Here’s another Christmas Keeper. This is from “Dave.”
Early in the relationship, back when we were both freshman college students, back in New Jersey, my First Love’s parents decided, for various reasons, to hate me. Virulently.
I was a resident but she lived at home. So, for nearly two years, we saw each other behind their backs. Stole minutes and kisses when we could. Walked the campus between classes, telling each other that it would be different soon, someday. In retrospect it was not the best way we could have handled it, but for whatever reasons, it was what we did.
Finally in the fall of 1976, we decided that we could not stand to spend another Holidays apart, so we confronted her parents. Came out of our personal closet. It was angry and difficult and frightening. There was shouting and tears, but that isn’t the Christmas story. We spent that Thanksgiving with my family, but that isn’t the Christmas story either, nor is the fact that before Spring arrived we were done forever.
On Christmas Eve in 1976, I drove to her home in Bergen County. The atmosphere in the house was tense and unfriendly, so eventually we went for a long walk. It was cold. It wasn’t snowing but there was a bit of snow on the sidewalks and front yards, clinging to the bare trees. We walked the empty suburban streets of her neighborhood, holding hands, stopping to kiss, delighting in the sensation of merely being together, of feeling free and in love. I remember little else of that long ago night except for the way that the dim, widely-spaced streetlights cast our long shadows on ahead of us, elongated and distorted against the whiteness of the snow. I remember that the headlamps of passing cars made diamonds glint from the piles of plowed snow.
I remember how the Christmas lights blinked on porches as we passed, and I remember that, for just a while, we were so very happy.
Happy Holidays to you and yours, Dick!
Dave V.