Happy Christmas Eve, everyone. It’s so good to be home.
It’s 81 degrees right now. I have had a lot of croquetas and have spoken Spanish in the grocery store. Lighted palm trees everywhere. I’m on my way to the beach as soon as I’m finished writing this, and the odor of roasting pig is in the air. White Christmas, my big white booty. This is what the holidays are supposed to be like.
Today I did some last minute shopping and went to Fairchild Tropical Gardens with my mom for the afternoon. We saw lots of trees and flowers and lizards, as well as fish, snapping turtles, and iguanas. As I told Carl: “You know like when we went to Rainier and saw all the marmots? It was like that, except with iguanas.” I think the differences between iguanas and marmots are allegorical to those between Carl and myself. Me: prickly, likes to swim, and something of a drama queen. Carl: furry, likes to climb mountains, is all for the good of the team. (He’s the marmot and I’m the iguana, is what I’m saying). Allegory aside, we did see a big orange iguana jump off a wall and into a pond, and then swim really fast underwater away from us. It looked like a big spiky eel. I had no idea they could swim. Galapagos marine iguanas, yes, but I didn’t know about regular old South Florida iguanas. So that was today’s Christmas nature show.
Mom graciously has rented me a bike for the time that I’m here, and I’m greatly enjoying riding around. It’s super flat and there isn’t a lot of traffic, so it’s very easy. The last time I was on a bike was when I was about twelve and was, in fact, right here at home. I’m happy to report that it’s true, once you learn, you never forget. I feel eight years old, riding a red bike with a basket and a bell, riding to the beach and the old zoo. I can’t wait until some of my friends get home so I can ride my bike to their houses and feel all independent because my mom isn’t giving me a ride. Driving your car to your friend’s house, that’s no big deal. Riding your bike, perhaps with some ribbons on the handlebars (are you listening, Santa?), that’s where it’s at. All the cool kids are eschewing their Corollas and getting down with the one-speeds, I’m telling you.
Everything here at home, as usual, is the same and not so much the same. Both my elementary school and my high school continue to add big huge buildings, rendering them almost unrecognizable to me. I feel old walking past the park and seeing all these kids who used to be in my mom’s kindergarden classes and are now driving. This island continues to get more and more resorty in feel, with cutesy traffic circles and “old-fashioned” lightposts and increasingly ridiculous signage. People still recognize me on the street and everyone is biking or rollerblading and walking around, when they’re not in golf carts. My mom’s house, which is the one I grew up in, is still not so much a house with a garden attached, but a garden that happens to have a house in the middle, under the grape and jasmine trees. Everything’s calm and breezy and warm, and I’m sleeping ten hours a night. Seattle seems so far away. It is far away.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t do a ton for Christmas. No big family dinners, nothing religious anymore. We’re going to have a little dinner, and some of my mom’s and my sister’s and my friends will stop by, maybe, and we’ll open presents tomorrow morning. My mom still has these old dimestore stockings she glittered with our names in the late seventies that she puts up, so we’ll open those too. As usual, she didn’t get a tree but as instead stuck up all sorts of pine boughs and put ornaments on them, and she put outside lights on a vaguely piney-looking tree in the backyard. We’ll go to the beach tomorrow and walk to the lighthouse and back, probably. We may or may not dress the ctas up with ribbons as we open presents. But nothing huge, nothing super traditional. I just don’t have a traditional family life, and so it’s been nice to just admit that and do what we feel like doing. And then some more friends will be back in town, and Carl will come for New Year’s. Mellow. Relaxed.
So, yes, home for the holidays. It’s Christmas Eve. I hope that you are reading this you are at your home for the holidays, or at the home of someone you love, or else at a really swanky party…of course, if you’re at a really swanky party, why are you reading this right now? The crab dip not agreeing with you so much? Anyway, I wish you love and happiness, and wisdom and joy, and peace, definitely peace this evening. Hope there’s some room at the inn if you need it, hope you’re finding way home as best you can. Merry Christmas to you.