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What Happened When There Were No Gifts Under Our Tree This Christmas

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All of us heading to NYC, including Maile, my ghost of Christmas present.

There are times in every adventure, every good idea, every new thing, when the old safe places suddenly seem vastly preferable. When you wonder what hallucinogenic drug you must have been smoking when you decided to do that thing you decided to do. It’s that moment when the Israelites looked back on their slavery in Egypt – their slavery! – and thought, we need to go back to that, because this freedom thing is way too hard and uncertain and did anyone consider where we’re going to get food out here in the wilderness?

You know. That moment.

It was around December 24th at three or four in the afternoon when I felt that way, when I started having second thoughts about our decision to go on a trip to New York instead of buying the kids Christmas gifts. We had gone to the mall to pick up a few very small things to put in their stockings (toothbrushes, pajamas, socks, that sort of thing), and I saw all the other parents racing like mad from here to there, huge bags hanging down at their sides like the packs on burros making their way through the Amazon. And for just a moment, I wanted to go back to that old slavery. To things. To clutter. To piles of Christmas wrapping paper and that Christmas afternoon malaise.

Have we made a terrible mistake?

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Rehearsal for the pageant.

That night we went to St. James Episcopal for the Christmas Eve service and our four oldest kids participated in the Owen Meany-esque Christmas pageant complete with 12 shepherds, 8 prophets, many angels, and a star that was actually a very small person. I kept waiting for John to lower Owen from the rafters, his God-awful voice calling out, “Peace on Earth!” It was adorable. Our 5-year-old Sammy even had a line, which he managed to say in a firm voice, his eyes wide with something like terror when he saw the hundreds of people in the church. I think he was also second-guessing a few of his Christmas season decisions, but he managed to get his line out.

“I’m sorry, my inn is full.”

Then came communion, and it was beautiful and it took forever because there were so many guests and I couldn’t help but notice how happy our rector seemed, and I thought what an honor that must be, administering the sacraments on Christmas Eve to all of these strangers from the community who decided to celebrate with you and your parish. I took the wafer and drank from the cup and it was all there, out in the open, so plainly visible. It was one of those moments when the veil was thin.

Christmas Eve was beautiful.

* * * * *

We woke up Christmas morning and the kids raced downstairs to pull a few small things from their Christmas stockings and then Maile made cinnamon rolls and we packed up the truck. My sister and my mom and my dad pulled up outside, and we left. Destination: New York City.

We moved towards the city like pilgrims. We crossed over hills, through forests, past small towns with their factories and churches and stores, mostly quiet, mostly resting, until New York City suddenly rose up in the distance, a bright spot of hope. We cheered. We held our breath as we cruised through the Holland Tunnel. We cheered again as we came up in the midst of that bustling, that movement, that life.

I know it’s a cliché, but New York is one of those rare places on earth that, while you’re there, you really do believe that anything is possible. The wealth of nations is right there at my fingertips, and fame is just around the corner. We circled Times Square twice looking for parking for our hotel and eventually decided the valet would be worth the money. I parallel parked, nearly running over a few tourists and a man pushing a two-wheeled cart full of things I couldn’t identify. By now taxi drivers were beeping at us. Pedestrians glared. Maile and the kids jumped out and I unloaded the suitcases and the stroller. The sidewalk was shoulder to shoulder, brightly lit billboards stretched into the sky, and Maile was searching for all the blankets and pillows and we really needed to move. The traffic on the road was honking and barely moving, and the cacophony of the city rose around us, tangible, like smoke.

Then I realized Sam had not yet exited the truck, so I leaned inside.

“C’mon, Sammy, time to get out. Hurry up.”

But he just sat there, his seat belt still on, his puffy winter coat swelling up around him.

“What’s up, man?” I asked him. “Let’s go. Gotta go.”

He looked at me through solemn eyes and said something I’ll never forget.

“No way,” he said. “I’m not going out there.”

He caught me off guard. I looked over my shoulder, trying to see what he saw. Hordes of people flowing past. Exploding lights. Noise.

“C’mon, Sammy. Let’s go. You’ll be fine.”

But I know how he feels.

* * * * *

I feel like I’ve been asked so many times during the last five years to get out of the truck. Do something different. Go somewhere new. Give up those old dependencies. And it usually feels pretty safe and secure right where I’m at. These addictions of mine are pretty comfortable. I’d rather not get out. I’d rather bide my time. I’ll get out. Soon. Just not yet.

