Four Days to Christmas (1980)

December 21, 1980

Four days before Christmas, the last Sunday before the main event.

Outside, the neighborhood roars with pre-holiday life, people stumbling down steps from the upstairs apartments, hollering at each other over forgotten car keys or presents or some other nonsense I can barely make out. Many need to reach the mall for last minute buys or risk finding empty shelves.

My pal Pauly says he’s yet to buy the hat he plans to give his mother, or so he told me last night when he hopped up on the barstool next to mine, exhausted from performing, caught up on the same Christmas disease he mocked me for earlier.

Garrick, more than a little inebriated, wandering around the bar alternately laughing and cursing, not quite sure whether he was angry or happy – which was perhaps his intent all along.

Although tired after a late night, I’m not hung over.

Outside, the traffic along 8th and Passaic streets has taken on a new tone, not quite like the hectic work-day stuff of the rest of year, yet in some ways more impatient, horns honking with an urgency only impending Christmas can cause.

And yet, behind the impatience is a quiet I can’t quite explain – as if a hope to achieve the peace on earth this time of year always promises.

Someone leans on the horn in the carport outside my door, trying to get passed some visitor who has parked in the driveway in from the street, making it impossible for anyone to get out – a ritual so frequent I would not take notice if not for the time of year and the need to find peace in my own life.

I hear Stella curse and realize she’s the one whose trying to get out, for more than fifteen minutes, needing to get to the store for milk and the newspaper, finally relenting when a young Cuban guy comes stumbling down from upstairs apartment next to Garrick’s and demands to know why Stella and apparently Garrick were trying to get into his car.

“To move it,” Garrick tells him.

Stella tells him she should have called a tow truck.

The boy climbs into the car, starts the engine and grins at Stella as he pulls away.

Four days to Christmas, I think.

I hear the howl of wind, too, stirring up a few brown leaves at the back of the carport and sending a chill through the thin walls of my cold water flat, a chill the stove can barely compensate for, and I shiver, huddled still under my blanket on the bed I moved out of the frigid back room to get closer to the stove – a Christmas present of warmth I will continue to enjoy until spring comes, and maybe even until summer.

My mother – living with my grandmother and my uncle’s family in Toms River – wonders if it will be a white Christmas this year. I peer around the window shade and see a bright blue sky and a brilliant yellow sun and think perhaps not.

I wonder if we will seek out Christmas on Christmas Eve as we used to. Two or three years ago – I forget which – Me, Pauly, Hank and Garrick found Christmas up in Towaco on a rainy Christmas Eve, rain everywhere except at the top of that mountain where Pauly’s girlfriend’s mom lived – there we encountered snow, and a scene straight out of Dickens’ Christmas Carroll – old Victorian structures lining each side of a snow-narrowed road as if waiting for horse and carriage to arrive, smoke rising from the chimney of the house we were to gather in, and the scent of pine and burning logs filling the air when we finally pulled up and got out of the car.

Inside, we gorged on cheese and soaked up the wine, sitting before a fireplace nearly as large as my car, laughing about the holiday and the future, and the dreams we all still had.

We were a small band of old friends sharing the moment.

Today, things would be different because my life is different, college collecting new friends and new rituals, though I suspect I will be returning to that house bringing my newfound girlfriend with me, having had no woman in my life back then.

She plans to join me when I go out with Hank and Pauly shopping for that hat for Pauly’s mother, and the host of other odd gifts Pauly routinely buys to fill in for those folks he hadn’t time to create a painting for.

Four days to Christmas, and really, life hasn’t changed as much as I think, only adding a few new stockings to the chimney, as we plan to throw another log on the fire and open another bottle of wine.