[author's note: this is not about clicks or likes or anything like that. it's about telling the truth and hoping that might mean one thing to one person for one day.]
When I am born May 11, 1971, I know seven things. My parents love me unconditionally. I am a Smith. I am American. I am Mormon. I am Christian. I am male. I have an identical twin brother.
The eighth thing I learn soon after my birth is that Christmas is the most important holiday for Americans and Christians and we must anticipate it year-round and it will change your life every year, and you must know it and understand it completely and love it and worship it, and you must rejoice in it and every calendar days counts towards it and away from it, forever and ever, amen.
No one ever bothers to slow down, you know with a PowerPoint or a Teams Meet and explain the whole Christmas situation: it is just here, it is a fact. There's music and trees and lights and dancing elves and fat Santa and baby Jesus and candy and you spend a boatload of money on electronics and this is supposed to fill you with everlasting joy and peace and understanding and Christmas is a whip to thrash yourself with, and it's a 15-foot iron wall to run up against until you fall down. And everyone cries and all the old people remember their dead relatives and they cry and someone tells the same story about the war about the Germans and the French having a ceasefire for Christmas songs and everyone cries and it all has to do with Christmas, nevermind that two hours later the Germans and the French mowed each other down with huge bullets that would rip your whole body apart for no reason except that it was the Germans turn to take over the world, you know, even though they believed in Christmas, at least in Christmas for WASP Germans. And your Mom and Dad talk about Christmas of yore and the family and all that's been handed down and how great it is, and then every Christmas everyone you know is depressed out of their mind, and I don't think it is Jesus' fault, I don't.
I want to examine this Christmas tradition in my and my family's life. I want to talk about the stories we tell. I want us to look at whether those stories are factual or true or not, and if that matters. I want to use the analogy of Christmas to look at how we tell other stories about our families, our children, our religion, about life and death, and our very existences.
1. CHRISTMAS 1978, 3637 South, Oakridge Circle, Bountiful, Utah
In my mind's eye, everything is beige and powder blue and my back is to Dad or his to me as our family decorates the Christmas tree in the family room. Dad's over in the corner by the TV and stereo hi-fi playing the Andy Williams Christmas Album. The music is relaxing and familiar and casual, a non-demanding routine backdrop to Christmas year after year. It's fun and perfect for unboxing the Christmas ornaments and enjoying time as a family. The music doesn't demand much. But then Oh Holy Night surprises me, the tune warbles out hopefully, Williams begs me to hear angels I cannot hear, to believe in that special bright yellow night when he'en connected irrevocably with earth with a loving gesture; then it seems Williams is begging the heavens themselves to make true the words he sings about salvation and Christmas, but is not entirely sure are true. He's a performer, not a saint or even a believer. I'm a boy, he's a grown man, I can tell he doesn't believe the words he sings, but I want to believe that he believes them. If he believes the words fully, maybe I can, too. Then maybe this feeling of stillness and magic, here in the family room and swirling around our family of five, can be frozen instead of fleeting. Christmas is here, but what is it, and why is it always escaping us, sadly.
When our family moved into this big brown brick 3637 house, Dad was the one who set up the record player. He put his albums up above the turntable on a shelf: Dylan, Willie, Cash, Merle, the Kingston Trio, Don Williams. The two speakers on their sides are old and brown and have what we now call a vintage look, but he bought a new steel grey turntable recently from Grand Central. In those days there was a man said to be an electronics specialist who worked in the electronics department at Grand Central. How did we know he was a specialist? Because he wore the beige vest of the specialist. Not to be confused with the paint specialist or outdoor plant specialist or shoe specialist or jewelry specialist. Dad had a long serious conversation with the electronics specialist before buying the turntable. It seems like Mom thought too much money was spent. One time time when Dad is out of town I figure out how to play a John Denver record and crank it up with the headphones on and hurt my eardrums to Grandma's Feather Bed, but otherwise Dad is the one to play the records. That's not true, Mom can pinch hit a record in an emergency. She likes music, too, although she adopts the musical tastes of her children. Dad's music is something he has brought with him from the past, and is something he takes with him to where he goes in the future, to his car, to his office; ultimately, the record player will travel with him four stops past the 3637 home.
Mom has in the years 77-78 decorated the family room with antique furniture and old farm tools and equipment from her father's home and farm in Newcastle, Utah. She and her brother Mike (after whom I am named) will, in the next year, move their father Grandpa Gordon Knell, who is sick, to live closer to them in the city. It was important, no essential, to Mom that she teach me and my identical twin Eric about her hometown of Newcastle, her family ties, and her upbringing. In 1978, these efforts on her part are affirmative, an indomitable will and an energy inside of her to bring into the present the past that she cherishes and doesn't want forgotten or distorted by those who weren't there. She wants to tell the story of Newcastle. But in all her talking and promotion of Newcastle, there are things not said about buried hurt. The stories omit as much as they add. In 1978, Mom devoutly researches her and Dad's ancestry using all the tools available through the LDS Church. This is painstaking work, little tiny photographs glued into large books, family histories written out by hand, information collected from interviews, dates gathered by visiting cemeteries and churches. How she finds time for this on top of being a nurse and a mom and a spouse, no one knows. I like her talking about her dead relatives all the time. I feel like I know these people and have extra friends out there somewhere rooting for me.
Along with the farm tools, photographs of Mom's ancestors hang on every wall of our home. My brother and I think Mom has good aesthetic taste. I am not sure what Dad thinks. I do not think to consider what he thinks. Probably he is glad that she is taking primary responsibility for decor. I'm sure it is a relief to him. I don't think he has manifested so far an interest in decor. There were no pictures of his family in our family room now that I think of it. I thought of it just now for the first time. If Dad were alive, I would call him or text him now and ask him, to find out his answer. Let me see if I can figure it out. I'll ask him now, in my head, and see how he responds.
Dad, you know how the family room in the 3637 house was decorated with all the Newcastle stuff? Did you ever wish Mom had had pictures of your parents and ancestors hung in the family room as well as hers?
I don't think she wanted those things mixed. There was always something unspoken she was shielding against.
He does not provide a definitive response.
Even at this time, Christmas 1978, forty-six years ago, Andy Williams' music is nostalgic. Probably the moment the songs were recorded, they were nostalgic -- yes, even the moment they were written, these notes on paper were dated and dusty and yellow like an old street light. I think every Christmas song is nostalgic in its inception; indeed by definition Christmas itself is nostalgic, isn't it? The Christmas story is nostalgic, the very day Jesus was born, everything in the history of the world tied to that moment and that religion turned sepia and golden and holy, it seems. In the drawings and paintings of Mary in the stable, she is an icon of nostalgia, her gentle smile comforting the whole world that she can bear up her tribulations to come. The first second of her baby boy's life already constitutes the entire history of the Western World. I wonder now if Madonna and Shakira and Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are jealous of Mary's fame. I imagine if Jesus and Mary were alive today how they would dominate Instagram and the other idiotic mediums. Some guy posting his dance videos or a lady in a new dress posting her health hacks and then the next reel is Jesus saying how He is God and then Mary about how She is the Mother of God. There would be a schadenfreude element for sure of watching vain people suffer from the comparison to actual deity. Bradley Cooper and the Kardashians are trying to keep up with the likes of Mary and Jesus. Hilarious!
