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Christmas Memories Dec 24
Among the Christmas reminiscences shared by my colleagues in the Cosmos this week, there is an awful lot of joy and laughter and love and all that good stuff. Christmas is a perfect time for those things, I suppose; I’ve had my fair share of them myself on December 25. But as our co-op student Amy Hurlburt says in her piece on page 9, Christmas is also the time when one is most keenly aware of the lack of those things. Amy, I’ve learned over the last few months, has an extraordinary amount of insight for a 17-year-old; I’ve begun to suspect that perhaps she is an ancient seer in a teenager’s body.
She’s very right about Christmas bringing into sharp focus the ways your life is not going well. Roger Pires’ homeless man (on page 6) is undoubtedly never more aware of his poverty (materially and spiritually) than when he watches the “shoppers rush home with their treasures” (to quote a merry Christmas ditty), broad seasonal smiles on their faces, with time only for pity as they silently say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
And even if you’ve had several dozen idyllic Christmases, the ones when you were lonely or heartbroken or down and out seem to stand out a bit from the rest.
For me, the bottom came on Dec. 25, 1974.
I was 24. Three months earlier, I had migrated 300 miles northward from my hometown of Edmonton to the small bustling city of Grande Prairie. My wife, who had just graduated from library school, had gone a few weeks before me to take a job at Grande Prairie Regional College.
I’d also just graduated, from journalism school, and while waiting to find out where she was going, I’d taken a summer job with a theatre troupe on the University of Alberta campus. When that wrapped up in late August, I booked myself into a week-long photography workshop in the Rockies; I figured it might increase my chances of getting a good reporting job somewhere in the vicinity of Grande Prairie.
Sure enough, by mid-summer I’d landed a job with the Grande Prairie Herald-Tribune, and they were quite happy to wait for me until I took my photo course, packed up and drove north. I finally arrived in the “Swan City” (it’s a popular stop on the trumpeters’ migration route) about Sept. 10.
As it turned out, apart from my wife, I knew exactly one person in Grande Prairie. Fortunately for me (although not so fortunate, as it turned out, for my marriage), this one person was the president of the Grande Prairie Little Theatre group.
Familiar with my acting skills from university, he asked if I’d be interested in directing something for the group.
“When?” How about right now? I’d never directed before, but this seemed an ideal way to get to know at least a few people in a hurry. My wife had already gotten us settled in an apartment. So a couple of days after hitting town I started my job, and a couple of days after that I was holding auditions for a play. Busy, busy. Trouble, trouble.
I asked my wife if she’d like to be involved in the play as well, stage managing or something. No, she said, she was still settling in at the college, she’d already made her own friends there (some very good friends, it turned out). Directing the play kept me out three or four times a week, even more as the production drew closer. Had I stayed home onthose occasions, maybe things would have turned out differently, maybe not.
At any rate, the play closed in late November, and only a couple of days later, my wife told me she was leaving me. She’d begun an affair while I was still in Edmonton, and it had continued while I was directing the play. She needed to “find herself”, she said, and had gotten her own apartment.
I was stunned, and before I knew it, Christmas was upon me. My family expected me back in Edmonton, but I found excuses to stay. I wasn’t exactly in a holiday mood, and I didn’t want to answer questions. Besides, I didn’t want to be far away if she changed her mind, which I was sure she would do at any minute (she did about 18 months later, but by then it was too late).
At the time, I thought her timing was pretty lousy, although I suppose it was perfect for her. But here I was in a town I knew only superficially. All of my theatre friends were too busy with their own families to notice I was all alone.
You don’t realize until you’re alone and don’t feel like cooking for yourself on Christmas Day, how few restaurants are there to serve you. Everyone wants to be with their families, not with you. And there aren’t too many places more bleak and empty, I discovered, than the streets of a northern prairie town on one of the shortest, darkest days of the year. I tend to be a fairly upbeat, optimistic person, but on that particular Christmas, I couldn’t find a glass that looked even remotely half full. Only a few days later, some of the theatre crowd thought to invite me to a New Year’s Eve party, and things began to lighten.
But I’ll always remember that Christmas as one of loneliness, confusion, heartache, maybe even a touch of depression and despair. I know if it hadn’t happened, my life would have gone a different way. I wouldn’t be here talking to you now, in a wonderful marriage with good friends in a great community. So it all worked out for the best.
But it sure was, to quote the King, a blue, blue Christmas.