our lady of perpetual soda blogs of estranged christmas poems, and in the spirit of dehumanizing holiday travel, i offer you my own somewhat scatterbrained reflections on chrismas ennui:

the task is simple: fly from chicago to boise. the catch: it’s 3 days after a blizzard closed the denver airport and paralyzed air travel all over the country, and 3 days before christmas.

in 38 hours i visit the following airports:

[chicago]
[denver]
[san francisco]
[san jose]
[reno]
[salt lake]
[boise]

i zig zag across the american west, and, in the cartoon version of my life there is one of those maps that shows red lines criss-crossing one another as they connect each hub city. push pins go into the map in an ever-narrowing spiral: my strategy is to hone in on boise by approximation. if i can’t go there directly, i will get there thru sheer perseverance.

…of all the airports i visited, chicago was the most like a refugee camp. i met folks who had been roaming the halls since tuesday (that was on friday afternoon). my flight to denver had a standby list of 309 people, who clustered around the service desk like hungry wolves until the airline attendant snapped that if they didn’t back off, no one was getting on that plane and it would just fly to denver with empty seats.

…arriving after midnight in san francisco, united airlines kindly offers to book me on the first available flight to boise, which is five days from now, after christmas and after i’m already scheduled to have returned to chicago. i go onto the standby list, but am disheartened when i probe for more information and come up with the following datum: i am 47th in line for a day of completely sold-out flights. united’s version of a hotel voucher is two of those little blue airline pillows and a quiet corner of the airport terminal. i decline and take a cab to an airport hotel where i drop my filthy traveling clothes onto the floor, take an excruciatingly hot shower, and contemplate the thought of christmas alone in a hotel in burlingame. i curse my ex-boyfriend, blame him for the snow, the isolation of a strange hotel room in a strange city, for the fact that i am going to these herculean measures to avoid spending christmas alone.

…in case you ever wondered about this, 1 a.m. is when night becomes morning on the SFO departure boards. yesterday’s scheduling triumphs and failures are wiped from the slate and replaced with tomorrow’s ambitious travel schedule. it’s also when they clean the escalator hand rails.

…everywhere i go i am plagued by the trappings of a secular, tacky, commercial christmas. christmas carols, bright with insincerity and their incongruous messages of peace, are piped in everywhere, even on the plane while we sit on the runway waiting for a maintenance crew to resolve unspecified mechanical issues. i am specially tortured by the selection of carols:

blue christmas
i’ll be home for christmas (if only in my dreams)
all i want for christmas is you
have yourself a merry little christmas

…and it’s the people i encounter, too: the airport shuttle driver who cranks the all-christmas-carol-radio station as we zip down the 101 toward san jose airport, the van swaying at 85 mph as we cruise past sleeping palo alto at five am. the security guard in chicago who bellows feliz navidad in an off-key voice to no one in particular. the gate agent with a white sparkly reindeer antler headband holding back a wad of bleach blonde hair, whose job it is to placate the 309 angry, tired, alienated passengers clustered around her travel desk. i realize that all of these folks in the travel industry, this is their christmas. like me, like every stranded traveler out here, these folks are working toward their christmas as well, finding the holiday in these tacky but familiar details. i envy them, thinking they’re probably already home, have families and warm, brightly lit houses awaiting them at the end of their shift. but i don’t really know that for sure.

…at 4 a.m. i sit on the edge of my hotel bed, watching coffee brew in the hotel coffee maker, a little device that takes a pre-packaged pod of coffee, runs it through a disposable filter and directly into a paper to-go cup. slap the lid on and i’m good to go, no clean up required of me or the maid service. i breakfast on the remains of last night’s dinner (two individual-serving size bags of wheat thins) and wonder what any of this had to do with the christmas of holiday myth: a cozy log cabin with a crackling fire; a silent full moon shimmering on the snow; midnight mass, strange in its ethereal beauty; a kitchen full of family, an oven full of baked goods, a heart full of love, a season of forgiveness.

…$17 for a sandwich and a beer in salt lake city airport. it was barely noon, but i had been up for almost 2 days and a beer sounded like a great idea. i wondered about liquor laws in utah, but when i asked the waitress if it was too early to order beer she just laughed and i followed her glance around the nearly full bar. time inside airports moves independently of time elsewhere. it’s always evening somewhere. afterwards i conked out cold in a quiet corner of the waiting area and had the most restful hour of sleep i’ve had in months.

