Leslie's BlogChristmas Spirit Around the Corner
The Christmas spirit came to me one year in the guise of a street fight. I was in Chicago shopping and touring the city, and since it was my first visit, I spent the evening craning and turning in order to take in the Art Deco downtown with its sweeping canyons of elegant buildings. My neck was sore for days. The city was busy putting on the dog in her finest Christmas finery: evergreen boughs and wreaths were festooned with brilliant gold, crimson, and emerald ornaments and lights on anything that stood still. The air itself appeared to glitter, glow, and hum holiday carols.
The wind was whistling in hard from Lake Michigan as I walked, and I grasped my top coat more tightly as my shopping bags banged against my legs. Crossing an intersection I made sure I was in the middle of the non-gawking locals, assuming that there is safety in numbers. Suddenly the man in front of me jumped back and knocked me into the woman following closely behind my heels. In the confusion all I could remembering seeing were people yelling and the flash of shiny yellow metal. It took a few seconds, but I finally understood that a taxi cab had run a red light and shot-gunned through our intersection, missing people by decisive inches. But then it got weirder.
One man, his face florid with anger, burst from the crowd and spit on the speeding taxi, hitting the driver’s side window with Calamity Jane accuracy. “Good shooting, Tex,” I thought, as I continued crossing before I became a hood ornament on another Kamikaze taxi. Suddenly the intersection was filled with the sound of screeching tires as the cab dime-stopped and all four doors flapped open. The driver AND his three passengers flew out like Keystone Cops from Hell. While still in the middle of the intersection with cars whizzing by and honking, the driver and his fares began to shove and yell at our Saliva Savior until the cops arrived. The show, which began so dramatically, sank into a series of questions, answers, and procedural paperwork.
Continuing down the sidewalk, I felt my adrenalin rush slowly ebb and a heaviness took its place. The holiday lights now seemed too bright, the carols too tinny and people’s faces looked cruelly uncaring as they rushed past me on Michigan Avenue. Even the presents I carried, stuffed in their colorful gilt bags, became heavier with each step I took. I realized that I had been so preoccupied with the business and doing of Christmas, that I hadn’t allowed the spirit of Christmas to live within me. It took a speeding taxi to slow me down enough to actually think.
But where was the spirit, the essence, the heart of our most holy day? It was no longer in the presents and cards I had bought, and approaching my hotel, I didn’t even glance at the dressed-up sidewalks. In turning the corner I found my Christmas spirit.
She was a middle-aged, heavy-set woman with lovely dark hair flowing past her shoulders. Her dress, simple and neat, she wore a red and green rhinestone broach pinned to her past-its-prime dark blue woolen coat. A microphone was attached to her wheelchair’s arm rest, and her music stand, crammed with Christmas carols, was clamped to the foot pedals. She had just smiled at someone who had dropped money in the cup by her side, and with great dignity she reached up and arranged her sheet music before beginning to sing.
On this street corner, between a drug store and a McDonald’s, her voice shimmered through the air with the fine delicacy of the underside of a butterfly’s wing. Her classically-trained voice, void of amateurish libretto, sang “Silent Night” with such forgiveness that I felt a chill run through me.
I didn’t find the Christmas spirit in her voice, but rather in her face. The traffic hammered by, the crowds swirled around her and the icy wind, like bony fingers, riffled through her sheet music. Despite the chaos and the cold, her face shone with pure serenity and peace and joy as she sang. Turning to leave, I picked up my bags which now felt as light as air.
Thank you for reading my blog Pineamike!
Leslie