Cancelling Christmas: (Not So Great) News From Home

When I was a kid (Note: as I am still a kid, what I mean to refer to is that time when I was still wearing tights and those abominable holdovers from the 1950’s, white leather saddle shoes my dad insisted were more durable, attractive, and cost-effective than the canvas tennis shoes it seemed everyone else wore), I was convinced my dad was undefeatable and could do anything and I was convinced of this for very good reasons, not the least of which being any of the following Amazing Accomplishments Only He Could Do:

· Only my dad would bring home a garbage can full of gigantic toads he and my uncle had captured when they took a load of miscellaneous junk to the dump and turn them loose in our backyard ‘just for the hell or it’ and to ‘see what would happen’. That was one evening of toad-chasing, no-cost entertainment I’ll personally never forget;
· Only my dad would think of building his daughters a play house suspended from the rafters of the garage and accessible only by a narrow ladder staircase sans safety rail daunting enough in appearance that local mothers banned all but one of the neighbor kids from using it, thus ensuring my sister and I the most elite playhouse in the neighborhood as no one but us really knew what it looked like on the interior;
· Only my dad would think of attaching a tow rope to the back of his Schwinn bicycle and entertaining my cousin, my sister and I for hours by letting us ‘water ski’ behind him on a skateboard;
· Only my dad would conquer my fear of the dark finally and forever by asking me what I saw when the light went out (“Nothing”) what I saw when I closed my eyes (“Nothing”) and asking me what the difference was and hence what was the big deal to be afraid of (“Nothing”);
· Only my dad would likewise conquer my fear of the deep end of a pool by unceremoniously tossing me into it one Saturday afternoon, demonstrating once and for all that if you could keep yourself afloat, it didn’t matter if you were in 4’ or water or 9’ you still couldn’t touch bottom;
· Only my dad, after politely echoing Mom’s warnings on the evils of R-rated movies and ‘that awful ‘Saturday Night Fever in particular’ would the next weekend (with a stealthy, “Don’t tell Mom,”) hike up to the local theater and take us to see it, seemingly as happy as we were to get away with something so blatantly verboten.

Dad has always been a thirty-something kid in my mind and over the years if I occasionally noticed some sign of aging (the hearing aid, the retirement from his job, the ‘Thanks for calling’ when he was the one who’d called me) it was easy to disregard.

Until today.

I was stepping into the coffee shop with a lunch date when Mom’s cell number flashed across my Blackberry’s screen. It’s not unusual for her to call during the day and after a brief hello I asked if I could call back, as I was just stepping out to lunch.

“If you’ll call right back,” she said and I’m no clairvoyant but I knew something wasn’t right.

“Is everything OK? Are you OK?”

“I’m OK,” she said. “It’s your dad. (Insert far too long a pause here) He’s not doing very well.”

So there you go, I thought, and I suppose that conversation, which took place in the hall outside the coffee shop after I’d left my date to be seated without me, was one of those moments which drive home very concretely the fact that no matter how young you perceive them to be, your parents do tend to age when you yourself are no longer thirty-something. They’re not indestructible and they’re not infallible and they’re not invulnerable to getting older. It was also one of those moments in which you understand the truism that eventually the parent becomes the child and the child becomes the parent, the parent bestowing calm and inserting logic and more than anything, really, steering the conversation into the realm of, ‘let’s just take this one thing at a time and not jump ahead of ourselves, OK?’. All of that came rushing down like a springtime downpour as I listened to Mom explain the situation, telling me what the doctors had said, what they hadn’t said, what they might find out after more tests and then, bizzarely, her tears came when she ended with telling me she and Dad had ‘called off Christmas, told all the kids to stay home, your dad just doesn’t want anyone to see him like this,’ and she didn’t know ‘what in the world’ she’d do with all the cookies she’d been baking for weeks. She was terribly upset about the cookies.

I suppose it was the cookies that put me into parent mode and I assured her everything would be fine, she should just put the cookies in the freezer, they’d keep forever, and did she want me to come home? What could I do? I could, she said, just call. Every day. But no, don’t come home. Your dad, she said, doesn’t want anybody to come. Let’s just wait and see but would I call that night?

Of course I would. And every day, and I guess at this point I suppose it’s pointless to note that when I returned to the booth and the waitress appeared I ordered three different things and changed my mind on all of them, finally settling on a fruit plate that for the most part I just cut up into smaller pieces and pushed around on my plate until I’d constructed a semi-modernistic artistic creation of skewered pineapple and various melon punctuated by blackberries and framed in cottage cheese that was attractive, if unconsumed in the end.

I can’t remember any difficult time in my life in which my dad didn’t, at some point, affectionately refer to me as ‘a real trooper’ because I managed to get through it without crying, not the least of which being every time he’d hauled me to the doctor’s office for stitches and/or a tetanus shot because I’d: a) fallen off the deck and neatly onto my head and a rock, b) decided to pick up broken glass with my bare hands, c) stepped on a nail or five, or d) otherwise been injured or hurt or frightened, and I suppose I really was a trooper through today’s lunch and right up until the moment I returned to the office where I did the completely human and sometimes necessary thing by bursting into tears. But only for a few minutes and then I got busy with what was on my desk because…well, just because it was there, and it was on my desk and crying didn’t fix anything and somehow, being busy did.

Two things happened later that really helped. The first being, I ran into Holly in the lobby and let her know what was going on. She listened as she always does, then said only one thing (Holly’s that way. She’ll say one thing and it’s always what I need to hear). “What,” she asked, “would you tell me to do in this situation?”

“I’d tell you,” I said after a moment, “to take the emotion out and try to see all sides of it.”

“So do that,” she said, “and we’ll wait and see how it all comes out.”

The second thing happened about an hour later when Mom’s cell number once more flashed across my Blackberry except this time, it was Dad on the other end. “There’s something going on with me,” he said, “that I need to tell you about.” And he did, not aware that I’d gotten a call earlier.

Listening to him I felt it again, that odd sense of the tables having been turned, the child becoming the parent because if I’d ever felt the desire to call someone ‘a trooper’ that’s what I would have called my dad as he ran through the gamut of the situation, what the doctors had said, what might be coming, how he felt about how things were now, and whether or not they’d change or not. It would be redundant to note how much I loved him in that moment because even with all the uncertainty and all the unknown I still heard undeniably that spark of the undefeatable, of that little mischievous kid who somehow wound up in the body of a 69 year old man. A man who was happy to have brought home that can full of toads ‘just for the hell of it’ and would probably do it again if he had the chance and even if he didn’t, was so damnably grateful that he’d gotten to do it once because in the end, it was a whole lot of fun.

I wanted, right then, to get on a plane, get a rental car, go to his house and hug him and yet I understood when he explained the whole canceling Christmas thing and just wanting to be home ‘without the chaos of a full house and all the damned grandkids running around’ and even as he said that last you could hear that he loved them, he just needed…a Christmas without all that.

So we’ll wait and see what happens. And we’ll wait to hear what the doctors have to say. And I’ll do the only thing I can do right now, which is to call tonight as I said I would, and somehow conjure up the right words to assure Mom that those cookies will be OK in the freezer.

I think we’ll both know we’re not really talking about cookies, but we don’t necessarily have to think about that.