Then that voice.

It’s time to get out. It’s time to move on. Let’s do it together. You’ll be fine.

* * * * *

10517571_10152621514852449_864184494690742915_nNew York City was beautiful to us for those 24 hours, the shops warm, sidewalks long and straight. The kids used some money they had saved up to buy a few special purchases. I found a macaroon café close to FAO Schwartz and ate a weeks’ worth of exquisite sugar in four bites.

Then we got back in the truck and escaped the city, back through tunnels and over bridges, back through the woods, back to our small city that now felt like a wilderness compared to the immense largeness of New York. The gift of that trip far outweighed anything we could have boxed up, anything the kids could have unwrapped on Christmas morning. We all agreed it was a huge success, a new Christmas tradition.

You gotta get out of the truck.

* * * * *

I’ve decided that during this season of being very busy, I’ll be blogging here on Mondays for the foreseeable future. I hope you’ll join me.

If you’ve had a chance to read my book, The Day the Angels Fell, would you consider leaving a review over at Amazon? Every review helps raise the book’s profile. Click HERE to head over there and leave a review or purchase the book.

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When the Candles Keep Going Out (or, “Tell Her That Her Sad Days Are Gone”)

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I parked along Duke Street in front of the Lancaster County courthouse, and the cold leaked into the truck as soon as I opened the door. Five-month-old Leo stared up at me, dark eyes wide, two black holes into which entire galaxies have spilled. I unbuckled him from his seat, walked close to the truck so oncoming traffic wouldn’t usher both of us into eternity, and joined the rest of the family on the sidewalk where the kids exclaimed their delight at the decorating lamp posts. Christmas greens and red bows.

The “Don’t Walk” hand flashed so we trotted across Orange Street, the kids shouting out the countdown.

“Oh, no!” Sam shouted back to Maile and I as the hand solidified. “You guys didn’t make it! The street exploded!”

Crossing Duke was a less violent affair. We all made it safely to the other side, then walked up the stairs into the solemn, dimly-lit beauty that is St. James Episcopal Church on a winter’s night, eleven days before Christmas.

I thought about coming to church just that morning, less than twelve hours prior, and how I had walked down to Square One Coffee Shop and then came back in time to pick the children up from choir practice. It was the first I had noticed the iron plaque on the side of the church:

St. James Episcopal Church
Founded 1744

* * * * *

Sometimes church feels more like an exercise in teaching children how to control their impulses than anything else. Stop picking your nose and please don’t nibble on your hair, that’s gross, and stand up straight and sit quietly and can you please stop laying down in the pew and wouldn’t this be a more enjoyable evening if you listened to the music instead of moaning about how hungry you are? The minutes pass slowly.

“I love our children, I really do,” I told Maile later that night. “But sometimes I think a quiet church service, alone, would do my soul good.”

But that was later. In the mean time, I tried to enjoy the “Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols” as best I could, surrounded by the whirling dervish of five children. And it was right there in the First Lesson, in the midst of children grabbing for the Book of Common Prayer and arguing over who owns the small green rubber monster just found in the depths of a pocket, when God reached down and spoke to me:

“Comfort, comfort my people,”
    says your God.
“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.
Tell her that her sad days are gone…”
Isaiah 40:1-2

These words made me sigh, and suddenly all the shenanigans going on in our pew faded away. I stared at the stained glass.

How long, O Lord? I thought to myself. How long until the sad days will be gone?

* * * * *

This is the 270th Advent celebrated at St. James Episcopal. Through wars and rumors of wars, diseases and epidemics, harvests and blessings. Births and deaths. Over and over again, we remember, and we hope. But at some point you have to stop and wonder.

How long?

How long until these injustices are reckoned for?

How long until the people are comforted?

* * * * *

We stayed after church and spoke to some friends and relatives who were there, and someone who was cleaning up gave Lucy a long brass rod with a bell-shape hanging from the end of it, so she walked down the long aisle, gently lowering it onto each flame. Then smoke, and darkness.

This is hope: lighting candles in a church where candles have already been lit for 270 years, candles that we know will flicker and fade and eventually be snuffed out for another year.

