My wife was decorating our little Christmas tree. And there was a song on Spotify — the Joni Mitchell piece about wanting a river to skate away on.
“It’s coming on Christmas/ They’re cutting down trees/ They’re putting up reindeer/ Singing songs of joy and peace./ Oh, I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on.”
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Yes, the perfect depressing song for the depressing, isolated COVID Christmas that we’re all facing this year.
It wasn’t even Joni’s young voice, that clear voice of the idealized hippie girl with the long, flat blonde hair. It was a cover.
Betty is particular about the hierarchy of ornaments on her tree. So I stayed out of her way, stared out the window into bleak December, thinking about something I’d read in school back when all I did was read, play ball, cut meat at work and party what was left of my brains out:
James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”
I didn’t mean for an escaped sigh so deep that my soul slipped halfway out before I could slurp it back in.
“What’s wrong?” Betty asked.
Oh nothing, I said.
“Yeah, right,” she said.
She knows what’s wrong. We’ve been together for almost 40 years. It always comes upon me, and now the prospect of a Zoom COVID Christmas in this terrible year makes it worse.
She knows it will linger until I drive it off with the Christmas Eve column that I’ve been rewriting for years.
Outside in the gray sky there was one last flock of geese flying south. What do the geese shout down to us as they fly away from death and cold?
Winter is coming. Run.
You know, all that happy Christmas-y stuff.
Christmas COVID depression came up the other day when I went to the doctor for a flu shot and politely asked the nurse:
When will we get in line for the big coronavirus vaccine? I mean, after the politicians get their vaccines, because they’re politicians and so important.
“That hasn’t been determined,” said the nurse, typing something into her computer, not really listening.
But then she stopped and gave me one of those serious looks over the rims of her glasses, eyebrows up.
“Have you had any feelings of depression lately?” she asked.
Me? Depressed? Hahaha. What? No, of course not. Hahaha.
Don’t you just hate it when people ask if you’re depressed in December, when you’re clearly, obviously depressed?
That’s like someone asking you about your diet when you’re sitting in front of a plate of Do-Rite Donuts (the Valrhona chocolate ones) and wearing a loose black sweatshirt.
What’s the bleeping point?
But nurse was persistent.
“Are you sure you have no feelings of depression?” she said. “The hospital administration wants us to ask.”
What I should have said: We’re all crazy with the COVID shutdowns. Politicians live like lords and kill small businesses. People are out of work. We’re all isolated, it’s December and you know something? Everyone dies, even hospital administrators with their aggravating questions. Tell them.
But I didn’t say that. Instead I said something in a chirpy voice that you put on out of concern for the feelings of others, like wearing that old mask you keep in your car.
Me: No. I am not depressed, OK? Me? Depressed? Haha.
“So, to be clear, you have no feelings of depression?” she asked.
Me: No. I feel great.
She checked my pulse, gave me my flu shot, and I left.
Nurses see everything and know the best and the worst in all of us. Nurse eyes are like cop eyes. What could possibly surprise them, except perhaps unexpected kindness and grace?
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You want to ask me about being depressed?
Then ask me on a sunny summer Sunday, after I’ve planted my tomatoes, the earth warm between my bare toes as I’m watering them in. A fine maduro cigar in my teeth. The White Sox on the radio, steaks about to go on the grill (with blue cheese butter). A crowd coming over.
Then ask me.
Yes, the bare feet in the dirt thing is rather hillbilly. But then, I am hillbilly by blood. My father plowed his own fields up in the hills with a surly white mule named Truman.
It’s been years since I’ve walked barefoot in my own garden.
When you’re alive, you can at least feel the earth under your feet. When you’re not alive, your toes don’t give two figs.
“I wish I had a river so long/ I would teach my feet to fly,” went the song.
Betty hangs the important ornaments first, the ones that the kids made years ago. Then she puts up my weird Styrofoam elf on the tree.
I made that elf in fourth grade, with a little felt jacket, pipe cleaner legs and anatomically correct elfin buttocks that I carved out with a Bic pen.
My mom spotted the elfin buttocks as she put it up on our tree that first time. She called me over in a sweet voice full of danger, pointed to the elf’s behind and said, “How dare you do this in school!”
She pulled my ear then gave me a crack in the back of the head.
But later she gave me a Christmas cookie. With sprinkles.
I think it’s about time I start writing that Christmas Eve column.
Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.
Twitter @John_Kass