Month: December 2010

In the small town (around 8,000 people at the time) where I grew up, things just stopped on Christmas. Oh, not things in the houses, or things on the highways, but by the time Christmas Eve rolled around there came a time during the late afternoon when everyone in town had actually closed their shops and gone home.

It stayed like that until maybe noon the next day, at which time a couple of gas stations opened, mainly because they were essential. Maybe a couple of bars opened too, I don’t know, and how would a little kid?

Inevitably the Christmas Eve procedure created pent-up economic demand-something needed batteries, somebody needed a tool to fix the thing they broke while assembling it, somebody discovered they didn’t have any butter for one of the dishes, the list was inevitable and remains totally to this day unpredictable.

But after you broke the airplane wing or discovered you couldn’t make the tank go, or whatever the problem was, you had to wait. The gas station would be open tomorrow noon.

That wasn’t the convenience store, mind you-we hadn’t thought of those yet. The gas station would have batteries, they always did, or glue, or whatever-you took your chances and went there looking for it even if you KNEW it wouldn’t work.

Now that it’s fifty years later, the news is filled with economic recovery stories about the Second Black Friday as Christmas shoppers are still buying on Christmas Eve. I’m going to be one of them.

Or I might be one of them on Christmas Day, not sure. I was busy online right up until this afternoon-I fielded an order which I drove through the snow to the Post Office and deposited it there by 3:00 and there was a lot of traffic moving around the town despite the snow.

I stopped by the convenience store by force of habit, but I know I didn’t need to-they’ll be there tomorrow.

Before I ran the package into the Post Office I thought maybe I could intercept our Postal Carrier on their way past the house after doing the turnaround beyond us, and I went for a little walk down the road in the quietly falling snow that was coming straight down (it’s been a year since it has done that I swear).

An occasional car went by (make that SUV-for some reason they’re the only thing you see on this road), but it was that same kind of quiet I remember from my days on West Ninth street, in awe as I looked out of the upstairs window with my new telescope at the patterns the frost formed on the trees in the far distance of six or seven blocks away.

Maybe it’s always that quiet, maybe I should go out there and walk down the street every day like lots of people in this neighborhood do, but somehow I doubt it.

It’s a serenity thing. The serenity thing is spiritual. It seems fleeting most of the time yet it hangs onto fifty-year old memories, happy to serve them up at any time.

You have to hit the pause button though.