matthew blake williams

Back in November, I started a writing exercise that turned into this short recollection of how, when I was growing up, my Dad’s side of the family spent our Christmas holidays together. It is also about Amy Grant, who is the most amazing singer ever.

I love Christmas music, more than is generally acceptable among even the most merry people I know.

Each year, wisps of smoke are still floating out of the fleshy eye sockets of a just-extinguished jack-o-lantern when on the first of November I army-crawl into the back of my closet to find the stack of cracked jewel cases holding my favorite holiday CDs. It’s an eclectic mix: James Taylor, Kristen Chenowith, Annie Lennox, a compilation of ska and punk bands from high school, a host of regional folk singers, the cast of Glee, Bing and Burl and Judy and Perry singing all the classics.

I play these albums on an interminable loop from the day after Halloween through the first of a the new year. I’m the living embodiment of a December department store soundtrack. But I figure two months out of twelve is a fair enough allocation for these songs that make it easier for me to believe in things like angels and guiding stars and hope. Songs that help me to hope.

There is one album in my ever-growing stack of Christmas CDs that brings the season to life in a way that no other does. It has that power not only because it’s a gosh-darn delightful album, but also because of the special set of circumstances that make it such a vivid memory from my youth.

When I was a boy growing up in Asheville, every Christmas Eve my parents would load the brown Crown Victoria with presents and casseroles and three kids to head south across the state line that separates the Carolinas. The destination was Lake Keowee, a maze of inlets built by the power company to keep the lights on. My Dad’s parents owned their little piece of paradise on this lake, a home that Grandpa mostly built himself. To a boy, it was a magical house – and that’s not merely the sentimentality of a grown man waxing nostalgic.

The house featured a vacuum cleaning system built right into its walls – circular holes the size of a racquetball designed to attach to a special vacuum cleaner that had no base or motor or bag or filter. Just a vacuum stem attached to a long coil of snaky tubing. When you plugged the tube into one of these holes in the wall, the whole system would whir to life, sucking up dust and dirt left behind by the feet of six busy grandchildren, pulling it somewhere deep into the house, somewhere in the basement. I’ve never thought about where all that dust and dirt went until this very moment. My child mind never considered this mystery as I drug the coils from the closet and cleaned, cleaned, cleaned the floor. Any house that compels an eight-year-old boy voluntarily vacuum its floors must be magic. Right?

The central vacuum system wasn’t the only piece of technology in my Grandparents’ home that held my fascination.

Enter through the front door and you are in a comfortable and spacious living room – stone hearth, La-Z-Boy recliner, and one of those behemoths of a television set that came in its own wooden cabinet and sat on the floor. Big screen in the days before plasma.

Keep walking down the length of the living room. In front of you is a hallway leading to the bedrooms. But before you reach it, the hearth on your left gives way to the curve of the wall, which in turn leads to a nook – a small sitting room with glass doors overlooking the lake. There is nothing much here save two blue swivel chairs. It is a place to relax, to read… or to listen. Built into the wall is a stereo system that is as tall as you are (as long as you happen to be an eight-year-old boy).

I was fascinated with this piece of technology, since we had nothing like it at home, where my musical options were limited to 8-tracks of Disney soundtracks or John Denver (both of which played a significant role in forming my lifelong tastes in music). Grandma’s stereo was cutting edge for its day. It was a five-level tiered system, with a record player on top, a dual cassette player, an AM/FM tuner, and a super-fancy, super-new device called a CD player.

At eight years old, this CD player was just so freaking cool. One simply had to push a flat button (that hardly felt like a button at all) and a mechanical tray slid smoothly out from the face of the stereo like it was straight off the set of Star Trek. It had a spring-loaded circular base, and that was where you gently aligned the glimmering CD, which was pulled back inside the machine to whir and spin and eventually play music.

