# bring back caroling

            Christmas was two days away.  The plan was to drive from Flint, Michigan to Glens Falls, New York to get Mom out of the rehabilitation facility and home for Christmas Day, make egg nog and cook dinner.  To realize the plan, we had to begin the cleanup as soon as we arrived.  She had to be able to get up the steps and down the hall to the kitchen table using a walker, and the hall was an obstacle course:  coat tree, pie safe, two-drawer stand, and shelf with candle-stick and a brass bowl full of buttons.  Interstate 69 was clear all the way to Sarnia, but by the time we sat in the Portugese bakery in Strathroy drinking coffee and deciding whether to buy a Christmas bread that looked like an edible wreath with confectioners’ sugar dusting big pieces of candied fruit, the snow was coming down thick and fast.  “Come on, we’ve got to decide and get on the road,” said my husband.  I bought the break and even though there was little room in our car-top carrier, we stuffed it up top with the tree I bought from L.L. Bean that arrived without working lights.  Paul had made a special trip to Bronner’s--the Christmas store in the faux Bavarian town of Frankenmuth, Michigan--to buy new ones on a hectic day of packing, wrapping, unwrapping.  Katya was curled up in the backseat with her black pillow.  Panda, our corgi, was in the very back and not barking, settled down, we hoped, for a long winter’s nap.  We were bringing the stuff of Christmas home, and, at the same time, getting ready to fill a dumpster that we scheduled to arrive the day after Christmas, making room at the Inn so to speak.  “I hope you have a nice trip,” a friend of mine had said, “and I think that whatever does or doesn’t happen at the house, it’s more important what happens here,” and she placed her hand on her chest.

            Just after Mom fell in November, I stayed in the house alone with the other mice.  The first night I remember washing at the kitchen sink before crawling over piles of stuff to get into the sofa bed in the room that had once been a family room before my grandparents came to live with us.  Us kids used to sit on a daybed and watch Bonanza through breezy afternoons filled with endless sunshine after we’d been invited to swim in the Tulley’s pool.  But this room had been repurposed when my grandparents moved in and needed a place to sleep.  There were still older memories—they didn’t go away—of my mother sitting in a rocking chair, wetting strands of hair to roll up in those wire brush, painful-looking rollers and watching General Hospital and I still remember my parents calling to us to “come see” the first astronaut set foot on the moon, weightless and bouncy on the small black and white screen where there was always “snow.”

Just as it had been years since the “family room” held a family, Mom’s bathroom was not what I would call clean.  I’d always hated the green paint that gave my reflection a corpse-like pallor.  The piles of unused wash clothes on the shelf had been collecting dust, smoke, and soot from the stove for years, and the same towel that read “Bah-Humbug” (a gag gift from Mom’s sister) still hung on the towel bar.  Was it ever used?  Did Mom ever wash it?  The kitchen sink was a safer bet.  It was deep and the porcelain basin had worn well.  It was still white.  I ran the tap cold, soaped a washcloth, rubbed it around my face, made tiny circles on my eyelids, dropped the wash cloth, cupped my hands, making them into a bowl and rinsed.  When my head was down in the sink, I thought I heard voices, happy voices, coming from the dining room where the only cheerful thing now is a carnival tiger.  I saw Mom standing in the kitchen, pulling trays of hot hors d’oeuvres out of the oven.  I was awake and dreaming, hallucinating a Christmas Eve party from long ago, back when my father was still alive, and he would gather the neighborhood kids together and we would run from house to house ringing bells and singing two songs.  Let’s do “Joy to the World,” No!  Hark the Herald Angels!  What about “We Three Kings”?  We ran and shouted suggestions breathless as we waited for the door to open—our cue to release all that red-cheeked energy that would burst forth in clouds of melody and breath.  A party would follow at our house—full of noisy neighbors and kids giddy with the excitement of getting to bed so Santa could come.  The voices said to me that somewhere in this house there was real warmth still:  it’s just that it was buried so deep in time, which had ruined everything.  Mom was in the hospital, and I was lonely in the house, listening to voices, not knowing whether they lived beneath the clutter or inside myself. 

         But this time I was coming with Paul and Katya, and I wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, join the mice.  We arrived at Mom’s house late on December 23^rd—not a moment too soon.  We’d come through the Mohawk Valley in freezing rain, and I’d seen the dark mountains looming over the lights of Amsterdam that twinkled down below along the river.  The driveway and porch steps were a sheet of ice.  After unlocking the house, turning on some lights, and checking the heat, I made my way to the garage, lifted the door on a chaos of boxes and furniture and stuff balanced it heaps, but I managed to find the shovels and ice pick to begin clearing a pathway for Mom.  Inside, I needed to make a bed up for Katya in the room with the wood stove, but it was dark.  I flipped switches on the table and floor lamps.  Nothing.  The outlets weren't working and the damper on the stove was stuck.  What to do?  Improvise.  The table top tree!  I remembered that its lights ran on batteries.  I set it up and, sure enough, the tree gave me enough light to fix the bed in the spot when Mom, on Christmases when felt ambitious, would place the manger barn that her father had made for the nativity scene.  I swaddled Katya in Mom’s puffy blankets and then joined Paul, who has already begun to sort the piles of mostly junk mail around and under the kitchen table. 

Mom’s is a house full of useless things that are there not for anyone’s convenience but seemingly for their own pleasure.  On the bay window sill sits a piece of green slag from the Batsto iron furnace, several old bottles with Glens Falls marks on them, a cobalt blue Shirley Temple glass, a black man (made of lead) wearing a straw hat with his black dog, various paperweights, little candles and crocks, shells and rocks.  Similar groupings of objects filled every available space in Mom’s house with something like personal thoughts and idiosyncratic preferences.  Having grown up here, I’d learned to treat these spaces as something like altars that should not be disturbed. 

