Christmastime in parallel

I went to find Hazel's old trailer but they built a drugstore on the land where it used to sit. I remember that trailer so well. Hazel would watch my sister and I when we were kids and we spent countless hours crawling under that trailer, hanging out in the living room longingly flipping through the Sear's catalogue, sitting at her kitchen table eating one of the only two things she knew how to make - peanut butter sandwiches or toaster oven french bread pizzas. The furniture was covered in plastic and the whole place smelled of Pall Malls. She had a giant glass vase filled to the brim with matchbooks from so many exotic places from the past; casinos and nightclubs where she once worked and mingled among the rich and famous from all over the world: The Southern Club, Coy's, The White Front Cigar Club, The Ohio Club, The Vapors.

These matchbooks hinted at something more elegant and cosmopolitan than the dreary trailer she then lived in. They told a story of a world and a life so dramatically different than the one she was currently living, and one that was only fifteen years behind her. At the end of her days she lived alone in this old trailer, driving a beat to hell Plymouth with a ripped up interior, rationing her social security checks between boxes of french bread pizzas and cartons of Pall Malls. It was a stark contrast to life at my other grandmother's house, where my sister and I played in a palatial two story brick home and were offered all the toys and ice cream our little hearts and bellies could bear. But for us, at that young age, there was no sense of disappointment or even difference. It didn't matter if we were left in the care of Hazel or Marie. We were loved, and that felt real and enough.

The holidays feel so much more familiar to me in Hot Springs than any other time of year because long after I moved away from this place I'd continue to come back here for the holidays. But trying to spend the holidays here now with my own family, with my own children, and hopefully give them memories similar to my own, has opened my eyes to how much Hot Springs has changed through the years. It happens gradually, all around you, like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, so that you don't really notice it when you're in it. For most folks with their own collection of matchbooks, the fact that The Vapors is no longer a plush casino and nightclub and now houses a church isn't shocking. It's just what happened to it over the course of thirty years. Those same thirty years saw the entire community move in a similar direction, all of its once-luxurious landmarks slowly morphing into churches or nursing homes, or just burning and crumbling to the ground. It's just how things happened. But coming back after a long absence those same changes can feel stark. Like my grandmother's trailer, the house where I was born is also disappeared. It's just gone, a vacant lot. Perhaps nobody else gives that empty space on the block a second look, but all I can see is the invisible outline of the home where I grew up. The trees in the lot, each of them are instantly familiar to me, yet also strangely alien in the empty space. It's like being in some weird parallel dimension - not exactly right but some shadow, some glimmer of what is real.

I took my family to the Christmas parade. It felt real and right. It was no different than the Christmas parades of my youth, or every other Christmas parade in Hot Springs for the past umpteen years. The high school marching bands, the flatbed trailers filled with cub scouts, the Mad Max-like phalanx of masked motorcross bikers doing wheelies around the SWAT team's military tactical vehicle. Ok that last one was definitely unique to 2016. But for the most part it was something that hadn't changed much at all since my childhood, or even my parent's childhood. It was simple and consistent and good. That's the stuff where nostalgia can take root and flower. The simple stuff. And now that I have small kids, I long for that stuff. My wife longs for it, too. Traditions, rituals, memories. I thought I had so many of them in this place, but now that I'm here I'm a little shocked at how few there are. The Christmas window display at Felix's, the choral concert in Arlington park, the Christmas Eve party at my parent's house, all bulldozed to make room for more drugstores.

My mother liked to remind my sister and I growing up that my father never got to have any Christmas. She'd often tell us this to put us in our place whenever we got too greedy or unappreciative or selfish around the holidays. He never got any presents for Christmas, she'd scold us. He was lucky if he got one toy at Christmas from a kind aunt or the parents of a friend. My father would corroborate these stories but he'd never rub them in our face. His attitude was that since he never had anything, his children should have everything they wanted that he could afford. That's not unusual for people who grew up poor. And my dad grew up as poor as they get. Not just because his mother didn't have any money, but because she just simply wasn't around. The one time he did get any presents, it was his older brother who bought them. Hazel just couldn't function on that level. She grew up poor, the daughter of a broke horse trainer on the road during the Depression. They sold possessions to move from town to town. Life was a hustle, a grind, and it didn't slow down for Christmas. In Hot Springs her life finally did slow down. Not for family, but for drugs. For booze. She made an attempt at a family. It didn't work out for her. It was filled with violence and tragedy. Most of us gather at Christmas to celebrate family, loving bonds, peace and goodwill. If you ain't got none of that, you ain't got much to celebrate I guess.

Tonight my family went caroling. It was the first time any of us had done it. It was freezing cold and incredibly windy, but the weather didn't dampen any of our spirits, least of all our children who grew more enthusiastic with every block. My life wasn't nearly as grim as my father's was growing up. But I never had the same kind of reverence for the holidays that my wife has. Her family is large and clannish, devoted to one another and to all of their myriad traditions and holiday conventions. They do largely the same things year after year after year. For them that's part of the fun of the holidays - repeating the ritual and passing it on to a new generation. By taking her far away from her New York family, not only now but potentially into the future, I rob her of that thing that she holds close to her heart. I stretch out and weaken those loving bonds. What I hope to show her with things like caroling in Hot Springs is that new traditions await us; a new family is taking form. Just like how my wayward father married my middle class mother and formed a family that took the best from both of their worlds and built something new, she and I are building on that tradition, too. We don't have to sit at her parents' table or stand in my childhood parade in order to have reverence for the holidays, or even to pass that feeling of reverence on to our kids. They only need to feel loved. That should feel real and enough.

Some physicists believe that parallel dimensions are real. Some theories have it that every time we make a choice, the universe splits into two - one where we made the choice we made and one where we made the other choice. There would be an infinite number of these universes. The trouble is we are unaware of our existence in these parallel worlds, so the question of their existence is just academic. Another theory, called string theory, says that the parallel universes can come into contact with each other and we can detect it through the ripple of gravitational waves. The theory is popular, but we still haven't successfully detected another universe yet. It's still just a theory. Physicists feel strongly that string theory may be the theory that explains "everything," but that's all they have so far is a feeling.

Hazel eventually kicked her habits and cleaned up by the time my sister and I came along. She had been to hell and back and in the end what she got for it was the chance to love her grandchildren. Nothing more and nothing less. She died completely broke. They sold her trailer to pay for the funeral. Another possession hocked to keep moving on down the road. And it had stood in the same lot for decades, a different impoverished family living in it, until finally they must have come and hauled it away to make room for this drug store. Still I can sense its presence in Hot Springs. For me, that trailer is always going to be a part of what I know to be real in this town. This town that's not exactly right. This town with some glimmer of what is real.

Seasons Greetings,

David