The Ghost of a Christmas Tree Past (Not)

I was talking to someone today about past Christmases and, as it inevitably does, the subject of the Christmas of 1989 came up.

I was but a wee young lass, recently divorced. Chase and I had moved to a place of our own only a few months before. Those were the early heady days of the original Nintendo and Super Mario Brothers. By the time of the move, both Chase and I could rescue the princess in the Mario game reliably. We had graduated to The Legend of Zelda, a video game that simulated the quest of a young knight, Link, and we worked tirelessly to conquer this game.

Though Chase was four and I was 25, we were pretty much dead even in our skills at the game controls. Okay, he was a bit quicker to react than me, but not by much. I had a tiny ancient second TV in my bedroom balanced on a tall, rickety cardboard box, and this was the set to which the Nintendo was wired.

Chase and I spent countless hours floating at the foot of the king sized waterbed I somehow came out of that divorce with*, each of us with a control in hand, taking turns working to collect Rupees, elements of the Tri-force, and painstakingly working our way through the various levels of dungeons and castles, deserts and forests.

This obsession reached its apex one Friday after work and day care when we rushed in, excited about having mastered a particularly difficult level the night before and eager to get back to playing. (That was the great thing about Zelda; finally, you could save your progress and came back later. Not so with Mario Bros.) We shucked off our coats, ordered a pizza, and took up our bobbing positions and controls at the foot of the bed and plunged into the game again.

We played and played. And then we played some more. We played until I awoke with a start Saturday morning, my control still in my hand. I turned over to find Chase similarly positioned. We had fallen asleep, at some point, while playing.

I gave Chase a shake to wake him up and watched as the surprise came over his face as he, too, registered what had happened. We laughed hysterically.

And then we sat up and started playing again.


*This bed was unimaginably huge and I had only one set of sheets to fit it. They happened to be blue. The bed was so gigantic, that often times, Chase would wake up in the night, pad into my bedroom, and climb into bed unbeknownst to me. I can remember waking up many mornings, and slowly opening my eyes to see a tiny Chase asleep waaay far at the other side of the bed, asleep, gently bobbing peacefully in the opposite corner on the vast sea of blue sheet.

***

And that is the end of that scenario. I’m leaving it as is and posting it because when I wrote that first sentence? I had every intention of writing specifically about the Christmas tree I had that year (and I still mean to some day!)

While I don’t think what I wrote is particularly fascinating, what does fascinate me is the process of creating, and the fact that, when I sit down to do it, I’m not always in complete control of the end product.

I suppose this sounds crazy if it’s never happened to you, and perfectly reasonable to you artist types who set out to paint, say, a rabbit, and out comes the Eiffel Tower or something.

In this particular case, what I actually wrote is from the exact same time in my life, and the incident probably happened within a few months of the Christmas that I had originally intended to write about. But when I began to type? That Christmas tree story just did not come out.

It has only been recently, since I’ve begun to write more, that I’ve experienced this phenomenon regularly. Re-reading Ann Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” is particularly reassuring in this regard. She quotes E. L. Doctorow:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

And since I'm beginning to contemplate a run at producing some fiction?

Ahem.

Let’s hope so.