This Christmas has left me a little down, and I probably should just go to bed, but I don’t seem to be able to. I’ve been reading through BT and ET, and wandering around my mother-in-law’s house, instead. Once again this familiar memory from my childhood drifted into my mind. I think I’ll write it, and then go to bed.
It must have been in the mid sixties. (My childhood memories have a certain fuzziness about them.) My family had gone up on Christmas Eve to visit some older friends who had built a small cabin in the Poconos. We were driving home late on a snowy night. My folks had put the rear seat of the VW down and my older sister and I slept under piles of covers.
I woke up and watched the snow through the back window. My parents were quietly talking and my sister was deeply asleep and snoring softly. As we climbed through the mountains, I would see the sky, then the darkened houses and businesses, then the sky again.
The VW chugged up a long climb and when it reached the top and my view leveled off, I saw a sign. “Welcome to Bethlehem.” We began our long descent into the valley, and I saw darkened houses, some with a few candles in the window, and closed businesses, their owners long gone home to be with their families on Christmas Eve.
Halfway down the hill we passed a steel mill, its huge doors wide open in defiance of the cold, the snow, and the season. A huge bucket suspended from the the ceiling poured out a vast river of molten steel that glowed orange red against the blackness of the night and splashed into molds on the floor far below.
Then our Beetle fought its way to the top of the rise, crested the hill, and coasted down the other side, and the steel mill was gone.
I awoke on Christmas morning in my own bed. I suppose my father had carried me upstairs and put me to bed without my waking up. I have never asked my family about that night, about Bethlehem and the steel mill. I do not know if I dreamed it, or it was real. I only know that it is one of the strongest memories I have of Christmas as a child. Now I do not want to know any more about it. The image is firmly attached to Christmas for me, and every Christmas I try to find time alone. When I do, I am a child again stretched out under old, woolen blankets in the backseat of that ’63 Beetle, peering through the rear window as the river of molten steel silently pours from the heavens in Bethlehem. And I am filled once again with mystery and wonder.
What a wonderful memory. Thanks for sharing it with us. Meryy Christmas and may the happy memories help you always.
Gosh teach, you sure have a gift with words. I was in the Beetle with you. š
and thank you for sharing it with us.
It is amazing how some things can trigger memories. In the Christmas memory I did for Farflung’s podcast, I mentioned that the smell of warm Bakelite can take me back to the Christmas in 1963 when I got the radio that started me on the path to nerdiness. There’s a certain lemon-scented perfume that takes me back to New Jersey and my first girlfriend-of-sorts. (I went out with her a few times but she was my girlfriend more in my mind than in hers.)
I hope you and yours had a happy Christmas!
Beautifully written, Teach! Thank you for sharing your memory with us.
To my mind, a sense of wonder is so very important to us, as human beings & the mournfulness so many feel at Christmas may have to do with that missing element.
This is also why the dark, quiet places — in which we may experience meditative solitude — are crucial to the spirit as well. As we’re less & less able to access these places, there’s compounded reason for our malaise & an experience of mystery becomes even more remote.
By & large, we seem to have been given a manufactured reality in place of a personal relationship with mystery, as society remains geared toward ’round-the-clock wakeful attention, either in work or entertainment. As adults (& increasingly, as children) we’re allowed little time for either solitude or dreams; the spirit is bent in subservience to productivity.
I’m glad for you & for each one of us who can still find the hidden passages.
Beautiful, as always, Wench. I feel so peaceful sometimes when I read your comments. Or that there is a peacefulness just outside my grasp that I want so very much.
I sure understand, SN. I believe that we only need the right opportunity to open our hands.
Very strange, 37 tears ago I was pouring that steel on christmas. Your memory sparked mine. On christmas of 1970 I was at BHP on the south coast of Australia, working in a large steel mill. About 2,000 men, from the dregs of society, inhabited a compound of buildings, each housing about 50 steel workers from around the world. My job was to take samples, with a small ladle on a long steel rod, & pour the molten sample into a little crucible to be sent to the lab. That sample, I had to take by carefully dipping the edge of the ladle into the stream pouring from a 125 ton ladle of molten steel, into a series of molds below. Every single person that night was alone & far from home. I had not remembered that night since I red your beautiful reminicense. Happy Holidays to you & yours.
Lives connect and intersect in unexpected ways.