Christmas Memories Flooding In (Cigar Smoke 12-30-10)

As I’m writing this the rain is falling on my head like a song. The only problem with that is that I am inside my house. Hey, it’s been quite a rainstorm, huh?

But as I sit here at my desk, something else is flooding in: Memories of a Christmas past.

In 1964 I was living up in Northern California in a little town called Arcata, in Humboldt County. I had just gotten married and I was 23 years old. My wife was getting her teaching credential at Humboldt State College and I was working on the green chain at Pacific Lumber Co., out on the Samoa Peninsula.

And that December we lived in this dumpy, upstairs apartment which we climbed up to on dark, shaky, unlit stairs. The main thing I remember about the place was that it had linoleum floors that were coming up at the sides of the rooms and I thought we would be the first people ever eaten by bad floor covering.

But that wasn’t the scariest part of living there. From our window on the second floor, we could look out and see our neighbors across the street. And our neighbors just happened to own a mortuary. And sometimes at night, when we turned off our lights to go to bed, we would hear suspicious noises and we would go peek out the window and we would see these shadowy figures carrying rolled up carpets or blankets with something heavy in them.

I am not kidding you here. (Would I lie to you?) We were absolutely certain that these guys were doing something evil. Stephen King evil. And Stephen hadn’t even started writing yet. The weirdest thing was that sometimes they would carry these rolled-up carpets into the mortuary and sometimes carry them out of the mortuary. We were sure they were dead bodies, or on the way to being dead bodies.

It was really scary. One time I was so scared I whispered to Sue, my then wife, “Honey, maybe you better go down there and check this out?” She tried to backhand me with the flashlight she was holding, but the rising linoleum knocked her off balance. Ah, the memories.

Anyway, I was working out at the lumber mill that Christmas season and I learned one of the many life lessons that I torture my kids with to this day. We were working very, very hard. And the green wood would come down the conveyer belt (the chain) and we would wrangle it off the line and stack these 20-foot boards onto pallets. Grueling, tough work.

And we would all bitch about how much work there was to do. We didn’t think those boards would ever stop coming down the chain. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. And then one day there were no boards on the line. We couldn’t believe it. We were all so damn happy.

Lots of yelling and relief until the next day. That’s when the foreman told us that, since there wasn’t any more work to do, he had to fire all of us. And he did. On the spot. Two weeks before Christmas. So I always tell my kids … ah, you know what I tell them.

And right after I got fired from my job, it started to rain. I mean, it rained. Hard. For weeks. And the water kept building up and the flood level kept rising and the bridges started to get washed out and thousands of dead cows were all floating in the Ferndale Valley and, boys and girls, we were right in the middle of what they call a 100 Year Flood.

And it was really something. We were isolated up there in Arcata. Completely cut off from most everything and everybody. And we couldn’t travel at all that Christmas. Just hunkered down in Humboldt County. Me crying and Sue just telling me to shut the hell up.

But it was kind of fun, too. We didn’t have hardly any of the Christmas shopping hassle and we didn’t need to make up any lame excuses for not seeing certain relatives, and school was out for Christmas vacation, and I could pretend that Sue would make me pot roast dinners and ask if there was anything else she could do for her man, her lord and master.

And I remember we went out to buy a Christmas tree and, of course, there weren’t any trees on the lots due to the flood. So we actually went up into the forest and cut down some scraggly little sucker and brought it home. This was one hideous tree, baby. It was just waiting for somebody to write a book about it — “The Ugly Christmas Tree That Nobody Wanted Unless There Was a 100-Year Flood and Maybe Not Even Then.”

But we liked it, dammit. We decorated it with beer can pull tabs and uneaten pizza crusts and strange shapes we crafted out of aluminum foil. I think Sue even painted a few eggshells with her toenail polish and hung those. (Now you know why I married her.) Ah, the memories.

I hope you all have great Christmas memories, too. Even you commies.