Of course no one would like and follow Jesus and Mary anyway. Probably Trump voters would put Mary and Jesus in jail for immigration violations. Or the left would cancel them for radical religious views.
Anyway, it is 1978, soon the Steelers will defeat the Cowboys in the Superbowl, I am excited for Christmas, for the toys; a few years later I will be more excited for the music and electronics (the best gift my parents will give me will be a double-cassette boom box (probably from the electronics specialist at Grand Central!)). Yes, in 1978, I am so excited I could pee and I won't sleep at all this night. Our parents have allowed us to roam the toy aisle at Grand Central, soon we will find out which Fisher Price toy or Star Wars figure or Hot Wheels or Parker Brothers game or Nerf we get for real.
In 1978, Christmas is on Monday, which means our family attends LDS church on Christmas Eve (Sunday). Christmas church is the best church of the year. There are no regular talks or sermons, just the choir singing carols and then old people and kids who don't know how to read, reading from Luke 2. The old timers in the ward wear sheets and belts to look like shepherds, the holiday positively energizing them to act like kids. One super old guy, Bill Curtis, who I later understand was only around fifty years old, is the Master of Ceremonies. He performs his role with real zest like a radio D.J. The Christmas Sunday elevates his status in the ward to mini-celebrity, so effective is he as MC.
And the Christmas carols, sung by all present with fervor, claim to purport to unveil an ancient Christmas, to unveil the ancient physical place of Christmas, the carols a musical archeological dig uncovering ancient traditions of the Nativity. The songs take us to Bethlehem and into New Testament and Old. We are asked to consider if we would have dropped everything to worship the baby. Yes is my answer in 1978.
Oh I longed for those Christmas carols to be true, for those songs to be made physical and tangible and visible and permanent. I longed to dwell inside of Christmas, inside the twinkle of a tree light, inside the smell of cinnamon or the sound of a bell, inside the tiny Christmas villages under the trees, to be captured and contained within a singular perfect note of music that would make the whole world quake and remember the baby Jesus and His innocence. Those carols were a whip with which I would smite myself. Such beauty, such grace, such divinity that could never be attained, and would always expose the human flaws of time and space. I wanted to hurt myself with Christmas and how far I was from it in every possible way. I was not innocent, I was not clean, I was not sparkling, I was not baby Jesus, I had no riches for the baby, I could not sing or dance.
Yes, as a boy, Christmas was a proposal of joy, a brilliant and colorful recommendation of joy, and not joy itself. The joy was not realizable, but a possible joy to come later, or it was a memory of some joy had by another person at a previous time then passed down to me through song as an idea or option to exercise later. Christmas was perhaps a reminder or refresher of a joy we could no longer remember, the ring of the bell a reverberation of some prior joy no longer findable. I wanted that joy to fill me up, to be permanent and complete and never wavering, and also to have been enough and overfilling to encompass also my parents and their parents.
The Christmas tree we are decorating in the family room is one Dad bought with me and Eric at a tree lot, that we then flocked with a tree-flocking device purchased for the purpose. Query: how much does a Christmas tree cost from a tree lot, the kind where the trees are already cut? Seventeen dollars? Does that sound right? Yes, I think it is always seventeen dollars, no matter what, for some reason.
I want to say that in these years, in this neighborhood, when a family bought a lot and built a home on it, part of what they would ask the architect at the very beginning is "Where will the Christmas tree go?" It seems like our house and the houses of our friends all had a perfect spot for a tree. The tree had to be tucked into a wall and also visible through a front window.
In my memory of the family decorating the tree in the family room, Dad has now changed the album to Christmas Present. For this album Williams is older in real life and he sounds like he believes his own words more; perhaps he has had health problems or lost a loved one by now. The songs sound more desperate and real. Born that man no more may die. Really? Never die? Andy knows that there's a way for a man to NEVER DIE!!! This is amazing if it's true. I'm old enough now to have experienced my first funeral. But Andy knows a work-around! Earnest and inviting Andy is. Come and see, come, watch, Williams says.
I'm a kid, I'm decorating a tree, I'm wondering if I get the Pittsburgh Steelers alarm clock or the Oakland Raiders garbage can from Santa, and Andy Williams is telling me that maybe I WILL NOT DIE BECAUSE OF JESUS! This is a lot of information.
For me and my brothers, probably because the song is vacuous and silly and not demanding of our faith, the single Christmas Present will survive all time and marry itself to every family Christmas memory involving this family room. It is enough to here anyone anywhere anytime pronounce "Christmas present," and I'm back with my family decorating the tree. Now, as someone who likes words, I wonder if it is Christmas Present / Christmas Past, or Christmas Presence, Christmas Passed, or something else. The opening piano notes by Andy remind me of the opening of Eternal Flame by the Bangles, released fourteen years later in 1988. I check to see if the Williams' group ever claimed copyright infringement. No. Christmas Present isn't even a Christmas song, it's just a bunch of notes that are available for all musicians for all their songs. Andy made a Christmas tune. The Bangles made a pop song. With the same notes.
Mom follows baby Jared around the room, putting up more Christmas decorations. Jared is born six years after me and my twin. There was a family of four before Jared, for six years, and now with him we have been a family of five, for about one year. These two family units, one with four, one with five, merge eventually into a singular Smith family unit, even though the six years without Jared was a distinct time for me and my twin, the two oldest Type A children learning from their parents, being told the truth of the world. And then when younger children arrive, they are not in competition with the parents so much, and they are allowed to be children, and they are more happy and normal than their older siblings. And this is why their older siblings have cancer and the young ones don't. Ultimately another boy Aaron arrives in 1980, forming the third and final iteration of the family unit.
Mom puts plastic holly around candlesticks; she puts up a plastic mistletoe. I don't believe that adults would want to kiss, to touch lips, to taste each other. At least we don't have this kissing at home--not in this house! One time I saw Dad combing Mom's hair while she sat on a chair--it's the one main show of affection I remember. Mom lines up our feeble nutcracker display on an antique desk from her Dad's house in the corner. I wish we had fifty big huge real German nutcrackers instead of just three puny fake ones. My twin and I hang ornaments on the Christmas tree. We think we have a special skill with this. One of the differences at this time between me and my identical twin is that Mom often complements my aesthetic taste. Whereas Eric is bigger and stronger and is the calm one. I don't know if these were real differences or if they only developed after our parents verbalized them. I think most parents make up a lot of sentimental lies about their kids. The parents have their little stories and theories and everyone has to listen to the parents talk about their kids, because then those listeners, parents too, need someone to listen to their made-up tales of their kids' magical origins and traits and how Little Robbie is probably especially good at shooting laser guns because his 49th great-grandfather was a longbowsman with Robert the Bruce. All parents have a secret compact with each other to listen to the crap other parents say about their kids because if you listen to their crap for ten minutes they have to listen to yours for ten. People do this with their pets, too. "I think my kitty Zola might have had a great-great-grandcat who lived in the stucco shade of an Egyptian palace."
We hang big red bulbs on the tree: Eric and I wish there were forty more to hang, the big red bulbs are we think a sign of wealth (we want more bulbs and less popcorn, fewer home-made things, more glass); then we put up the elliptical white bulbs made of string or satin; old candy canes of cherry and of peppermint: candy canes so old that not even a child will eat them. Mom in future years will hand stitch each boy his own ornament each year. Sewing is a skill she will use her entire life, until the very end. That and listening and reading and thinking are among her greatest traits of which many accrue to her.
