Driving in Chicago (well, sort of)

This is a piece I wrote sometime around 2003 when I was working as a project manager for an environmental cleanup project outside of Chicago and losing my mind trying to deal with the many loony personalities in the local community of Oak Park. I had totally forgotten about it until I found it on a storage disk, and it made me laugh to remember everything my colleagues and I had to go through on that awful project. I was playing around with a sort of a Dave Barry writing style back then, so I thought it would be fun to post here.

If you are planning a fun-filled driving tour of a lawless third-world country where all the local drivers are self-taught, licenses and insurance are considered silly frills, lane markings are just suggestions, and the rules of the road are analogous with the rules of the jungle, you might want to consider spending a week in preparation by driving around Chicago.

Although I have experienced the joy of driving on a wide variety of roads and conditions in and around Chicago, most of my daily Chicago driving experiences have actually been in Oak Park, a small, rectangular suburb just west of the city. Chicago area suburbs are required to use some combination of seven words – oak, elm, forest, river, park, hurst, and brook – or else they cannot receive matching funds from the state of Illinois for maintenance of their many fine roads. This is why one avoids driving in Berwyn or Cicero.

“Suburb” is really a misnomer because Oak Park is quite urbanized with many impoverished neighborhoods complete with broken-down cars on the streets, a dynamic criminal element, a flourishing drug trade, and – of course – plenty of traffic. What sets it apart as a suburb, aside from legal incorporation, is the fact that many of its cab drivers speak English, even if only as a second language.

Oak Park is actually two very different places: The north is populated primarily by wealthy white people who own big homes designed by Oak Park’s patron saint, Frank Lloyd Wright. So loved is Frank Lloyd that the local government once sought to officially change its name to Franklloydwrightsville, but then they would have lost all that state money for road repairs and dog parks.

The south is pretty much indistinguishable from Chicago or Berwyn, and most of the people live in small homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s less successful brother, Skippy, who was later found to have suffered from attention deficit disorder and severe nervous twitches in his hands. Oak Park rules require that at least four houses in south Oak Park occupy the equivalent lot size as one house in north Oak Park.

Oak Park was named after its many oak trees and many parks, most of which eventually became the private yards of wealthy people in the north or were paved over to build lovely lower-income housing in the south.  In between the north and the south is a thriving business district – despite the best efforts of the local government – in which there are many expensive condos and town homes populated by Oak Park’s most influential residents: wealthy white homosexuals. 

Oak Park’s town motto is (and we are not making this up) “One tree, many nuts.”

Actually, Oak Park is a village, not a town. This change is believed to have been made shortly after its other patron saint, Hillary Clinton, published her book about taking villages, which I originally thought was a novel about the Vietnam War.  Imagine my surprise. I am still curious to know who actually wrote that book, but not curious enough to waste time reading it.

To say that Oak Park is politically liberal is like revealing that dolphins defecate in the water. Like liberals everywhere, Oak Parkers like to call themselves “progressives” because it fits with their collective superiority complex.

In the finest liberal tradition of trying to control other people’s lives as much as possible, Oak Park likes to regulate everything, and its village council is always very busy making up new rules to force everyone else to conform to their view of the world. On those rare occasions when they can’t think of something to make a new rule about, they amuse themselves instead by sending their bureaucratic minions out to harass restaurants and other businesses, issue parking tickets, or count how many pets residents have.

But the fact is that Oak Park can almost always think of something new to prohibit or require, and they are really very creative about it. For example, by official ordinance, it is illegal to own or carry a nuclear weapon within the village limits (we are not making that up).

It is also illegal to be a Republican or Libertarian, or to listen to conservative talk radio. Oak Park even has a village-sponsored jamming device located somewhere in the public library that is specifically tuned to prevent anyone from getting good reception on WLS-AM, the Chicago radio station that carries many conservative talk shows. I heard that Oak Park attempted once to make Christian prayer illegal, but a “higher power” prevailed in thwarting that attempt. (OK, so some of that might have been made up, but just a little.)

