A tale of winter told in 2 acts
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- December 28, 2024
- 502
Time was you could create a snow day; I mean it wasn’t science, but if you really, really didn’t want to take a test, it was worth a try.
All you had to do was turn your PJs inside out and go to sleep.
What’s that? You never heard of that childhood trick? Hmm.
No wonder I didn’t make the honor roll more often: While the other kids were studying spelling, I was trying to conjure a spell.
But getting a day off from school was something to be fervently wished for, a rare treat, somewhat akin to a miracle, but without all those theological trappings that made you look for the fine print.
The ritual was always the same. You’d look out the bedroom window, see that it had snowed overnight, so you’d say a quick prayer and then turn on the transistor radio and listen for the list.
In my little town, the AM station took its role as a source of reliable information seriously, which meant we believed what we were being told, even as the on-air newsman stuck to delivering the school closings in alphabetical order, much to Catholic chagrin.
When the first word was “Saint,” you had a long, long time to wait.
One more thing complicated the process, which was that as the only parochial school in the county, we didn’t have access to the public bus system. That meant we were always on our own, not exactly a novelty in a Protestant enclave, but an isolating factor.
It was sort of like the way the newspaper printed the upcoming week’s cafeteria menu, all prepared and delivered to the public schools, whereas we relied on a couple of saintly ladies to feed us.
Boy, did I love their beef and noodles. Mom never cooked like that.
Speaking of my mother’s culinary skills, which I sometimes mock, mention must be made, especially at this festive time of year, of her tuna noodle casserole, which she always, always made for our Christmas Eve supper. It wasn’t a sumptuous holiday repast — when she taught me how to do it, she always stressed buying “the cheapest frozen peas” — but it soon and forever became tradition.
You may be wondering why she chose a fish dish. Well, back then Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Fridays, so Mom decided to beat the system by going the seafood route, which meant that when Christmas Eve fell on a Friday, which it did sometimes, she was ahead of the game. In our little family, that made her amazing.
I’m reminded of Bob Cratchit in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol:” “I regard this pudding, I regard it I say, as the greatest achievement by Mrs. Cratchit since our marriage.” That line gets me every time.
Echoes of the past — “Long past?” “No, your past” — have been reverberating in my head all month long as my wife and I experience our first holiday season since moving back home.
After nearly 25 years spent living off the North Carolina coast, a place where it seldom snowed and seafood was more than plentiful, we’re dealing with a collision of old memories and new ones, which is like the way scientists learned how to split the atom.
This, courtesy of the internet:
“By bombarding a heavy element like uranium with neutrons, causing its nucleus to become unstable and split into smaller nuclei, releasing a large amount of energy in a process called fission.”
In layman’s terms, that means when you decorate the house with treasures that remind you of home, it’s wonderful to be there again.
It occurs to me I’ve written 600 words since I sat down and have yet to come within caroling distance of what I intended to be the subject of this week’s year-ending epistle, which is, well, death.
Did you know the only times I’ve ever won any kind of writing awards, my focus was entirely on real-life tragedy?
It started with John Lennon, moved on to Rodney King and culminated with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. All three times that my work was singled out as deserving of statewide recognition among my peers, my own life was curiously absent.
Maybe I should have paid more attention to the world outside my narrow parameters, the minutiae of my own history, and shifted my “award-winning” skills toward adopting in a more global approach.
But “write what you know” has always been my guiding star, the simplest and most important lesson I was ever taught in school, though I never expected my words would still have value all these decades down the road. For that, I’m very, very appreciative.
I’ll close with this: A good friend of mine died last week. He’d been fighting for his life for a long time, and now that battle’s over.
I sat next to his bed in the nursing home a few hours before the end and rested a hand on his, which were folded across his chest, the very picture of a man in repose and at peace, ready for the next act.
I’ll never know if he heard what I said, but it wasn’t why I broke the silence, a little Christmas tree’s lights twinkling in the corner.
Quite simply, I just wanted him to know I was there on behalf of many, many others who felt lucky, grateful, even privileged to have been his teammate, his classmate and his friend over the years.
From ball diamonds to barrooms, cars to classrooms, pizza places to party houses, I let him know how long a shadow he had cast.
I told him there was a lot of love in that room, that he had touched so many lives and that as long as any of us who knew him spoke his name and shared our stories, he would always be remembered, and in that way, he had blessed us, every one.
Then I walked out into the December night to find it was snowing, and that’s when I realized there’d be no school tomorrow.
I couldn’t help the smile that began spreading across my face.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. You’re invited to find him on Facebook, where you don’t have to be related to feel like family.