Christmas Tree and a Music Video
Every once in a while, it seems my readers like to look into my personal life. So here is something:
Some people think it is late to be doing this. But right now I'm putting up the Christmas tree in my mother's house. While I do it, I usually play a music DVD, like Ben Folds Five Sessions at the West 54th - which remains the best video document of my favorite band ever. (Here is the one sample I could find on YouTube) This year, I'm watching the last season of The Wire - On Demand.
This tree-lifting is usually a solitary effort. Although not always. I remember one year, in high school days, my girlfriend was helping me with the tree. I dated her for more than half my time in Brewster High. That feels like a decade when you are that age. I remember figuring out the fraction of my life that I had spent as her boyfriend. It was significant. She was very sweet to me and she was my first love. If you can have a first love at that age.
At that time I had started taking dance classes - ballroom and swing - and my girlfriend was not my partner. My dance partner had a boyfriend of her own but we were growing close. A little jolt of jealousy can help a relationship. Sustained jealousy rots it.
Anyway, I remember the way she bent herself around the tree and the look of concentration on her face - getting the lights just right. I went outside to get a breath of the cold winter air and then, in the dark of the entrance hallway, I looked at her in the Christmas lights. I was about to call to her, but it wasn't her name on my lips. So I said nothing. I thought I was in danger of breaking her heart. She was very pretty that day. I remember that image of her and my tree came to me years later when in New York City, I bumped into her. (Yes, sometimes in a city of 8 million people you do run into your one ex-girlfriend.) My two friends lingered behind the two of us as we walked through the Village and found a cafe. She was pretty that day - the last time I walked with her.
A few weeks after that Christmas, I stayed home from school, sick. I called her that afternoon and we broke up. After many hand-written letters, I started dating my dance partner that November. On a more recent Christmas, she got a present from a young man. On the following St. Valentine's Day that present revealed an engagement ring. They got married this year, I heard.
For some reason, while I was putting up the tree tonight, I thought to myself, "This has been the best year of my life." And then I heard this Fionn Regan song, and everything you read here occurred to me.
I've lost touch with that girl since. Almost everyone I know has. But I bet this was the best year of her life too.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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