Oak Park prides itself on embracing human diversity (provided none of those diverse humans are conservative or Christian), and this is evidenced by the many black people and many homosexuals who live there. Of course, in Oak Park, you can’t actually say “black” or “homosexual” (you guessed it, they passed an ordinance).  In fact, the president of the village council herself proudly pledges allegiance to a rainbow flag.

Oak Park goes to great lengths to tout its many gay and lesbian residents because they are mostly white and have money. This allows them to claim the diversity mantle and act very superior while obscuring the fact that they really wish that most of the African-American people would stay in Chicago or Berwyn. As it is, most of the black people live in the houses designed by Skippy Wright that are crammed onto the small lots on the south side, while homosexuals generally live in expensive new condo developments near the business district, most of which were happily funded by the village government in order to attract more gays and lesbians with money.

Oak Park is believed to be the first community in the entire nation to be considering an ordinance requiring that all residents be homosexual. They believe this could also help solve the “African-American problem” by encouraging more of them to move to Chicago or Berwyn where they could remain heterosexual.

Although all residents of Oak Park are required to vote either Democrat or Green for federal and state offices, the village has a variety of entertaining political parties for its local elections with names such as the Village Managers Association, the Out Party, and the Village Citizen’s Alliance. But by far, the most popular local party is the Entitlement Party, sometimes known also as the Pity Party. 

The basic philosophy of this party is that they are all victims who are “owed” something by everyone else. In their view, “someone,” such as the federal or state government, corporations, or utility companies, should be forced (by village ordinance, of course) to simply give them stuff. This is because they believe they are entitled the same stuff that anyone else has, but should not be expected to have to actually work and earn it.

Admission to the Entitlement Party is generally open to anyone who is not a heterosexual white male. In some cases, however, heterosexual white males have been allowed to join the party, provided they sign a letter asserting how much they hate themselves for their race, gender, sexual orientation and the terrible treatment their forefathers perpetrated on everyone else.  Considering that Oak Park will probably enact a ban on heterosexual white males soon (unless they are officially registered as househusbands), the admission criteria may become moot.

Because so many of its residents chose academia over actually working for a living and are, therefore, very well educated, Oak Park has two weekly newspapers. One paper is called Oak Leaves and is so thick it has to be bound with staples. The actual news content, however, can be read in approximately five minutes. Oak Leaves is the less popular of the two papers because it is owned by a large corporation that publishes local papers all around Chicagoland. Due to this corporate relationship, it is largely considered to be a pawn of the right wing and ultimately responsible for keeping Guatemalan peasants in forced poverty and depleting the ozone layer.

The other paper, Wednesday Journal, is one of those publications where journalistic integrity is not just a motto, it’s an oxymoron. The Journal’s real motto is “All the News that’s Fit to Slant.” It is edited by an avowed socialist, and its staff is made up of “reporters” who were not good enough to intern for a large Chicago daily or work for the Oak Leaves. At the Journal, they never let facts get in the way of a good piece of left-wing propaganda.

Oak Park has a very entertaining government system with numerous autonomous entities such as the park district board and school district board, which provide opportunities for citizens with no talent and overriding Napoleon complexes to pretend they are actually on the village council making up all those ordinances to control everyone else. 

The park board is especially fun because everyone who gets elected believes that it is a stepping stone to higher elected office such as the sewer commission. No one actually gets on the park board because they have an interest in parks; they just want to pretend that they are the alternate village council and prepare for that big opportunity to move up to controlling sewers. Plus, they feel special when they get to go into “executive session.”

One of the most fun things to do on the park board is to feud with the village council and to say insulting things about village trustees, which will then get printed in one of the local papers, further heightening that board member’s renown in the community and enhancing that person’s opportunity to make it to higher office. Each of Oak Park’s newspapers is aligned with one of the boards; the Oak Leaves tends to side with the village council, while the Wednesday Journal exists largely as the park district board’s “newsletter.”

