Good Dark / Christmas Day 6

The dark time works its magic.

Matteo and Marin always sit in the dim of the log house morning for his waking-up time, sometime between 6 and 7. She calls him her "birdy" and he calls her his "nest." (Marin just remembered that another milestone of 2007 was that we weaned Teo, and I concur, remembering that it wasn’t possible for us to get pregnant before she took that step.) After Marin leaves for work, Teo will sometimes sit in the circle a dim light creates in the darkness and contentedly turn pages in his picture books for a half hour.

By 10:00, when Teo and I finally get in the car, driving out of the Birch Hill forest into the open, where you can see the morning twilight with the eastern sky reddening, he’ll remark, "it’s getting darker."

In the middle of the day, when the sun is making it’s appearance on the horizon, sculpting long blue shadows with its golden light, we’re done with the morning activities, and driving up to Fox or beyond, ten miles, fifteen miles, to let the rocking and the warmth of the car submerge him in "sleepie-pie." I’ll ask, "Is Teo sleepie-pie?" The answer is always "no, I’m NOT sleepie-pie." Last week he sang this response for fifteen minutes to the tune of Jingle Bells before I gave up.

On the days the car doesn’t contradict him, we slink home, he eats a little, and plays a little, and soon we’re on the sofa reading books, and soon we’re in bed reading books, and he’ll accept sleep. The smaller-carbon-footprint nap.

When Marin gets back from work, the light is fading, and Matteo is waking up. Like a inveterate drunk he calls out for another round. "Juice and nurse," he cries, as if we were drunk bartenders. J&N is like an orange julius mixture with lots of water. The one thing that he reserves the right to choose about it, is whether or not the added water comes hot from the teapot. He’ll reject the whole thing if it’s a temperature he doesn’t want at the moment.

Sometimes in these mid winter days, Marin goes to work before 7 and comes back closer to 1 pm, and gets in on the nap. In the past month, she hasn’t been able to sleep past 4:30 am with her belly-tenant on early morning adrenalin surge, kicking her in the kidneys.

In the day’s sinking twilight, if I’ve done errands, or laundry, or dinner during the day, Marin can sit and read to Teo. By then, if he hasn’t been out running around in the fresh air, it’s too late. I’ve taken him out skiing in the early morning, or skating in the early afternoon, but not in the past two weeks. Actually, he will march around happily and at great length in the foot-deep snow (which is light snowcover for us – another low snow year) of our yard, but in minus-10 you have to be out there with him.

We bring back the interior dark when dinner is ready. The lights on the tree are joined by four candles lit on the table, and the rest is quiet darkness. We ask Matteo what he wants to give thanks for, and he comes up with something from his day – for swimming, or for the moon. He carefully lights a candle and puts it in a bowl of sand, then Marin and I follow suit with our gratitudes and concerns. Now the table is a blaze of light.

We hold hands and sing our Johnny Appleseed song, which goes, "Oh, the ____ is good to me, and so I thank the ____, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the appleseed." The word "Lord" has lost its standing as the blank-word. We use "stars" or "kitty" or "Opa" or anything Matteo is pleased with at the moment. Sometimes he holds our hands while we sing, sometimes his hands are busy putting food in his mouth, sometimes he’s snubbing our song, sometimes he’s just preoccupied with any something that takes 2 3/4 year olds away.

Like the present he’s going to open, as soon as dinner is over, during these Twelve days of Christmas, with his little headlamp on. Like a surgeon, he rips the paper off. Tonight it’s a balsam airplane. Carefully and gently constructed on the spot by Papa, the plane streaks off into the dark of the log house.

Oh, the Dark is good to me...

Stories, Lost and Found / Advent Day 3

What I meant, when I said that "the good stories get lost," happens to me all the time. Last night it happened this way. Marin and Matteo were bedding down in our upstairs radon-free nest, and I was reading something at the dining room table.

"Light the Christmas tree," chanted Teo, leaning on "tree" in his sweetly emphatic way, "for the baby." Huh? I didn’t get it, but Marin usually knows what’s on his mind. She replied, "that’s right, Matteo, there’s a baby that’s born during Christmas."

I could barely hold myself back from shouting the corrective, "Baby Jesus," drawing out "Jesus" in my sermony, corrective, highly-annoying-to-Marin way, but managed to.

But what the heck are the Christians doing spending four weeks of their lives in the dark during Advent, lighting candles, praying, longing, listening, singing quietly, asking for God to come. "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" (means "God-with-us").

They’re waiting for an intervention in their lives, a sign, a fierce encouragement, a liberation. And when, faithfully, you look for what you need, you receive what you need, in one way or another. This you are required to believe, somehow or other, in order to be healthy, to be a good companion to your friends, your community, your generation, your era. To be a good steward of all the universe has invested in you.

Jesus was one of the heros. He found a richly adorned religious facade with forbidding guards and an imposing admission-fee-structure (no women, no children, circumcision, etc). From the side, though, the view was different. A lot of people knew that, but Jesus was the one who knew what to do about that. He located and entered by the side door, and invited all the people he ever met (+women, +children) to bring their most important hopes, dreams, and memories with them, and help him reconstruct the ancient ruin. To make life-giving a place that inflicted death.

This is the time of year we remember people like him, who are born into our world and give the world its greatest hopes back, at great cost. We owe them dearly. In the darkest time of the year (and up here in Fairbanks, that’s no metaphor – it’s 9:00 am as I write and there’s a crescent moon hanging in the skeletal trees behind me through the window, but there won’t be a lightening of the sky for another half hour, and I’m not even talking about sunrise), all people who know their connection to the earth and to each other, prepare to light the bonfires to call down and give thanks for these heros, these enlivening spirits.

They have helped bring us back to ourselves when we have locked ourselves (or been locked by others) into various dark rooms, behind shiny facades of many failed illusions. Each has a side entrance. If you can find it, bring your friends along when you invade, and make a real home for all of you there. Don’t forget Pooh, the bear of very little brain, and his very good stories.