Sans Fig Leaf
"Sentimental Fool"
4 January, 2001
It should come as no surprise that I cry at movies. Yes, lots of people cry at movies, but I'm worse than most.
I cry at movies I've seen dozens of times.
It doesn't matter how many times I see Ebeneezer learning to regret his past mistakes, I still cry when that point arrives in various versions of "A Christmas Carol." Just as I still cry when Charlie Brown discovers the true meaning of Christmas.
As a kid I tried to hide my tears--the fear of being perceived a sissy was very strong. But I've gotten over that. My sentimentality isn't limited to movies, by any means, nor does it only manifest through tears. There are objects around my house that I only hang onto for sentimental reasons. That's not always a good thing. But it isn't always bad, either.
We packed away the holiday decorations this weekend. Funny that it takes so much less time to take down ornaments, roll-up strings of lights, and pack away wreaths than it does to set them all up. Last year Michael convinced me to get rid of several of the old, odd-sized boxes that a lot of the decorations have been stored in for years. We bought several Rubbermaid® Roughtotes™ and did a lot of repacking. We didn't replace all the old boxes, but it was a start.
This year I bought more of the Rubbermaid storage boxes and continued the process. We were nearly finished with the packing when I discovered the problem. I couldn't quite fit everything into the containers and boxes remaining. What I had left over wasn't enough to justify getting another container.
We tried shuffling things around among the containers, but didnt' make any progress. I started completely unpacking one of the boxes. The bottom half of the box was full of candle sculptures. When I was a kid I thought such things were kewl and pretty, until the first time we actually tried to burn one as part of a christmas celebration. Something about the dyes in the wax made some parts of the thing melt much faster than others, and then the whole candle folded in half, dropping a large, flaming ball of wax onto the table, which bounced onto the floor and halfway across the living room carpet before my Mom caught it.
I look at them now with suspicion, at best. They're also frequently just ugly. It's amazing how cute they can look sitting on a store shelf, yet when you get them home and set them out, they just looking tacking and strange.
But Ray loved them. He bought the big, grinning Santa, the dog tangled in Christmas lights, the matching set of six snowmen, the little forest of wax evergreens, several smaller Santas, a pair of kissing Santa and Mrs. Claus candles, and several others. For the last three years they've come out of the box only briefly as I looked at them, thought about Ray, and then decided to put them back in the box.
With the wax sculptures out of the box, there was plenty of room for the remaining things which needed to be packed away.
All I had to do was get rid of the sculptures. Which meant I needed to convince myself that it was okay--that discarding these things wasn't the same as discarding a bit of Ray's memory.
I did it. It wasn't soul-wrenching. They are just things, after all. Ray's memory is something I keep in my heart and my mind, not in objects.
But it wasn't easy, either. Movies aren't the only thing that make me cry. But I crossed the threshold some time back. Remembering Ray does frequently get me all choked up. But just as often, it makes me smile or even laugh, as I replay the many, many good times we had together.
As Kermit the Frog said, while playing Bob Cratchit in the Muppet Christmas Carol: "Life is made of meetings and partings. That is the way of it."
Bless us, every one.