delayed christmas entry.

Christmas Eve my father and I went to Garduño's, a so-so local Mexican restaurant chain with a free buffet before 6 PM with the assumption that you'll buy their drinks. We got there at 5:57 and piled on the reheated enchilada-y lasagna-y-ness with some stray chips on the side, and sat down on our bar stools. My father got me an intimidating margarita and a humble beer for himself. But he watched my margarita like he watches most things he orders me. Sometimes I ask him if he's in love with my food, or something smart like that, and he backs off. And that's all Christmas really is anymore, an excuse to eat badly. Before my mother died I was lavished. She would bake tree and snowman-shaped cookies, a new banana bread loaf a week and concoct elaborate turkey dinners the likes of which I've rarely encountered since. The first Christmas after she died was only two days after the fact; we opened gifts from the dead, almost all of them being from her, an obvious sign of what was to come. The following year I begged my father to try and make Christmas be like she did. He already got out of having to buy me any gifts by getting me a car. I told him the least he could do was make sure Santa would make a stop at our electric fireplace and fill my stocking. On Christmas morning, I woke up early with that ritual eagerness to find what could possibly await me: A bicycle? A motorcycle? A kitten? There were no presents. My stocking was lying on the fire place on its side, not bulging or overflowed with peanut butter cups or chocolate Santas. I looked inside and found assortments of nuts, licorice and dried fruit. I told my father he didn't do it right. His face lit up when he realized he would have to eat it all himself. Over the years I've adapted to his version of Christmas. There's no better or worse version. I'd even prefer the nuts and dried fruit at this point.

This year I got my father to order the gay channel on his new digital cable subscription. I watched this movie about a guy who cheats on his boyfriend on a cruise by falling in love with a girl. I watched a TV show about Dolly Parton obsessors. One guy with cerebral palsy had Dolly Parton cardboard cut-outs in his room and his mother seemed proud. Dolly liked to bring him up on stage, and it was fascinating seeing this scrawny guy with a flopping bent arm next to her and her bosom. One middle-aged man made fancy Dolly dolls, and said Dolly got him through his unaccepting upbringing. Now he lives with his lover, another Southern man his exact age, stature and baldness. My father was watching at this point and kept judging the dolls on how realistic they were. Then he grizzled, "when are they gonna get through this and show us Dolly Parton?" I watched a show about a man who woke up after being in coma for twenty years. He was 19 and had just been married and had a baby girl when he was in a car accident that turned him into a vegetable. His family couldn't afford to keep him on life support or in a hospice, so they brought him home and tended to him like he wasn't in a coma. They'd bring him to Wal-Mart or the movies or Denny's and take him out of his wheelchair and seat him and give him a menu and order him food. They'd tuck him in bed at night, they'd converse with him like he was responding, he was their comatose open-mouthed teddy bear. For twenty years they did this and never once paused to think if it mattered that he never seemed responsive. His mother said she always could tell that he was "in there" and hearing what she said. When he woke up, she asked him questions like who the president was, and he'd answer in a retarded-sounding voice "Ronald Reagan." His daughter, who was born just before he got in the wreck, was now the age he was when he was last awake. He kept hitting on her and calling her by her mother's name. The way twenty years passed him by, it matched so well with these redneck Arkansan's outdated hairstyles and conservatism. Anyhow, the doctors fawned over this man and how he could have possibly lived in a coma that long. They said it was because the mother's intuition was right. She knew he was in there somehow, and that's why he came back. I've been thinking a lot about these people: I think my parents were a lot like this too actually. They never worked a day in my life, and until age ten I had no other friends. We would eat every meal together and go on two-month-long road trips each summer. I hope when I have a lover and children that we can keep each other alive like that. Not only that, but my friends too. I love (some of) them as a family and aspire to keep them mentally and emotionally strong even if they become bumpkin pumpkins.