Here it comes, the faint snare drum!. We LOVE the drummer boy song. Dad replays it a few times. I don't know how to drum, but I could drum for a baby. How demanding could the baby be? We ask Mom if the song has a factual basis. She doesn't respond directly, because she doesn't want us to cease these magical beliefs.
Listen, listen, pay attention. Think of your own childhood, your own family, pick a year. 1977. 1978. 1980. 1984.
For me, there is a feeling rooted in time, in the year 1978, that this family, this Smith family, is a family unit. It is a physical thing like a tree or a part of a tree. It (the family unit) is connected somehow to the ground, the air, the water, the sun. I know that this Smith family unit existed tangibly in this place and in this time of 1978. 1978 is a place and 1978 is a time and 1978 exists outside of my memory, I know it. If my consciousness were made extinct or depleted, some other citizen, some other time traveler, could locate the 1978 Smith family unit of which I speak. I can feel this idea of the Smith family unit as having a physical mass. It is still there somewhere. This family is still there in 1978, decorating that tree. If you could rip open the plastic of time you would hear Christmas Present leaking out of the container. The Smith family of 1978 is always safely in there. We are in 1978 demographically an LDS family in an LDS neighborhood. Mom is a nurse, Dad an engineer. Everyone is healthy. The children are not troublemakers. Our family, it feels to me as I think of 1978, has a high degree of utility to society. Two workers, two in school, and then a cute baby. We have no sicknesses or vices. We rarely utilize the healthcare system, never the justice system. We perform our family, neighborhood, community, regional, and national functions. If you look at a population count from the year 1978, we are one of the families constituting the aggregate number of families in Utah for the year 1978.
That night, I go to bed in light blue flannel Batman pajamas. The tag on the long-sleeve pajama top in large letters says CAUTION: INFLAMMABLE. I ask Mom about this. She says that means that if the whole house catches on fire, my clothes will burn along with everything else like my skin and hair. I deduce that even a shirt marked NOT FLAMMABLE would probably burn in a house fire that burned at 1100 degree Fahrenheit. This is probably the first time it occurs to my parents that maybe I will grow up to be a lawyer. Mom confirms that yes, if the house catches on fire, we are all goners regardless of what the tags on our clothing might say. Our clothes and our skin and our hair and our organs will all certainly melt in a hot hot house fire. But there will be no such fire, my son, she comforts me. And on this point, this narrow point, she is right.
The next morning, Christmas is at last unveiled even as it ends. Mom makes cinnamon rolls and German-style eggs in a 9 x 13 pan. It takes two minutes to open all the presents, even as Eric and I open as slowly as possible to make it last. I receive a digital wristwatch, which I will wear on my right wrist for some reason. A little later in the morning, Uncle Mike and Aunt Nancy bring their daughter Lori and our Grandpa Knell over. I don't remember but from the photograph it looks like someone received a softside suitcase, another a microwave oven or food dehydrator. How fun! What a great gift! Maybe Cousin Lori was striking out on her own soon? Grandpa Knell sits in the corner and doesn't say much. Afterwards, Mom says he is really hard to be around because of his biting cynicism, but that he also repeatedly says how much he loves "his boys" (grandchildren). Grandpa Knell has one more Christmas after this. He will live in a small apartment over by West High and then will pass away from emphysema and pneumonia at LDS Hospital where my Mom works. In one of his final moments of life, he asks Mom if there "isn't a little pink pill," he can take to get it over with. There isn't. He has to die the hard way, just like everyone else.
2. CHRISTMAS 1990, Rue Edouard Gand, Amiens, France
Feeling of dark, stillness, magic, light fog, wonder, unsettling excitement, surrender, vulnerability, and mania. It is 11 p.m. Christmas Eve and my LDS missionary companion ("Elder B") and I (this companion is a person I barely know and just barely met) are up past our bedtime (10:30 p.m.) to attend Midnight Mass at Amiens Cathedral with four other LDS missionaries, two of whom are female, one of whom is cute and fun to be around ("Sister M"). It's exhilarating to be out after dark. I feel guilty being out past the 9:30 curfew posted in the missionary rules, even though we have gotten permission to do so. I feel guilty going into a Catholic church for a reason that seems enjoyable (As LDS missionaries, we have been brainwashed by now that the Catholic Church is the primary reason for the degradation of religion in the entire western world). I feel guilty being around two females, especially when I think they are both fun and funny, and one of them is cute. The rule is to "lock your heart and throw away the key." I don't think my heart is open to Sister M, but my eyes might be slightly open is all.
Earlier tonight, my companion and I went door to door knocking on people's doors after dark, interrupting their Christmas Eve dinners, asking them if they wanted to learn about Jesus. We walk right to their front porch, knock on their front door, they open, and we sort of yell to the whole family inside that we are there to teach them about Jesus. We do that. Who does that? How did I do that? We felt good to force ourselves to talk to people about Jesus on Christmas Eve. No one took us up.
Now it's a few hours later. Lost and in the dark and in what still feels like the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, I cannot believe we six missionaries have found each other on the glistening cobblestone streets surrounding the world's greatest cathedral, OK second greatest after Notre-Dame. The massive Gothic Amiens Cathedral, built 900 years ago through the taxing, labor, and torture of peasants, towers over you, watches you, follows you through the streets, its sharp angles and bold exterior reminding you that time is old and heavy and did not include you in its decisions. And when it's dark out, the church can see you, and you can't see it; and it has many many eyes!
I've tried to understand from then 'til now what this twenty-four month Mormon missionary experience was about. Was it a learning experience similar to attending college or joining the Army or the Peace Corps, or similar to getting married young and moving away from home? Was it primarily a cultural experience of learning a foreign language and learning that the world doesn't rotate around America and its stupid guns? Was it a calling from God to perform service to other human beings by spreading a message of salvation through Christ? Was it an LDS Church assignment designed to get boys my age involved in the church and indoctrinated so that we would make future tithe payers and leaders and faithful members in the church, instead of having sex, looking at porn, and taking nine years to get through college?
Yes.
I am grateful I got to have this adventure. Life is about being alive. The only reason for life is life. If you are alive, live. There is no reason for life except that it is. There is no purpose. You are alive because you are still alive. You don't deserve it and you don't don't deserve it. Take a deep breath. You are alive. Being awake and aware is life. Every day is life and death. Every second is closer to life and closer to death. Every second we stand on the edge of the knife, with life on one side and death to the other. Any experience that awakens you, that shakes you, that takes you closer to living and dying, is good. That's it. Being a missionary was scary, being a missionary was being alive. Those were good things. Was it "true"? Was it what God "wanted"? I don't know. Did God want me to do that? Did I want myself or require myself to do that? I don't know. Is there a difference?
Looking back on the two years now as a Mormon missionary, I want to say I was a soldier first and foremost and that I had to be to survive. I believed I had to do something, something hard, and I had to not allow myself to get hurt in the process. I believed God required me to do this thing, this impossible hard thing of leaving home for two years to proselyte full time among strangers, and if I didn't do it, I would go to hell and be separated from all love and light forever. That's why I did it.