Grandma only had a handful of these CDs. I don’t remember what most of them were – Readers Digest or TIME compilations, I think – but one CD I remember very well. The jacket cover featured the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen leaning on an aspen tree trunk in what appeared to be the White Woods. Her soft, colorless face, which gazed knowingly beyond the camera’s lens, was framed by pillows of curly auburn hair, and her lips matched the plush, rich red coat that was keeping her warm in this winter wonderland. She wasn’t quite smiling, but a slight curl of her mouth showed she was full of memory, full of… thought. Home for Christmas, the album was called.

My sister with Grandma & Grandpa

Every Christmas Eve, one of my first acts upon arrival at Lake Keowee was to gently remove this CD from the case, carefully place it in the sci-fi CD deck, and press “play.” The stereo came to life and soon the room filled with sounds of strings and harp, setting the holiday mood. Finally, Amy Grant’s gentle alto would fill the house with the promise that “from now on, our troubles will be miles away.” And for this eight-year-old boy in a Rudolph sweater sitting cross-legged on the carpet, with his family moving around the magic house and casting lines off the bank of the lake and basting a turkey in the kitchen, all was right in the world.

I feel like I did this twenty times or more. I feel like I have infinite memories of endless Christmas Eves on the lake, letting Amy’s sparse rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” fill the house and my head. The reality is that there were but a few. Just a handful of times that Grandpa smiled from his recliner, watching his grandchildren through lenses that must have been a quarter of an inch thick. A very finite number of years that brought cousins together, cousins who spent a few minutes shyly becoming reacquainted with each other before resuming the prior year’s adventures down on the dock or under the peach trees in the yard. A short-lived tradition of Grandma’s crock pot mac ‘n cheese and creamy chicken ‘n dumplings. (A lot of foods in the South are irrevocably conjoined by the letter “n.”)

Grandpa left us first, in 1994, his body slowly succumbing to the tumor that doctors had discovered in his brain. Though I don’t recall the words, I remember watching my Dad speak softly at the funeral. Grandma spent much of the next decade in assisted living, her body shutting down a little more each day.

Medical care for both Grandma and Grandpa was expensive. By the time she passed in 2005, the lake house had been sold and the bulk of possessions from their life together had been redistributed. The stereo system ended up in our own living room. Even after my parents ended their marriage and Dad moved out of the house with a few pieces of furniture, it remained in the living room. It’s now a permanent fixture in my Mom’s home, and every year my brother, sister, and I bring home new LPs to spin on the record player, a piece of the stereo that for years saw no action. Now every Christmas, it plays the fuzzy sounds of Carole King and John Denver records. I suppose the once-futuristic CD player isn’t much used anymore.

After a brief childhood cemented in reliable traditions, the world did what it always does. It changed. The family continues to gather. My grandparents’ eldest daughter, our Aunt, assumed the annual role of holiday host. The cousins, one by one, graduated high school and scattered across several Southern states, going to college and getting married and starting families of their own. I left the South altogether, wending my way across the Sierra Nevadas and finally settling in the southwestern-most county in the Continental forty-eight: San Diego.

I often think about the magic in my grandparents’ home when November rolls around – that vacuum cleaner, Grandma’s stereo, the food on the table and the people gathered around it. The little flashes of memory that compose our family’s tradition in my mind.

These memories from my few years on Keowee are deep as the lake itself. And though the magic is different now (I’ve yet to encounter another vacuum quite as exotic as my Grandma’s), the foundation of our family seated around the warm stone hearth with Amy Grant serenading us from the stereo around the corner is a memory just mystical enough to conjure the same kind of expectation that hung in the air on Christmas Eve in South Carolina all those many years ago. In sunny San Diego, where – in December – flip-flops are unquestionably appropriate footwear for wrapping a string of colorful bulbs around the trunk of a palm tree, a few measures of the now-classic Amy Grant album are all I need to transform my home of beaches and board shorts into a snow-laden aspen grove where I can peer knowingly across time and space, awash in yuletide memories (plush, rich red winter coat optional).

