Bread—a Christmas story

Christmas 1965 will always stand out in my mind as the best and saddest yet somehow closest to perfect Christmas of my life.

My father died in April that year and I started to hate everyone and everything, in no particular order.
Ma and I were never close, and we both decided to, at best, survive our relationship, not unlike, I’m sure, people brace seconds before the impact of a train wreck.

In many regards that was a perfect picture of who were were, a dysfunctional wreck. We both did the mechanical things a relationship requires to function, something like how a cam shaft and a crank shaft work together, performing different jobs independently but mechanically lashed to each other. It was always, at best a functional relationship.

It snowed heavily that Christmas Eve day, and that made me feel all the more isolated and angry and alone in the little stone house down by the swamp my dad insisted was a lake. It was not, not a lake by any stretch, except in his mind, I suppose. I don’t think it qualified as a lake by any definition, except, perhaps, it involved a relatively large ponding of water.

I watched out the front window as the snow worked to pile up on his lake until it disappeared from view. I watched a big buck deer plod through the thick white frozen drifts until it got too close to the stream that drained the swamp, where the ice was soft and thin. With great thrashing and sprays of icy water I watched the helpless animal break through and fight to free itself from the entanglement of the weeds and grasses and sharp and thicker ice, wailing at times that hollow bellow a stag will make in a fight. I watched it’s last fight and heard it’s final howl as It finally went under the water, dead.

I put on my red and black plaid coat and rubber boots and walked the quarter mile through the snow and ice. At times the dead and brittle grasses that poked up through the frozen water line would trip me and I’d land face first in the white and wet frozen mess. I came to the spot where the buck went under and down a foot or two below the surface, I saw the violence of his final bout. The water churned muddy and red. Bloody hoof prints covered the snow and the sharp shards of ice that cut him where he tried to free himself from the swamps death grip. I figured he bled out and drowned.

I felt strangely envious of the deer. I looked down past the man-made wood and stone dam that made this mudhole something more than a wide stream, and dreamed of building a boat, or stealing one, to one day sail away from that dead man’s house and his goddamned lake.

The night began to fall and the cold rushed in even quicker. As the gray day became the gray night, I could see Christmas trees in the windows of a couple of the few houses that surrounded this frozen pond. Including the front window of our closest neighbor, Mrs. McCabe, an old, widowed woman I’d been scamming for home-baked cookies since I was old enough to walk. I didn’t give a fuck about trees and lights and mythical men in red suits or mythical babies in mangers, I wanted no part of any of it that this night. I went back to my house, slipping in through the back door in silence, where my mother and me retreated to neutral corners to try and survive this cold and wet and wretched Christmas Eve.

I remember sitting in the dark, up in the attic, the safest place I knew to be alone, comforted and tormented by boxes of my fathers’ clothes, not yet ready to be thrown out or donated. My house was haunted. I wrapped my knees with my arms and rocked myself slowly, listening for and hoping for a word with the ghost, but none came, and I found myself just hoping the night would end.

Resenting the words of the of songs I heard on the small, staticky AM radio in the kitchen as they lifted up the small and dark stairwell to my safe place. Songs of peace and comfort and joy. Holly and pine wreathes and red bows and white Christmases, and silver bells.

I thought about the now dead deer and how I envied him and admired his thrashing fight. I thought about the stream and my escape. I was not sure where I’d sail, but I’d go anywhere to escape my father’s goddamned swamp.

I heard a knock on the front door. I ran into my sisters empty and darkened room. Ten years older than me, she’d left that year. Looking out her window, I saw it was snowing harder. The world an ugly collage of grays and whites. There were no streetlights on our dead-end road. We didn’t have an address; we were just RD#3. Middletown, NY. We might have had one of those new Zip Codes by then. If we did, I didn’t know what it was. I figured the mailman knew where we lived and that was be good enough for everyone, and I didn’t care because I knew I no longer lived there. I just survived there and suffered the nights like this one.
The noise at the door was Mrs. McCabe. I was summoned to join her and my mother. The old woman had walked down from her house up near the main road the thousand feet or so from her door to ours in this heavy snow. She stood in the small front room, wearing her deceased husbands’ heavy railroaders jacket, and big black wet boots and a thin cotton house dress.

