Merry Holidays!

                   Fifty Christmas: Hand Held to cynical. Part one.
                                       By Mark William Darus.

　

This Christmas I was given a view to see xmas’s past.

Perhaps it’s the medications working, but my memory seems to be able to run backward over time on a single day of recurrent memory.

Christmas day.

As tiniest memory took hold, I so remember the smells of childhood.

My older and sisters and I would desperately wait at the top of the stairwell for mom or dad to give us the ‘all-clear’ to run down and see what Santa left for us. The smell of English Tea always hit me first. Mom would make me warm tea in a Skippy Peanut butter jar. She’d make it for me with the right amount of sugar and milk. Delicious!

We’d run down the stairway, and through the childhood view of things, see the same things we saw the night before. Colourful room of magnificent splendor where all things looked brand-new to us. Packages shining against a fake fireplace.

Setting the wayback machine, Sherman.

I remember Christmas eves with my fathers mother. Besides funerals and weddings, this was the only time there’d be a gathering of the Darus’. The food was always great, and though my elder sisters have a different memory of this, I was still happy to see my cousins and uncles.

Their memories became twisted with their experiences and should be seen as real to them. I being younger saw things through lens’ vastly different and much less cynical then theirs.

I was about 6-8 then.

Granted at that point I had a knowledge of death. My dad faced his first heart surgery that back in the late 60’s to 70’s was a 50/50 shot at best.

Death? Well, that was when the nightmares become real when you awake and all you love is gone, right?

　

So many xmas days I’d run downstairs to see what Santa left for me.

More Importantly to me: How my dad and I would put them together to make work! Slot car sets, train tracks, Lego, Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets. During this wondrous point, my father and I would meet and work together. He’d give me his time, so incredibalbly important looking backward, so blown off by me back then. Sometimes hitting the rewind button hurts.

One of my fondest memories was that of my father and I building an Eldon Slot car set around 1970 or so. Wide track like that of Carrera 1/24 Scale. Cars would fly off the track and he’d laugh at me as hit the throttle too strong.

Years later, he’d get me a Tyco set. It would take he and I hours to make the track. So patiently we, by his guidance, would place the guardrails on the corners to keep the cars from blasting into the otherness of living room furniture and dogfood bowels.

End of Part one…

　

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Mark William Darus. 12252012