Viva Brighton Issue #46 December 2016

COLUMN
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Amy Holtz
The truth is, I’m a Minnesotan
Standing at the stop lights
on Church Street behind a
mother and her daughter,
I overhear the girl say,
in a small, hopeful voice,
“But Obama can just come
back in another four years,
right?”
The lights change but I
find myself frozen in place.
Life always seems so much
brighter when you’re
young, when you don’t exactly understand how
everything works.
When I was a kid, my grandparents’ fake Christmas
tree (which I didn’t realise was fake until I
was too old for fooling) was always covered in
what we called ‘bubble lights’. They were little
bulbs topped by a candle filled with water. Once
they were switched on, the bulb would make the
candle different colours - reds, greens, golds, and
once they got hot enough, the water bubbled up
in the candle. During the holidays, they were always
flickering, casting shapes up the walls; they
gave the room a life of its own which you could
happen upon and get lost in.
There were lots of other Christmas traditions:
clam chowder, though we were thousands of
miles from an ocean; Nat King Cole’s voice and
the sweep of strings in the dimmed living room;
the fabric advent calendar from another era -
sewn sequins clinging to old-fashioned toys that
marked the long, long wait till Christmas Eve,
when we were finally allowed to open presents at
Gramma’s house. But it was the moment when
the lights came on that
always sent us kids loopy
with anticipation.
Waiting for all this was a
kind of agony-spiked thrill,
radiant against your small
being. Magic, in a way -
because as kids we couldn’t
grasp how everything
happened, so perfectly,
just when it should. If
you’ve been lucky in life,
the adults around you made everything warm,
plentiful and right. You don’t worry about losing
these moments, about the time when they’ll be
no more, because loss isn’t something you’ve
learned yet.
It’s been three years since my Grandpa died;
two since I said goodbye to my Gramma in their
house, where I spent my childhood. I’m not the
same since. On quiet, now-dark nights at home, I
light tall votives - dollar saints, we call them; not
because I believe, but because they’re beautiful,
rich with the primary colours and stories of
my youth. It’s only now, staring at their glow,
that I see how much they look like those lights,
drawing the tree in a silhouette against the walls
I grew up in.
On Church Street, the little girl is rushing to
keep up with her mum across the street, blue
hockey socks blurring with the movement. The
response is low, the mother shaking her head.
I wait again for the light to go red. I pretend
to search my pockets because I’m embarrassed.
Somehow, there’re tears in my eyes.
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