And lighting them again.

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Finding Peace in the Dark (And It Really Is A Wonderful Life)

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Some days you just feel pulled in seven different directions in a world that won’t let go, don’t you? A great breakfast with a friend and then walk six blocks home and some of the kids are sick so I had to take the girls to the dentist and before I knew it, it was four o’clock and things are still piling up. Work for an hour. Clean the house. Eat dinner. Do the dishes. Bed time snack for the kids.

Then I hear Leo crying so I leave Maile with the oldest four and go up to the dark bedroom and pick him up and rock him back and forth. His eyelids get heavy and he sucks on his index finger these days and you know what? There’s nothing like singing hymns to a sick baby in a dark room if you’re looking for peace.

What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer

Later we watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and I finish off the ice cream because there’s not really enough left for the older four to split (“Nice of you to take one for the team,” Maile says). Maile cries in the beginning of the movie, when Mr. Gower accidentally puts poison in the capsules and then young George Bailey confronts him about it. We both cry at the end when George’s brother gives the toast: “To my big brother George…the richest man in town.”

* * * * *

I think back to what Bryan and I talked about at breakfast, how we have no idea what 2015 might hold. That’s both encouraging and terrifying. I think back to the beginning of 2009, back to when we had no idea the ride we were about to embark on: $50,000 in debt, my parents’ basement, trying to scratch and claw my way into a writing life. I think back to the fall of 2012, when I had no idea how good the next two years would be – Sri Lanka, Istanbul, and so many great writing projects. A move to a cabin on 40 acres of woods. Then a move into the city.

Who knows what’s next.

And that song comes to mind again, that old hymn I sang to sick little Leo, the one my Grandma Smucker used to sing:

Blessed Savior, Thou hast promised
Thou wilt all our burdens bear;
May we ever, Lord, be bringing
All to Thee in earnest prayer.
Soon in glory bright, unclouded,
There will be no need for prayer—
Rapture, praise, and endless worship
Will be our sweet portion there.

 

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Why There is a Tooth On My Desk (or, For When the World is Taking Pieces of You)

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There is a tiny tooth in a plastic sandwich bag on my desk. It’s strange what you will accept as normal, once you are a parent. Saving a bloody tooth? In a sandwich bag? Beside my books and on top of a binder? It’s the size of a small pea, the color of a not-quite-white seashell. It’s shaped like a broad, flat shovel. I guess it’s about six years old.

It is the remains of Abra’s toothy, childhood grin. This was the one that stuck out, the one we affectionately referred to as “the fang.” It’s been replaced by a gaping black hole, the kind that sucks in time and matter and space and leaves you wondering where a childhood has gone, where it’s going. Black holes are ruthless. None of us can escape them.

Her grandmother convinced her to pull it out. At first Abra wanted to do it herself, so she vanished into the bathroom with Sam as support, and I heard them talking, conspiring, strategizing. Sam got bored and came out. Abra emerged a few minutes later, nearly crying, blood on her chin, the tooth pointing out at an awkward angle, like a broken bone.

She sat on her grandmother’s lap and her grandma said, “Tell me if it hurts,” and before she knew what was happening, she was sitting there with a tiny pearl in the palm of her hand and an empty space in her mouth, six years of her life pulled right out.

This world just keeps taking pieces of us, doesn’t it? There’s no way around it. It just keeps yanking and tugging and leaving us bloody and hurting with gaping holes. Things don’t work out the way we had hoped they would, and our writing gets rejected yet again, and we have to find another job, and relationships crumble. People we love get really, really sick. Sometimes they die before we do, which seems a terrible injustice because while none of us want to die, even fewer of us want to be the last one standing.

Little pieces of us, big pieces of us. Gone. Chunks of years. Vanished.

The only thing we can really hope for is that someone will be there when it happens, that someone can help us take the piece out when it gets stuck, that they can clean the blood off our chin and lay the piece in our palm so that we can study it before moving on.

If we’re lucky, we have people who will help us bury these pieces under, way under the pillow so that it doesn’t hurt us anymore. So we can sleep easy again. But if we’re really, really lucky one day we’ll wake up and realize that thing that was taken somehow transformed into something beautiful.