But I digress. This was supposed to be about driving in Chicago, wasn’t it?

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March of the Meat Machine

It’s the end of the day. Another “consultation” and more bad news. I trudge along in my black coat, a wool cap protecting my head from the cold wind, with a backpack over my shoulder, a gym bag in one hand, and in the other a set of techno-med images that seem to confirm there is a brain somewhere inside my head.

But the images only prove that there is a three-pound piece of meat inside my skull. And at the moment, that’s all it is: a piece of meat. No mind, no soul, just a meat-based computer executing an application called “walk.”

And a piece of meat is all I am – a meat machine marching slowly along the cold, slushy street and the crowded stairs and passageways of the subway in accordance with the meat computer’s instructions. As my brain tells my legs to put one foot in front of the other and my hands clutch the bags that dangle by my side, I just lurch forward, without expression, without thought, without feeling – without anything that might mark me as more than just a kind of organic robot.

I lag behind a wave of humanity moving from one station through a cold gray passageway to an adjoining station. They move past me and, for a moment, I am walking alone. Until the next wave comes up behind me.

In that brief interlude between waves, I wonder. Why am I walking through this place? Why am I in this city? Why have I been here for so long? Why has my life come down to a series of numb zombie walks through soul-less metro stations or along the same old gray streets? What has happened to me? Where did my spirit go that has left me to just exist inside this cocoon of flesh, blood and bone?

As I stand on the platform waiting for the next train with hundreds of other meat machines, I look at the concrete wall across the tracks. I wonder if this is real or if I am having one of my strange dreams. It would be better if it was a dream because I would wake up and snap out of it. But that’s not my luck.

Maybe I’m a ghost. I am moving like a disembodied spirit. But that can’t be; a spirit is still something of a soul, I suppose. And I am without spirit or soul. Imagine being emptier inside even than a ghost.

Neither am I dead, at least not completely. I live, but in every sense that matters, I am lifeless. Where is happiness? Where is love? Where is passion? What happened to reason? For that matter, where, even, is pain? I feel nothing, I am nothing.

Happiness? Were you ever here? Perhaps once. Before the shapeless black apparitions rose up from below and blotted you out. Larger and hungrier they became, sucking what happiness remained, faster and faster until there was no more. The light of joy finally went out for good, and I became one of those shapeless black apparitions myself.

Passion? The fire died, little by little, until all that remained were a few smoldering embers. And then they went cold, never to blaze again. The ashes have been cold for so long, it’s like they never held warmth in the first place. I can’t remember.

Reason? How can reason survive in a world that makes no sense? Everything I see – in the news, at work, in people around me, in everything everywhere – makes no sense anymore. It’s a card game with nothing but jokers. The world is broken, the people are broken. I am broken.

Love? It never existed. What I thought was love flew away long ago, far before I realized it was gone, replaced with tantalizing lies and sweet self-deceit, circus acts and predictable practical jokes for the mistresses of ceremonies.

Jump, jump up on the pedestal! Do tricks for me! Entertain and please me! Then go back to your dark little cage, and don’t let me be aware of you until I require you again.

Come on, Charlie Brown! Kick the football. Don’t worry, I will hold it still this time. I promise! Once again I trust, and yet again she pulls the ball away at the last moment. I fall on my ass as I’ve done so many times before, and she laughs the same evil laugh as each of those many times.

Love and trust: the moronic blabbering of self-loathing fools in a carnival sideshow.

Happiness, love, passion, friendship, trust, loyalty, basic human decency: all just so many lies and illusions.

But wait! I do feel something. There is pain.

Alas, it’s not pain of the soul or spirit. How can it be when there is no soul inside this meat machine? I can't cry; I've forgotten what that was like. No, it’s just physical pain. The back, the hip, the knee. Trying to stand up on a moving train with my hands full, while smug young nobodies sit with their faces in their smartphones.

I would hate them… if I could feel anything.

