“Now look, if you’re gonna come around here
and say those sort of things,
You gotta take a few on the chin…
Yeah, you’re talking about sin and redemption,
Well you better wear your thickest skin…
Sometimes you can’t please everyone,
Sometimes you can’t please anyone at all
Sew your heart onto your sleeve,
And wait for the axe to fall…”
- Bill Mallonee & Vigilantes of Love, “Skin”
No apologies.
No excuses.
No guilt.
It’s fake.
It’s artificial.
It’s fabricated, simulated, imitated, manufactured, plastic, bogus and faux.
It’s phony.
It’s a monstrosity - 9 towering feet of man-made Christmas forgery that I willingly conspire with every year.
We bought it when we moved into this house and then discovered we needed something big to fill a big space.
A festive-centerpiece-showpiece-stop-you-in-your-snow-shoes-level-holiday attraction.
We needed a big deal and we got one.
It’s the Christmas tree I’ve been assembling - yes, assembling - annually, for nearly a quarter of a century now.
The biggest tree in the neighborhood.
But it requires effort.
Effort in dragging it up out of the basement, like I’m an extra in a Sopranos-hide-the-body episode.
Effort in separating each piece into their faded-color-coded-wristband-wreath-of-branches.
That’s my term.
“Wreath of branches” - for every grouping of 8 or 10 branches that need to be individually arrayed and inserted into filling out the 9-foot “trunk”.
“Wreath” helps me keep the process festive.
Effort in stringing the lights and deciding on 9-feet worth of ornaments.
A titanic-esque-Tannenbaum-undertaking.
And it stays up past Christmas, too.
Too much effort to do the okay-now-hurry-up-let’s-strip-the-house-bare-everything-comes-down-the-day-after ridiculousness.
Never understood that.
Even without the 9-foot spectacle of fakeness.
Christmas-spirit-killjoys.
Sociopaths.
My once-a-year-big-fat-Christmas-tree-raising has taken on new meaning since my Covid-chaos rite of passage.
I look forward to it now.
I curate a playlist, pour an outsized, appropriately festive drink, and the convening of the wreath of branches begins, one by one by one.
It’s become a ritual.
A sacred ritual.
A sacred-advent-breath-reflective-ritual of peace.
A Solomonic-Byrds-esque-to-everything-there-is-a-season-turn-turn-turn moment-in-Christmas-time-to-reflect ritual.
Descartes with a twist: “I build my tree, therefore I think.”
And I thought a lot this year while I re-constructed our tree.
About life.
My life.
Family.
Lauren.
The Season.
Friends.
Health.
My health.
What was, is, and could have been.
Lots of thinking while grooving, imbibing and building.
I thought about some words that have floated around out there for some time.
Some words that have always seemed off to me.
Not quite right.
Especially since Covid came barging into our lives.
My life.
Good bumper sticker stuff, maybe, but then again, not really.
It’s these words:
“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.
Or words to that affect.
Always bothered me, but I could never explain why.
A few days before the coming-together-of-the-tree-ritual, I read something that crystallized for me what I hadn’t been able to put into words.
Something that helps me put the finishing touches on this, the final episode of Tales of the ‘Rona.
Read on.
(I’ll have to explore a bit to recover who wrote the piece.)
“They say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.
I don’t agree.
Some things that didn’t kill me came so close that they’re still damaging.
They didn’t make me better.
Some things made me worse.
Are we stronger for what we’ve been through?
Maybe, but the price for that strength was often not worth it.
As it turns out, people are not iron.
We do not get tempered by being beaten and going through the flames; we mostly just get PTSD.
Trauma and pain and suffering are bad, end of statement.
Generally speaking, they don’t make you stronger or tougher, they just mess your life up, potentially until said life ends.
Going through trauma sucks.
Having to go through daily abuse, daily gunfire, or the constant deaths and injuries of people you know and care about takes a toll, and you can’t always get that back.
Even a one-time trauma like losing someone close to you can be enough to screw with your life and coping mechanisms for years or decades.
Can’t some things just break you?
And can’t that be okay too?
This whole world wants you to believe that admitting defeat makes you weak.
For God’s sake, bleed.
And bleed openly.
There can be pride in vulnerability.
Honesty is maturity.
And really, it’s the things that did kill me, that made me…”
Amen.
I’m still sorting through these words and concepts, hard ones to be sure, but there’s a distinct, albeit dark, ring of truth in them.
I’ve bled, and bled openly in this blog, these Tales of my Covid nightmare.
It’s been a therapeutic labor of love for me; hopefully the same, in some way, for others.
Two years on, stuff lingers, but stuff is better, too.
Much better.
I am fortunate and blessed to have been given time.
More time.
Time for my family.
For Lauren.
For friends.
For life.
And hopefully for many more sacred rituals of re-constructing my big, fat, fake tree.
Amen.
Thanks so much for taking this ride with me.
It’s meant the world to me that you’d spend a little of your time reading about my life.
I’ll be back.
The next iteration of my blog will deal with other aspects of my life - our lives - like spirituality, God, the Church, music, politics, and, of course, pizza…please stay tuned…