…in the southwest airlines holding pen in the salt lake airport, there is a santa claus, fully decked out in the deluxe velvet costume, complete with padded stomach (how did he get that thru security, when they make me strip down to my t-shirt?), a silky white beard, and a sack full of candy canes. at first i thought it was a nice touch that the airport had hired a santa to entertain the hordes of young travelers, but then i saw him fumbling with his ticket and realized he was a passenger on my flight. in spite of the storybook-perfect costume, santa seems strangely isolated. when children approach he gives a hearty ho-ho, but for the most part the kids are keeping their distance. maybe they’d never seen santa struggle to dial his tiny silver cell phone thru thick white gloves before. or find it suspect that, on the day before christmas, he’s boarding an airplane in salt lake city rather than finishing things up at the workshop in the north pole, or at the very least holding court in front of an elf-size castle at the shopping mall. perhaps this is how the seeds of disbelief creep in.

…i am no longer on christmas holiday. i am on my own person leg of The Amazing Race. as i type this section, dawn is brightening over san jose airport, the sky purple and streaked with yellow.

…i chew gum in lieu of brushing my teeth. i hide my hair under a baseball cap. i find comfort in exchanging conversation with strangers, even when it’s the same words over and over: our stories of how many airports we’ve been to, what city we’re trying to reach. the conversations are framed by air travel, but it’s really a microcosm of what all human connection is about: telling the stories of where we’ve been and where we hope to end up.

in the end, i did make it to boise, just hours before christmas eve. my family was waiting with hugs, a hot meal, a warm comfy bed which the family cat and dog both tried to crowd into during the night. the christmas tree with the white twinkling lights was there, and my brothers and i even played with (grown up) legos late into the night. sigh. it’s nice when you can go home, even just for a little bit.

i love the smell of a live (well, recently cut down) christmas tree in the house. when i was a kid i would look forward to the nights when everyone else would go upstairs to bed and i’d be left alone to sit on the sofa and gaze into the tree dreamily, the house dark except for the white lights* on the tree and very quiet, but with that cozy feeling that accompanies a house full of sleeping people.

since i’ve lived on my own, i’ve never had my own christmas tree. there have been many student/artist-budget approximations: mistletoe over the door in our toyon dorm room; the year hannah and i thumb tacked christmas lights in the shape of a tree on the wall of our apartment in buffalo; the year i went through an urban home depot’s dumpster and collected the cast-off branches they were trimming off the bottom of the christmas trees and decorated the mantle of my first chicago apartment with them. (home depot caught on; this year they were selling the bundles of sawn-off branches that they used to toss into the dumpster).

mostly it never made sense to get a tree because i was usually headed back to idaho to spend the holidays with my folks, and we’d decorate a tree there. this year i’ll be going home as usual, but work is limiting my christmas trip to a long weekend, and so i’m spending more of the christmas season in my own apartment. i thought about a tree, but as i watched the families and couples picking out trees at city lots and wrestling them on to cars or dragging them home on the CTA, i felt strongly that i didn’t want to do that alone. picking out the perfect tree, and cursing while you get it into the tree stand**, whiling away a whole winter afternoon decorating it — those are things that you do with a loved one. while this christmas season i’m trying to get used to being on my own again. so i compromised by going the hippy route: i bought a live 10″ norwegian pine that will live out its days happily in a pot (no backyard required). its branches are too delicate for ornaments, so i settled for a few white lights and some red ribbon.

i’m also struggling with learning how to cook for one. basically, it sucks. particularly since i hate leftovers. i’ve never really loved cooking, but i love eating homemade, cooked-from-scratch food. which means that i’ve had no choice but to learn how to cook for myself, since i have neither wife, mother nor live-in maid around to do it for me. in the early days, we cooked together, andy and i. we’d linger over the meal we’d made and critique it, making mental (or literal) notes for the next time, more salt, less curry, whatever. we weren’t great cooks, but it was wholesome in spirit if not body. it was just the way food is mean to be: shared. it had been months, maybe a year or more, since we’d cooked together. we’d cook for one another, but we didn’t cook together any more. perhaps it was a harbinger of our relationship’s demise.

all this makes it seem like i hardly have a reason to cook these days. but i’d just be more depressed if i ate out of a chinese takeout carton or a frozen dinner tray every night. i’d feel even more like a single, lonely cliche than i already do. so i cook. the sight of 5 stalks of broccoli at the bottom of the colandar breaks my heart just a little bit, but i cook. i tupperware leftovers and eat them for lunch the next day. when bananas go spotty and brown i bake them into bread, and bring the loaves to work where the carpenters devour them on their morning break. if i get a craving for a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie, i make a batch and then share them with the kids who live downstairs.

it’s not just food. i’ve realized that life is meant to be shared. with a partner, with friends, with family. there is no one right definition of community. but our community is what defines us. i don’t wish to be bitter and single. i will be wholesome, i will be whole again.

* i belong firmly in the anti-colored lights asthetic camp

** a family tradition, cursing the cheap plastic stand but never buying a better one

in my next life i want to be a housecat.