Holidays as mileage markers of pain November 29, 1985
It feels like snow.
One day before Thanksgiving and the air is thick with it.
Another holiday, but one also thick with loneliness – Fran
and Safire gone.
But there have been lonely holidays – especially the one in
1972 six months or so after Louise left.
I spent a whole year trying to find a way to fill in the gap
in my life, as if she had been a drug I could not kick.
Then nostalgia kicked in and instead of moping around in
front of my Uncle Ted’s boat store, I was writing letters to Mike’s ex-wife
Chris in Detroit talking about Buddhism – on Thanksgiving, no less.
But I suppose that was better than sleeping through
Thanksgiving the way I did in 1969 when I lived in East LA and was still being
hunted by the police – Louise living nearly a thousand miles away in Bolder,
equally alone, eating turkey by herself in a motel room.
She was still picking the bones when I showed up a week
later
We had no way of knowing that a year after that we would both
be living in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a cheap East
6th Street apartment with a baby on the way and chunks of ceiling falling down
on our heads.
I don’t remember Thanksgiving that year as clearly as I
remember Christmas when we went up to Radio City Musical Hall to see the
musical version of “Scrooge.” (We went to a movie on Christmas 1969, too, at
some theater on Hollywood Boulevard, but I don’t remember what we saw – only
that we saw several movies back-to-back.)
Then, a year after the year we celebrated Thanksgiving in
New York, we were back on the West Coast again, not LA this time, but in
Portland, our baby rolling around in a wheeled walker over the wooden floor of
a paneled apartment in the St. John’s section of the city – our lives together
coming near to an end although we did not yet know it, only that we could not
stay in Portland and were making plans again to bounce back to the New York
area, as if we were playing ping pong with the whole of the United States as a
table.
Although I ache as the thought of spending Thanksgiving
without a lover this year, no year was ever so bad as 1972 was, unless it was
the one in 1966 after my grandfather died and the family tradition of gathering
in the old house on the hill in Clinton came to an end and we all made our way
up to my aunt Alice’s house in Fairfield – only that tradition end, too, with
her death in 1975.
Again, the details of that last Thanksgiving with her fade,
but not the Christmas that followed when Hank and I made the rounds of my
family on Christmas Eve, first to see Jane in Towaco, then pausing at Alice’s
house on our way back to meet with Garrick in Passaic.
My aunt, in the midst of her own holiday celebration, heard
Garrick was alone in Passaic, and insisted on packing up two shopping bags full
of food to bring back with us so we could celebrate with him.
I think that was the year Garrick gave me a beer mug and a
bottle of scotch which I mistakenly drank in the beer mug until the room spun
and I woke up on his cot Christmas morning with the hangover from hell.
With Alice’s death, Thanksgiving celebration reverted to the
old house on the hill in Clifton where I stopped briefly before going to my
mother’s house on Trenton Avenue.
This ended when Ted packed up and moved to Tom’s River,
taking my mother and grandmother with him, and holidays became a trip to the
shore each year with Ted, his family, my uncle Frank, and visits from Uncle
Harry, Alice’s kids and Aunt Florence and her kids until Florence passed away
in 1980 – a year I spent Thanksgiving with my girlfriend Susan at her parents’
house in Rutherford, and Christmas without in in Toms River with my family.
By 1981, I was taking care of my Uncle Ritchie, who I could
not trust to leave alone in my Passaic apartment – he had tried several times
to jump into the Passaic River – and once actually drove his truck into it.
He hated the idea and climbed out the basement window of
Ted’s house without shoes or coat, the police recovering him a few hours later
walking down Route 37 towards the Parkway – apparently intent on finding his
way home or into a more convenient river.
He vanished before Christmas and I didn’t see him again for
nearly a year when I found him living on the front steps of Paterson City Hall
with the rest of the homeless.
By 1982, I was dating Fran – but did not bring her south
with me to see my family. She wanted to spend the day with her father, who she
loved, but also could not stand being around.
A year later, Pauly had moved into the Passaic apartment
with me – after Fran refused to, and then changed her mind after Pauly had
moved in, leaving her no place to live except with her father, where she spent
another miserable Thanksgiving while I went south to see my family (Ritchie was
safe and in Graystone mental hospital – where I would visit him before
Christmas that year.)
Last year, I went south again without Fran – we were already
on the verge of breaking up and would do so just before Christmas, making yet
one more painful holiday.
Tomorrow I plan to make the trek south again and feel just
as empty as I have in the past, not over Safire, more over Fran – as if Safire
was just a milestone in a recovery a year did not allow me to complete – just
as all these holidays have become milestones of misery with 1985 living up to
this painful tradition.
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