I baked cookies for Christmas. I wanted to give gifts that were consumable and personal and quietly anti-consumerist, and I wanted to give gifts that were special. As far as I could remember, I’d baked cookies only once before in my life – for my girlfriend’s birthday during my Junior year in college – and that time I’d used a mix. This time I made the cookies from scratch; I mixed oats and cranberries and cinnamon and brown sugar and white sugar and vanilla and oil and coconut flakes, and I baked the cookies and let them cool. And just to make sure they would be received in the same spirit they were made, I prayed and thought of the people I love while I worked.
The cookies tasted pretty good. I gave a batch to my grandparents on Christmas Eve, after joining a number of my family members that afternoon at a “megachurch” in Dallas called Watermark.
(The place was so crowded that we were seated in the “West Community Room,” which was the overflow from the 300-seat Chapel, which was the overflow from the 2,100-seat Worship Center.
The multi-media service was strange to me. And I was put off by the huge crowd and resisted the unfamiliar Christian vernacular and aesthetic; I didn’t dislike the music the band played, but noticed – as I had in the few times I’d been to “megachurches” before – that ritual and ceremony weren’t emphasized.
Instead, the focus was “the message,” and the message was simple and appropriate and challenging: it was that a celebration of birth can be a reminder to seek a real and lasting relationship with God, rather than a “plastic” one. And after the message, and after a number of testimonial videos, the entire crowd, even those of us watching the service on a big television screen in the West Community Room, lit candles and sang Silent Night.)
In the evening my family ate dinner. My grandfather brought fresh and spicy guacamole from home and my grandmother brought pecan brittle from Alabama. We ate brown beans and fresh green tomatillo salsa and banana-leaf wrapped tamales and beef stew and after the meal my step-father Sidney said in earnest that he was pleased and grateful. Because we were all together.
On Christmas Day, driving with my brother to my mom’s house, I stopped at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. My brother had been the first of my family members to start attending Watermark, and he’d been instrumental in bringing a number of us there. In years past, we’d all attended Catholic Mass on Christmas Day (including Sidney and his sons, who are also Catholic), but the group consensus had changed. So it was especially meaningful to me when my brother joined me at Thomas Aquinas, even though it was only for a passing prayer.
(I’d intended to quickly enter and exit the church, but was captivated by the image of Christ on the cross, which seemed doubly powerful above a bed of red poinsettias and a brimming congregation. My brother and I stayed long enough to hear a reading from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, to which I’ve always felt a special kinship; I’d translated that chapter from the original Greek when I was in college, and I’d once attended a moving midnight Eastern Orthodox Pascha service at which the same verses were read in Greek and English and French.)
It was a pleasure to reconnect to a familiar ritual and aesthetic, and it underscored the value of what I felt I was compromising – willingly, but not always politely – in order to show my family that they were my priority: my time. And it underscored the complexity of a big family with divided value systems – economic, political, religious, and social – and challenged me to learn comfort with so many moving parts.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy to be consistently loving with my family or rise above the stress of our stirred emotions; it wasn’t easy to fail in my attempts to exercise restraint, control my moods, and forgive myself and others for little mistakes; it wasn’t easy to long for personal affirmation and nurturing during a busy time; it wasn’t easy to oppose consumerism and also shift to new social norms; it wasn’t easy to feel a deepening anxiety about money; and it wasn’t easy to ask for the emotional space and patience that I wasn’t always able to give.
In short, it wasn’t easy to live life with the people I love.
…But although I often felt off-center, there were a number of centering forces that helped me find balance during the holidays.
My friend Jeremy, who I’ve only recently started to understand is one of the most generous people I know, gave me a free month of membership at a big corporate gym called Equinox. The gym has a national presence and woodpaneled combination lockers and complimentary cotton swabs and clean floors and grapefruit soap in the showers. And although Equinox would not otherwise be my first choice for a gym – because of both cost and ethos – I was very happy to join for free and even more so once I saw that a favorite yoga teacher led classes there three times a week.
The classes are challenging, and the teacher – Aaron – is dynamic and funny and devoted. And in addition to his classes at Equinox, which seem somewhat hemmed-in by the gym’s desire for mass appeal, I also started attending classes at Aaron’s own small studio, which is called “Ascend”.
(The Ascend studio is a space Aaron shares with a dance teacher, so in addition to the practical ornamentation of yoga mats and blocks and blankets, the studio is decorated with bright posters, one of which features two tango dancers mirroring a painting of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob wrestling an angel.)
My little sister Jessica joined me for two classes, in which Aaron was truly at his best. The first class we attended was meditative and transformational; throughout the class, Aaron repeatedly encouraged us to witness our environment, body, and mind with unchanging compassionate detachment; he encouraged us to see the self as consciousness only, as the observer rather than the thing being observed. And despite the fact that Aaron’s regular admonishments and reminders sometimes gave little comfort, the day’s refrain worked; as a class we became very quiet and centered; immediately afterward Jessica said she couldn’t stop smiling, and the next day she said she was sore.
In addition to a spiritual and physical practice, I also felt centered by interactions with friends. In these I was free to relax, and remembered that although some intimate exchanges are challenging, others are easy and fun. With one friend I snoozed and watched television; with another I drank peach tea and ate sugary yellow cake, recounted memories of in-common friends, and shared reflections on where we both were professionally and personally; with my friend Colin I pet his parents’ long-legged poodle and regained perspective as Colin explained that he believes there is no perfect city in which to live, and that interactions with family are difficult because they necessarily involve unconscious layers of deep emotional associations. (My sister Carla had said something very similar regarding the emotional “triggers” that seem inextricable from familial exchange.)
