Though it was the siren song of “Dude, there’s palm trees” which enticed me to move down to the San Francisco Bay Area, my heart longs every year to witness an honest Northwest winter. My friend, and fellow contributor to The Vaults, Dave Banuelos, would mock the very notion of an “honest” Northwest winter as anything other than an adorable attempt at best. And please don’t get him started about his feelings regarding the “weather” here in the Lower Kneecap of California. I’ve been here for almost a dozen years, and while my body may confuse 50 degrees with chilly, my soul longs to feel the invigorating pain of the not-quite-freezing temperatures and ever-present tease of snow my hometown has to offer. But not that Billings stuff. That’s just ridiculous.
When he was just a little baby, we brought my son up to the Puget Sound so my mother could see him baptized. I’d been living in the Bay for half a decade, and all I wanted for my birthday was to have the chance to see it snow. Despite the forecast downplaying the odds of crystallized precipitation in favor of particularly chilling rain, I got my wish, and stood beneath the falling snow once more. My son wasn’t terribly impressed, but he was only just five months old, the only thing which truly impressed him was drinking milk straight from the tap. My wife, however, having spent all but a few years living down in Mexico, had only seen it snow within a television’s glow from the safety of her living room. Like a child who’s realized school’s been cancelled for tomorrow, she jumped right in and started making snowballs. The battle began shortly thereafter, and I honestly believe she enjoyed getting hit by exploding snow just as much as targeting my growing bald spot.
We returned back a few days later to our home in Berkeley, CA to temperate weather and the daily grind of working life. My son, of course, has no recollection of that visit, but I know it is a memory my wife will cherish always.
A few years later, shortly before I took the reins at the pizzeria where I’d been working for some time, I sent the two of them back up to my hometown to spend Christmas with my family. I’d planned to meet them shortly after the new year, but managed to swing an earlier departure, and surprised my wife in time toast her on her birthday, just hours before the end of 2011. Again, she’d fallen in love with the place where I’d grown up, and to sweeten the deal for her, it had snowed once more, shortly after her arrival. There was nothing left for me, of course, by the time that I arrived, the snow having been washed away once more by the incessant drizzle of the Pacific Northwest. But the two weeks she’d spent free of work, and in the care of family, had done wonders for my wife: a miracle more valuable than even Birthday Snow. Of course, trying to corral our son while on their 22 hour train ride home washed most of that tranquility away, and it was decided shortly thereafter that on any future visits to Seattle, our son would fly with me.
In about a week and a half, the three of us will be heading back up to the place of my birth to spend the holidays with my family (something that I, personally, have not done since I moved down here). Part of the reason that I left my job when I did, was to make sure that I could go this time, though I’m sure my wife would have enjoyed a small vacation without me. But like I mentioned a couple days ago in El Que No Podia Aguantar, I’ve come to understand the value of family, and the continuity which it represents. This may be my final opportunity to spend a Christmas with my grandparents, and I didn’t want to miss it because I had to put work first. That had been my reason for all these years I’ve spent away, but time and health are conspiring against me, and I dare not miss out on these treasured moments.
But there is another reason as well. It wasn’t only the promise of nice weather and exotic flora which convinced me to move on down the coast. The previous summer, my great-grandmother had passed away. For years, my mother nagged at me to go and see her, or at the very least, give her a call. But I was too busy trying to figure out my life, and was ashamed at all the countless ways in which I’d failed. I’d assumed she would be disappointed in me, and didn’t think that I could bear to see that reflected in her face. So I avoided Gram, telling myself that I still had time in which to make things right, to give her a reason to hope I’d wind up as something other than an abject failure. The news came out of the blue, at least to me. I’m sure that somewhere in-between the lines of my mother’s incessant call to familial obligation, there was a warning of Gram’s failing health. But it was so easy to put off, I mean, what twenty-two year old truly considers his mortality, or the fleeting flames of others’?
At the annual family reunion just a short while later, her absence was unbearable. All of her children (who’d given up tobacco years before) hovered around me, breathing in my second-hand smoke to calm the rising anxiety at the loss of their mother. For years, I’d been desperate to be regarded by the world as an adult, and now, seeing what could await me, I chose the quick and easy way out. I made my decision to go to California toward the end of November ’02, and that year, for Christmas, we were all doing our best to avoid discussing the tangible emptiness of the holidays without my great-grandmother. My entire life, until that point, we’d always spent at least half the day at her house. We’d listen to the same old stories (“So I says to this guy, I says…”), play musical couches as more and more family arrived, and I’d pop handfuls of candy corn into my mouth, just waiting for the moment when I could open all my presents, and then head home to wait for Santa.
I missed the entire point of it.
I’m not religious, and for me it’s not Judeo-Christian mythology that marks the day as special. That day is Holy, and has always been, because of who we share it with: those moments spent together, finding the rhythms forged in DNA and honed like use in forest trails, those moments remind us of who we are, and from whence we came, and why that’s so important.
It’s taken me far too long to finally figure out what’s actually important, and that money truly can’t buy you happiness. This year I choose to make life count, to suffer painlessly through the tales of my embarrassments, knowing that the foolishness of youth can’t hurt me if I am surrounded by those who love me. My gift to David is a chance to make a memory or two of his great-grandparents that he might actually be able to recall in the years to come. And with my wife I share the template of our matrimonial success: The example of a daily love which has withstood the decades of excitement and banality, the deep and playful which both my grandparents still share with one another.
-Tex
Note: all photographs are used with the permission of Tex Batmart