And so I push my way out of the subway, acting on instinct. Like salmon, we all flow in unison toward the stairs and climb up to the exits. I wonder if the other fish are as devoid of feeling as I am. To look at the faces, you would have to think so: there are almost never any expressions on the faces of the Kharkiv metro. But most of them probably still have some things to cling to that help them believe… in something. Good for them. I wonder what that might feel like. I wonder what feeling might feel like

The “walk” application in my meat computer guides me out of the metro and out to the cold street. And more slush. I trudge on to spend another empty evening of an empty life in an empty apartment so that I can “rest” for another empty day at an empty job tomorrow.

And the meat machine marches on.

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Tales from Dreamland

I enjoy my night dreams, when I have them. In fact, I find them so interesting that I keep a dream journal where I write down as much as I can remember about the dreams that I do manage to recall. To do it successfully, I have to have the presence of mind to actively run the dream back through my mind as soon as I wake up, and then either sit at the computer or jot down the key points in my bedside notebook. But it’s worth the effort.

The other night I was looking through my formal dream journal on my computer, and it came to me that some of those dreams could be the inspiration for some interesting stories. So I decided to try taking a few of the dreams, elaborating a bit, creating names for characters, and making some short stories out of them. I tried writing from different points of view (first person, second person, third person) and in a few different styles. What follows are a few examples:

Death by RV

You are motoring along a highway in a fairly large RV. You are not driving. Instead, you are sitting in a special seat toward the back of the vehicle. It is set up high so that your head and upper body reach through a special hatch in the top of the RV. From this vantage point, you look out over the roof of the vehicle, see the scenery all around you, and feel the sun on your head and the wind in your face as you race down the road.

It’s a bright summer day. The air is warm but fresh. All around you, everything is a succulent green. There is not a lot of traffic, and you are far from any city. As you pass through the semi-forested countryside, you catch the aroma of hay fields and stands of pine trees. From your perch atop the vehicle, it’s a perfectly beautiful day for traveling.

There are other people in the RV with you, but you don’t recall how many. You can hear them talking and laughing below you. One of them is your sister. You know this because she mentions that “Dad is up ahead of us” in a separate car. You are not sure who the other people are, but they seem to be having a good time.

Far up ahead, you can see that the road curves sharply to the left before running parallel to a large, wide river. It might be the Shenandoah. Way off to the left you can see that the road curves right again and crosses the river over a very long bridge. But you sense that you are approaching the first curve too fast. Something is wrong.

Instead of turning left with the highway, the RV barrels straight forward. It runs through the safety barrier, off the road, and toward a cliff. The ride becomes bumpy as the wheels run over uneven ground. At the edge of the cliff, you continue forward, flying out over the river, which is in a gorge far below. There is no way to stop it.

As you plummet toward the bottom of the gorge, the RV begins to turn over. You realize that the top of the vehicle, where you are now trapped, is going to hit the bottom first. As you turn over, you can see that you are headed toward huge rocks. You are going to be crushed. But you don’t scream; you can't.

Inside the RV, you can hear people yelling and crying. You hear glass and plates breaking. But you block out those noises and concentrate on the rocks that now seem to be racing up to meet you. Even though it is happening in an instant, it seems like slow motion to you.

You are keenly aware of everything around you. You can hear the whistling of the wind against the metal railings that line either side of the vehicle. You feel your hands grip the support bars along the hatch. You hold on so tight that it’s like either the bars or the bones in your hands will break. You can feel your hair, your lips, and the skin of your cheeks being thrust back by the force of the wind.

And still those rocks draw ever closer.

You know you are about to die a horrible, crushing death, and you wonder how much it will hurt. You want to look away, but you can’t. You wonder whether God – however you perceive the deity – will pull your soul out of your body at the last second to spare you the pain. Or will you die in agony?

And just as you are about to be smashed upon the rocks, everything goes black. There is nothing.