And my dad’s visit to Dallas was centering too. I talked with him about the coming year and talked about my options for where to live in 2012 (San Francisco, Portland, Taos, and Austin topped the list), and options for what to do if I did indeed return to the States. I also met my dad and my sister and my step-mom Cecilia at a coffee shop with green awnings where we were eventually joined by my childhood nanny, a woman named Graciela who had lived with my family in Santiago and Mexico City and Dallas and who I hadn’t seen since my father’s wedding in 1997 and who still had freckles and who – my dad told me afterward – had years ago habitually spent hours twirling my sister’s then-blonde hair into coils.
And I ate dinner with my dad and Cecilia and my sisters and my brother at a newly fashionable restaurant in south Dallas called Bolsa; I had a beet and hazelnut salad, and lentils and salty potatoes and arugula, and my dad had a “bone-in” pork chop served with polenta that had been drizzled with honey from the restaurant’s rooftop beehive.
But perhaps the most centering force in recent weeks was the presence of my friend Victoria. Of course, in the days before she arrived in Dallas I was anxious and stressed, but when she appeared at night on the yellow flamelighted sidewalk in front of my step-dad’s house, everything became quiet and happy and calm.
(Victoria and I met sixteen years ago at a “talent identification program” summer camp at Duke University. I was twelve and Victoria was thirteen, and although I didn’t realize it then, during those three weeks I fell in love for the first time. We wrote innumerable letters in the years that followed, and talked every year on Christmas Day; I visited her in Richmond and Los Angeles, and she visited me in Dallas and Hong Kong.)
Victoria was in Dallas on the second leg of a multi-month trans-American road trip from California to Florida to California; she’d been traveling since October, and her dog Baxter – a twelve year-old Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever – had been traveling with her. Victoria ate dinner with me and my family that night in the dining room where we’d had Christmas dinner.
My mom and Victoria got along at dinner and in the days that followed, just as they always have. They are similar and have unceasingly liked one another; Victoria’s presence not only made me happy, but also brought me perspective and created an easy reparation of the recently strained relationship between me and my mom. Victoria also met my dad and step-mom for the first time, and although their meeting was relaxed and informal, – we ate sandwiches and white cookies at a bookstore – it felt meaningful to us all.
In the morning on December 31st, Victoria watched me shave my beard. I hadn’t substantially trimmed it in almost a year, and finally shaving felt symbolic and profound and silly and sad; Victoria laughed and took pictures of my beard in various stages of disappearance, from what I vainly called “Civil War General” to what Victoria discreetly called “Charlie Chaplin”.
That same day, with my face freshly revealed, we drove aimlessly through Dallas and stopped at a small lake in Highland Park. The air was sunny and cold, and as we walked I drank blueberry pomegranate juice and stepped on piles of spiky brown Sweetgum tree seedpods and held Victoria’s hand. That night, we joined my mom and Sidney downtown; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was performing at the glassy limestone squares-and-circles Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in the Arts District, which has become increasingly impressive in recent years, and which is where my mom works in community engagement. Our seats were on the floor, and the orchestra played Jacques Offenbach’s riotous “Orpheus in the Underworld” Overture and Johann Strauss’ brightly blooming “Blue Danube” Waltz. In the intermission we drank champagne.
After the symphony, which left us ecstatic and happy, Victoria and I met my friend Jeremy at a houseparty his friend was hosting. The party would not match the sensory or emotional momentum of the Meyerson, but among the smokers huddled outside around a standing firepit and the loud Irish folksongs playing on the iPod stereo within, and after sipping beer and toasting more champagne and sweetly kissing Victoria at the year’s end, – and the year’s beginning – I felt quietly pleased with nothing more than a relaxed atmosphere and Victoria’s presence.
The night wound down at Jeremy’s house, where I smoked and drank – because both felt right and because my year of conscientious restraint had ended – and where I gave Jeremy a bottle of whisky as a small token of gratitude for his generosity and friendship, and where Victoria fell asleep next to me curled under a blanket.
Victoria’s presence on New Year’s Eve was what I’d been wanting and looking forward to for weeks. And I was wary of my desire, but seeing her and spending such an easy and beautiful and funny and happy day with her reminded me that she truly was able to meet my expectations; she was curious and attentive; she was calm and confident; she was grounded and affirming, and her eyes were pretty and green and arresting too.
New Year’s Day – which could’ve felt like a monumental change or shift – felt normal. Maybe because of Victoria’s genuine companionship, or maybe because of something internal and already integrated, I felt relaxed and centered.
…In the days I spent with Victoria and in the days before, I both daydreamed and made real decisions about my future. I bought a ticket to Rwanda and thought of a committed romantic relationship with Victoria; I was vaccinated for Yellow Fever and Tetanus and Hepatitis A, and I imagined a future in which I didn’t have to keep saying goodbye to my friends; I fantasized about publishing and fatherhood and African travel, and told my dad I’d be home by Thanksgiving.
But mostly I thought of the ways in which I deal with stressful times and happy times, and thought with gratitude for the emotional and physical space I have to process the changes in my life. I didn’t make any formal resolutions, but simply continued to look for a middle path in which restraint is balanced with indulgence, solitude with community, exoticism with familiarity, conflict with resolution, and revelation with hope.