She carried with her a heavy, woven wicker basket with a lid wrapped in a blanket that was covered with snow, now melting on the floor.

Mrs McCabe apologized almost meekly for not coming by since the death of my father and offered the basket to my mother, saying, “You both need this.”

She turned for the door and offered a shy “Merry Christmas.” She paused and looked around the house realizing perhaps she’d mis-spoken.

In the basket was a loaf of fresh baked bread and a small tub of butter.
Ma and me, we sat in the tiny dark kitchen and listened to the staticky radio, it carols making a mockery of this night. The wind had picked up and wet snow flakes slapped against the glass panes of the back door.
We drank black coffee and ate the good, warm bread in a silent communion and listened to the windswept storm.

I’m not saying the bread fixed anything, some shit is too broken to ever fix. But it was the first moment in almost a year I felt anything that didn’t feel like hate.

In all my life I’ve never known a greater kindness than old Mrs. McCabe and that loaf of bread.

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Lives-Richie-OMalley-Thriller-ebook/dp/B087SRJP38

Over in the corner of the barn we stored some old farm tools. Hay rakes and bailers and mowers, an eclectic collection of old parts and once red and yellow and blue painted, now rusted iron. Unk walked over to this equipment placed his hand on the rusty metal then to the the wheels of the hay wagon. Even in the dead of winter the scents of this barn were always the same, a mix of dried grass, burned grass, mold, grease and cow shit. The odor was somewhat deadened by cold air, but it was there, lingering.

Unk walked up these machines and and touched them with a reverence.

He turned and looked at me and said, “These machines, this equipment was built by a good man, good men who went to work at seven in the morning every day and brought their sandwiches in bags and on weekends they watched baseball and drank beer and they took their families on picnics on Sundays. When they died people went to their funerals and genuinely wept because men like this would be missed in a community, the community was somehow diminished by the passing of men like these. They built things that were good and strong. These old machines are their legacy. They still work and do the job they were designed to do long after these men have passed. We will never be men like this we will never understand men like this. We are another type of men. There is no good in men like us. Sometimes I come out to this barn just to be alone by this equipment and try to understand what it must’ve been like to be the man who built such things. What will our legacy be, nephew?”

With that he turned toward the barn door, stopping to wait for me as I let his words sink in.

—from The Three Lives of Richie O’Malley

When I listen to some people talk, I don’t care white or black, but they make statements like, “I don’t understand the whole school lunch thing, I make my kids a sandwich every day,” I’m stunned at the blind privilege; gut punched stunned.

You need be humbly glad you don’t understand, on your knees humbled.

Archie ate half my peanut butter sandwich and half my banana for a lot lunches from first grade to sixth. He thought I was rich because I had a sandwich every day. In a way I suppose I was. Half sandwiches split with a kid who never had any lunch stays with you a long, long time.

I’m happy and sad for the people who can’t understand this.

It’s the way the rain dripped off the leaves on the summer morning after the evening’s thunderstorm, and the big and small puddles filled with worms and the way the air smelled clean again. The early breeze cooler than the wind of the past few weeks. Some of the leaves were yellowing now and even a few had fallen to the ground.

I come inside and sit in a room I built with my own hands on furniture saved from the dumpster and inherited from dead relatives, enjoying my comfort and privilege. Finding myself irritated the picture window has fogged over because the seal broke and I have to replace the glass panes, fully aware somewhere, someone, right now, is being stoned to death or beaten or imprisoned or raped or otherwise tortured and killed for their beliefs.

Watching the last drops of rain sashay around the edge of a wide maple leaf, find its channel and drop to the ground. A fat squirrel steals his morning meal of wet bird food, as I’m struck with the realization my belief system is gone. It has been on shaky ground since I watched Billy Graham and Nixon pal around in the 70s, and the day I realized God worked for the government.

I turn my attention to a corner of my neighbors yard that grows wild and free. Long grasses and Queen Anne’s lace, purple loosestrife, six foot tall succulents, all well quenched from the storm, one man’s weeds, another man’s garden.

I’ll take my comfort and solace in the random and the chaotic.