Christmas in California

It’s December 23rd, 2009, a gorgeous day, the kind that makes your chest swell and ache at the beauty of it. Cloud-dappled skies and sugar crystal sand are the bookends of Huntington Beach where I am walking—the heels of my feet making dimples in the damp shoreline—with my brother, his wife, and new baby.

Crush, crush, crush. The waves lull me into a wakeful sleep, and I smile at the busker on the boardwalk who is earnestly strumming a song I can’t hear. Salt is everywhere—kissing my lips, knotting my hair, stinging my face—and I get the distinct feeling I’m being brined, like a pickle, like a turkey, like a pickled Christmas turkey.

In my periphery, a flash of crimson and white shocks my eyes. I am amused, when on the pier—it’s caterpillar network of sturdy beams stretching high above an expanse of churning, turquoise soup—Santa comes riding, not in a sleigh, but in the back of a cherry red pickup truck with the word, LIFEGAURD emblazoned across the side. A radical twist on the conventional costume, this Jolly Old St. Nick is wearing Rayban Wayfarers.

And I think to myself, “This is why I’m here.”

This is what Christmas in California looks like.

—-
Last time I visited Huntington Beach, it was Thanksgiving 2006. I was married. My brother was not. Tommy was healing from the heartbreak of a broken engagement. I was about to—unbeknownst to me, my adulterous ex-husband having orchestrated my absence so he could break bread with his mistresses’ family in Pittsburgh—suffer a similar misfortune.

Three years later, my brother is married. I am not.

I spent most every minute of the last eight days cradling, my arms wrapped tight in a protective swaddle, the form of my pudgy precious nephew. Colby’s stunning halo of flaxen curls and the delicious pink bloom on his cherubic cheeks transfixed me like a cobra charmed, and my heart—now that I’ve returned to Houston—hurts a little knowing I won’t see him again until summer.

Sure, Christmas in California looks like Santa in sunglasses. But it also looks like closed doors, fresh starts, new love, true love, and a beautiful baby boy.

I’ve only been gone a few days, but I miss them already.

16 comments

December 2, 2009

30

See the girl in that picture? That’s me. I’m celebrating a day that’s a lot like today, except it was 25 years ago. I was 5. I had fewer teeth, bigger dimples, and a lot less candles on my cake. My favorite TV show was the Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes Comedy Hour, followed closely by Knight Rider and the Dukes of Hazzard (check out my sweatshirt). I had just learned to tie the shoelaces on my clunky, kid-sized Caribou boots, and was very proud that my bed—now that I was a “Big Girl”—was stripped of its protective, plastic sheets.

The day I turned 5, I remember my smile—like a watermelon in winter—was wide. At my party, I was Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt; instead of red grapes, I was served a Duncan Hines chocolate cake coated with canned frosting so sweet, it made my mouth ache. Before we cut the cake, Mom asked that I make a wish on its flaming crown. I filled my little lungs and puffed my cheeks. I blew for all I was worth, dousing the candles with a not-so-mighty wind and spray of spittle.

“What did you wish for?” Dad asked.

“World peace!” I cheerfully replied, mimicking something I’d heard Luke Duke say on TV.

My father snickered, and within moments the entire table was laughing at my precocious distraction. As I had hoped, no one was any wiser about my REAL wish. My secret wish, my true heart’s desire was that every day could be a birthday … that every day could be filled with friends, fun, and cake from mix … that every moment of my life would be so charmed. And also, I wished for a pony, even though I was scared of their stumpy legs and overly-large eyeballs.

…

Flash forward to today and suddenly: I am 30 years old.

I have gone to sleep and woken up 10,958 times. Since my birth, ticking clocks have counted down 15 million minutes. And if my life’s breaths were dollars, I’d have more than a quarter billion.

I have—as my 5-year-old self wished—lead a favored and felicitous life. I have many friends, an amazing family, money in the bank, and business cards with my senior title emblazoned across the front. I have hiked Mount Fuji, biked the Texas hill country, and survived nights spent at sleazy, Canadian hostels where the aged windows busted and shattered when wedged shut. I have witnessed great beauty in blizzards of cherry blossoms and in raindrops that transform when white-sleeved snow gowns are donned. In the faces of my cherubic nieces and nephews I have seen God, and because of them, I know He is gracious.

Save for my marriage to a troubled man who told so many lies—to myself and to his mistress—he lost track of all truth, I have had few sorrows. And even in sadness, there were always lessons learned. Since my divorce, I have pledged to love deliberately those who deserve it. And to those who do not? I now know to distrust a heart that’s so bowed it can’t break.

For my next 30 years, I’m wishing for babies, a house, a second shot at being a bride.

And if all those things come true, then the next time I do this assessment—when I’m 60 and smile lined—the only thing left to wish for will be the pleasure of a posture bra and sensible shoes. And maybe a pony, assuming I’m over the eyeball thing.

Happy birthday to me, xoxoh

13 comments

November 5, 2009

Bringing Up Baby

(photo credit: Jeltovski@Morguefile)

I’ve said I would remarry, but really? I think I could be happy as a clam living in sin with my Hotpants lover the rest of my life. The Beatles told us, all you need is love. They didn’t say anything about marriage certificates.

The main reason I’d remarry is, I’d like to have babies and it would be great if they weren’t born of wedlock. But there again, pre-marital baby making is the way in my family. Each of my grown siblings walked the aisle alongside a bride with a baby in her belly; the delivery room staff being very confused when—instead of the standard cry—our little ones were born wailing Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

Of the unmarried siblings, two of them are teenage boys whose obsessive preoccupation with video games—to the detriment of their hygiene—effectively ensures they will remain sexually pure until one of them takes a break from Halo long enough to google, How do I stop being a virgin? And the last and littlest sibling? Josie Jo is two. She can’t eat a banana without first mashing it down her frontside, so it’ll be awhile before she’s shamefully impregnated.

Are you surprised I have a two-year-old sister? The thing about my father is, outside of having excellent taste in beer and bratwurst, he is Supremely Virile. My dad is 58. He has sired a slew of children (five) over a time span (30 years) in which his mustache has gone from being righteous to ruinous to righteously ironic, in an easy fashion that would put all but TLC’s Duggar crew and their matriarch’s clown car womb to shame. My father’s daughter in so many ways, clearly I’m not living up to my potential on this one.

Even as I lament the failure of my ovaries to produce the surprise pregnancy my birth control pills are successfully preventing, I still have hope for the future. Maybe the far distant future. In one fantasy, sunlight streaming through sheer curtains, a faded flower-patterned tablecloth under our plates, we’re having breakfast. In my hand, a foggy tumbler of Metamucil. In Hänni Jr.’s, a half glass of organic apple juice. Both of us are trying to pass something—for my daughter, it’s time before the bus pulls up to whisk her away to school; for me, the aged matriarch, it’s last night’s Salisbury steak and pureed peas which have become uncomfortably lodged in my increasingly stubborn intestinal tract. Looking up from her bowl of organic raisin bran, Hänni Jr. asks Momma to make her laugh. I take out my dentures, wincing a little at the relaxed suction and sticky bits of adhesive. I grin at Jr. My smile is all wrinkles and mottled pink gums.

I always thought that by this age I’d be a mom—and not just to hairy babies who lick their own butts and subsist on dry kibble (no offense, cats). Blame it on biology and the fact that in three weeks I’ll be 30, but dang it, I’ve got babies on the brain. Not ready to be a bride, maybe I’ll make a baby the way my mom made me, which is by accident. Yes, it might be nice to have something growing inside me … apart from the unease that one day I’ll find Salisbury steak and mushy peas a delicious and desirable supper, that is.