Tonight, December 24, 1990, we get to do something different, something fun, something constituting a short break from proselyting. Six of us, four males, two females. We enter the glorious, massive, monstrous, cathedral. It's scary oil grey in parts and it's kind of a reflected pale pink and bright in others and it's a super old mystery. What strikes you is how tall it is, how skinny, how dark at the far end you can't see, and how clean and bright the tile below your feet where you can see. It was probably made like this on purpose, no? You can see where you are but not where you're going. There are a thousand maybe two thousand people there in the congregation; I was hoping it would be more full, bulging with people, overstretched with people. Sister M., who is French, is the only member of our small group who is familiar with the inside of a Catholic church. She is having fun, she is not feeling guilty. It's fun to watch her. She has frizzy dark-brown hair and super dark brown eyes, pale skin, a dark ankle-length dress she keeps moving around. I think she is probably Moroccan or Algerian by heritage. Big lips, crazy energy, cute gap in her teeth that she's not self-conscious about. She is wanting us to have fun, later she will push us to stay out later. She wants us to move up into the crowd towards the altar. The rest of us stand there in the back like timber. It's OK for us to visit the church, but not to participate in the functioning of the great and abominable church! Keep your distance from the priest, the altar, and the sacrament! We stand in the back, it's hard to see anything, hard to hear anything. We stand there to the end so that we can say later in our lives that attending a real Christmas Midnight Mass was something we did. Like now.
Outside after, Sister M. wants to keep going, go somewhere else, stay up later. This seems like a good idea to me. But where? We don't know anything about this city. Where is there to go? Is there somewhere open for food? All the options are unfathomable. We are absolutely not allowed to hang out an apartment with two girl missionaries and four boy missionaries. No orgies please. What are we going to do, go dancing at a club on Christmas Eve? We stand there outside shivering, all six of us in long navy London Fog coats, looking like gendarmes, the crystal breath rising into the night sky. It's magical and little ice crystals hang in the air, making shimmers in Sister M's frizzy hair where all the ice pieces are landing now. I wonder if we can as six just stand here forever in a loos circle. Is that possible to just keep standing here, please? Is that a possible way out of this? To not go anywhere and not go home, and not do any more missionary work and to wake from this nightmare dream.
3. CHRISTMAS 1992, 3637 South Oakridge Circle, Bountiful, Utah
This Christmas of 1992 is the final one for our Smith family unit. Actors, take your places. Then curtains. The mythical family unit (that still exists in plastic in a parallel universe) that started in 1968 with the marriage of my parents, and was added to with boys in 1971, 1977, and 1980, has been bruised and battered but still regarded as and classified as a family unit. In the Utah population census, between i guess 1975 and 1992, we show up in an aggregated footnote somewhere as a traditional family unit. Hooray. No more after 1992.
I return from my LDS French mission to home August 7, 1992. August 7 is a good day for me throughout my life thereafter (cool things always happen on this day). August 7, 1992, I am released from a prison of sorts and for the first time in two years dream without nightmares. By now I speak, read, and write French at what is called level B2 or B3, advanced intermediate level. On my bed at home when I enter my bedroom, Mom has placed the new Achtung Baby CD by U2, along with the double CD of Rush Chronicles.
A few days after getting home, I am helping a neighbor, the ward Bishop (the person in charge of the LDS congregation) put in some sod in his yard for a wedding. Out of the blue he informs me that "your parents do not love each other." He tells me to pray for them to try to save their marriage. I am not sure how to process this information. It's terribly surprising and not at all surprising. If you pay attention you notice that most marriages stand on a block of ice, delicately balanced on a stool which stands on one leg on one of those red school balls. Around the same time, I overhear Mom talking on the phone to friends about how, in her characterization, the ecclesiastical leaders want to take a position with respect to her that will cause her to fall on her knees and tremble and beg for forgiveness. They want her to grovel, in her opinion. Piecing things together in my naive brain, I understand that probably Mom has proposed a divorce from Dad, and either Dad or Dad and Mom have spoken to their church leaders about this proposal and how the LDS Church itself would respond to such a request from my Mom individually or my parents collectively. Why my parents would ask an LDS Bishop about their marriage is beyond me. It's the most stupid and disappointing and embarrassing thing I can imagine them doing, and I revere these people, now that they are dead I worship them. Why would my parents ask for marital advice from LDS church leaders? It's like asking a bear for SuperBowl predictions. It still puzzles me.
Mom also tells me she recently got in trouble at church for praying out loud in a meeting to Heavenly Mother. This somewhat new concept at the time had sort of emerged in part from Sunstone convention stuff that Mom had been attending. This is how you become Jeanne D'Arc in Bountiful, Utah, 1992. Talk about divorce. Talk about a Heavenly Mother.
This conversation with the Bishop prompts me to pay more attention to my parents.
Meanwhile I enroll in my sophomore year at the University of Utah, with a declared major in Accounting and a minor in French. Accounting is a mistake, French is not. I kick ass in French. In my French class is a cute girl Jess. We click immediately as two highly motivated A students, college scholars, and LDS zealots with parents in the same social and economic class. She's cute and she wears the Beautiful perfume scent by Estee Lauder. We see each other around the Orson Spencer Hall Building. This is the best building ever built on the University of Utah campus, in terms of performing the function of a University. It's a building full of classrooms, students, and teachers. Go figure.
Thanks to OSH, Jess and I begin dating in September of 1992. I can't believe she likes me. A girl has never expressed an interest in me before in a romantic way or in any way other than a pitiful way like commenting on the size of my sternum. It's startling, shocking, breathtaking to be noticed. I finally understand all the lyrics by the Cure, the rock ballads of Poison and Tesla, and the crappy Shakespeare sonnets. It's all about puppy love and hope and fear and being seen and being witnessed. Everything I missed in high school, all the Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Say Anything, Can't Buy Me Love movies, it all makes sense now. Love is in the air.
Dad spends a lot of time in his office at home, down at the end of the hall. The hallway in our 3637 house, for some reason, is narrow and fifty feet long. It was an architect's mistake. Architects are always making mistakes. No one seems to care. Mom's space in the house is under her brown afghan on the little love sofa adjacent the TV in the family room, near the stereo wi-fi, opposite where the Christmas tree will be soon on Christmas. At various times over the years she loves shows like St. Elsewhere, Thirty-Something, Magnum P.I. (not the shitty modern one), Hawaii Five-O (not the shitty modern one), and especially especially especially these last three: Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Miami Vice. You can often find her crying to Hill Street Blues. She always liked tough men, tough romantic men, tough romantic men with ethical dilemmas about whether to shoot the bad guy or not, or whether to go home to the wife or screw the lady at work. For some reason my shy brilliant introverted nurse Mom thought her perfect romantic partner could be a man whose main problem in life every day is whether to shoot the bad guy in the head or just to beat the living shit out of him. I'm making myself laugh here. I wish she were here, I know she would laugh too. She's been at a Mormon Relief Society meeting for two hours talking about knitting quilts for cancer babies at Primary Children's Hospital, then races home to see David Caruso's television breaking nude scene. She's a brilliant woman, her mind constantly spinning in every dimension, but she's a sucker for the handsome cop and his ethical dilemmas. Pretty funny. We are all like this. I am a sucker for romantic French films. Mom's routine watching of these types of TV shows more and more is a sign that one thing is being replaced by another. BTW, my Dad is the toughest man I've ever met. Sometimes I think she was looking too hard. These celebrities she thought she loved, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Sam Shephard; Dad was always right there as a real person in her actual space, doing push-ups, chopping lumber, shooting wild animals in the yard, cooking meat, hunting, fishing. Yeah, he was sort of the Fifties Dad type, focused on work, not always super observant about the home life. I understand her complaints, to a point. I understand his probably better, probably because he tried less hard than she did to make the sale.
