An old-fashioned Christmas? (Dec. 14, 1981)

                                                                                                                                      Dec. 14, 1981

Eleven days till Christmas and not a present bought. It's one of those seasons which hasn't hit me yet, except maybe for the little things of the past popping up. Like Felice. Though others have risen up from the grave, too, like faces from the Shayds. John Ritchie and Marylyn Ryan have become lovers. Two years after my association with them. I guess it's appropriate. It's Christmas season and I've felt naked without some aspect of the band.

 Though in truth, I hadn't really divorced myself from it completely. Jimmy and I still see Patty Joyce, a near-romantic element of my life now married to a man she called as bastard. Jimmy had commented on the affair but has warned me not to get involved. It's hard not to. Things keep pushing themselves into my life.

 I keep hoping the season will fade without major incident like 1972 and 1973, hazy comfortable years of loneliness which one day bumps into the next without clear distinction. All I want to do it hide in my room and write bad rhyming poetry like I did back then. I remember coming home during those years to the cold Montclair house, the boys leaving me off at the door with chores of their own. Ed, Sue, Ellen, Meatball, all off to their own families. Nothing but the unpainted hallways and my cluttered room. Felice was on my mind then, too, a still bleeding wound which would take years to heal. If anything, I remember the pain, and fear this Christmas might become one of those from which the only memory is pain and cruelty and loneliness and despair.

 The years following had more tradition, and I find myself aching for some aspect of them, too, particularly from 1974 on, when meeting Jimmy, Garrick and Frank made up my yearly ritual. They made 1972 seem worse for its lack. No more Felice at Christmas-- the Hollywood boulevard movies in 1969, the radio City movie in 1970, the small tree propped up in the paneled apartment on North Lombard in Portland Oregon. Nor Crooks Avenue home and big living room tree from my youth.

 Now, for the first time, Garrick, Jimmy and Frank have gone, leaving me feeling as empty in Passaic as I did in Montclair, I've started a cycle of loneliness that hits every nine years. Gathering in a Christmas spirit is like trying to catch blowing leaves. You never quite capture all the elements. Perhaps we'll have a white Christmas this year-- as if that means anything.