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| photo: Kae Penner-Howell |
The tollbooth lady wants to know if our dogs would like a holiday treat.
“Pardon?”
It’s late at night on a spooky stretch of interstate in the Appalachian Mountains. We’ve just driven eleven hours, with three more to go. We’re not particularly alert.
“Your dogs, would they like a treat?”
“Oh sure. Yeah.”
The tollbooth lady peels the lid off a blue plastic tub and quickly hands us two dog treats, along with our change from the toll.
Merry Christmases are exchanged.
The dog treats are clearly made by hand. Each one a flattened cylinder of grainy brown dough, bent at one end to resemble a candy cane. Halfway along their length the treats are perforated with fork marks, to make them easy to break in half. A practical touch.
We’re on our way to the east coast where my wife’s family live, and I’m preoccupied with preparing myself for the upcoming visit. Wondering how - or if - I can help keep things simple, or if I should just lie low. Over the next few days, millions of us who celebrate this holiday will engage in some manner of role-playing. Each must deliver a convincing individual performance in order to make it a success. You’d think we’d get better at it by the time we reach adulthood, but no other well-rehearsed day can come off the rails quite like Christmas. No day brings the “crazy” like Christmas. None other offers as many triggers for anxiety and depression, or sets the stage for family drama.
At my in-law’s home, the holidays are shaded with a heavy yearning - the echo of events eight decades old. Back in the Great Depression, my wife’s mom, Laura, was abandoned by her mother just before Christmas. This woman had disappeared with her eldest daughter and was never heard from again by the family. She had reached some sort of breaking point, the details of which are lost to another time. The little girl Laura, along with her father and several siblings, were left to ride out the depression by themselves. The dad tried to keep the family together for a while, but eventually had to surrender some of his children into foster care. He kept the older ones, since they could help run the family business. The three youngest ones, including Laura, were sent to live in a series of foster homes. Fractured households, abandonment and adoption were commonplace in the wake of the Depression, and the repercussions still ripple through many of those families. There’s much more to this story which isn’t mine to tell, but suffice to say that old wounds are real wounds nonetheless, and in this family Christmas remains forever complicated.
The traffic around us swells dramatically as we hit the Blue Ridge Parkway. The right lane is a blur of trucks hurrying the goods of the season to the brick-and-mortars of the mid-Atlantic. The left lane is crowded with impatient holiday travelers headed to their ancestral home towns. I imagine many of the cars around me are filled with families bucking up to the demands of the next few days, reviewing the ground rules for behavior, and coaching each other about forbidden topics. Many of these pilgrims have left their chosen tribes of friends and lovers, only to intentionally spend time among the people with whom they may have the least in common - their own extended families. They are vowing various things. To not act passive-aggressive this year. To let things go. To be patient. Some of these people even have it in mind to be deliberately kind. And they will try.
I picture the lady in the tollbooth rolling out her dog treats with the heels of her hands, twisting each into a cane, then toasting them on non-stick baking sheets in her West Virginia home. She’ll do this for days ahead of time, to make enough for the hundreds of dogs headed east in the way-backs of SUVs. I picture her peering into each car, looking for dogs who need treats. I wonder if her supervisors approve, or if the WVDOT has a policy provision for such idiosyncratic generosity among its employees. I imagine she does this because she loves dogs, and also to stave off the mind-numbing boredom of working at a tollbooth. On a day like today thousands of cars pass under her watch. She has only a few seconds contact with each driver. There is no time for chit chat, let alone a conversation. She uses these brief moments to reach out to travelers by way of home-made dog treats. For a gesture so tiny - trivial, in fact - it is remarkably effective at creating a sense of welcome. It strikes me as a kind of drive-thru Eucharist for dogs. She had asked if our dogs wanted a treat, but in a way, what I heard was, "Take this. It is real. The first real thing you’ve been offered in days. Share it now with your dog, and go in peace.”
For many of us, the holidays will always remain difficult, but they're rarely only difficult. They may also be a thousand other things. Some intrusion of ridiculousness and frivolity will break the tedium of ingrained patterns. Drunken board games and ugly sweater parties will do their best to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously. We may even get brief glimpses of joy, or some of the other things mentioned in carols. If someone drags us to a house of worship, or even if we are left to our own thoughts for a few moments, we may connect with deeper currents of meaning available for contemplation in this dark season. The emptying out of events on our calendars. The long pause as the natural world holds its breath until spring. The glimmers of hope and renewal as the days begin to lengthen. The persistent and seemingly preposterous theme of redemption.
Up ahead the traffic funnels down into one lane around a work zone. I’ve been staring almost exclusively at tail lights for two solid days. Drivers slow down to let each other into the one remaining lane. And so it begins: the small kindnesses and temporary civility that will crescendo over the next couple of days. Like children on their best behavior, these social niceties are awkward and theatrical. Doors will be held open longer, tipping will briefly increase in restaurants, greetings with strangers will be bravely exchanged. Small gestures will lead to bigger gestures until finally, exhausted from all the effort, we will collapse back into our individual comfort zones and life will return to normal. Old familiar fears and small-mindedness will slowly be restored. But we will have spent some small measure of time being the best version of our selves, and briefly abiding our own beliefs, which is its own kind of holiday miracle. Is it not?