I don’t know what happened to the stack of CDs on Grandma’s shelf when my Dad and Aunts packed up the lake house. Some time ago, in college I think, I bought my own copy of Home for Christmas. It’s now well-worn and skips in a couple of places; the case is scratched, and the photograph of Amy on the jacket is a little faded. When I pull it out of the closet, along with all my other Christmas albums, on the first of November each year, it’s never the first one I play. I try to wait until Christmas Eve to put it in the stereo, out of respect for the memories it triggers of Grandpa and Grandma and Christmas Eves on the lake.

Me in Grandpa’s lap

Truth, though, is that I rarely make it to Thanksgiving before I can no longer resist the woman in the White Woods and her plaintive, melancholy rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The season, for me, never quite arrives until the strings introduce that understated dirge of a carol and I find myself transported to my own White Woods, where I uncover just enough hope and magic to carry me into the next year of change.

Matthew Blake Williams
December 7, 2012

Share this post:

On Monday, October 1, I had to let go of my border collie. He is called Winslow. He developed a spinal tumor that rapidly progressed, leaving him paralyzed and beyond recovery. My words here are woefully inadequate, but I needed to write them down so that I will be reminded to delight in life the way he did.

Winslow’s tail thumped the floor incessantly. If all I did was move, or speak, or simply make eye contact – the tail told how he delighted in this, just in my presence. I have not heard a more reassuring sound than the thump of a dog’s tail on a hardwood floor.

There are a thousand fleeting, incidental moments that are a chasm in my day now that he is gone; tiny things that I will miss until my mind forgets to remember them – sounds, smells, and sights. His eyebrows in their unique arch, hinting at how alert he was, even when his chin lay resting on his forearms. The click of his toenails on the hardwood floor as he attempted to sneak into the kitchen. (He never was very good at subtlety.) The way he smelled my clothes as I dressed in the mornings to see whether they were work clothes or play clothes. For him, the difference meant either eight hours of waiting for me to return home or the immediate gratification of a trip to the park.

Winslow took delight in every waking second of his five years on this earth. The moment he was unleashed, he shot across whatever stretch of green lie in front of him, cutting a circle back to me only when my calls became tinged with desperation, or when something distracted him along the way.

He abided in expectation. Every moment was a chance for something wonderful to happen. He was ever-alert, employing all of his senses to their fullest capacity to find something new to sniff, eat, chase, or roll around in. New adventures were life-giving to him, which is why we so rarely repeated a route on our runs through the neighborhood and Balboa Park.

There were things he didn’t like. Vacuum cleaners, smoke detectors, plastic bags (the menacing crinkle that continued even after they had been set down was unnerving). When these things assaulted his senses, he immediately ran to me and buried his wet nose in between my legs, armpits, any place that offered escape – unless, of course, I was the one pushing the vacuum.

Through everything, Winslow was dedicated, loyal to me, and so eager to please. When he was alive, I did not have the capacity to fully appreciate this. Now, in his absence, in the void when I wake up and realize I don’t have to step over him to climb out of bed… Now I begin to understand just how much he gave me. No one else can offer that kind of unwavering belief in me. No one else can promise he will stay, heel, come, sit, and lie down with me.

No man can apprehend the depth of conviction and fortitude of a good dog. We are too far beneath him, wrecked by our disease of want. We crave too many things, too much, too often, and we forfeit the good opportunities our long lives grant us to simply be delighted.

Even from within the stupor of the extra dose of Tramadol I insisted he take on his last day, Winslow’s fortitude shone out. I will always remember it:

I move in close, and my face is wet, and I put my forehead on his. I feel his leg, one of the two he can still maneuver. He lifts it and rests a paw gently on my shoulder. It is a touch that puts to rest every dark thought at work inside me. Even facing the unknown world that waits, even after the frenzy of hospitals and drugs and the pain that comes and goes, Winslow knows only this moment – man and dog, together in the place where we sleep – and though he no longer has the ability to thump his tail in delight, he delights anyway, and assures me that in this moment, as with every other moment in his life, there is nothing better than being where I am.