Christmas circles

It's the day after Christmas and I am sitting at my Dad’s desk. No one else is home. My uncle, who lives in Western Mass, just called. He said that he is sipping coffee out of the mug I gave him while finishing the article in the New Yorker that he’s been reading for the past week. How different reading feels in the morning than right before bed, he says. He tells me to thank my mom for hosting a great Christmas brunch.

He is right: the brunch was great. We had an endless supply of muffins cut into quarters, cookies, late morning cocktails and coffee. Before the meal, we sat in the living room, handing out gifts in no particular order and crumpling the wrapping paper into balls. What I like most about this hour is that it all happens in a circle. We focus our attention toward center, listening to each other and laughing at the same jokes. Everyone holds up their new items so everyone else can imagine that person wearing or reading or drinking out of whatever-it-is in the days and months to come. There are no corners or television or phone calls. It’s just us and what we give and receive; the presents adding to the large web that will keep us together. 

Today, I woke up and continued to read This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett, which is a collection of the essays she’s written over her career and kept in a Tupperware container since 2011. It’s lovely: a portrait of spending Christmas in the home of her mother’s second marriage; thoughts on writing and appropriate reading materials for first year college students and reasons for opening an independent bookstore during a time of fewer people reading books. I just finished the title essay, which she wrote about her divorce at a very early age, the years that followed, the decade of refusing to get married to the man she loved and the day she chose to dive in. She reminds us that the beauty of relationships is not in permanence or stability, but in the forces that relationships exude that push us sideways and forward and make us let go.

Other event that happened this week: Macey, our thirteen year old Golden Retriever lost her ability to stand up.  My mom called the vet who came over and patted her head and felt her heartbeat. I sat in kitchen eating spoonfuls of oatmeal listening to the conversation which included words like “cremation” and “peaceful” and “down.” They scheduled the time for four or so PM, my mom called my brother and he said he could come home from work early. The vet acknowledged that this was both right and hard. Macey was part of our family, and she was no longer strong enough to live. We spent the day crying and wandering around the house. I went to out to buy ingredients for cookies I promised to bring to a friend’s house for dinner that night and finish Christmas shopping. It was cold and raining and crowded. After I bought what I needed for the cookies, I came home.

Later that night the vet came back to put her down. As I stood in the living room, listening to my sisters say the same things to our dog that they have said since they were five and six—“You are such a good girl”-- and I realized how much older we have become under Macey’s supervision. We can drive, schedule our own doctor’s appointments and buy our own lunch. We drink alcohol and coffee, vote in presidential elections and fold laundry. And after every test, play, lacrosse game, school dance, college semester, failure and success, we've had Macey to come home to. Now, when we open the door of our house, we’ll miss her curled up in a ball on the kitchen floor, lifting up her nose up in the air to say hello.