ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 18, 1995 TAG: 9512180011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Christopher Powell
1962 began with all of the expectations and hope for a better life for my mother, my father and me of any new year. I was in the middle of my junior year at Jefferson High School in Roanoke and completely in love with Carol, who lived in a part of town that had taken her away to the as yet un-named new high school at Shrine Hill in Raleigh Court. Aside from this one setback in my personal life, things were pretty good for me - as they were for most teen-agers who were beginning the Decade of Great Change in American culture. By midyear, however, life would make a course change that would never again bring me back to that stable place, that place where everything was the same as it had always been, that place of home and family as I knew it.
June 25 fell on a Monday in 1962, and Monday was the first bowling night of the week for my father, who made the sport a five-nights-a-week occupation as serious as his day job as office manager for a local refrigeration concern. It was a short work week; he died of a heart attack at a bowling lane (we called them alleys in those days) that night, transforming the balance of 1962 into a checker board of red and black days: red ones were filled with the sting of loss to death, and the black ones were just black.
My mother was the daughter of an Italian immigrant and in many ways she followed the old-world traditions of her upbringing. One of those traditions was mourning of a seriousness that allowed for no form of celebration for any occasion for at least a year after a death in the family. So Independence Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving passed with not so much as an acknowledgement of their existence. Christmas lay ahead in a bleak December of a bleak l962.
At 17 years, I understood the concept of respect for death and those that it had chosen, but my feelings about allowing Christmas to come and go with no celebration were a source of sadness compounding that which I already felt. Nonetheless, I was resigned to that gloomy prospect, even giving my superficial approval. Suddenly, it was Christmas Eve.
The eve of the celebration of Christ's birth fell exactly six months after the eve of my father's death. The day was Sunday, and we didn't go to church. Actually, we rarely did in those days, so there was nothing strange in that. What was strange was the barrenness of our house on such a decorated day. There were no wreaths, no cards on the mantel, no lights in the front window, and to me the most tragic of all - no Christmas tree.
The day slid easily from morning to early afternoon and I could feel Christmas slipping away with each passing moment. Mother said nothing for most of the day and I had nothing to say to her. We each kept our silence and our emptiness to ourselves. But, there was something at work in the drab rooms of that small house that day, something that I have wondered about for 33 years. As the light. of the overcast day dimmed to dusk, I sensed that my mother was watching me when she thought that I wouldn't notice. She kept silent, but, there was a definite change in her demeanor, and as night fell I began to feel a slight elevation of my own spirit.
Sometime around 6 or 7, I asked my mother if we could put out some decoration, no matter how small, so that Christmas could make even the briefest appearance. That request seemed to be the catalyst that set a bizarre but wonderful event into motion. Looking back over more than 30 years, I can't recall exactly which one of us made the suggestion, or why, but we decided to go out at nearly 8 o'clock on a Sunday Christmas Eve to buy a Christmas tree.
Perhaps the weather records would prove otherwise, but viewed through the lens of my memory there was a cold wind blowing snow across the deserted streets of the city that particular Christmas Eve. Driving my father's DeSoto past one darkened tree lot after another, I began to again feel the sadness of Christmas lost, but my mother was not daunted. She kept telling me to go up or down one more street that was known to possess a Christmas tree lot, but each one we tried presented the same emptiness.
Finally, almost as if presented with a mystical vision, she said to drive down Jefferson Street. I protested. I had never seen a tree lot there in all the years I could remember. But, as we drove northward toward town, we saw the lot. It was wedged between the old Carlton Terrace building and a small grocery store. Just as I wheeled the massive DeSoto into the tiny lot, the tree man began to turn off the bare, hanging light bulbs that illuminated no more than five trees. Four of them could hardly measure up to any definition of the word, but there was one that could.
Walking up to our car just as we stepped out onto the concrete, the man said that he was closed, that there was nothing left, that it was 9 o'clock, that he needed to get himself home. I pointed to the one real tree on the lot and asked why we couldn't have it. He seemed surprised that there truly was a remaining whole tree and said, ``Sure, I'll let you have it for, oh, say, 50 cents.''
My mother handed the tree man the money. He secured our tree in the trunk of the DeSoto and said as we got into the car, ``How about some running cedar? I'll throw that in for free.''
It was nearly midnight when we got our tree up and decorated. We stood back from it, looking at the physical representation of a spiritual rebirth. Even though there was the still-felt pain of my father's death, the Christmas tree that almost wasn't called our attention to the direction in which Christmas trees always look - upward. And the mystery that is Christmas became manifest when two people - a mother and her son - very late one Christmas Eve found an open Christmas tree lot with a kindly man and one remaining tree.
CHRISTOPHER POWELL, 51, teaches English at Roanoke College. He lives in Roanoke.
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Christopher Powell. color.by CNB