Small things for Christmas
Winter starts, and the salting is unusually heavy. Budgets are still full, and drivers and walkers have forgotten ice. Maybe the salt-spreaders know this and are easing us into it.
Early in the snow-year, early in the morning, and the salt is crunchy underfoot as fine, thin snow gills by on the wind. The sidewalk otherwise bare, the concrete dried by the sudden shift to cold.
Look down, look carefully and the individual kernels of salt are ringing with a perfect circle of fine snow.
The snow the salt has caught and melted has made a wet trap for more flakes that, otherwise, would have simply blown by. Opposites attracting; a circle of snow the size of a quarter around every lump of salt.
It’s trivial, perhaps. But, if you’re lucky, there’s a new small wonder in the world each and every day.
Like the keys.
I can hold in my hand two very different keys that were owned by two very different brothers, though there was only a single lock on the door of the root cellar they owned together before they sold it.
One key is worn much smoother by use and by pockettravel, but that’s not the only difference. Hold them up next to each other, and they obviously have fundamentally different dentition.
Yet either one will open the door with the same smooth oiled click. (I love that lock, the effortless buttery click of it.) Magic? Yes.
But magic has always been the purview of keys, unless and until you carefully take apart a lock for the first time to see the ingenuity of springs and the dumb obedient obstinance of the tumblers. Sometimes, it’s enough to simply experience the unlocking.
A car rolls by, windows tight shut to keep the wind out, but the music inside is loud enough that I can hear it clearly outside the vehicle: the opening bars of The Cars’ “Just What I Needed.”
Tumblers slide: the words pop into my head, without bidding.
In 1978 in Sussex, N.B., dancing exactly three dances with a girl whose name I never knew in the warm damp fug of a Legion Christmas dance, before my friends — Doug, Doug’s brother, and Chris who lost the tip of his finger in a meat-packing accident — dragged me away so we could slide the car sideways at high speed on empty, snowpacked winter streets, avoiding police and fetching up in snowbanks. December in Sussex so long ago, but still so sharp I can see it.
And that flicks me through time again, to a handful of years ago in a house in east-end St. John’s, to The Counting Crows and “A Long December,” the collision of the two places held in two lines of a song 10 lines in:
“All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl.”
Warm hand on cold shoulder. Sometimes I think I’m completely made up of the information I’ve spent my life gathering, with no conception of why any of it is important, why any of it sticks, or what numbers are the next ones to be added to the big equation. And I wonder if you get to have the satisfaction of solving it before you reach your own personal end.
But gathering pieces of this great nonlinear collection seems to me to be the very purpose of life.
Beneath the same big thrownout sky, we chatter through our interlocking, crossing-over ways, the moon and stars looking down on us equally and dispassionately.
We bought a small wooden cabinet at a summer yard sale where a woman’s house was being cleared out, with her, right there, sitting upright in a hospital-style bed in what had been the living room while her lifetime was emptying out of the house all around her.
I opened the bottom drawer when we got home.
Inside, a broken Christmas light (green), a single 30-06 cartridge, two red-sleeved 12gauge shotgun shells and a brass oil burner nozzle in a snap-top plastic sleeve.
Still trying to make sense of all that.
But diligently filing it away, anyway.
A new decade’s around the corner. Live big.