“But all my words come back to me, in shades of mediocrity. Like emptiness in harmony, I need someone to comfort me. Homeward bound, I wish I was homeward bound. Home where my thought’s escaping, home where my music’s playing. Home where my love lies waiting silently for me, silently for me.” It’s Thanksgiving Week 2021, as we inch ever so closer to the end of this calendar year. And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I myself am very thankful that this year has not been near as bad as the clusterfuck that we all call 2020. In fact it’s not even in the same league of so-called bad years as 2020 was. For one, I didn’t get dumped and have to restart my life all over again. I didn’t have to bury my mother. I didn’t have to watch my personal income take a 30% drop because of covid. But most of all, this year I was able to once again learn what it felt like to be happy again. Maybe not “truly happy” like I once was just yet (and that might not come until I have someone to come home to every day?), but so, so damn much happier than I was a year ago. And for that, I really am very thankful.
Like most people, standard practice for me during this time of year now thru Christmas, is to remember the events of my childhood. When not only both my parents were still alive and thriving, but also my grandparents, all my aunts and uncles, and of course my sister. Those days will always stand out for me as perhaps my happiest? When I was still so young, so innocent, and above all, so naive to the world and all it’s problems. Some of my earliest memories are from the holiday season, watching my mother and grandmother start the cooking of the following day’s feast the night before. When the aroma would quickly fill the house, and of course the anticipation of relatives arriving from nearby and far away. Which now, all except for my aging father, are gone now. All of them ghosts that are still alive only in my thoughts and memories. And how I miss all of them, especially my younger sister, who never got the chance to experience the joys of what should have been her own eventual family as well as her own holiday traditions. Yea I know, life’s not fair, but she should have lived, goddammit she should have lived. She should have survived childhood cancer and had a chance to live her life too, just like her older brother did. And don’t give me that bullshit that some things are meant to be, or that heaven needed an angel, or that god needed her there more than she was needed here on earth. It all sucks, in fact 48 plus years later, it still sucks. And truthfully I know that her death has affected me more than I sometimes want to realize. And maybe because I was so young then, I was able to block out the pain of going it alone after her passing. And I have no doubt that’s why I’m so fucked up when it comes to death now. After all, that’s why I got dumped a year and a half ago was because of my inability to react properly when my ex’s son died (or at least that was the excuse that I was given). And I take full responsibility for that shortcoming, as they say “guilty as charged your honor”.
Honestly, I don’t dwell on her death (or anyone else’s really) until the holiday season does start to approach. That’s when the memories that I mentioned before start to flood my mind. I miss not only her presence, but my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and of course the man I loved perhaps more than any of them?, my grandfather. Damn I miss him, yes, even now, almost 30 years after his death, I miss him. I had a dream about my grandparents not too long ago. I was young again, running thru the corridors of an empty hospital, when I stopped in my tracks, and there they were, both of them sitting in the waiting room staring at me. Like many of the dreams that we have, it seemed so real, or at least maybe I wanted it to be real? So as this week starts the holiday season now thru the end of the year, for some reason I know I’m not really alone. I have many friends that are there for me, my two daughters (both of whom are here at home together for the first time in a year), my newborn grandson who will in the next few years start to retain his own childhood memories that one day he too will reflect back on. And I have my memories of home when I was a child, when everyone was still alive, and there for me. And in a way, they always will be. Memories of them that still comfort me. Of home, where my thought’s escaping, where music was playing. Home where all my loved ones are waiting silently for me. How today I wish I was homeward bound.