Snapshot: I’ll Be Home for Christmas

This week I went to Denver on a business trip that involved difficult meetings, giving a speech, and so on.  That all went well enough, and finally I got to go to the airport and begin the homeward journey.  There, I stood once again before the larger-than-life statue of Jack Swigert on the B concourse, a copy of the statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, and it gave me chills as it always does.  One reason is that I knew him and liked and admired him, and actually worked for him on his 1982 congressional campaign.  It is very strange to have lived long enough to see people one knew made into famous statues.  That is odd enough.  But the other reason is the sense of loss I feel for the fact that, though he was elected, he never got to serve because he was cut down by illness.  He was the hero of the Apollo 13 near-disaster and an authentic hero of our modern age, an age when heroes are in rather short supply, as possibly you have also noticed.  This is what I was thinking about as I stood there looking up at him and at all the Christmas travelers hurrying by, barely noticing the statue of “the astronaut guy”.  Life is strange.

But this reverie, was quickly replaced by another, as I focused on the fact that I was heading home for Christmas myself.  This is the time of year when that last day of business travel has a special keenness, because it is travel homeward for Christmas. and the New Year.  Even if there are a few more days in the office left in the business year, that last day of business travel is especially sweet and easy to bear.  Home, family, Christmas, vacation, friends, visitors, rest, fires, wine, lights, presents, food, sleeping in, walking the dog, not doing chores, not looking at emails or taking calls or solving problems or negotiating deals, or putting up with all the petty hassles and harassments of the workaday world.  And each year in December when I turn my face toward home, I feel all this with a light heart, and memories of other years and other trips flood into my mind, in flashing sequence, like an old-fashioned slide show.

One that particularly stands out is December of 1991, when I was ending a difficult and stressful first year at the U.S. Commerce Department.  I had traveled extensively abroad and with a high profile in countries that were new to me with the difficult assignment of promoting commercial openness and free trade in parts of the world where those things are not very settled items in the commercial culture.   I had visited Kuwait in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War; also Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.  Then in the spring I went to Pakistan and India.  In late summer I went to Australia with my wife for a vacation, then to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya for the government.  Then in December I went first to Egypt for meetings in Cairo and then a sightseeing jag that took me through the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, to Luxor and Karnak and Abu Simbel at Aswan.  From there to Tel Aviv for meetings, then a drive through Israel to Jerusalem, for more government meetings.

I stayed at the fabled King David Hotel and when my last meetings were finally over, I allowed myself one day to visit the holy and historic sites of the great and iconic city.  To my considerable chagrin, I awoke on that morning to a cold and drenching downpour that discouraged sightseeing, but if you are in Jerusalem and only have one day to explore and the weather happens to be unpleasant, that is just too bad.  So I took an umbrella and set out to visit all the holy places.  I am sure I am not the first person to remark how small Jerusalem is, really, this gold and limestone city that looms so large in the world’s collective mind and in its history.  You can walk in Christ’s footsteps from the Garden of Gethsemane to Golgotha in a short time, though when Christ walked it the fate of the whole world and the hopes and dreams of all its people hung in the balance.  The Western Wall.  The Yad Vashem memorial, Bethlehem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Dormition, Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Cenacle and on and on.

All these sites and all these holy and historic places that have defined three of the world’s great religions and cultures are all here thrown together in tremendous propinquity.  For anyone who is in the least historically or spiritually aware, it is completely overwhelming and thrillingly wonderful.  I was soaked through and freezing by the end of the day, exhausted and coming down with a terrible cold, but I floated on air as I returned to the hotel for a hot bath and a good night’s sleep.  For I had seen Jerusalem, I had seen the golden city shining on the hill, though only for a hurried day and in miserable weather, and I was going home for Christmas, at the end of a fascinating and difficult year, to my family.  I thought I was going home to my wife, but I later knew it was in fact to my family, for our daughter would be born in the new year about to begin.  Jerusalem, Christmas, family: for me, as surely they are meant to be for everyone in all places and at all times, these three things are all bundled together forever and inseparably, with such a warm, mellow glow.

Many years later, in December of 2001, I traveled to Munich on business, doing some due diligence work on the German pay TV industry.  This was my first international trip since the terrorist attacks of 9-11 that year, and it was strange to be traveling in that post-apocalyptic world.  Munich was cold and crisp, of course.  I had been there several times before, though not in a rather long while.  I have always liked Munich, so I was enjoying the chance to see it again.  After days of meetings and briefings, and stuffing my head with far too much new information, much of it in German, my work was finished and I was relieved to be able to relax a bit and walk around Munich’s old town in the city center.

