I haven’t left the house in two days.  Wheelchair-bound, I’ve spent the holidays rolling between the kitchen and the living room (like a fabled Russian-grandmother with my single bed near the wood-burning stove).

It is my general theory on love that you try to do no harm. That you try to love with the best parts of you and bring your worst parts along so they can see what that looks and feels like.

When my younger son arrived Christmas morning, just in a sweater, I ask if its that warm out.  Well, no, he says, then that while riding the bus over, the guy a few seats behind him was talking on the phone about how cold it was, how he came up from the south, how he couldn’t find a place to sleep. My son noticed he was just wearing a hoodie, and so he took off his jacket and gave it to him.

I tell my son he could start the trend of long-haired Red Santas—red-haired and red-bearded, red-hearted.

Something in all of us turns liquid from kindness, spills into each other.

He will leave in a jacket and vest my partner gives him.  A jacket he had worn when his daughter was young, which she recognizes and remembers. And a vest that had belonged to a childhood friend’s dad.

My older son gives my partner a high-vis jacket for riding his bike at night, to be seen. Being invisible a topic we touch upon often, (the driver who hit me had told me he didn’t see me, then drove off, the reason I’m in this wheelchair now.)  And because I am in this wheelchair now, my partner sometimes, often, goes unseen.

My partner tells his nephew who has grown his hair out, tossing it to one side, that he looks a little like Elvis, that if he becomes an Elvis impersonator, he could become a matchbook preacher, and that he could marry us, in a little wedding chapel. 

I wouldn’t mind being married by an Elvis.  The younger version of him.  When life was something he had a hold on, and his better self barely noticed the shadow his worst self was making, Maybe he was both the smoke and the burning fire, traveling upward, leaving us to carry the heat of it on our skin, the scent of it, in our hair.

Perhaps this is how the world began.  Two sticks rubbed together.  Something that sparked. Wanting to learn how to deal with all the ice and cold, with all the darkness.  Wanting a place to warm our hands, wanting to have something good to offer each other.

jks December 26, 2024