Home for the Holidays

I was in Charlotte this past week, since the end of the yoga teacher training. Well, there was one day between, and that I spent with Zach in San Francisco; his wife was out of town. We don’t have too much to talk about, but we hung out like we used to: silently without interacting. The term’s parallel play: Zach suggested we make soft shackles, where you make a loop of braided rope and a stopper knot to close it off. I’ve got one around my wrist and one on my water bottle as a carabiner to attach it to my backpack. It was a perfect activity to do together. Amazing how things stay the same.

The next day I came to Asheville to stay with my cousin Kathleen there; she’s a fabulous cook, and it was fun to hang out with her. She’s worried about her older daughter, who’s washing out of yet another residential therapy program. I shouldn’t say “is washing out”: the daughter’s not been showing up to therapy sessions, nor performing the responsibilities she’s expected to in the group living arrangement. The details are fuzzy to me, but Kathleen estimated her daughter’s made about one in eight of her required hours of therapy and programming; once they lowered her workload, as it were, she was making about one in four of the required hours: which is to say, she’s doing the same amount as she was before, but expectations are lower. As Kathleen’s put it, the bar’s in the basement and her daughter’s still contriving to slip under it somehow. Dismayed by her consistent failure to progress, her parents are not paying for further treatment and are not accepting her into their homes. They’ve reached a point of fatigue beyond which all further labors only drain them without advancing prospects for their daughter. So come the beginning of next month (and year!), my little cousin’s out on her ass. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, except they won’t take her back into their houses, and they won’t expend money to support her.

“I hate it for them,” is what my mother would say. Would have said. It’s got to be in the past tense. I took communion during Christmas Eve service at St. John’s Baptist Church in Charlotte, where my aunt Selina has gone for more than fifty years. The church is dying out; traditional-style churches are. Lots of these people who advocate Christian values are Christian in name only: they don’t know the rudiments of their own religion, not that theoological technicalities or bible trivia are necessary for religious sincerity, but when people say “Christian”, they mean a certain aesthetic ideal of a phantasmatic lost social homogeneity and order. I escaped into frustration at the religious formalism, that they observed the form of the religion devoid of content, because I was crying in the pew trying to meditate on god, to pray, earnestly for the first time in a long time: not crying because it was particularly difficult to access god or focus on it (distractions about the weakness of the eucharistic prayer not withstanding), but because I miss my mother and everyone who’s dead. They’re gone, and the holidays always bring their ghosts back. “Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow.” As the original version has it, “until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”¹ My mother always pointed that line out in that song and said it made her cry. I understood intellectually but not viscerally why it upset her so; but now I also feel that pang in my heart and behind the eyes whenever her absence makes itself felt.

My cousin Karen, whom I’ve only gotten close to after my mother’s death because my mother didn’t like her very much and we never spent much time together, hugged me after the service, because she saw me struggling. I spent Christmas day with her and her family, and it was lovely. They’re struggling with their private school, which is falling apart (as they tend to do), and there aren’t any straightforward alternative options: Indian Land, South Carolina is not known for its excellent public schools, and the private schools in Charlotte are distant, expensive, and not obviously an improvement over the situation they’re in now. At least they’ve got solidarity from the other parents; presumably some solution will be forthcoming, even if they have to found their own damn school.

I, in the meantime, am off to Chicago for a whistle-stop (26 hour) visit, then on to Germany for the Junulara Esperanto Semajno. Then a few days in Berlin to see the sights with some folks from JES, then on to Brusels to visit Mads and Cíara, and London to visit Max (whom I’ve not seen since graduation) and Ellery. I might see my father and sisters, in the sense that it’s technically possible that I could see them. I doubt it’ll happen, but you never know. Christmas miracles do happen.

The current thinking is that I would like to be in London to cultivate social relations there, and that the strategy for a visa would be to train to teach computing in secondary schools. I loved all the teaching I got to do during my master’s and think it’d be a fun thing to be up to, at least for a while. Someone once pointed out to me that the way to master a subject is to teach the fundamentals over and over to beginners: I believe it. And hey, if it’s not for me in the long run, I’ll have the experience, skills, and qualifications to do something else. In the post-apocalypse (I’ve got a pretty French attitude about the future in this way), being a wandering teacher of youth would be a sweet deal: I’ll teach some kids to read, write, and do arithmetic in exchange for room and board. Unless there’s a Leibowitz-style great simplification: then I’d have to run and hide. But if the prognostications of A Canticle for Leibowitz come even the least bit true, I’ll have bigger problems than what I want to be when I grow up.

What’ve I got more to add? That’s the update for now. I’ll end with something I said to Selina as she was stressing herself sick over preparations for lunch on Christmas Eve. God himself couldn’t procure a room in the inn for his own son’s birth (Lk. 2:7): the feed trough was good enough to accept the one who (according to Christian doctrine) is the beginning and the end, God’s logos and only son. Of course, “he came to his own, and his own did not receive him” (Jn. 1:11). But it was good enough: Mary didn’t die of an infection, and the baby grew up healthy and strong. The plan of salvation was in no way derailed by God’s failure to book a room far enough in advance. That seemed to calm her down, at least for a few minutes. Then she was back to her old shit; I resisted saying “Martha, Martha” (Lk. 10:41), but Karen brought that story up the next day. But that’s a whole other conversation that we didn’t get in to (I picked the story of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha as the gospel reading during my mom’s funeral, so there’s a lot to say).

I, in the meantime, am off again to the next stop and running out of time to get this post wrapped and up: it’s almost time to take off! Happy Saturnalia everyone, enjoy your time with family (or not!), and be safe. I’ll see you next year.