with my Christmas stockings with a variety of toiletries: deodorant, shaving cream,
stitched holly leaves and berries. It was magical, providential even, it seemed, replacement razor blades, aftershave. He was joking, mostly. But he was a
that my father was named for Christmas, or perhaps it for him. One of my stickler for intricate rites of hygiene. During his last Christmas in 2010, he
finest, fondest memories was being awakened early mornings with the sound was in awful shape, ghost-pale, bedridden roughly twenty hours a day, eating
of the soles of Dad’s dress-shoes thrumming along the wood floors of the hall- nothing, his head slumped in his hands during most of Christmas dinner. The
way as he belted out Christmas carols. He was tone-deaf and the tunes were lively drumbeats of his shoe steps had subsided into the eerie, terrible metal-
very much out of tune. What he lacked in singing virtuoso, he made up for lic clicks of the medical walker as he labored forward along those self-same
in vitality and creative presence. And he loved the food at Christmas, from wood floors. I realized how difficult it had been for my mom to have tended to
Waldorf salad to roast beef to mincemeat pie. Not just eating it up, but talking Dad for the past year, his condition ever worsening. Dad had gone unshaven
it up. A friend accustomed to Dad’s barker-like ability to drum up any meal for days, too weak, and now his face was covered with a rash of white stubble.
as divine once averred: “Noel could make a plate of steamed shit taste good.” At the dinner table, one of my boys called out, “You look like Santa Claus,
68 HUB FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Granddad!” Dad did not laugh, just peered back into the distance. Having been
a soldier, he shaved every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, until his final ROOFTOP REFLECTION
months when he was too ill for such devotions. In hospice, the nurses asked us
each day if he would like to be shaved as well as bathed. Of course he would.
Oddly, though we sat there for days and watched his suffering, his breaths
and body thinning before our eyes, his chest indented where his right lung
collapsed, we were asked to leave the room while the nurse performed this
cleansing rite. Why was that? Would it have been too stark a sight, too much
like a body being washed and prepared for burial? Which, of course, was what
it was. All our lives, really, are only a matter of time. Such existential abstrac-
tions—so easily spouted out in a college literature classroom—were brought
to bear, however, in Dad’s pained sufferance, hour-to-hour, nothing we could

I
climbed silently onto the heater in one of the small breakout rooms of the
do to help him, only a matter of time. fourth grade Sunday School class. We had to move quietly. The teacher
Yet an equally lasting memory from my father’s last Christmas is of opened the window, and we climbed outside onto the roof, single file, just
Dad alert, engaged, and—per usual for someone of his unchecked spirit— like we had practiced.
shooting a Nerf dart gun playfully at his grandsons on Christmas Day. He The cold December air hit my face, and I was glad I wore a turtleneck
was sitting in a grand old chair, formerly his mother’s. He squinted an eye under my angel robe. This was the only time we were allowed to climb on
and took careful aim from behind the thin palings of the walker. The boys the roof of the church. There was something magical and mysterious about
rolled with laughter and tried to shelter behind the Christmas tree. Dad was knowing how to get to the roof of your church, especially when there was
sporting that well-worn green Tyrolean. Even amid death, he was still life- such a great view. It was the beginning of the Christmas season, which meant
giving, my boys embodying his genetic afterlife. The scene brought to mind it was time for Christmas on Main. Because First Baptist Spartanburg was
a short poem I wrote during our last winter in Albany. I wrote it at the time, I downtown, the middle schoolers of our church participated in the festivities
thought, for my sons, but I realize now that it was—and is—as much about my by creating a nativity that we took turns acting out over and over—a live pag-
father as my sons. eant on repeat throughout the evening.
The backyard is wrapped in pale rags of snow— I always chose to be an angel because, honestly, who wouldn’t want to
The winter carries over its long division. climb on the roof? We crouched down and waited for our cue.
From such ragged teeth the spring will grow— And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host …
We’ll keep green memories till then. We stood up, magically appearing to friends and family gathered
May your days be merry and bright, and your memories a world ever below on Main Street. As the “Hallelujah Chorus” played, we held up our arms.
revolving—somewhere always verdant, and enduring. That’s how I’ll keep I secretly glanced down at the street, knowing that after my shift, my family
Dad’s memory: crowned in deep green, smiling rakishly, and still thriving. would walk down to the rest of the festivities, and I would be able to see my
friends who were in the Nutcracker. They would be dancing behind big store-
front windows for eager crowds. But my favorite was always the windows that
were converted to stages depicting scenes from Charles Dickens’s A Christ-
mas Carol. Watching the story come alive was like being transported back in
time to when my great-grandfather lived in Spartanburg. The women in the