6:29 a.m. - 2023-12-30
oh little, lucky, star...
I'm sitting at my socially awkward auntie's house. The one everybody forgets to invite to parties, but whom my mom always nags me to visit. We’re sipping coffee and eating shortbread cookies as the supermarket poinsettia I brought sits, in all its holiday-foiled splendor, on the table between us, and I feel blessed. Would I have rather been at the anti-Christmas Christmas rager my friend was throwing out at his place, shucking oysters and grilling steaks, watching football at the bar he built in his barn and getting to know the new girl-of-interest better? Yes, yes of course.
But I was still a bit shell-shocked and grateful from the day before.
I'll spare you all the details of my arrest, but suffice to say that at some point during an unfortunate and contentious interaction with a deputy-sheriff, he “detected alcohol on my breath” (a subjective metric, but I'll defer to his crackerjack sniffer here). Whereupon I was cuffed and hauled off on a PI charge. No field-sobriety test, no breathalyzer...a misdemeanor ticket for which I was released on a PR bond. An “injustice” for which, despite 22 hrs in the tank, I actually owe the dude a hug and a "thank you sir, happy holidays".
Because things could have gone so, so, very-much worse. So much fucking worse. I'll spare you the details of my legal history as well; just know that had my luck broken another way, shit would be dire right now. This Christmas would have been canceled for sure, and no doubt some future Christmases as well. I'd be incarcerated, and in the throes of a despair too deep to convey, instead of enduring a banal stream of awkward conversation and enjoying way-too-many cookies as the peaceful sunlight of a mild December afternoon spilled through my auntie's kitchen window. That's how thin my margin is.
~ ~ ~
But thank Santa, my luck held. So my marathon pull in the tank was made easier by an appreciation of the bullet I'd just dodged, and when I finally was released, luck broke my way again. It seems they'd impounded my van in some rural yard 14 fucking miles out of town (cruel and unusual!), so I called the first friend I could think of who might give me a ride.“You in town? I just got out of County lockup.”
“I am honey, but I'm workin'.”
“OK no worries I'll figure out someth...”
“Hang on a minute...(shouts to the barroom at large): Anyone wanna go pick Ernie up at the jailhouse?”
Five minutes later I was riding in a very-new truck w/a dude I'd met a few times in passing. A good Samaritan who not only fetched me back to the bar, where I was sympathetically received, but drove me all the way out to the remote impound-lot. Perhaps this was “karma” for the countless times I've picked folks up under the same circumstances...but given the excessive distance to the tow-yard, and the fact that this guy happened to be at the bar at noon on a Sunday? It all felt extra-fortuitous.
It wasn't just the distance to the yard that struck me as punitively excessive though. The impound fee (even without the “holiday release” surcharge) was egregious. Amounting to more money than I've had on hand for the last several months. Except that...my parents had just gifted me some Christmas cash. Hence the healthier than usual stack of bills tucked in my personal-property envelope, w/a total neatly noted in the jail clerk's handwriting: a sum that turned out to be just enough to spring the van. So instead of finding myself stressed and stranded as usurious daily “storage fees” compounded over the days to come, I was jingle-ballin' my way home in disbelief.
Because good luck is a foreign feeling.
~ ~ ~
Aside from the mouser, fussin' that her breakfast was late, the ranch was quiet under bright and breezeless skies. I slept well that night, grateful for a mattress and pillow and wondering if guardian angels get a holiday bonus. This sense of incredulous well-being has endured. Through lunch with my awkward auntie and into the holiday smash of family who descended a day later, I've viewed everything through a fresh lens of appreciation. From the kinetic commotion of kids and dogs w/new toys to the abundant avalanche of snacks and drinks and redundant deserts; from the thoughtful-but-useless and ill-fitting gifts to our comically competitive family badminton tournament (an affair that finds everyone from my 77 yr old mom to my 7 year old cousin slingin' racquets and talkin' serious trash)...things I usually consider obligations felt, in the flickering light of their drastic alternative, like blessings this year. Moments to savor.Which begs the question, why this and not every year? Or every day? Is circumstance that obligated to slap me awake...to shake clear my fog of depressed indifference? Because, while I can't read the news of the day without feeling an empathy-reflexive appreciation of my relative privilege; that's an abstract observation. The hot breath of a more-intimate, existential, threat to one's freedom on the other hand? That's appreciation of a different order. That's a selfish cognizance felt from within rather than viewed from without...an exultant revelation that, in the parlance of the season, “it's a wonderful life”.
~ ~ ~
So while it may seem counterintuitive, this was, when considered in context, an excellent (and certainly memorable) holiday. Where one lucky blessing served to remind me of so many others. And while I don't subscribe to the (ironically pagan) conceit of a “virgin birth”...I can't deny the existence of a little “Christmas magic”, not this year.
