Christmas miracle

This house was a disaster. Our newly acquired Christmas bounty arose in tenuous stacks around the living and dining rooms amid wrapping paper shavings, swatches of ribbon, tape dispensers and scissors, and the usual accumulation of pet fur. The kitchen sink was filled with and surrounded by batter-caked mixing bowls and platters, and crumpled paper towels and aluminum foil littered all other available counter space. A recent influx of wedding presents that hadn’t yet found their resting places populated the floors of the back rooms, still in their shipping boxes. Did we really own this much stuff?

My wife, whose appetite for organization is insatiable, bravely set to battle against the shambles around us. Like the Tasmanian Devil in reverse, she tore through the detritus, leaving all horizontal surfaces spotless and gleaming in her wake. Mountains of boxes became mounds and then disappeared entirely, their contents relocated to appropriate shelves and drawers. A pleasant Fraser fir aroma prevailed over the combination dirty-dishes-and-dog smell to which we had come home an hour before. Entropy has a nemesis, and its name is Whitney.

12-20

Having occupied this body for twenty-seven years, I have grown pretty comfortable with myself. I have a pretty solid gauge on my capacities, my limitations, the qualities that make me unique, and the ways in which I am not at all unique. All my life I have bounded from one activity to the next, satisfied that I have demonstrated ‘potential’ in whatever I’ve done: scholastic, athletic, musical, and more recently, comedic potential. In fact the ‘potential’ itself has satisfied me enough that I haven’t felt the need to actually try to realize any of it -- especially considering that the honest attempt and subsequent failure to achieve it would be very humbling indeed.

There comes a moment or a series of moments when one realizes that the range of outcomes he is capable of achieving in his lifetime is steadily narrowing. This might be obvious very early on to some people; it has only recently begun to concrete with me. I am starting to understand that there is little to be gained by avoiding the disappointments of failure; the realities of your time passing will humble you regardless.

I have seen this coming for a while now. The pressure to get out from under my stagnation has been growing. Each day that begins and ends the same way, with no tangible progress in any direction, is another shovelful of dirt on a long-mounting pile of frustration.

Having never stared into an indefinite future, into a blank landscape that will be shaped by toil and struggle and persistence rather than one that’s already laid out with potential, I am a little afraid and a …. time's up

A turning point....

After another winter night of brief, fitful sleep, my mind slowly registers the cell phone’s cascading digital notes that began again at exactly 5:40 am. More than four years into the daily routine required by my line of work, I still have not adjusted to its hours. While I was never ecstatic about being jarred into activity in the pre-dawn darkness, I lately have begun to regard my phone with a rather unhealthy contempt. On this particular morning, only my body’s waking lethargy prevents me from leaping out of bed to grab it up and fling it screaming into the bedroom wall. Instead I twist my legs out from under the duvet and find my feet clumsily on the floor, raise myself and stumble the three steps to where it sits on the floor, flip it open and manage to shut it up after a few swipes at the keys. I check to see if my wife has been disturbed by this flurry of graceless activity; a brilliant sleeper, she hasn’t stirred. I stand before the door and prepare myself for the second shock of this very early morning.

I turn the knob and gingerly pull the door open a little. As if it has been eagerly waiting for this moment throughout the night, a gust of cold air shoots through the aperture, stinging my skin awake. During winter in our eighty-year old, poorly insulated bungalow, the furnace pours hot air through the vents all night long, but only the bedroom manages to capture any of the heat; the closed bedroom door acts as a dam during the night, holding the temperature inside the bedroom at least ten degrees warmer than anywhere else in the house.

I step out into the heavy chill of the living room and, pulling the bedroom door closed behind me, shuffle quickly across the house to the bathroom. I flip the switch with my eyes closed and feel my way along the wall to the shower while my eyes adjust to the harsh light. Mercifully the shower produces steaming hot water in only a few seconds, and I pull back the curtain and step inside. It is during the next thirty seconds, with my body loosening under the warm, even pressure of the water and my brain detaching itself from an interrupted dream, that I realize something has changed.