Ghosts

A new year dawned today.  I’ve never been one for making resolutions because I’m not likely to keep them.  Broken resolutions equal failure and prick like thorns on a dewberry vine when you go to pull them from the garden.  Even with gloves on they find their way into skin.  Nor I have ever been one to make plans too far into the future.  I think that is one of my negative personality traits, actually.  Had I made future plans years ago perhaps I would be in a better station in life today.  Oh well, I am what I am.

Instead of looking ahead I can’t help but look back on something that happened last week.  It has been nagging at me ever since and anytime I’ve sat down to write about it I’ve drawn a blank.  I might draw one now too, but let’s see what happens.  

Only a week ago it was Christmas Day.  If I were Scrooge I would have looked into the window with The Ghost of Christmas Present as my sisters and brothers and our families spent the day together like we have done my whole life.  It was good.  At some point during the Middle Child pulled out that tin of video tapes again.   She must have found the missing link because this time she was able to play them on the television her favorite son gave her for Christmas.  So, instead of watching my younger self on a two inch camera monitor I got to see me on a 50 inch widescreen.  Not good.

The Ghost of Christmas Past made an appearance as she played a tape from a Christmas long ago when we all still piled into my parents’ living room and total mayhem ruled during the gift exchange.  I think it might have been Christmas 1998 or ’99.  The first thing I noticed is how detached I seemed to be from all that was happening.  I watched my son try to show me his Buzz Lightyear toy and then give up and take it to his dad instead.  I call those years the Lost Years because when my children were little I lost touch with the outside world and basically lost myself.  I know now, with video tape as evidence, the  years were not lost because of my children, they were lost because I was depressed.  Or maybe it was because it was Christmas and I was stressed as always trying to keep up with what my children were unwrapping to make sure the giver was given acknowledgement.  Maybe it was the chaos of the moment.  Maybe it was for a hundred other reasons I do not even remember now.

But that is not what has been bothering me all week.  

A pause in the tape and the scene skipped to my mother’s kitchen later in the day.  My family must have left because none of us were in the scene and the rest of the house was quiet.  My mother washed dishes, my brother played his guitar, my nieces sang and danced, my sisters danced, and my daddy sat at the kitchen table and cried.  No one seemed to notice he was crying, but there he was, with videotape as evidence.  At one point the camera panned the room and even settled on him for a second and I could see the telltale signs; hands rubbing his red face and a glisten of water in his eyes.  As if the videographer was embarrassed to capture that moment the camera shifted away.  A moment later a grandchild caught his attention and he perked up and played it off.

Why did my daddy cry when he in the middle of a happy moment surrounded by his children and grandchildren?  Maybe he was remembering the Christmases when we were all children and it was magical.  Maybe he was missing his parents.  Maybe he was missing the daughter he lost a few years earlier.  Maybe it was for a hundred reasons I will never know.

I think I know why but I can’t express it in words.  I think he cried for the same reason I cried during mass on Christmas Eve, as I have done every year since my sister died, and then him, and then my mother.   It’s a feeling of loss and hope at the same time.  It’s a feeling of sorrow and joy.  It’s a feeling that doesn’t make sense.

Why do I continue to look back instead of looking  forward?  Why is it easier to see the past instead of planning for the future?  I think it’s like reading a really great novel over and over.  Every time I read it I find a new meaning or discover clues in the beginning that play out in the end.  The past offers clues for the future, and like the gift of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come I can see my shortcomings and make changes for a better future.  That and because I know the future is not a given.  I have videotape as evidence.