Welcome To New Friends

This morning, the day after Christmas, I had that feeling again of eyes following me...or something else, something new, as I looked at the blog, seeing the xmas poem had scheduled and published on its own. There was a new friend, daryldarko, to welcome. He is an photographer and artist and quite mad, so I feel very much at ease. I had spent the previous two days, Xmas eve and Xmas day, with my own family - blood, you might say - and they were run-of-the-mill to the point of disaster. Things were only saved by my brother, who got amusingly drunk, and started to laugh at all the right spots, which was different from the rest of the perplexed multitude - laughing only when desperation seemed to set in.. We were at my parents', and I had to drive him home with my parents' old Hudson, and was then dependent on my other brother for a ride home myself - my daughter, visiting for the holidays, had stolen my car and driven off yelling "Ha-ha! So long, Dorks!" as I stood in my parents driveway, feeling despair creep up my pant legs...either that or snow was melting on the corduroy. My mother had come up with a brilliant idea for gifts this year: she cannot bear to throw anything away, keeping even the plastic domes once used to cover grocery store cakes. She says they come in handy. I have noticed in the past that this type of recycled container leaves a little to be desired in the areas of concern to the Department of Leak Prevention, however. These hard lessons had usually been taught by things such as gift dill pickles, briney things with perdurable odors, transported from her place to mine, and leaving one's automobile with the faint odor of a delicatessen for years to come. Anyway, it was to be a White Elephant Christmas, where we gift things we don't want anymore, and hope that it may end up half as funny as a Mad-Libs game among the dull and abstemious. Since the rest of the people involved had no particular fear of the Waste Collection and Recycling Industry, most of us had already disposed of the disposables, not having saved them for Xmas gifts like my mother had done, so she was one or two up on us already: the way she likes it. My wife and daughter received some used articles of clothing. I got a plastic coffee mug, wide in the keel for stability in one's car while driving into "the mixing bowl" or "malfunction junction" during "rush hour" while one "commuted" to the "rat race". I also received a handsome plastic carafe, about 3/4 liter in size, to presumably hold more of "the black" (coffee) in. All I needed was a container for "the white" (milk) and "the sweet" - I forget what the sweet refers to. I got a small, travellers' size container of tooth floss. I got some Altoids - new, not used. During the summer, we were cleaning the dining room in their summer cottage and came across an empty box from American Spoon Food jams, which seemed to have been behind a table for five years or more. It was black and dusty, and the top had a picture of an American primitive style painting, rather like Grandma Moses' watercolour of Nantucket harbor. She had just broached her White Elephant idea that morning, so now I suggested she give it to my niece. Well, I had a gift now, a box, a black box and obviously old, and I thought - irony of ironies, 'tis the American Spoon Food jam box back to haunt me! But it wasn't. It was merely another antique box, into which another item had been stuffed. I think it was a roll of toilet paper. I began to shut down the memory unit at this point, hardly even noticing the three used egg cups at the bottom of my gift bag; white and blank egg cups - not cute at all - no pictures of rabbits or bunnies or happy monks: the type of pictures one is used to seeing on the broadsides of egg cups; just white, and an egg-shell white, too, I may add. I had a brief nightmarish flash of Keir Dullea in 2001 eating some soft boiled numbers from these babies, in that scene where he is old, very old, and tottering towards whatever Bethlehem only Stanley Kubrick could imagine...old and in a white, white room of whiteness, eating white eggs in porcelain cups. I began to hum: I'll fly away, after egg cups, I'lll flyyy awayyy! I was trying to get things moving out of the slough of holiday despond we had excavated for ourselves in the front room. The brother I was to catch a ride with was drinking egg nogs, one after the other, and - as the song goes - showed "no signs of stopping". Since I spend more time with the folks, the complaints, grievances, and stories they were regalling him with were old and archival bits for me, but for him they were fresh and dewy, and he felt impelled to make commentary and adopt a "take the bull by the horns" type of "get 'er done" attitude towards Comcast and the Township and Disturbers of my father's peace & quiet, which everyone must have assumed I had not done, merely shuffling my feet and moaning and wondering when some intelligent go-getter - like my brother - might come along to help. Rain was promised, and once the sun has set, temperatures usually get colder...even on Christmas. So I drove the one brother home. He discovered all the smoke shops were closed, it being Xmas day. I gingerly looked around at the shuttered stores. Not an open shop in sight. We passed the SpeedyQ: he said he and his lady friend had stopped there last year after Xmas. "Really." I said. "Yeah" he said. "Who, pray tell, was hauling your backsides about town back then?" I asked. We thought, and it was clear I was hauling their backsides back then. "Yeah." I said, "It was open: a twenty and a sixer." recalling the cigarettes he had bought - 20 to a pack - and the beer - six to a pack. I escaped soon. I drove back, hoping coats would be laid out, ready to encumber shoulders, but only ran into a pile of indifference, nogs, and the dreary sisters Chit & Chat. The minutes limped by like the remnants of Pickett's Charge. At last, we left. On the way home, I discovered my brother had received a book I had given my father - new, not recycled - about 4 years ago. After driving for fifteen minutes, the hard rain started.