So I went to church

It was the day before Christmas Eve and I went out to dinner with my parents. I was caught up on my present-wrapping, food and gift shopping. The house was not totally clean but I knew I could tidy up pretty easily by throwing all the bills, unread magazines, clean laundry into corners of my bedroom then shut the door and no one would know that the house wasn’t perfect. 

My parents belong to this country club that requires you spend a certain amount per month at its restaurant.  The month was up that night. My parents had to spend some dough fast. In the past, they’d have headed out with some of their friends who were in the same boat. But there have been lots of funerals lately and my parents’ social life is not what it was.  So I got invited instead, just like last month too.  

I love the club restaurant, the dark wood paneling half up the walls, the high, wide windows and thick ceiling beams, the sweeping views of the green hills and sand traps, the way the hostess greets my parents by name and leads us immediately to the perfect table and the wait staff knows exactly which bottle of Cabernet my dad means, and gives us plenty of time to sit and chat before asking us if we’d like to see the menu. 

Tonight at the coat room at the entrance we run into the youngest child of my dad’s and mom’s best friends.  His mom had died a few years ago. His dad’s passing was fresh, just two weeks earlier.  A’s wife was working late so he was eating out with his two little girls, ages three and five. We chatted for a bit about sad things, but the little girls were a distraction so that didn’t last long.  

My parents are former teachers and know how to talk to kids like you wouldn’t believe. They complimented the girls on their big smiles and poufy skirts. We talked about how their day had gone at school and the sitter’s. I asked them if they were excited for Santa and they nodded their heads so vigorously that I had to laugh out loud.   

I don’t remember what we talked about once the three of us were settled at our quiet corner table. It was an ideal people-watching spot. Through the walls of glass we could see all the way past the sparkling pine tree boundaries of the course, all the way to the lights of the jail in the next town over which tonight looked festive. In front of us, were holiday-bedecked restaurant patrons, lots of laughing, lots of green, gold, and red-dressed families.  

I remember watching A and his girls. He’s a tall, muscular guy, a former athlete, with the dark good looks of both his mom and dad. His back was to us but we could see the girls quite clearly. My parents and I chuckled a bit at how cute they were as they kneeled on their seat cushions and colored and chatted with their dad. It was hours later, near the end of dinner, when I realized that my two girls had been the same age as A’s kids when all the bad stuff had happened and I needed to get a divorce.  I took that as a good sign, a sign of healing, that I hadn’t made that connection immediately.

The thoughts about my own young daughters came at the end of several hours of reminiscing about early Christmases with my parents, when my sister and I were tiny, in our three-decker. I reminded my dad that we, my sister and I, used to stand with him late at night, at our bedroom window which faced downhill.

We’d look far across the sky, past the railroad tracks miles away near the towering gas tanks at the center, flat part of our city. I said I remembered how he’d direct our eyes to the stars, and how we could always see stars, even on the cloudy nights because they had to be there if he said so. He’d point ahead and up, and squint his eyes and say, “Do you see it? That blinking light? The red one? Do you see it?” My sister and I would squint our eyes just like him, and would always every year see red flashes and would squeal that it must be Rudolph. And I left out this part at the restaurant, how I said I saw Rudolph even that last Christmas on View Street, though I’d I snooped all over the house the week before, and found in the front hallway the piles of shopping bags from Denholm’s and Filene’s, and the toys with the Spag’s price tags.  

My dad remembered how he once questioned his mom on how Santa got into their three-decker apartment because they didn’t have a real fireplace. She took him, her only child, around to the back of the big stove that they used for heat and for cooking.  It’s been at least eighty years, but he remembers still how she pointed to those pipes and said Santa came through them and used magic dust to open them up so he could get presents into the room. My dad laughed. “She pointed her finger right at me and said I needed to remember that Santa would be coming and to be good or else.”

Then he remembered the one time when I was little when we almost didn’t have Christmas dinner. We’d had a Christmas Eve blizzard and the snow the next day was up to his waist. We never made it to his mother’s house miles away on Grafton Hill until nearly dark, because he spent most of the day shoveling the long driveway and then we had trouble getting out of the neighborhood because our hill wasn’t plowed. 

My mother said we’d never gone to his mother’s house for dinner, because she was always saddled with the holiday cooking. He reminded her that there was that one time, and it was during a blizzard. “If you say so,” she said, shaking her head at me and smirking a little.

 

While we were eating dinner, some dear friends of my parents stopped by to say hello as they were headed out the door. They’d been dining alone in another room so we hadn't seen them.  Like me, my parents, and A, they also had two daughters, though they’d had to say good-bye to the older one, about my age, on Thanksgiving when she’d succumbed to breast cancer.

So you can picture the scene and imagine the surface conversation, the raw thoughts beneath: me and my mom and dad in our corner overlooking twinkling lights on the patio Christmas tree illuminating the fairway beyond; the elderly, recently bereaved couple, stooped from age and I'm sure the events of the last month, their voices at times level then breaking, and just two tables distant, that younger family, the tiny girls chatting excitedly, the dad’s broad shoulders rounded, his head bent, voice quiet and low. 

Later, as we walked to the car, my parents mentioned that their parish, my old parish, was doing only one Mass instead of two on Christmas Eve. My dad asked how we should do Christmas Eve because they usually come directly to my house from the Mass at six, but this year there would be just one Mass, and that was at four.   

I go to Mass for funerals and that’s about it, but I blurted out, “Hey maybe I’ll come to Mass with you this year.”    

I don’t remember what my parents said. They know I don’t go to church and they are excellent at letting me know that they disapprove.  You’d think they’d set off fireworks or something, because I was asking if I could join them at Mass. But they didn’t say much, though my dad mentioned the Mass was a children’s Christmas Mass so it could be long. 

I said I would manage.  

They called twice the next morning to verify that I would be picking them up and going with them to church.  

When my sister called on Christmas, I told her I went to Mass with mom and dad. She laughed and made some joke about “oh you poor thing.”

I thought about telling her how good it felt to sit there with them like in the old days. I thought about how at one point I realized I was crying and how, rather than obviously blotting my eyes with a tissue, I let the tears dry on my cheek so my parents wouldn’t notice. I thought about how much would get lost and how much really wouldn’t get said by sharing this with her over the phone.  

“No really. It was nice,” is all I said, though in truth it was my best Christmas present ever.