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What Maile Said to Me Ten Years and Two Days Ago

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Ten years and two days ago we drove through the beautiful English countryside just outside Wendover, speeding through roundabouts on our way to the Stoke Mandeville hospital. Maile was panting in the passenger seat, and her mother sat in the back, encouraging her.

I parked, then led her inside. She walked gingerly, the way we now walk across Lego-covered floors in the middle of the night. It was a cold, December day. December 4th. Those winter days are short in England, and the sun had already started to descend, even though it was barely lunch time. Dark days. Days when headlights always led me home.

* * * * *

I tell this all to Lucy as we sit around the dining room table, ten years and two days later.

“You came so fast,” I say, and the older four children listen in awe with smiles on their faces, the way they always do when we talk about a birth. The older ones know the details by now. It is like a children’s question and answer time within a religion service.

“What did you say when she came out?” Cade asks.

“Well, I looked at your mom, and she didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl yet because the nurse hadn’t even said anything, so I walked over beside her and leaned down close and whispered into her ear, ‘It’s a girl!'”

Lucy is smiling from ear to ear now. What a precious thing, that feeling that someone anticipated your existence, that you were loved from the first moment.

“And then your mom looked up at me and started to cry. ‘It’s a girl?’ she asked me, not able to believe it. She was so happy. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked me.”

We all laugh.

* * * * *

Ten years and two days ago. Time is not linear – it is cyclical, seasonal. I hope that someday time will circle around for them, that they will look into the eyes of someone they love with that same disbelieving joy.

“It’s a girl? Are you sure?”

Happy Birthday, Lucy.

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When Impossible Boys Grow Up to be Unbreakable Men

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This is a tale of my three sons. The youngest is only four months old and his personality is emerging, the way those old Polaroid photos leeched up through the blackness. My oldest son is eleven and exactly like I was as a child: a rule-follower, not a risk-taker. He’s kind to his siblings and isn’t particularly rough. He loves to read.

My middle son Sam, well, sometimes I wonder where he came from. He’s a climber, adventurous, and never gives up. He will ask for something over and over and over again, even if I say no. His primary way of relating with people is by being physically rough with them: he has a game he plays with his grandpa whenever he sees him that involves punching him in the stomach as hard as he can. He finds this hilarious. If I am ever on my knees changing the baby’s diaper or picking something up off the floor, no matter where Sam is in the house, he will sense that I’m on my knees, find me, and jump on to my back. He spent all Thanksgiving weekend wrestling with his cousin.

He is five. Words that describe him perfectly at this point in his life? I’ll take Defiant, Strong-Willed, and Passionate.

* * * * *

Maile was recently reading an interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Unbroken. It’s been on the NYT best-seller list for 180 weeks, and it’s the story of a man who served in WWII, survived a plane crash, being lost at sea, and then imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp.

There was a quote from the interview that stood out to me as she reflected on the subject of her book, a man named Louie.

“Defiance defines Louie,” Laura Hillenbrand said. “As a boy he was a hellraiser. He refused to be corralled. When someone pushed him he pushed back. That made him an impossible kid but an unbreakable man.”

An impossible kid.

An unbreakable man.

Sometimes I think I am way too short-sighted when it comes to raising Sammy. Too many times I want to change his personality NOW because it will make my life easier. But I think that, with him, with all of my children, I need to think about how these current struggles will someday become incredible strengths of character. I don’t want to break him now just so that bedtime routines or dinner times are quieter. I don’t want to quench his spirit just so that I can walk through the house without getting jumped on.

I want to guide him into becoming an unbreakable man.

* * * * *

Sam catches up to me as I start down the stairs.

“Dad, can you sing me a bedtime song?”

“Sammy, everyone else is asleep. If we go back in there and I sing, we’ll wake them up.”

He looks up at me.

“C’mon, Dad,” he says.

“It’s not going to happen, buddy.”

“C’mon, Dad,” he says again.

Did I mention he does not give up?

“Come here,” I say, and I sit down on the floor in the hallway, my back against the wall. He comes over and sits on my lap, facing me. He wraps his arms around my neck, puts his head on my chest, and sucks his thumb while I sing his favorite song.

After getting through it twice, I whisper into his ear.

“Time for bed, little man.”

He looks at me and smiles, then walks back into the bedroom. Sometimes he seems like an impossible kid, but from now on I will choose to remember that this will someday make him into an unbreakable man.