Now, however, without the presence of the “Duchess” (as she’s called at Rehab), we can acknowledge that there is a life more important than the quiet life these objects have led.  As I lifted, examined, washed, polished, threw out, took down, and rearranged, I didn’t feel like I was marring my mother’s creation but writing in the margins of her book, adding my energies and thoughts to hers.  The next night, which was the night before Christmas, my little family ate a pizza from Amores as we struggled to hang the curtains back up that we’d washed at the laundromat, and we put the finishing touches on a clean kitchen in which—tomorrow!—we would cook Christmas dinner for Mom.  Would she notice that we’d moved things?  We can just say what we’ve been saying for years that we put the stuff “down cellar.”  Paul and I laughed at the boxes of saved junk mail and the crates of shoes—so many identical pairs, and the piles of catalogues and Country Living magazines.  We lit candles and drank small glasses of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Highland Scotch, compliments the cupboard above the oven that also contained Mom’s burnt-out light bulb collection.  I opened one more tiny drawer in the telephone stand, and near the top there is a snapshot—the only one I’ve ever seen—of Christmas caroling.  There he is!—my father totally concentrated and animated, belting out the song of the moment.  I am leaning against him, singing and smiling at the same time, and there is my brother, Jim, neighbor girls Jody Dennett, Kath Sheehan, and Cathy Canape, and my sister, Katie.  I remember that night.  We stood on the porch and rang the doorbell of our own house to surprise Mom, who was probably buried in work back in this very kitchen.  “Oh, come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.  Come and behold him, born the king of angels, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him.” 

from left to right:  Mary Jo, Joseph, Cathy C., Kathleen Sheehan, Jim, Jody Dennett, Katie 

I didn’t need the photo to remind me of that night as I had already found the feelings in myself and was, with a family of my own, preparing to celebrate the possibility of homecoming, the hope of new birth for my 87-year-old mother.  I put the precious little photo aside to look at other artefacts—all of which tell me things about the girl I was.  There is Mom’s red Christmas card address book that I once thumbed through as I wrote the cards, signed our names, and addressed the envelopes to Mom’s friends from Georgian Court College and her family who still lived in South Jersey.  There is the Christmas card that I designed and Pop had printed:  with pen and ink, I drew Mary as a young girl, holding a doll in her lap.  There are extra cards we never sent—simple scenes of a family with pets in a stable.  Mom had saved the song books I made for my wedding.  Each thing seemed to offer evidence of my energies and my desires to contribute to making a family.  I kept checking the caroling photo because I was afraid that my father’s face would disappear.  When he died, his face changed and it’s all but gone from my memory now.  Even when I look at the snapshot, it is hard to focus on his face, and I don’t understand why.  In truth, the photo was and is almost unnecessary because the memory is so alive in me, and in that memory I hear his voice singing “on a cold winter’s night that was so deep.  Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel.  Born is the king of Israel.”  Even so, finding the little photo felt like a blessing for opening the door of the past (being the genius of a new, more livable, house) and for still bringing Christmas in (with song in the way my father taught me to do).

Postcript

Finding the caroling photo did, however, explain a strange impulse I had before leaving Flint.  I’d decided that instead of just walking through the ruined neighborhoods on the city’s east side, I would knock on doors and ask people if they needed anything:  prayers, coats, gloves, kids’ toys, anything.  Because I am shy and a little afraid of offending people, I put together a flyer—a kind of Christmas card.  Still I was fearful of actually distributing the cards.  The color copying was pricey, and I think I only did $20.00 worth.  Finally, it was that that motivated me, and I did walk the familiar streets and pop them in peoples’ boxes.  I made a point to hit a particular house on Missouri Street where I’d seen a woman and man with a baby carrier walking from car to door many times.

This is the image and the text that was on the "card"---------------------------------------------------------

I walk through this neighborhood almost every day with my dog.  Things can seem bleak with all the burned out shells of houses, but the bleakness makes the shiny things stand out even more brightly:  Christmas lights, a tree twinkling in the window of a house where people live, the smile of a rare passerby, the moon, a dusting of snow, a yard that is well taken care of, and WATER … living water again.   
I wanted to wish you peace and to share whatever pain and struggle you are enduring.  If there is anything you need:  Prayers for specific things  A food item  A coat  Boots, socks, gloves  A toy for a child  Anything that wouldn’t break me (I’m just a struggling teacher) 

Please call 701-1009 or 239-5139 or email mkietzma@umflint.edu   

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Today, January 8^th, after the Christmas season officially ended with the feast of Epiphany yesterday, I walked down Missouri Street again, thinking about the connection between caroling and my desire to connect with the people who live on the streets of this poor poor neighborhood.  A woman opened her side door and yelled to me,

“Are you the lady who left that paper in my mailbox?”

“Yes!”

“I knew it was you.  I told my fiancé.”

“Well, I walk through here all the time, and just felt like making a connection and helping even a little bit, you know?  Do you need anything?”

“No, but I want to tell you that I think it was a very thoughtful and kind-hearted thing to do.” 

Wow!  All I could think as I walked away is that thoughts really are extraordinarily powerful.  As soon as I saw her house, I began wondering how my card had been received.  It was then that she opened her door and thanked me for the song, my lyrical impulse to love.  This sequence of events like my father’s face which I still cannot bring into focus, tells me that we must fully commit to every song, literal or metaphorical.  I hemmed and hawed—should I pass out the flyers or not?  My husband thought it was silly, “they’ll think you’re a Jehovah’s Witness.”  My daughter thought it was a “white person thing” to do.  I was too fearful to knock on doors, but I still did it—I went door to door and wished my neighbors well in my own way.  Maybe next year (or next season), I’ll be able to do it in full voice.