Homecoming

I'll be home for Christmas / You can plan on me.

119 million people are traveling this holiday season. Since my family never celebrated either Chanukah or Christmas, my recollections are few except for all those vivid memories that never quite happened.

What did happen was the dread I felt in 5th grade when we were assigned to draw a holiday scene. A one-horse open sleigh was not in my skill set. Even a picture of hanging stockings was beyond me. If I'd known about abstract expressionism I might have gotten a gold star. As it was, with a nickel and quarter I traced a thirty-cent snowman and called it a day. (It's O.K. not to be good at everything).

Another almost true experience happened at around age twelve. For one day I worked in a Christmas tree lot in Forest Hills, which had neither forest nor hills. I didn’t return when my nose fell off into a cup of hot cider. 

Then there was the time when I sped down an incline in my flexible flyer. The bottom of the slope was the Grand Central Parkway. Even with my three sweaters to protect me I was never heard from again. It was a quick demise as I recall. For the next eighty-one years I've been enjoying my afterlife.

One year, out of pity, I was given a Monopoly set, the board game which rewarded winners with hotels on Boardwalk. I never got past Marvin Gardens. It was my fate to remain mostly on Baltic and Mediterranean. Life follows art.

Homecoming has always been a popular theme of holiday movies. Prodigal grown-up children return home to siblings or old flames or to reconcile with their crypto-fascist father who beat them for sport...or worse. But it's Ho, Ho, Ho time and all is forgiven over toasted marshmallows, gift-wrapped scarves and a Rockwellian dinner. 

The home, the haunt. That word, haunt, originally meant to visit or appear frequently or as the noun... an old haunt. Nothing haunts us like memory. So, in another version, we return hoping to recover shards of ourselves, which is to say, to recover our youth as it might have been.

In Greek mythology Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War and got a well-deserved short, sharp shock in his kishkes by his wife, Clytemnestra. Ulysses took his time slaying dragons within and the fury of the Gods. When he finally showed up after ten years, he embodied modern man, conniving, pragmatic and ferocious, while Penelope raveled and unraveled the woven tale. 

My brother was never at home in this world. He returned after three years in the army and remembered why he had left. Within a month he was gone again in the grip of his haunts. He died in his thirty-third year, driving in an alcoholic haze. Maybe he heard the mermaids singing.

My life is visited by returning haunts, not spooks but good spirits hovering. Janice is here tending to me lovingly. Lauren and Shari are many miles away, yet I feel them close to me in this room. We are singing off-key in our separate versions of what was, exchanging the gift of ourselves and our amazing journeys.

You can't go home again but we keep rowing toward Eden anyway.