O Little Town

I loved Christmas.  I loved the rich colors of the lights in the darkness, I loved the old-fashioned music, I loved the sense that inexplicably wonderful things had happened before, and might happen again.  Although I never could manage to believe in God, or to give any credence to the Biblical account of Christ’s conception and birth, I could not have been more devoted to the pageantry that surrounded its celebration. 

Each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, I would assemble a small plastic village on an old coffee table on what we called our front porch, a long, narrow room stretching the width of the house.  It also contained a scarred wooden desk, the stereo cabinet and record collection, a coat tree, the telephone, and a rocking chair.  The telephone did not ring much. 

A few months before my tenth birthday, I had begun to set up the village when the fish tank caught my attention.  My father had kept several tanks for a while, Guppies and Mollies and Swordfish, a source of hours of entertainment for the cats.  We didn’t have the cats any more, though.

I peered through the dense green carpet of algae into the tea-brown water.  An ancient crone of a guppy and her friend the angelfish had been living alone together for years, long after the filter and the enthusiasm of their human caretakers had given way.  Eye to eye with the two ancient beings swimming slowly, meditatively, back and forth, I felt a surge of protectiveness.  It seemed in keeping with the Christmas spirit to give them a gift, too. 

I scraped a good chunk of the algae from the front wall of the tank, stirring up a typhoon of fish excrement and plant bits.  The fish hid behind the rock that had been placed in the back of the tank by my father, carted home from one of his trips to the mountains. 

I frowned, observing that the fish’s quarters looked even more unhealthy than they had before I’d begun my mission of mercy.  Walking into the kitchen, I fished around in the cabinet for something with which to scoop water.  I came up with a yellow plastic cup with a smiley face stamped into it in black, along with the words, “Have a nice day.” I didn’t like to drink from it because it smelled so strongly of plastic that it made my Pathmark brand powdered iced tea taste bad.  I figured that being dunked in the fish tank wouldn’t make it any worse.  The other item that I brought back to the porch was the puke bowl.  It was a turquoise tub meant for soaking one’s tired feet, but we used it for situations in which a person might need to vomit suddenly. 

By the time I had filled the bowl twice, each with two dozen cups of smiley brown water, I was tired of this project.  The fish would peek out from behind the rock periodically, looking alarmed.  I filled up the tank with bowls of water from the kitchen faucet—and only spilled a little bit on the way through the dining room and living room—and stood back to look with satisfaction upon my handiwork.  The fish ventured out, their gills heaving, startled by the sudden influx of actual oxygen.  I sprinkled some food on the top of the water, replaced the hood, and turned my attention to Jesus.

The coffee table, tucked into the far end of the room, was shielded from the view of anyone entering or leaving the house.  On this table I set up a little village, complete with a few houses, a picket fence, a gas station, and a church.  In my mind, a gas station was the essential component of a town.  My father was a gas station auto mechanic.  How else would the fathers of the town make their living, if there were no gas station?  There were no factories in Plasticville, which seemed like a major oversight. 

The smell of gasoline and grease that accompanied my father home meant that evening had come.  Later, when he didn’t always come home, I marked the hours by the appearance of certain television shows, a subject on which I was an expert.  Their arrivals were much less likely to be accompanied by unpleasant conversations, fights, or ominous silences than my father’s.

In my coffee-table town, there were some free-standing plastic lampposts, the kind that were reminiscent of gas lights, but the only real illumination came from the church.  The Plasticville church came equipped with a clear C7 bulb on a wire, and a clip that held it upright in the center of the church.  After dinner, I would slip onto the porch, plug in the church, and read my Children’s Bible by its dependable—if somewhat dim—light.  I was determined afresh each year that I was going to read the whole book, cover to cover.  An avid reader, I was certain that I could accomplish this, and I went about it in the most sensible way that I could: by starting at the beginning. 

The problem was that I wanted not just to read it but to memorize it.  I had thought about that myth about the man with the baby calf, who lifted it every day until it became a bull, because if he started when it was small and each day it was only a few pounds heavier, of course he could do it, right?  So, then, surely I could memorize the whole thing without much trouble, if I would just stick to it.

I had a lot of ideas.  Relatively few of them reached any stage that could have been called fruition.  I became very familiar with Genesis, but whatever came after that was a little bit fuzzy.  One year I did get to Joseph and his coat of many colors, and I reflected upon how very much blood was involved in the stories of the Bible.  Admittedly, my children’s version skipped much of the more tedious speechmaking, exposition, and prophesying, focusing on the more colorful stories. 

Still, I was giving it a shot.  Every night I knelt before Plasticville, humming “Silent Night” before settling in to read.  When I’d taken in as much regurgitated revelation as I could stand, I opened the front door and went outside.  Leaning against the American Elm tree by the curb, I considered my house, with its red candles in every window, the string of large outdoor bulbs of all colors ringing the doorway, and a red crinkled-cellophane dime-store wreath in each of the second floor windows. 

Then I would go back inside, put on a scratched 33 rpm record called The Sweet Voices of Christmas, and lean up against the stereo cabinet, the black speaker fabric with gold threads running through it rough against my cheek, listening to British children singing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

 That was Christmas, for me.  Not the presents, not the relatives, and definitely not Santa Claus.  The thought of a bearded stranger entering our house unannounced always made me uncomfortable.  We didn’t have a fireplace, and before I found out the truth, I worried that he would end up in the furnace.  Even though the idea of him was kind of creepy, I didn’t wish for him to be broiled alive.  I was assured that he used the back door, a flimsy thing with louvered glass and a half-broken lock.  Finding the price tag on that deck of cards on the Christmas just before my fifth birthday set my mind at ease, and my mother’s, too, I think.  She didn’t like to lie to me.

Christmas was about the possible—the light in the darkness, the possibility of finding out that the night fears and the sadness and the unhappy surprises were not all there was.  It was about trying to see the town by the light of the church, although the whole not-believing-in-God-thing was problematic.  I kept trying, but I couldn’t.  It didn’t stop me from appropriating his imagery for my own purposes, and from trying to see the world by the light of my coffee-table altar.  The ancient gilled creatures were my witnesses, remnants of Biblical times, a tiny living presence in the suffocating silence of the house at night.

The next morning, I skipped in to inspect the transformation of ichthyological darkness into light. The guppy was belly-up, and the angelfish was flat on the surface of the water, one eye staring up toward heaven and the other down at the gravel.