Connecting at the holidays

It's that time of the year again -- either the nicest, happiest part of the year; or the loneliest, and most alienating. Or, occasionally both. It all depends on your situation, as well as on your willingness/ability to reach out to those you care about.

When I was a kid, it was usually a mixture. For Thanksgiving, we'd gather with my father's entire extended family at his sister Norma's place at Oxbow Lake.

Aunt Norma sternly warned us away from the kitchen if we crept too close. It always seemed to take hours for the turkey to be ready. My cousins, every last one of whom was a boy, seemed like members of an alien species to me. I was a boy, of course, but with three sisters and no brothers, I had little in common with these male cousins. They were rowdy, mean, and quick to turn to fisticuffs to resolve their conflicts.

I hung around the perphery with them for a while, but when they inevitably started talking about torturing my sisters or hatching some evil plot against the adults, I slipped away. It's not I was a goody-goody; I never snitched on them for their doings, but once I saw they might bother my little sisters, I knew I had to prevent that from happening.

The feast finally brought an end to this tireless routine of masculine bullying. There probably were 30 adults and kids at these gatherings. Afterwards, the kids, bloated with turkey and stuffing and pie, retreated to a backroom to play pool or the like. The men started playing cards, drinking and smoking and telling stories.

In another room, the women were doing the same. My aunts, all of whom were tall, slender and prematurely white-haired, lived decades longer than their husbands. Somewhere along the way, I understood this to be because they sucked the marrow out of the bones of turkey or any other meat they eat.

Uncle Ed was the loudest joker. He liked to tell stories from previous gatherings, like the time he had gotten drunk, walked out to the front porch carrying a drink, slipped on the ice and bounced on his butt all the way down the steps to the street. All the while, he had been calling out, "Didn't spill a drop! Didn't spill a drop!" at the top of his voice.

When he finally came to a stop, at street level, he yelled out one more time, "Didn't spill a drop!" only to look up into the eyes of a policeman.

Once the stories had all been retold, it was time for us to get back into our car and head home. Some years, we had to fight our way through blinding snowstorms, inching along as my father skillfully kept the car from snowplaning into a ditch. We had neither chains nor snow tires in those years. So when we got stuck, he and I had to dig away at the snow and ice around the tires, and then push the car, rocking it back and forth, with Mom at the wheel, until it luched out of its trap, tires spinning madly, coating Dad and me with grimy, mushy gunk head to toe.

Afterwards, shivering under a blanket in the backseat, I'd slowly get warm as I retreated into my own fantasy world, where all of the evil forces were neutralized, and the alienation I felt from almost everyone around me turned into a kind of magic, something I later knew to be my concept of love, where kindness replaced violence, and somebody beautiful showed up, knowing me as I was, not as I supposed the world wanted me to be.

-30-