What with the mountains of torn wrapping paper, opened boxes and packaging material, the discarded holiday cards, the pile of dried-out wreaths and garlands and the mounds of food and food waste left after our holiday feast, the holidays bring plenty of garbage.
The garbage people give us one regular can, one recycling can and one yard trimmings can. We pay extra for another regular can. These four cans serve our weekly garbage needs for most of the year, until the holidays, when our garbage production overwhelms our suddenly meager can capacity. The garbage people will only take trash that fits within the cans, so we're forced to pile up our extra holiday trash in our trash area, doling it out over subsequent weeks until we finally get rid of the last of it in late January or early February.
So as I lug another bulging garbage bag from the house to trash pile, I look down at the world below my hilltop house and get this strong urge to just huck the bag down the hill, sending it out of sight and out of mind. And freeing up much-needed space in our crowded trash area.
I get the same urge when confronted with the fathers in our family, who through habit and inertia, and a strangely resilient vestigial shred of familial obligation, manage to materialize back into our lives every holiday season like ghosts of nightmares past, present and future.
What horrors will they perpetrate this year? At best they just lurk in the corner, sheepishly avoiding their divorced wives and neglected children. At worst they assert themselves, vainly seeking the paterfamilias status they ceded long ago, demanding filial piety from those they left behind. They retain their ability to re-open old wounds but, as time goes by and more and more of our lives get lived without them, they are fading into doppelgängers, men so full of themselves that they're empty.
How much easier it would be if we could just huck our memories of them down the hill too, sending them out of sight and out of our minds and clearing some much-needed space in our pile of cares. But I fear, no matter what we do, we're doomed to be haunted by what they did and didn't do.
That's a very nice piece. I've not been around here reading much during the holidays, but I just wanted to let you know -- tha's a good 'un.
Posted by: I, Squub | December 30, 2004 at 11:30 AM