Welcoming the Doldrums

Now that the holidays are over, we coast into the doldrums of January, February, and March, that long stretch with no holidays or long weekends (well, some of you get Presidents Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) that feel like they go on for six months, rather than three. Spring break looms for those with kids. For those without, life will go on pretty much as usual.

And I’m so there for it.

I have a complicated relationship with the end-of-year holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. There’s a melancholy to them threading through the mirth. People who had happy childhoods have unhappy adulthoods, forever trying to recapture the joy of those happier years.

I had a large-ish family: Mom, Dad, and four sisters. In general, Christmas was a magical time, as indeed all of winter was for me. What child doesn’t love playing in the snow? And we got a lot of it. Holidays in our home were exciting and fun, even though for most of my childhood years we were quite poor. Mostly I remember Christmas lights glowing warmly on snowy evenings, electric candles in each window of the house. In those days nobody was doing those garish, hideous displays with tens of thousands of lights, trying to rival Disney’s Electrical Parade. There was one house in town that put up a homemade animated tableaus of large, 3-foot-tall elf dolls in working ski lifts, riding around on a carousel (elf-sized), working in Santa’s workshop, and all manner of things. It was a wonder, and it was charming. People came from all over to see it. It was written up in the local paper year after year.

But mostly I remember the warmth of Christmas, a child’s memories of it as magic. We always decorated the tree as a family on Christmas Eve (a tradition of my mother’s Norwegian upbringing), my dad singing “O Tannenbaum” in his baritone voice as he put tinsel and ornaments on the branches my sisters and I were too small to reach; Dad pulling out the old reel-to-reel tape player and cueing up the Christmas music. I will forever associate “The Troika” with my dad. One night when putting the youngest 3 of us to bed, my second-eldest sister (who has an incredible voice) sang “Silent Night”. Even then it made me cry.

I have moments when the music helps. My local classical music station does a 4-day “Festival of Carols” full of ancient music, familiar tunes done well, carols from around the world (the Finnish are some of my favorites), and it’s just glorious to listen to. Shame it’s only 4 days on the regular broadcast frequency (they have a new HD station that starts earlier, but I don’t have an HD radio). Now even the music has lost its spell. It’s been the one thing I’ve looked forward to over the years, the main thing that I could take solace in now that both of my parents are long dead, I’m estranged from most of my sisters, and all my aunts and uncles are gone. I’ve spent many Christmas Eves alone, put up and decorated trees by myself, because even though there was no one else to do it with, it was still a link to those happy days. This year the tree was put up without me, and taken down without me.

Christmas lights no longer cheer me; in fact they leave me cold. Maybe they’re just too pre-packaged and processed for my taste (don’t get me started on the inflatables). As I writer this, there are still a few folks who have their lights up and on even now, after the new year. I see them as I drive to work in the morning, and come home at night. The season just seems to have moved so far away from the gentle family celebration it once was I start to wonder if we’ve simply outgrown the spirit of it in the 21st century. It feels like if you didn’t get a new car for Christmas you’re doing it wrong. Maybe I just want to be a child again. I miss my mom and dad so much, even after all these years. There’s so much family drama and stress now, and most family traditions have gone by the wayside.

So I, at least, am glad the holidays are over, and I welcome the looming doldrums.

Star Trek and Nostalgia

I’ve been working my way through the original series of Star Trek, which I have always adored. My family watched it together when I was a child. It was our Friday night ritual. We’d have cheese pizza (being good Catholics, so no meat on Fridays in the late 1960s) and watch first a series called “The Name of the Game” and then “Star Trek,” if memory serves. The early “Mission: Impossible” figured in somewhere, but I can’t recall if that was the same night or a different night. At any rate, I was brought up on Star Trek, and science fiction  has always been in my blood. This past Christmas I received the boxed set of the full original series, and have been pacing myself, working through those three delicious seasons. Of course over the years, when it was in re-runs, I’d catch it whenever possible, so I’ve seen all the episodes many times. That doesn’t dull their appeal for me.

And now, in the internet age, I can watch the show and simultaneously look up the actors’ biographies on IMDB.com to learn about them.

Mostly I look at their dates of birth. My parents were roughly the same age as many of the actors on the show. I note the ones who were born around the same time as my parents to see if they’re still alive, and if so, how old they are now. I count off the years, and feel a strange sense of injustice at the ones who outlived my parents, who maybe were born within a year or so of when my parents were. I feel so cheated to have lost my father far too soon (aged 62) and even my mother at the age of 83. But when I see actors who died much younger I mourn for them, for their lives cut short. There is no fairness in life, I know. There’s no one to be angry at for their deaths, no one and nothing to rage at. Dad’s been gone more than thirty years, Mom eleven this May. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t wish they were here. Dad would have loved seeing the advances in science and technology, and to see his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and Mom mostly for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Technology baffled her at times. She had a vague understanding of the internet, but  never really used it. She was amazed by it and in awe of me using it.

In the Star Trek:ToS,  S3:Ep23, “All Our Yesterdays,” Kirk, McCoy and Spock visit a planet called Sarpeidon whose sun is about to go nova and destroy it. All the people have fled into some past era on their world. McCoy and Spock accidentally pass through to the planet’s ice age, where they meet a woman named Zarabeth (played by Mariette Hartley). Spock begins to revert to a more primitive state and falls for Zarabeth. When he and McCoy find their way back to their own time again, he observes, “Yes it did happen. That was 5000 years ago, and she is dead now. Dead and buried, long ago.”

And so she is, from where he stands, even if he was with her only moments ago by his reckoning.  (Mariette Hartley is still with us, happily.) His memories of her will always be a part of him, and the fact of her existence will live on in him, just as my parents live on in my memories, and in my heart.