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Saving the Castle

It was medieval times, and there were thousands of people in and around a castle. The people of the castle were trying to defend themselves against an invading horde. The castle’s defenders were more sophisticated, knights and soldiers with better weapons and a sound defensive plan. They wore fine armor highlighted with cloth in sharp red and gold.

The invaders were barbarians, large men with great beards and long hair. They were clad mostly in leather and fur, but with rough iron breastplates and helmets, and they carried long swords and axes. Though they lacked the finery of their opponents, they had greater numbers and were ferocious fighters.

The battle was intense and moved into a tunnel complex below the castle. Despite heavy losses, the invaders were gaining ground toward taking the castle and the city. At one point, they had surged through the next-to-last defensive point, and most of their army was below the castle complex.

At this point, the commander of the castle’s defensive forces ordered

a black-powder fuse to be lit, and this caused a series of explosions that destroyed the castle and brought it down upon the attackers. The entire invading army was crushed and destroyed under the rubble of the castle. But the city had been saved.

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In the Kitchen

Derek and Cathy were in Derek’s kitchen peeling vegetables for dinner. The kitchen was not Cathy’s favorite place, and Derek was really more comfortable and capable in the kitchen than she was. But she enjoyed spending time together, even if it was in the kitchen.

Derek noticed that Cathy was having trouble with the knife she was using, so he asked if she wanted to change with him. She said that she really did want to use the knife he was using, so he gave it to her gladly. Then Derek asked Cathy why she didn’t just ask him for it if she really wanted it. She just looked down, shook her head, and said, “I don’t know.”

Derek told her – reminded her, really – that he would give her anything or do anything for her. “You know that,” he said. She nodded and responded that she was trying to understand that, but it was hard for her to ask for what she really wanted. She said it had always been hard for her.

As they continued peeling vegetables, they got into a discussion about hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. Cathy said that she wanted to host a dinner for her friends, and Derek asked if that meant she would not be coming to his annual dinner. She said that she wanted to, of course, but she also wanted to get together with her friends, and it was a conflict on that date. Derek suggested that he could cancel his plan and help her with hers.

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The Never-Ending Search 

You are in an underground parking garage looking for your pickup truck. The garage is huge, and you don’t know exactly where the truck is because someone else had parked it there for you.

Suddenly the lights in the garage go out, and you have to search using only the light on your mobile phone. You walk and walk from one level to another, but you can’t find your truck, and you are getting frustrated.

Then it seems that you are not searching for a truck but for an airplane. It is an old B-25 twin-engine bomber from World War II that had been converted into a private civilian plane. You finally find such a plane, but it has tail guns, and you can see another gun turret on the bottom, so you know it’s not yours. You keep searching, but you never find it.

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A Strange Day

A group of guys were about to stage a robbery of some kind.  They were like mafia guys, perhaps even characters from the Sopranos television series. Greg wasn’t part of the robbery; he was just along as a kind of observer.

Suddenly three of the robbers turned their guns on the other two and shot them dead. Then the three killers ran off.  It was a "hit" that had been disguised as a robbery so that the two guys being clipped would not know. And to the police, it would look like the two guys were just victims of a botched robbery.

After that, the mafia guys were playing basketball. Greg was playing with them, but he missed a lot of shots. Embarrassed, he admitted to the guys that he had never been very good at the game.

After he left the basketball game, Greg was in a store with a group of people that included a family he knew. The mother in that family was a friend of Greg’s, and he knew that she was having an affair with another man. Greg had also had a short affair with her, and he knew that she had also had sex one time with the teenaged son of one of Greg’s other friends.

At one point, the whole group left the store and was walking to another place. Greg and the woman managed to cross a busy street ahead of the others who had to wait for the traffic lights. That gave Greg a chance to talk with her. He told her that she needed to figure out why she had such a need to cheat on her husband and either work things out or get a divorce. She asked him if he still wanted her, and he said not anymore. It wasn’t because he didn’t care, but because he knew he couldn’t trust her. She was very hurt and tried to hold back her tears as the rest of the group joined them.