I was staying at the time in a small boutique hotel right in the middle of the old town, which was transformed into a winter wonderland.  I had never been in Munich before in December, and so had never seen how the Bavarians decorate their shops by festooning them with evergreen boughs, many of which are then wired with tiny fairy lights.  Almost every shop-owner participates in the magical transformation, and the result really is impressive; it is as if you are in an enchanted Bavarian forest, and it could not be more charming.  In the middle of the old town, in the square in front of the Town Hall where the famous clockwork tower is, they build the Christkindlmarkt (Christchild market): rows and rows of wooden stalls, also festooned with evergreen boughs and fairy lights, and selling everything from handcrafts, pastries, roast meats, cheeses, linens and of course Glühwein, a hot spicy mulled wine that is perfectly delicious and makes the sharp Alpine cold merely refreshing.  The wine and spices and fir boughs scent the frozen air, a million lights sparkle, everyone is happy, the famous Rathaus Glockenspiel works its magic into the night and Christmas seems so freshly and joyously defined in the heart of a tired businessman, who will be up early and with bells on to go home to his family far away.

Something about the authenticity and antiquity of these traditions, their warmth and their light, their charm in short, served as a counterweight to the awfulness and horror of what happened a few months before, in September.  Terrorist vandals may stand on the roadside where the cavalcade of progress is passing by, and throw rocks at the ark of civilization.  But the world goes on, light and goodness and kindness and tradition prevail over time; broken things mend and wrong things fall away, fall behind, and the good in the world goes forward, and the good people with it.  The center holds, and life goes on.

Just the next year, in December of 2002, I was on the board of a television company in Brazil and after the board meeting in Sao Paulo, several members of the board decided we needed to go to inspect the company that was making the consumer electronics equipment for our TV signals.  This was located in Manaus in northern Brazil, at the confluence of the two great rivers of the Amazon Basin: the Rio Negro and the main stream of the Amazon itself.  We flew into Manaus, toured the factory and met with the electronics company officials, which was all very interesting to me at the time for business purposes, but the reason I am telling this story here is what happened afterwards.  I had always wanted to see the Amazon and now finally was there on the banks of the mighty river itself.  Even this far inland, it was far broader than the Mississippi and dark brown tea-colored, from all the decaying vegetation that it passes through and sweeps along.  It is a vast, overwhelmingly large river, especially at this point, where the two colossal streams combine.

The first day after the meetings were over, I hired a power launch to go up the river and explore.  I remember I plugged my earphones in and listened to Celine Dion’s Christmas carols.  As the speedboat tore upriver in the nearly equatorial sunshine with the gorgeous rain forest streaming by on both sides, I listened to the magnificent Christmas standards at high volume, with a big grin on my face.  To this day, isn’t life funny, I cannot listen to that recording without being transported instantly to the Amazon.

We toured an old rubber plantation, some old coffee settlements and had lunch at a famous ecological resort that is built entirely on 40 or 50 foot stilts, so it is in the very canopy of the rain forest.  Gorgeous blue and red macaws were flying through the air and howler and capuchin monkeys were swinging through the trees.  One capuchin was quite tame and come right up to us wanting to be held, so we carried him with us for a while on our walk through the canopy.  What a stupendous ecology!  We even, at one point in the great river, came upon a pod of the rare, small pink dolphins that live I think only in the Amazon Basin and, yes, they really are pink.  What an amazing world.  It was a glorious day, and later in a local shop I found a large emerald that I bought as a Christmas present for my wife, and which I later made into a necklace with this brilliant pendant jewel.  I went home for Christmas that year with a green Amazon reverie in my mind’s eye and with a very beautiful green jewel in my pocket.

Another December years later, I was in Madrid on another business trip and, after days of meetings at the headquarters of telephone giant Telefonica, I had an entire afternoon off before my flight home the next morning.  And my hotel was located in a chic district of central Madrid, within walking distance of the Prado, so I decided to spend the rest of the day walking around one of the world’s greatest art museums, which I had not been inside of since I was a poor student and visited Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Franco era.  So this day, I feasted my starving eyes on this stupendous art collection.  Three pictures stand out vividly in my recollection, all iconic religious subjects: a representation of the Annunciation, one of the Baptism of Christ by St. John and a very dark and hypnotic Crucifixion.

These three pictures hung in the gallery of my mind as I headed home that year for Christmas and I see them still as if I had visited them this afternoon, especially the dark and other-worldly Crucifixion, because my father died earlier that same fall after a harrowing final illness.  I was still traumatized and sorrowing over that.  The death of someone close to you is naturally a wound that is slow to heal, sometimes that never really heals right, and the pain and awareness of not being healed just go on and on.  And then the consolation of Christmas comes and with it the brilliant promise of the Incarnation, confided to Mary at the Annunciation, shared openly with the world at the baptism in the Jordan River, and then fulfilled in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.  The sorrows of the world fall away, for a time at least, and hope is reborn.  That is no doubt why those pictures stand out so vividly in my mind.  That is what going home for Christmas means.