Neon Rainbow

I remember that it began to snow in the morning before the first bell rang. Every student rushed to the long cold window to watch the big soggy flakes fall past and flutter down to the grass at street level. It was early in the season, early in December, and the snowflakes were too wet to stick. They kissed the grass briefly, then dissolved, as suddenly as dreams upon waking fly away. Nonetheless, we had our hopes. Each of us had his and her hopes and watched together for that one vigorous, high-spirited, cold-hearted flake to take hold, to linger, to join with another of like-minded ideal and thus become the first weave of a thick white bell muffling traffic stopping school terminating carpet of snow.

But there was more than this. 

We had all just come in from the cold, ears nipped by the chill and still tingling, noses pink and probably running, tennis shoes squeaking and stocking caps steaming, and there seemed something newly minted about us, fresh-baked, an unusual glimmer, a glaze.  Someone had turned on a transistor radio, allowed before the sounding of the bell, and the song playing was Neon Rainbow, by the Box Tops. 

All the people going places
Smiling with electric faces
What they find the glow erases
What they lose the glow replaces, 
And life is love ... 

And moreover, and most of all, and most importantly there was the red-haired girl, singing along to that song, my favorite song--and Ah! Hers too! Surely we were meant for each other, surely we were meant to marry someday (but how to speak? How to say such a thing?) What flurry of snow, I wondered then, could match the flurry of freckles on her face? What greater future than to count them all?

I fell in love, for the first time, that very day.

And later it rained. 

But I've never forgotten what might have been. Through all the years that have drifted down and melted away, there remains that uniquely minted moment, frozen in time, honest, true, irreproachable. 

As pure as driven snow. 

The Ghost of Christmas Past

This morning I talked to my long lost daughter. One of them anyway. We talked via e-mail, as I had sent best wishes for the holiday. She mentioned that Christmas is not the same anymore. And of course it isn’t. It never is.

I can identify, because for me Christmas hasn’t been the same for decades now.

What Jamila is missing, of course, is her own childhood, a feeling of familiarity and security, a foundation that seemed permanent, yet proved transitory. Children count on their parents at the deepest level—and even though I was not her biologic father, I was nonetheless the closest thing she had known to a father. Twelve years is a long time to a child. Twelve years is equal to permanence.

And then the whole thing crashed, as she said in her e-mail. The whole thing just disappeared.

What is Christmas? What is family? Where is home?

It is what we remember. It is the elusive set of feelings and smells and tastes and faces and voices and times and journeys emanating yet from the past like specters out of Dickens. The bell above the door tinkles, the knob turns, and no amount of locks and bolts can keep us from the visitation.

What is it by which we find ourselves confronted?

It is love, of course. Pure and simple.