After that, Greg was walking home to his apartment. He had been gone for a very long time, years in fact. It had been so long that he wasn’t sure which apartment was his, and he could not remember the combination to his mailbox. As he was going up the stairs, he suddenly remembered that he had left a cat and a dog alone in the apartment when he left, and he became filled with grief that they must have starved to death.

When he opened the door, he found the cat, alive but very hungry. Instead of crying like he usually did, the cat just reached up and hugged Greg’s leg. The dog was also there, but she was very weak. Greg felt terrible pangs of shame for having been so irresponsible with those little lives.

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Robbery and Attempted Murder

You live with your teenaged daughter in an apartment. You are awakened from your sleep by a noise. Then you feel a drop of water on your head. You decide to get up and check it out.

The lights don’t work, so you find a flashlight. Then you notice that something doesn’t smell right. You feel a bit light-headed, almost faint. You hear a sound coming from the kitchen and find that all the burners and the oven are open, but unlit, and they are spewing deadly gas into the apartment. You turn off the burners and open all the windows.

You go to the fuse box and see that all your circuit breakers have been shut off. So you reset the switches, and your lights work. You wonder why that lights had been turned off and the gas turned on, and you realize it had to be intentional. But you can’t understand who could have done it.

Looking around, you see that a lot of things are missing. Expensive stereo equipment, television, computers, and other items are all missing. You have been robbed. And it seems that the robbers turned on the gas to kill you in your sleep.

Suddenly there is a man in the apartment – one of the robbers who apparently had come back for something. But he sees you and quickly leaves. You see that there is a door between your apartment and the one next door. You look for a weapon and can only find a baseball bat. You open the door and go into the next apartment.

You see more people and all kinds of stolen items. Not only are your things there, but there are many other stolen items. These robbers are able to pass through doors into other apartments as well. You yell at two men who are there and demand that they return your property. They ignore you and speak to each other in Russian.

Thinking angrily about how they had turned on the gas and tried to kill you and your daughter, you yell “pochemu?” (why?). Then you lift the bat to bash one of the men, but you can’t bring yourself to actually hit him.

The men go out of the apartment, leaving three women behind. The women are part of the gang of thieves, and their job is to process everything. You identify your items among all the stolen goods, and you demand that they be returned. But no one does anything. They ignore you.

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Caught Between Worlds

I was alone at the trailing edge of twilight, camped on a relatively flat spot, part way up a very tall hill.  It was a grassy hill, fairly round or conical, with even slopes except for the small plateau I was on.  Below me, perhaps 100 yards away, was the edge of a dark wood, from which I could hear the sounds of the forest night: tree frogs singing their monotonous love songs and crickets voicing their praises of a warm summer night.

Occasionally, the precise call of a bird would add a bit of spice to the chorus, but with the gathering dark, birds were mostly silent.  Those sounds from below were comforting, and together with the crackling of my campfire and the aroma of burning wood, I felt very comfortable. Looking at the edge of the forest below, I could see almost nothing except a dim vision of the facing sides of trees, which seemed to dance with the flickering light of my small fire.

Far above me, framed by the very last glow of a day fading beyond the jagged horizon of mountain peaks, was the top of the hill, and on that hilltop was a building, a resort of some kind. There were small white lights, but it was much too distant for the lights to bother me much.  Behind and beyond this building were others, separate, yet connected in some way that I couldn’t entirely discern. 

From the top of the hill I could hear intermittent voices and even laughter from some kind of gathering or party.  But like the lights, the sounds were too distant to distract me and only floated down on the breeze every now and then.  They were just an occasional reminder of what was up there.

After a while, there was a rustle from the bushes around the trees below me, and a mountain lion emerged. It walked up leisurely and sat beside me at the fire.  The lion and I knew each other well, and we talked.  We reminisced about walking for days through the forest without ever crossing a road, walking under a power line, seeing an airplane overhead or hearing the sounds of people.

