Sometimes you just let your leg fall asleep. You feel one leg cutting off circulation from the other (or in my case, my foot digging neatly into the soft padding of my opposite thigh) and though you feel the numbness forming, you are engrossed or reposed and you simply don’t move the limb. This is me new years day. I woke up at 2pm and made us both eggs with manchego, baked beans, bitter greens, chorizo and toast and served it with mimosas made from Pascual orange juice “exprimidas” – that means squeezed – and cava from the Pakistani-owned deli just up the narrow damp street that runs perpendicular from our door.
We’ve decided we’ll let the Christmas lights twinkle on our tree for one more day. After that, we’ll unravel everything and give that corner back its free space and get on with the rest of our year. Though I’ll miss the play of light coming from the corner of our living room, I really didn’t feel Christmas all that deeply this year. A bit like how I didn’t feel my leg until I shook the numbness loose and walked over to the bed to continue to write, resting my neck (which has been suffering from a pinched nerve for two days now). Peter kept saying ‘c’mon, it’s Christmas’ and I went along enjoying myself immensely for the shopping in Santa Caterina market that it required. We bought a half of a turkey. They were so big that half was the only solution. We simulated a British Christmas meal with BBC radio and all the acoutrement I described in the last post and we got loopy on Jameson’s while playing dominoes which created a nice atmosphere, but I didn’t feel the noel.
It’s not that I’m a scrooge — and Christmas doesn’t depress me like it did when I was single and didn’t have this burgeoning family of my own — it’s just that while the rest of the world was caught in a flurry of white that wouldn’t let them forget the season, we’ve been in a damp south
ern European city where the cultural cues, the extensive nativity scene decorations, the blocks of turron candy sold at every shop, the squatting elvin figurines ‘pooing’ presents – an actual custom in Catalonia – a bit like our Santa Claus if he were the scatological sort – are not mine and don’t trigger the Christmas reflex, sad or happy. It just isn’t Christmas without the familiar store sales, marketing gimmicks, Saks windows, airport congestion or train travel like last year when we went to Madrid.
Christmas is for kids, besides. The years before this we channeled our childlike instincts (which are not so far from the surface) and we did the same this year but with feeble results. We spent most of it in stillness, wondering about tomorrow and feeling the waves of inbetweeness that still wash over us. In that frame of mind, we watched stories from his culture and mine – the British animated cartoon, The Snowman with the exquisite song ‘walking in the air’ a boy’s fantasy of flying while his dull inured parents sleep through til Christmas dawn – and cruel American tales of an ostracized Rudolph and a lonely and alienated mountain man, the Grinch.
Yesterday I went to a reflexologist for my neck pain. She folded her hands in front of her after the Chakra stone therapy she threw in proved fruitless. It was a jumbled up misfiring of signals that made my stomach tighten. True relaxation just wasn’t possible. You are a good person, she told me to start, but you are not happy inside. Your liver, your kidneys, your intestines, she started to write using Google Translate to list out the organs that were not happy inside. She sent me to an herbolist for a tea to drink mornings to flush out my kidneys. I looked inside the bag which contained the usual dried herbs and leaves but also tufts of something that looks like the hair I sweep up from Niji’s coat thrice weekly. It’s chilling in the refrigerator now. I’m going to go with this. I’m going to imagine it to be a cure for listlessness and indecision. I know a million writers work way off the grid to get their book published but the whole publishing world I know so little about seems no more than a muffle in its distance. I have to face the idea that to lose my ego completely I have to stop pretending I like big corporate jobs that support big corporate salaries. I have to unwrap one leg from around the other and let the feeling flow back in. And if I’m succesful in that, I can say it will be a happy new year indeed.
Happy New Year.
-Chauncey Zalkin
(Here is Walking in the Air – Sony will make you go to Youtube to watch it but it’s worth the extra click)