From 1992 to 2012, she is always there on that love sofa, half stretched out and flexible as a cat, the setting sun spraying in through the northwest facing window bay, watching TV, sewing, knitting, doing cross-stich. She makes tens or hundreds or thousands of little blankies that are donated to various charity groups. I want her at times to be somewhere else (like when Ben Affleck's character tells Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting that he just wants him not to be home one day) but on the other hand anytime I call home Mom picks up on the first ring, or if I come upstairs from the basement (when I live there) or when I come home at any point across the years, she's always there to greet me, welcome me, comfort me. If loving your kid is always being there on the first ring, no Mom loved her kid more than mine did me.
In winter of 1992 (get back to Christmas!), she's in a space where things are changing but she's still my regular nurturing Mom. She was trained for years as a nurse, then nurse psychologist, then social worker and counselor. She's an excellent listener. Her office is always open for her sons, and especially for me, as by now the twin is out of the house and my younger brothers are more oblivious. Her ability to counsel us will end definitively in 1997, but for now she's still available and energetic as a Mom, despite her and my Dad's unraveling marriage and her increasing distance from reality (she has not had a job in several years now, and rarely leaves the house).
By winter of 1992, the cassette tape and the CD have replaced the record. The first CDs I buy are Lou Reed's New York and Rush's A Show of Hands. No records are played any more at this home nor will they ever be again in this home, by these characters. Never. Dad has bought a combo speaker/cassette/CD machine made by Emerson, which we children lovingly and mockingly call "The Emerson." It's functional but it's kind of a piece of shit. It's square and grey and it's a tragedy of electronics and of design. But it works clear up until Dad's death June 5, 2024. So he gets the last laugh, by far.
One evening in the office fall-winter '92 Dad shows me how to fire up the Emerson and he shows me this CD he is loving, December by George Winston. He plays the first couple of tracks. We both sit there and listen the way you used to listen to music. We just sit there. You don't say anything. That's the point. Dad has heard it before. I haven't. It is gorgeous and sad and plucky in the sense that the pianist is covering this sad, epic, historical salvatory material and he's just going right down the middle, he's not getting carried away into crazy crescendos, he's not selling it too hard, he's not going opera or pop on us, he's not doing bikinis for Christmas like Mariah Carey, he's not ruining everything with frills and manipulative crap. He's just bravely bravely bravely laying down the notes of Christmas, the notes of winter, the notes of December. Hearing the music, I think of a man, the age of my Dad, walking in the snow in a thin coat and a scarf, walking a long path into some fir trees.
This is music of isolation, of hibernation and loneliness, of rethinking and re-building. This music is an ice dance that makes all ice look blue and it's reverent and it's trying to make the holy accessible and approachable and fun and not heavy and guilty, and it's a revelation. And we sit there.
About fifty times that winter I go into Dad's office and listen to that CD alone. And Dad tells me about Dave Brubeck and his love of jazz which I didn't know about, and he's been to a fair number of all kinds of Jazz shows in Salt Lake and elsewhere in connection with work trips. He tries to hook me on Joni Mitchell but that doesn't take for me, sorry. I don't get it.
His office is clean and tidy and he's always working on something in there, he's always bringing work home, and there's always a different CD on the Emerson player, and Mom's always in the front room, holding office hours for any troubled children, and she's watching TV and she's sewing, and more and more she's on the phone hours and hours and hours a day with a friend. And more and more she's talking about taking a different path, and talking the Road Less Traveled, and she's using a lot of I/Thou language, and I never see my parents talking to each other. Never. I have declined the assignment of fixing their marriage. But I am observant.
Jess and I have taken our finals including our French finals. Now that school is out we have a harder time figuring out our new dating schedule. We have the idea to go visit our French professor at his house during the holidays and bring him some cheer. His wife recently died. This we do and we carol him in French and bring him food and gifts and he's delighted and it's a moment from a Hallmark movie and I can't believe it's me in this cheesy movie. What is this film called? "French Christmas?" "The Noel Scheme." "Jess and Scott's First Noel."
And the rest of the holiday is like that for me. George Winston non-stop on the Emerson at home, and now I have my own copy on CD in the car. And Jess gives me an Enya CD, and that is a life-altering sounds in winter of 1992. And love is new and we do all of the Christmas things, shopping together, great food, visiting Temple Square in Salt Lake City, we meet each other's families, Christmas lights, movies, going to the mall, all the magical things from all those stupid songs we talked about before like Silver Bells and White Christmas and Jingle Bells and we do ALL those things. I'm 99% sure Jess and I ride in a horse-drawn sleigh wearing an old gross horse blanket.
And I have no recollection of our Smith family Christmas tree that year, or who got or gave what. I have no memory of sitting in the family room Christmas morning in that home. No Andy Williams that year. Six weeks later, February 14, 1993, my parents separate. Dad boxes up the record player and the records and other things and moves to a condo in Bountiful. The condo has become available because Mom's brother Mike died in 1988, and his widow Aunt Nancy is marrying again and moving to Hawaii.
4. CHRISTMAS 1997, 1138 Briggs Drive, Bountiful, Utah
For Christmas 1997, I have Stage III testicular cancer, and Mom has gone bananas. I say that lovingly as a person who has himself gone bananas, bonkers, cuckoo, and the rest.
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After a Pioneer Day bicycle ride with my Dad in July of 1997 (we ride bicycles clumsily with bonnets over our heads like the Utah pioneers would have done, trying to incur extra injuries), my scrotum is swollen as big as an eggplant, and it's painful to go up and down steps, or even just graze against a chair. Lining my underwear with strips of gossamer does not alleviate the pain nor does dipping my scrotum into a cereal bowl of icewater. I first go to a DO who is contracted with my employer through United Health. He feels around down there like a scared veterinarian on his first day of work checking on a bull's crotch, and says he can't feel anything abnormal. Two weeks later I'm back in there as the sack has now swollen to more the size of a Nerf volleyball and it's clear the ductwork is blocked. I'm now myself able to feel pea-sized rocks attached to the testicle, which is the classic sign of cancer that the DO missed in his twelve-week DO degree. I'm no longer hopeful that I hurt my sack on the bike ride. I offer to do testicular cancer screenings for male friends who are concerned and who have a DO as their PCP. Three separate male friends express initial interest in my expertise but all three projects fall through the cracks.
Again the DO (short for Drop-Out) says I'm over-thinking it but agrees to refer me to a urologist. This is in the day when your insurance company restricts you from seeing a specialist without a referral from your PCP. Luckily, the day I see my urologist is my final date of employment at a printing company. So YES I am insured for this diagnosis, going forward, even though my job is over (thus ending the insurance coverage going forward). This is important. (Never forget that Hilary Clinton, by herself, fixed this so that you can carry your insurance from one employer to the next, and be covered by COBRA in between. She did that. She did. Look, there are three unsolvable problems in our country: immigration, healthcare, and homelessness. And she was capable, on her own, of solving healthcare.)
