I was 10. And I guess my mom had had "just about enough of this nonsense" so she told me a true story that in its truthfulness ensured I had been living a lie for quite some time.
You see the story went something like this...when I was say 4 or maybe 5 I was awakened in the pre-dawn hours of central California...where my grandparents lived, a valley city that brought such deep fog in the winter. It was cool, almost cold and if you looked past their house in the distance you could just make out the mountains and in some cases the winter snows. The valley was flatlands, fertile, rich with raisins and nectarines and we pulled and plucked these fruits to stave off the boredom of spending yet another day there. Christmas was a 3 day affair...Christmas Eve at my paternal grandparents, Christmas day at my maternal grandparents and then the five hour drive home with my younger sister to get to the real presents.
Looking back, I realize the heaven of having such family in proximity, the triad of the bloodlines, the ability to drive in minutes to see the family tree. At the time though I'm certain I felt it was a special hell, particularly since the good gifts were a day-trip away back at our home in San Diego. (Although I do take a special pride in the time my maternal Grandfather asked me what I wanted and I told him the Kiss Destroyer album...this was a few years later of course, '76, and the thought of that dear old man shuffling through music stores seeking a Kiss album continues to make me smile. Also the fact that my Grandmother had a compact record player that looked like a suitcase with a small speaker and it became the machine that played that Kiss album haunts me to this day...)
I digress...but such is the taffy pull of Christmas memories, the collision of times when there were chimney fires because my uncle decided to stuff all the wrappings up the fireplace and the subtle sweet moments when an evening grew quiet in the comfort of each other...
So anyways.
I was awakened that early morn, the evening still heavy on the land, the fog a gray blanket and really in the darkened neighborhood there was nothing to see. It was that one TV channel that is always on the blink, nothing but cable snow.
But then I heard it, probably because about 15 of my Mexican relatives kept saying "can you hear it" but against their din I heard the slightest of high key notes of a bell. And it was in the distance...and we had walked onto the porch of the house that my Grandfather had built...a reference I was to make 85 years later when I delivered his eulogy about a family that was hand-built by him...and as I walked the porchline I did hear something...I did hear what sounded like a bell.
Against the backdrop of the night I could see the road, tar black and moving into the distance, and the fog hovering slightly above it...and the bell seemed to be getting closer. I could feel the crush of the family behind me, the cold of the night and as I looked I swear I saw a red light beacon coming down the road.
There were no cars, no streetlights. No stars. There was an evening, quiet as a church, enveloped in fog, the cusp of a Christmas and I was hearing a bell and seeing a red light moving towards me.
The rest of the story gets a little fuzzy. Lots of hands imploring me to go back to bed, go back to sleep...my grandmother: "Timmy, you need to be asleep when Santa comes."
Okay. Like anybody is going to sleep after this event.
Needless to say, I stamped that memory in my mind like a coin-maker's strike...an indent upon my heart, a flashbulb in my brain, and when one of my neophyte elementary school friends laughed about Santa and said that he didn't believe anymore I just stayed silent.
Because I knew. Because I had seen. With my own eyes. Awakened in the sweet twilight like the man in the book, when light was dim and the rest of the world was asleep...I had had my moment and I knew what I saw.
7 years old, 8 years old...didn't matter. My smugness was the truth.
9 years old. 10. I was debating teenagers on the existence of something that they hadn't seen.
"But I'm telling you what I saw"
In that kitchen, there on Belle Glade Avenue, a corner house across from Lake Murray where I grew up playing baseball and had a pool and my parents had parties and we were happy and got our first dog...in that kitchen my mom broke the news to me like she had dropped an egg. Oops. Sorry. Let's clean that up.
When she wanted to bring up a serious subject she called me "Tim".
Today, 40 years later, she still calls me "Timmy".
I remember turning to her...we had been cooking or helping or baking or something. But I remember her height above me, and I remember the matter of fact way she admitted the truth.
"Tim, that was your Uncle Steve. He had borrowed your Uncle Benny's army flashlight with the red lens. You really need to stop telling people that you believe in Santa Claus because you saw him."
Bam. Needle skips off the record. An icicle falls and shatters.
It wasn't a collapse. It was just the realization that something fragile but treasured can break so easily. Can break into a place where it just cannot be put together again. Faith dissipates, but faith to a child is not the same. Trust is just a hope. A memory is ideally written in ink but sometimes it is written in pencil.
I absorbed the story, but I also held onto a piece of it...like the way you clipped out an article from a magazine. You ripped out a memory to preserve. You decided on your own conclusions.
Many years and a couple of kids later I still can see that twilight gray and the single penetrating red. I can still hear my family behind me, wondering at the moment that was happening...many of those on that porch night have gone...or have changed...
But to me, Christmas is that moment, when things stopped for a second, and all the things that they had told me could happen did happen...and I was there with them when it did.
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