The Christmas Ride
I've had some rough Christmas Eve's.
I spent the morning of Christmas Eve watching the puzzled Canada geese crash landing on the ice and
around noon the phone rang. It was my mom. She had moved to Florida to be closer to her brother after I left home and told me she was invited to Christmas at Gary and Faye's out in Lawrenceville, GA. My uncle had married Faye's mom and she was the one who had hired me as a draftsman at Scientific Atlanta.
She let me know she had just arrived at their house and asked if I wanted to have dinner with them. In Lawrenceville. Lawrenceville was 39.3 miles. 1 hour 16 minutes from where I sat watching the geese on Lakeshore Drive in Mountain Park. If I took the short cut. It was 23 degrees and dropping. Naturally, I said yes.
I did not have motorcycle clothes back then. I had an old welding jacket of my brother's because I rode a Harley Shovelhead, after all. Well, I did when it was running. It was now in boxes waiting to be choppered, so I grabbed the jacket and the keys to the RD and took off.
Instead of risking my life on Georgia 400, the 285 death-loop and I-85 in traffic, I risked my life with hypothermia by taking the long way. Yea, buddy. The back roads. It only took me three hours and two Waffle House stops to make it. I was numb, but after only twenty minutes in the bathroom with my hands and feet in a sink full of hot water, I thawed out!
Dinner was amazing. Even more amazing was at 9:00 pm when my mom sat down next to me and told me I had to leave. "Gary and Faye wanted a private Christmas with their son Todd.", she said. "They're funny like that." So down the road I went. Like George Thorogood once said, "Everybody funny, now you funny too."
It was brutal. Getting on the little RD in 23 degrees was wicked cold, but now, at 18 degrees? I would have sooner mounted an electric chair. I screamed out loud the whole ride home, just to stay warm. Luckily, there's not a lot of traffic in Atlanta on an 18 degree Christmas Eve. By the time I hit the 285 loop, there was not a car in front or behind me. I made long sweeping turns across all six lanes on that little 2-stroke twin, just because I could. I knew it was taking me longer to do so, but hey.
Christmas Spirit and all.
I was 23 and there was this girl. I'd met her at the wedding of a good friend on St. Simons Island in June of the same year. . Christmas came, I had been shopping for her and her daughter, and had gifts wrapped from Neiman-Marcus.
I packed my car, an orange Datsun 240Z, and arrived at her aunt and uncle's in Charlotte about 6pm. Just in time for dinner and my first sort-of family Christmas since leaving home at 19. After a few months of chopping firewood, fixing cars and plumbing for them, they almost started to like me.
As I was warming up and trying to decide between eggnog or a nice Red, she gave me her gift, a picture of herself, and gently announced that her new boyfriend was coming by for dinner and could I be gone in the next 15 minutes or so. The sound of my heart breaking was rumoured to be heard as far away as Pukewana, South Carolina.
Oddly, I took the picture and then headed for my car. I drove with no direction until I saw the entrance to I-77. There was a Roadway Express truck blocking the south exit, so I headed north. I would have driven to Key West I suppose if the south exit were open. I hit the highway and gunned it north without any idea where I was going.
I drove all night and into the wee hours of the morning until I could no longer stay between the lines and began hallucinating. I was following a man on a bicycle wearing a long green trench coat who kept turning around to look at me all the way up I-95 to the New Jersey Turnpike. When I rolled down my window and the icy blast brought me to my senses, I realized this was probably a bad thing and there really was no man or no bicycle. I threw the picture out the window and watched it shatter in my rear view mirror. I pulled into one of those classic Jersey turnpike Hardy's burger truck stop places and crawled into the tiny back of my Z.
Yep, Christmas morning 1982. No eggnog, no stocking, no oranges, no presents. Just poor, poor, pitiful me waking up in the back of a car. I found another gift I had not wrapped in the back. It was a small gray book, blank pages, a journal. So I began to write poetry.
Monumental, epic, heartbreaking poems. Hopeful poems to the lovely girl whom I would someday marry.
Suddenly, I remembered my sister lived in New York City. I went to a pay phone. A pay phone is a dirty, black, phone homeless, desperate people put actual money in to make a call. Nickels, dimes and quarters. Really. I called her collect, she answered, accepted charges and was delighted to hear from me. She invited me to come and spend Christmas with her. I did. My brother-in-law gave me a pair of genuine cowboy boots that I wore out in less than two years.
Those Christmas boots reminded me that I always wanted to, needed to, go to Colorado. By October 1983, I was again sleeping in the back of my car, but this time on the eastern high plains of Colorado on the side of I-70. When I woke up before the crack of dawn and watched the indigo sky turn red to the east and the line of clouds to the west suddenly turn into the majestic snow-capped Rocky Mountains before my eyes. It took my breath away.
I knew I was home.
That Christmas from hell eventually led me to the family of twenty-five with whom I would spend Christmas with for the next thirty years. Man, there were some good ones too. Still are. A few challenging ones, but nothing compares to those Christmas rides.
So, keep your chin up, cowboy. It gets better if you keep getting back on that horse.
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