In three seconds the urologist diagnoses me with testicular cancer and schedules me for surgery a few days later. I'm 26 and I have testicular cancer. This is scary but it's Stage I cancer and the surgery will probably do the job, 95% odds in my favor.
Over the coming months, this first surgery and another surgery to remove glands from the abdomen don't solve the problem, and the cancer has spread to my lungs and become Stage III, so I am put on an aggressive 10-week course of inpatient chemotherapy. This is during the time that Lance Armstrong has testicular cancer, and is still an American hero, as he has not yet thrown all his friends and supporters under the bus and betrayed every loyalty he owed to anyone else. Do you realize Armstrong has fallen so low now (in 2024) that he is not even referred to in the general sense as someone who competed in, let alone won, those prior races. He's such a loser he never existed. Don't be like Lance Armstrong. Don't lie and cheat and sue your friends and use your money and your stupid Nike power to intimidate normal people like doctors and the people who massaged your legs after the race. Don't be a loser. Don't lie to us about your story. You know what Roger Clemens did when he was accused of using steroids? He blamed it on his wife. Don't do that. Don't be a loser. Don't blame her. Don't lie about your story. Be a man, Roger. Be a man, Lance.
By December 1997, I have dropped out of my first year of law school, due to my long-term hospitalization. The chemo is brutal and I lose 55 pounds in a few weeks, unable to eat anything but an orange and a handful of nuts. My body is smooth like a baby's, with no hair follicles at all. It's nice to have no armpit hair, pubic hair, nosehair, eyelashes, eyebrows, ear hair, finger hair, toe hair, belly button hair, chest hair, back hair, or hair hair.
Dad and I agree he can take better care of me than my roommates or Mom. I live with him and my brother Jared at 1138 Briggs Drive, Bountiful, Utah, in a spare bedroom. Dad has moved out of the condo and bought himself this home. The highlight of this stay is that I watch the French movies Blue/White/Red with Jared, three of the best ten films of all time, which yes, do need to be watched in that order.
The Briggs Drive home has a funny Nineties color scheme with sea foam carpet, white walls, and a white-painted brick fireplace. Dad has a skinny artificial Christmas tree decorated with some Russian Santas of tin or carved wood he picked up on a work assignment in Moscow. The home is furnished in the spartan bachelor manner. However, Dad defies convention and nurtures me back to health by feeding me scrambled eggs and unseasoned fried breasts of chicken and spaghetti noodles slathered in butter. And boiled eggs. For some reason I can eat these things and not barf. It's like he knows I can eat these things, and because he knows, I know, and my body complies, and I gain weight. It's a superpower he had, Dad, to know something like that.
One day December 1997 I have a panic attack lasting thirty-six hours. This is not the fun kind. I stand there and tremble and pace, without sleep, food, or bathrooming for 36 hours. I'm worried about dying because my case now with lung mets is said to be 50/50 even though we know now in 2024 that testicular cancer is highly curable. I call Mom on the landline for help and she's in the middle of an even worse panic attack; I attempt to comfort her for several hours until finally one of us hangs up. This pattern repeats itself.
I am starting to understand that Mom has untreated anxiety, depression, and PTSD associated with being raised by an alcoholic father and temperamental mother (her father was also temperamental) who fought occasionally, to the point of violence. This challenging foundation, combined with the early death of her brother Mike in 1988, and now my cancer, have brought her PTSD into a critical state. She is non-functional, catatonic at times, pacing and watching the walls for paint cracks. And worse, she is stubborn, doesn't think she has a problem, and refuses to seek medical attention for a long time.
A few days before Christmas 1997, I receive a Bleomycin injection that puts me into a sick and feverish state. While I sweat out the fever in the bed at my Dad's house, I overhear Mom crying in the living room to my Dad. It's a pathetic type of crying.
"What do you want?" Dad asks sternly.
"What I want is for my son to not have cancer on Christmas," Mom says weepily, really injecting the word Christmas for maximum effect.
I find Mom's behavior abhorrent. This is too much. We all have our problems, but she needs to buck up.
Dad organizes, some time around Christmas day, a Christmas dinner where he and Mom and my brothers and I all eat together. I eat eggs with my mouth full of chemotherapy blisters and leave dinner early. I have no memory of anyone giving or receiving any Christmas presents that year. By February of 1998, my treatment is complete, the chemotherapy is successful, and I eventually recover from that cancer; and depression and anxiety about a year later.
During this time of being treated for and surviving testicular cancer, my Christian faith and Mormon faith are not helpful, to me, in my opinion, in dealing with testicular cancer. I do not say this is the experience of all people. I do not say the faith is flawed. What I do say is that, as to me, the faith is flawed in the way that I attempted to rely on it during this testicular cancer experience. In my faith, as taught to me by my parents, there is the idea of personal revelation in which God can and does reveal His will regarding highly personal matters to His children.
After my testicular cancer diagnosis in July of 1997, my experience is that my parents, along with other parental and authority figures around me (mostly associated with Mormonism) ask me routinely if I have obtained God's will regarding my cancer. I also expect this of myself (to identity the will of Deity re: my future). This is the faith I have learned, interpreted, analyzed, internalized, taught myself and absorbed beginning in 1990 and going forward, and for whatever reason this is how I perceive my relationship to God. I have testicular cancer, a fact. And He is God, so I should be able to ask Him when or if it will go away and to ask Him even to take it away. Mom , also a practicing Mormon her entire life, seems to view the role of religion, faith, and prayer, similarly--it is reasonable to expect God to cure me. Again, I take full responsibility for my actions and my views and my faith, but no one around us in our family or church structure at this time dissuades these views or offers alternatives. LDS visitors, by contrast, encourage us to have a fixed belief that God will eliminate the illness with enough faith, prayer, and fasting.
I do not believe that an ideology of personal revelation in which a person relies on God to fix his cancer is a viable ideology. I find that to be a harmful ideology.
I would have been better in 1997 to have taken a secular view of my situation. Talk to the doctor, rely on her advice, undertake the care as best I can, hope for the best, and spend my emotional energy accepting my situation. Get therapy, use benzos, go on anti-depressants. All the energy I spent trying to "find out" the will of God, or asking Him to help me escape, was in my mind wasted and misplaced and increased my suffering.
What does this have to do with Christmas? Well, Christmas is a story. And Christmas in 1997, in our family, has nothing to do with Jesus, with innocence, with joy or holiness, or anything religious. There is no joy, hope, faith, or Christmas shivers of wonder at 1138 Briggs Drive that Christmas. The Baby Jesus cannot help us, at least not the way ourselves interpret and understand the world and our faith. I'm sure in some other world, some other family had a different experience with cancer and Christmas, and I am happy they did. Such did not occur in our family. In our family in 1997, Christmas was a corkscrew that Mom used to draw attention to her anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Christmas was a multiplier for suffering.
5. CHRISTMAS 2006, 1138 Briggs Drive, Bountiful, Utah
My wife Lee (now my ex-) and I are now living in the Briggs Drive home formerly owned by my father. This is over by old Rocket Park in Bountiful for those familiar. Lee and I meet and date in the late 1990s and we marry in 2001 in Salt Lake City and buy the home from Dad in Bountiful in late 2002 when Dad remarries and moves to a new home (yes, he takes with him his record player, his records, and his Emerson!).
