A safe and merry Christmas to all. The poem that ends my most recent book of poetry, “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents.” CHRISTMAS NIGHT, 1957 Grandma’s house was packed with family and friends, orbiting a dining room table jammed with cakes, pies and cookies, a clove-studded, honey-glazed ham, a bronze turkey slightly smaller than a baby pterodactyl, and at the center, the star of the show: a giant crystal bowl that appeared but once a year, with a half-gallon chunk of vanilla ice cream floating in a lake of grandma’s egg nog. It had always been grandpa’s job to stir in a fifth of Kentucky bourbon. But for the first time this ritual was performed by one of his sons. Uncle Roy, perhaps, or Uncle Albert, I don’t remember which. But I remember Grandpa’s oxblood leather easy chair, empty this year for the first time, keeping a silent watch on the proceedings. At five I had no yardstick to measure the hole that chair created in my mother’s childhood home; I was too busy weaving through the forest of grown-up legs for another piece of pie. Finally, with the children overtired and sugar crazed, our coats and hats were gathered and the exodus began. All night the spiked nog had been off limits to my sister and me, but the taste we were allowed just before leaving made us easier to load into the car. On the ride home, while I dozed in the back seat, our station wagon was the world, warm as a womb, the faithful engine’s tireless hum, and drifting from the front, a lullaby: the murmur of our parent’s voices.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 19:47:58 +0000
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