Recovering from Christmas

December 26, 1980

The hard part is over: the expression and glitter of Christmas, the opening of presents and the mad dash from my mother at my uncle’s place at the seashore to the arms of my girlfriend a stone’s throw away from Giant’s Stadium.

I fell asleep in her arms last night and woke this morning on her parents’ couch.

I’m still unsure whether or not her parents objected; but the sticky part of the holiday is over and all that’s left is recovery.

The whole affair started two days ago with me visiting my girlfriend at her parents’ house, and now I am home again, alone, filling my cold-water flat with steam in order to get warm.

My girlfriend came down with tocolytics and wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, where I found her when I showed up and should have left her, but I didn’t, choosing to help her mother wrap presents while letting my girlfriend rest, and my making a mess of the whole things since I’m no better at wrapping gifts than romance, my girlfriend’s mother eyeing me with some distain while asking just when it was I had to be at work – suggesting maybe I should try and go early and leave her with the chore she knew how to do and clearly I did not, with me glancing out the window as the snow and telling her I wouldn’t be going.

Later, their relations arrived and I went up to hide in my girlfriend’s room, waking her briefly, before she faded back into blissful sleep, with me waiting for her to wake so we could both take the trip up to Towaco to Pauly’s girlfriend’s mother’s house for the first part of our annual Christmas Eve tradition, and then later to make the trip south to my mother’s in Toms River on Christmas Day.

Traveling in the snow scared me; traveling south to meet my mother scared my girlfriend.

Garrick saved me from the trip in the snow by picking me up at my girlfriend’s house, waiving back at her as she waved from her door up the long set of stairs from the street with me merely having to pay the price of listening to Pauly in the front seat predicting ill tidings for the upcoming year.

My girlfriend’s sickness allowed her to escape the trip south to see my mother, leaving me to make the trip there and back along, returning to her late Christmas Day exhausted, falling asleep in her arms and waking on the couch under the scrutiny of her parents.

With my girlfriend still not recovered, I wanted to stay with her today – but had already told Uncle Harry that I would drive up to Greenwood Lake to visit him, knowing that he was ill as well.

“Someone has to visit him,” I told his brother Ed down in Toms River, “and since I’m the closest geographically that someone has to be me.”

Harry like many in our family has been ill for a long time and Christmas time did little to help him mend.

Harry and Christmas were old drinking buddies and I over the years was the hapless bartender condemned to listen to their tales of woe.

My girlfriend’s illness robbed us of what may be our last and only Christmas together since this time next year she will likely be off in some remote place at graduate school.

The whole two days made me realize that we are constantly saying goodbye to each other, each time feeling as if it will be the last time, and that we might never see each other again.

Now, I sit in my own place on my own bed aching for warmth that may never come, from a stove that is not adequate to heat this sieve of an apartment, and from a love I know already is only temporary.