Lee and I have been working with LDS Family Services during 2006 to become eligible to adopt a baby through the adoption program run by the LDS Church. We have completed a number of classes and steps and lots of paperwork and vetting processes and are in limbo, meaning we are "approved" and our laminated profile is out there in the adoption offices owned by the Church, so pregnant young women considering adoption can look through prospective adoptive couples and choose us as their adoptive parents. This can take three months or thirteen years to be selected by a birthmom.
Lee and I receive a surprising phone call in early December, 2006, that a young pregnant woman from Michigan, working with the agency, has preliminarily selected us to be the adoptive parents for her biological baby girl. She liked what she saw of us in the profile in terms of our potential parenting ability for her biological child. This is astonishing and revolutionary information to me and Lee. We scramble around to meet with the social workers and complete additional paperwork, then are put on hold again while the birth mom goes forward with her pregnancy, which is said to be close to the delivery date.
At some point in the days and nights following our learning in early December 2006 that this young pregnant woman (close to delivery), pregnant with a baby girl, has preliminarily chosen us to be the adoptive parents of her biological child, I have a transformative or supernatural experience or understanding in which I come to understand that this unborn girl is now in heaven, with loved ones, getting ready for a journey to earth, and getting advice from my and Lee's deceased ancestors (back in heaven) about what this girl can expect from these new weird people (her soon-to-be earth parents). In this transcendent experience I come to the understanding that I have communed with (had communion with) my unborn daughter and have an understanding of her personality and innocence and that she is coming to us. I am given the simple information that she is innocent, loving, nurturing, and likes animals, and we will take care of her. She has chosen us. Is this a prayer, a vision? Is this religious or spiritual information or simply matter in the universe communicating through energy and light. I don't know. Somehow this information is indeed transmitted to me. Is it real? Yes. Can I explain it? No. Is it provable and can it be replicated? No. Is it the province of religion to own or explain or contextualize this information to fit into a religious rubric? Absolutely not. Does the Pope or any other religious or political leader control the flow of information in the universe with respect to matters fundamental to existence, identity, and life and death? No. Do these just listed people have any role whatsoever in informing humanity on such questions of ultimate import respecting the nature of matter, light, life, existence, and energy? No. Does the will of political and religious figures throughout Utah, USA, and the world have any relevance to the communion or possible communion between all living things including unborn persons and their parents, or between trees and chipmunks, or anything else? No. Do religious and political figures have training, knowledge, or authority to understand how light, matter, energy, life, and love are communicated in the cosmos? No. Can they ever, will they ever, have they ever? No. Should laws and moral decrees be made by political and religious leaders around the operation of matter, rays of light, atomic energy, cellular energy, photons, gravity, love, and so on? You tell me.
Again, as a huge surprise, the social worker telephones (on a landline!) on December 18 and says it's time for Lee and me to come pick up Bella from the agency. Now! Turns out Bella was born on December 12 in Layton, Utah (a few days after the supernatural experience). After six days with Bella, Bella's birthmom has finalized her decision; birthmom and baby and birthmom's biological mom (Bella's biological grandmother) are physically at the agency, ready to complete the adoption. Lee and I buy a carseat and drive to the agency overwhelmed and overjoyed and start calling our families. After several hours at the agency, where we complete additional paperwork and meet Bella, we return home around midnight with a baby girl, our daughter Bella! Several family members are waiting there at home. We spend the next 3 hours playing with Bella, getting to know her, giving her her first shampooing, and so on. She is wide awake, open eyed, taking it all in. She is the delight we knew she would be, that we already had known her to be, and would always know her to be. She was herself.
This event absorbs Christmas for me and Lee and eliminates any idea or energy towards a structured Christmas. Like any new parent, I only recall surviving the long nights and all the laundry and scrubbing of bottles. Each baby bottle has six or seven components, so a dishwasher load of twelve bottles will yield somewhere between 72 to 10,000 clean parts that need to be re-assembled. A new baby will poop herself between 7 and 700 times per day, yielding several thousand garments in need of washing.
What I want to say about adoption as it relates to the remainder of this essay on Christmas is that everyone has a story or a projection about how they want to build their family. We are talking about stories here, stories of Christmas and what the holiday means or what it's for. When we talk about families, we also have stories about children and how they came to us, whether biologically or adopted, or through foster avenues, or other informal avenues such as extended family or mentoring/mentee relationships in schools or sports.
None of those stories is right or wrong. There is no correct story about having a child. Adoption is a beautiful way to grow your family. It brings you into contact with a son or daughter who is not yours by blood or DNA or even conception, which enables you to grasp at a deep level that this person, this baby, is NOT yours, not your property, not your DNA, not your blood. This baby is her own self. This understanding of adoption helps, in my opinion, the parent to not create a fake story about what the baby is supposed to be interested in, or about. Of course as an adoptive parent I want Bella to follow some of my habits and personality, but in a greater sense I understand she comes to me pre-programmed by other genetics and prior destinies of other earthly adventurers, and so I am more an observer and a teacher than a king. I know biological parents feel similarly, like stewards and not owners.
Bella is my responsibility, it is my honor and privilege to be responsible for her, I call myself her father, she calls herself my daughter. She is not my property. God did not give her to me. She does not belong to God; she never did. She was always herself. I voluntarily chose to be her father, a role I take seriously to the point of life and death. I do not own her. She volunteered to come to this earth and chose to be raised by me and Lee for some period of time for some reason that I am probably not entitled to understand.
Existence is a miracle, unexplainable. How did we get here, where are we going. I don't know. It's OK not to know. I believe Bella came to us from heaven in some type of voluntary manner of her choosing, and I don't know more than that, and it's OK not to know. My relationship with her as her father is profound and that's enough for me. We all have our stories.
6. CHRISTMAS 2006, Apartment 31A, Bountiful, Utah
Lee and I are separated and I live in an apartment near Target on the Bountiful-Centerville border. She and Bella live in a home in Kaysville, Utah.
The apartment is sterile white because that's what color it is and also because I clean obsessively. No one visits a single man and Lee and I are still working out visitation and custody. I have a lot of empty time and space.
There is all this space around me in this apartment, this sterility. Without seeing Bella regularly, I have all this fatherhood and nowhere to put it. All the times I would wrestle her, play with her, dance around, read, watch a movie, play outside, sing to her, give her a nap, put her to bed, wake her up, dress her, bathe her, feed her: all that time is now free time, time for what, time for nothing. I have written elsewhere that I feel in these days/months/years like I am the hot hot infinite sun spraying down on an empty Wal-Mart parking lot. I have all my fatherly energy, my vitality, my fatherly love, my commitment, my sacrifice, my desire, and Bella's not there so often and I have no place to put my parenthood during the times I don't have her. All this fatherhood is sent out there into the universe through waves of light and energy and I don't know where it lands or if it lands.
It's a type of death.
The apartment is so void, empty, and clean, and full of air.
I buy the Josh Groban Noel CD at Walgreen's at 3 in the morning one night and play it on a big wi-fi I have in my bedroom. Like my father I have taken my wi-fi with me. This is a nice CD player with receiver/tuner/amp connected to a couple of tweeter and mid-range speakers with a massive 18 inch square sub-woofer. It sounds nice. I bought this in 1997 and have carried it all around since.
