Years ago, I broke baby Jesus, and this past Christmas I broke the angel. The cow placidly observing the manger has been missing her right flank for years.
Back story. Jesus and the brown cow I bought in Spain the first Christmas I was married. I was following my new husband, an officer on the USS Pharris, around the Med. He had shipped out six weeks after we were married and would be deployed for nearly eight months. The ship was expected in Barcelona on Christmas Eve, and while awaiting its arrival, I bought a ceramic crèche to add holiday spirit to our hotel room and eventually carry back to the States.
Last year, Jesus and his cow were part of the menagerie I packed away after the holidays, but I left the angel on a shelf in my office. Purchased by my parents before I was born, she has witnessed every Christmas of my life from the top of the tree, but I decided to broaden her job description. Who doesn’t need an angel come April or May?
So, my angel is a blue-eyed blonde, with a gold rope belt on her white dress and wings as transparent as a dragonfly’s. In the grand scheme of things, she is just a piece of plastic, and if an asteroid were on a collision course with Earth, and I had 15 minutes to live (yes, I do think about these things), saving her would not be a priority, but I like to think that she is watching over me as I write, perched amidst my novels and books on craft. There is something deeply grounding about making room in your current life for observers of your past.
So my roommate from my junior year of college was visiting from Idaho recently. Because my work spills over onto my weekends, it’s difficult to find the energy to throw out the welcome mat for houseguests—the cleaning, changing sheets, the putting aside of a schedule– and yet– the best things that have ever happened to me are all things I didn’t have the brains to ask for.
It’s a list. You’re probably on it.
We decide to go back to our college town for lunch. To drive through our campus, explore the changes, or perhaps discover nothing much has changed at all.
“Do you remember the Call Center we worked for?” she asks as we walk into a bistro on High Street. “I think it used to be right over there. In that building.”
I have no idea what she is talking about.
“You signed us up as volunteers,” she says. “You thought it was something we should do. It was some kind of crisis hotline.”
Still—not one molecule of memory.
“Remember when we were thinking about moving off campus? Remember the weird guy with the farmhouse?”
I pick through my fries, looking for the crispiest ones. “Nope, nada, not a clue.”
I can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that I could actually have done significant things I don’t remember. Then I’m struck by the thought…could it be her memory that’s faulty?
Maybe it wasn’t me!
But it sounds like me.
Just like me.
We pay the bill, moved by the vulnerability of our young waiter. Dark eyes, slight, uncomfortable with his duties, probably the conscripted teenage son of the owners. How many versions of ourselves have we forgotten that are living in other people’s memories? Childhood playmates, elementary school classmates, boys you kissed, girls you loved, pals from the old neighborhood? These are the only people in your life who know where you came from, who can say, because they were there in the beginning, whether you turned out all right.
I have clearly forgotten a great deal, but I remember a roommate who was perpetually cheerful and generous. Who lent me her yellow Mazda for the weekend. Who sewed a gray-green wool jumper and left it on my bed in our dorm room as a surprise when I returned. Who stood with me as a witness at the altar, as I stood for her. For a few days, my house held the two girls we once were. And there was plenty of room; my heart expanded as hearts do.
And then she was on a plane to Salt Lake City. And there was a hole to fill that had not been there just days before. An unmistakable sense of loss, a little letting go to adjust to, a reconfiguring to do.
I think hearts are never at capacity, there is always room for more. And we are made and remade by the people passing through. But when someone we’ve enfolded even briefly leaves, there is a moment of grief, a pause. It is the price of the gift we didn’t know to ask for.
And the universe does the same just on a grander scale. We are in the expansion mode now. The first beat from the heart of God is encompassing more and more space at the speed of light. Swirling nebulae, spiraling galaxies, from which new suns will burst.
The moon and stars are simply gifts we didn’t know to ask for.
Like rediscovering the people who knew us first.
