LETTERS FROM HOME: CHRISTMAS LETTER 1994

Dec. 22, 1994

Christmas

letter

1994

Dear friends,

I've always deplored as impersonal and lazy these one-size-fits-all Christmas messages from our family to yours. Until this year. Be assured, the quality of our relationship has not deteriorated. Nor I have become a complete slug. It's the family part that has changed.

In the past year, I moved from Missouri to California and back. It was a pilgrimage to the land of holy trees to claim my spiritual other. Neither of us was sure we wanted to come back to Missouri and nobody thought we would. But California wasn't home anymore. Ultimately, home is wherever the people you have loved for eternities are.

Some nights, DC and I lie in bed confessing to each other how much we miss the immensity and freedom of California. All the reggaeheads, the New Age dreamers, the free-for-all of mountains and sea, 7.0 wake-up calls, exotic shopping (hers) and scintillating music (mine). But we are beginning to get inklings of another life available to us here.

Over the holidays, we'll be watching our neighbor's four dogs. We have not yet acquired any more animals of our own, in fact recently lost a finch, but this may be the trial that decides whether the zookeeper in DC finally emerges.

The gadfly already has. This week, she went before the city council to protest the mayor's gambit giving himself the authority to pardon crimes. The prosecuting attorney, whom DC babysat as a teenager, thought he'd heard better ideas, too. Their side won.

I was proud of my beloved introvert's gumption, while reminding her that the difference between an activist and a crackpot might come down to which one has access to a copying machine. (She does.)

It's been an emotional first year of marriage. Two miscarriages, uprooting and replanting ourselves, DC leaving her busy community clinic for the insecurities and isolation of self-employment.

Sometimes when she looks at me I can tell she's wondering who this stranger is who capsized her life and dragged her ashore in a place called Cape Girardeau.

It can be a nice place, I tell her. It's like that line in the "Cheers" song: "...where everybody knows your name." Or they went to school with your parents, or they know somebody who broke your heart. It's all the same: connected.

I realize this Christmas letter hasn't been nearly as newsy as the prototypes, which usually brag on the children and announce the arrival of new cars and promotions. All these are important, but what I want to say is: I'm glad to be alive with you on the third planet from the sun just this side of the millennium, glad to be in love with a woman as fierce and tender as DC. I'm mystified daily by the violence that hides in our hearts and encouraged by the compassion only a ventricle away.

When DC misses her California Christmas traditions, like cappuccino at Union Square and walking through Chinatown, I promise we'll start some of our own. Like the used Nativity scene she bought this year at a flea market, our traditions one day will become worn and treasured from loving handling. Like a Christmas letter from friends.

Love, Sam