It looks as if her beloved nascimiento (nativity scene) may have fallen from the car as we were retrieving Christmas boxes from the storage unit. The sucker had better be there still tomorrow when I heave that nasty door back open. Of course, I did forget to close the hatchback, which took about a quarter mile to figure out, but I didn’t think I’d lost a box. Traffic was pretty heavy and we didn’t turn around. It wasn’t clear that anything was gone, we hadn’t heard a sound, and so on. If it did fall out, maybe it landed inside the fence and someone took it to the office. Better yet, it never made it to the car.
My mother bought the set for my wife in Nogales in the early days when she was nice, before the crazy settled in. It’s something of a touchstone of a better time, and I remember the outing well. My wife and I had flown to Tucson for a visit, probably at Christmas, and my father had driven us all to Nogales to buy cheap booze and take us to lunch at a seafood restaurant. I had pescado al mojo de ajo. Probably everyone did. The best part was scoring several liters of top quality tequila and mescal for about four dollars each at the supermercado and a little hole-in-the-wall place that was practically giving away Hornitos. On the way back to the border—in Nogales it was at the end of the block—my wife and my mother went into a little shop and came out with the nascimiento. My honey was beaming and does every year, taking the clay figurines out for Christmas and arranging them just so.
Hauling the goods back to Maryland was easy inside my carry-on bag. Not too many years later I was on another airplane from Tucson to Maryland with the old man’s ashes in a carry-on bag on the floor, writing a song about his dying in my head. Much simpler times they were, richer than I knew, and none of those days will be back again.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
This is my first Christmas without my mother. She died August 29 at 105 years, five months of age. It’s just me and the two old cats this year. Quiet.
I didn’t know she’d passed on, Joe. Thanks for letting me know.
We’re having a quiet Christmas, too. My wife has substituted a collection of angel figurines (“a choir of angels”) for the Nativity scene that’s missing and told me not to rush off and try to find it this morning. “We have abundance,” she said. What a fantastic attitude. Loss, but appreciation of what’s already here (and what could be) seems to be the theme this year. Letting go, dropping the pressures—and some conventions—of the season. All is well, however, very well indeed. Drying laundry in front of the wood stove again, sunlight on the snow…
Perhaps the Nativity set threw itself into the larger world and found another way to serve, or perhaps it needed to plunge you into important memories and give an active gift. Whatever happened or will happen is a gift of soul.
Yes, I agree with all of this. In fact, I had a great time writing this post, which reaffirmed a number of things for me in exactly the way you speculate. Cool!
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