We remembered going to the tops of mountains and looking out over a world that seemed ours alone.  We recalled the warmth of the sun and the close comfort of finding a cave, hollow or some other refuge from the rain or snow.  And we remembered too those times when there was no shelter and we shivered in the rain until it was done.  As we exchanged memories, those times came alive for us. They were special.

We talked of freedom, of “owning the world,” and of starry nights you could get lost in. The cougar pointed out that there was a clear sky and endless stars over the forest. But looking back toward the top of the hill, we could see none – the sky behind the buildings was bleak and gray. Then she asked me to go back into the forest with her. I said it wasn’t the same any longer; what we had was lost forever. I didn’t belong there any more and I’d only be disappointed.

Then she motioned with her head and eyes toward the top of the hill and asked me if I was going back up there. I replied that I didn’t belong there either; there was no one and nothing up there for me. I said there were sometimes when it was OK, but that mostly I felt separate from what went on up there, different from the others and very out of place. Still, I added, it seems I have no choice but to return and do my best to get by.

“There is no freedom anywhere,” I said, “and no place left to find happiness.”

“Your soul is not there,” she said.  “There is nothing there of spirit, nothing that fills your eyes and soul with awe or takes you beyond yourself, nothing that makes you grow or gives you life.”

“I’m lost,” I told her. “It’s just my fate to be lost.”  Then we just sat for a long time, quietly watching the fire.

After a time, I turned to say something and found that the mountain lion had become a beautiful woman. She was a bit exotic looking with a roundish face, high cheekbones, large green-gray eyes, and brown hair that flowed just past her shoulders. She looked at me at first with a kind of sad expression that spoke of carrying a heavy burden of emotion. I looked deeply into her eyes and tried to relieve her of that sadness.

After a few moments, she allowed a smile to creep on to her face, slowly at first. I answered with a smile, and then she opened up into a broad smile that was like a bright light that released all of her hidden beauty.

She placed her hand on my cheek, looked at me plaintively, and said that I didn’t have to be lost and that she would be with me always, just as she always had been. I just needed to learn to “recognize her” again when the time was right. Then she laid me back and lwe made love. While we were locked together, my vision blurred into a kaleidoscope of color, becoming evermore brighter until it was like fire. 

When the lights finally dimmed and my vision returned, she was gone and I was alone. The forest was still there, with the night sounds and blanket of stars. And when I looked back up the hill where the buildings and people had been, I saw nothing, except a clear, starry night.

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Christmas Lights

I was alone on Christmas Eve, which was to be expected and not a big deal. I decided to sit for several hours in my apartment with the only illumination coming from the Christmas/New Year lights I had put up the previous week. To heighten the ambiance, I played Christmas music.

And I did a lot of thinking.

I tried to steer my thoughts clear of the fact that I was alone, and it wasn’t a problem. That will be a lot harder in a week when it is New Year’s Eve and being alone will be tougher to deal with. But for Christmas Eve, I focused on the lights. I just watched all the lights shining, blinking and cycling through their colors, and let them take me away, far away in time. And it was good.

The lights on my small tree progressed through several programmed phases, and my favorites were the slow alternations between red, green and yellow. But the flashing and sparkling were enjoyable too.

What really piqued my imagination were the multicolored lights I had put up along the top of my front wall and the string of blue lights along the top of a storage unit on the adjacent wall. It was the way the colors and shadows played off the ceiling and walls that made them special.

The front-wall string cast undulating spotlights of red, green and blue against the ceiling from one side wall to the other and threw shafts of color down upon the front wall. Meanwhile, the blue lights produced eerie, yet comforting shadows upon the ceiling and even the opposite wall. All together, they produced a show that, for a time, brought me back to my childhood.

Those Young Days

Christmas lights were among my greatest joys as a child. More than just being symbols of the magic of Christmas, they were magic themselves. Decorating our family Christmas tree was special, and it always started with the lights. Our lights had to be multicolored, and in those days we always had the strings with the large bulbs that have not been in style for decades.