In the white chamber of sterility the Josh Groban sound is crisp and clean and penetrating and it reverberates through and about and into the empty spaces and walls of the blank townhouse apartment. The music sounds like I'm in a church. I listen to Petit Papa Noel a hundred times. Two hundred. I stand in front of the wi-fi for hours. I sit down and listen. I listen in the car. I listen on the bed, which is white with white sheets. I am reminded of that Midnight Mass in Amiens, Christmas 1990. A feeling of cold icy magic drizzling down upon a scene of hope and desperation in which a person is frozen in time, trapped between expectations and reality.
Groban's music is magical, nostalgic, transported from an ancient realm to modern times, perhaps an old French or German carol about a poor orphan from four hundred years ago begging father Christmas to spare him. It contains all those elements of the Christmas song and the Christmas story and the Christmas carol. It feels like a Dickens story, a Hugo story.
I don't need a baby Jesus story in this moment, or an orphan story. I don't need a pair of shoes and I don't think Bella needs a pair of shoes either. She is well provided for. The song ultimately resonates with me, I think, because the song says, essentially:
Please. Please spare me. Please forgive me. Forgive me. Spare me. Hear me. Listen, Please.
To whom is the speaker praying? God? Jesus? Himself? I don't know. Does it matter? Can a person pray to himself, ask himself for conditions to improve? Can a person pray to the universe, for energy to be changed and re-aligned. Yes. No. I don't know. I guess so.
So please I am saying in 2009, I just need for things to get better, for me, for Lee, for Bella, for everyone. And I know I will take all the steps I can for it to be as good as it can be, under the circumstances. So maybe it makes sense that I am saying to myself, please do your best, that's all you can do.
And it makes sense to me that the song is about armies of people on earth all hoping for something better, all hoping for please for themselves, to please try hard to do their best.
Those words by the singer, delivered in crystal clear wi-fi, make sense to me. They pierce me. They comfort me. They energize me. They calm me. They are beautiful to me. I like the idea of holding please in my heart for as long as I can, as clearly as I can. Are they Christmas words? I don't know. Is this a Christmas song on a Christmas album? I don't know.
7. PRESENT DAY. CHRISTMAS 2024, 350 South 200 East, Salt Lake City, Utah
I don't know and you don't know and no one knows the day of your death. Mine feels closer than I understood it to be two years ago. Mine feels too close. Is it? I don't know. No one can. A week before Thanksgiving, Kim and I learned that the targeted chemo I was taking was not working effectively for me, and that I needed to change to a new one. At the same time, I was recommended to begin brain radiation treatment for several cancerous brain tumors (lung cancer in brain) that were not responding sufficiently to treatment. This scared us. This brought us to the sober precipice again. Death is real. It's right there. It's close enough to touch. I can almost grab it. Life is also real. We all touch life every day. These two forces co-exist. They are happening all the time all around everyone of us, all the time, all of us, as you well know.
And it's Christmas. And it's the best Christmas ever.
Because life and death and Christmas and existence and identity mean ... I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I'm drunk on I don't know. I'm high on I don't know, and I'm completely drugged out of my mind on I don't know, I can't know, and I'm not going to, right now, right now, try to know anything.
How far can love travel and how does it hold us when we change? How we do commune without bodies, and how throughout space and time? Is there even space and time? I don't know and will I ever? I don't know.
It has been better for me to deal with my lung cancer with brain metastases in a secular way than a religious way. This is the third distinct type of serious cancer I have had. I now have two experiences of dealing with cancer in a religious way and now this current experience which I am viewing in a secular way. For me, the secular way is best, it feels the most accurate, factual, honest, useful. Because I don't know. And secular allows for I don't know. I have been harmed many times in life, I have harmed myself many times in life trying to find unfindable religious answers. It's not for me. I won't do it again.
When I die, do I become light and matter and atomic energy and carbon and plant food? Do I return to the face of God? Do I turn into light energy or rays of light? Do I convert to electrons and neutrons? Do I go to a spiritual kingdom? Does my consciousness go with me elsewhere? Is my consciousness something created and controlled by my brain, or does my consciousness exist outside of my brain? Is my consciousness my own, or does it pertain to a collective? Is it changeable and alterable? Is human consciousness shared with animal and plant consciousness? How does one contribute to a collective consciousness and what does that mean for identity and autonomy? In what ways, when my body is dead, can I or can't I commune with those still living? What rules apply? What is possible for me, for us? Do I maintain a personal will or is it something more like Occupy Wall Street with hand signals?
I had brain radiation today. There are at least four tumors in there the doctors are targeting, each 1 cm or larger. These are small, but it is in their nature to grow. I want them to die, but they kind of do their own thing. If they keep growing they will shorten my life. I will keep working with the doctors to take the opposite measures. We don't know.
The brain radiation makes me drunk because it takes me to I DON'T KNOW. The seconds tic. The weighty matters of life and death stare us all in the face. Do not squander this moment! Do not squander this opportunity. Everything is happening now.
If you are alive, LIVE. As long as I am alive, I will LIVE. Life is for the living. Death is for the dead.
Brave people have offered to take my cancer. It makes me weep. If you are reading this and you have cancer, I would take yours, if I could. I would. No one can take another person's cancer. This cancer is all mine, it's in my body. That's where it lives, that's where it wants to live. If it's not in your own body, you can't take it from another. That's where it found a home somehow. The living get to live. The dying get to die. The living have to live, the dying have to die. No one can take this cancer from me, because then it would take away I DON'T KNOW. I can handle it. I will handle it. I will handle I DON'T KNOW. I want to be strong enough to handle I DON'T KNOW and in any event I have no choice.
Look Mom, wherever you are, I love you. It's 2024, you've been gone 3 years. And also it's been 27 years, and I have again, cancer for Christmas, for the third time! And this time it's MUCH MUCH worse!!! Before it was only two different strains of testicular cancer, but each a distinct new growth, because my body is so good at welcoming cancer in! Now it's lung cancer, in my brain! And guess what, Christmas is a story, and cancer is a story, and life and death and existence are a story.
Here's my story, Mom. I'm so happy and grateful. I love Kim. I love Bella. I am so happy all day long from the moment I open my eyes until they fall heavily shut at night. I don't need to be nor do I ask to be cured. I don't want God to take this away. It will either shrink or grow. I will keep following the prescribed treatments from the best doctors I have been able to find. And I hope the treatment extends my life a great deal, a great great deal indeed. I believe you are out there somewhere loving me, rooting for me. I believe I have come to understand that. I don't know where or how or why. Thank you for looking out for me. I will keep going and you will keep going and we will all keep going as best we can as conditions allow, and for the rest we will wait, and we will not put deadlines and ultimatums and binary or linear expectations upon trying to know something that is unknowable. That's my story. And it hurts so much, and it's so beautiful. Everything is in color, and its fifty layers wide and deep and I gasp in awe at the beauty and immediacy and the passing violence of each moment. I am shocked by beauty at all times. I am paralyzed by beauty, awe, and love and I want more of it forever.
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If you enjoy my writing, you can purchase my new novel A CURIOUS TOUR OF SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH on Amazon at the link below:
This is me under a pen name, with a satirical look at culture in Salt Lake City, Utah, through the eyes of a Mormon ward in the Avenues area. All proceeds from Amazon sales of this book for the next quarter go to benefit Native American scholarships at University of Utah.
Or try this dystopian late teen, young adult fiction about the future of America's educational system, by the same author.
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