What was even more impressive than our family tree, however, were all the different arrangements of lights outside, all over the town, all over the region – all of the world, for all I knew. Many families put lights on the outside of their houses, or on trees or bushes in the yard.

One of my strongest childhood memories of Christmas is driving to visit relatives in Taunton, the town where I was born, which was between 30 and 60 minutes away, depending on the weather. Along the way there were many houses lit up beautifully, and the city streets were always decorated with magical colored lights.

Some houses even had replicas of Santa, reindeer and sleighs in the front yards, lifelike caricatures with back and front lighting or steel frames turned into realistic images through the magic of colored lights. In those days, it was rare to see the boring, septic arrangements of white lights that you see today in so many American suburbs. It was all about color, and it was the color that really made the magic.

There were two places in particular that were extra special for this young boy: La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, and Taunton Green, a small park in the center of that city. Both were, and I assume still are, famous all over New England for their displays of Christmas lights. We would ride past La Salette sometimes on our way to Taunton, and a few times we even made it a destination where we would get out and walk around to get an “up close and personal” look at the lights and figurines.

Taunton Green was unique for its large traffic circle that ran all around the park and its two “lunch wagons,” small diners set in what looked like old train cars. Usually, we would take a couple of slow laps around the Green to take in all the lights before moving on to our relatives’ house. In those days, the center of that small city was virtually unchanged from times before the Second World War, and you could imagine old-style cars, right out of a 1930s movie, motoring around the snowy circle years before to the same kind of holiday display. The Green has been renovated and changed quite a bit since my childhood, but I’m sure it’s still a beautiful sight around Christmas.

There were other things that helped a kid feel the magic of Christmas: cold weather and a blanket of white snow, traditional holiday songs, the smell of pies and other special dishes baking and cooling. But there was nothing quite as memorable as those wonderful colored lights.

The Years Since

At times throughout my adult life, I attempted to recapture that magic, but it has never been quite the same, and I struggle to really recall any “magic” Christmases since my childhood. I suppose there were some nice ones when my girls were little, but there is no indelible memory.

As I was working on this post, I took some time to look through my collection of photos to try and find some memories of Christmases past. I found almost nothing. I did find a couple of photos that reminded me that I did put up a Christmas tree most years when I lived in Parker, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. I had a large window that faced the street, and the tree went in front of that window so that it could be seen from outside. But I did nothing else.

Sadly, I couldn’t find any evidence that I ever decorated my forest home in Bailey, Colorado, for Christmas, nor do I remember doing so. I don’t think I even put up a Christmas tree there. I lived alone and never expected to have anyone over for Christmas, plus I had an active little cat who probably would have pulled the whole thing down.

The Past Decade

Here in Ukraine, Christmas is not so important. It’s New Year that takes on all the focus here in much the same way that Christmas does in the U.S. Whether I decorate or not has always depended on my mood: whether I feel celebratory or just feel alone and depressed. Some years, like the end of 2015, there seemed to be no point in decorating, so I didn’t.

Some other years, like last year, I put up the lights and other decorations in an attempt to raise my mood, even though I knew it was likely I would spend New Year’s Eve alone. This year, in a new apartment, I’ve decided to decorate like I haven’t done in years. I guess part of that was due to throwing a holiday party the night before Christmas Eve.

The decorations will stay up until at least a little past New Year. I don’t know what will happen on the evening of December 31; New Year’s Eve presents an entirely different feeling here than Christmas Eve. And I know that I run the highly probable risk of just sitting here alone again, looking at the lights and getting drowned in a tide of melancholy. But I hope for better. I will try.

But Christmas Eve this year was notable because I discovered that the lights still mean something to me. They may not hold the same magic as they did all those many years ago, but they still have something for me, something to tell me, something to raise my spirits.

It’s funny how you can go for so long in your adult life not thinking about the magic of childhood, only to find a new appreciation of it in later years. If only we could keep that childlike wonder all our lives.

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