Surgical Pencil

I have one valuable piece of china. The signature Haviland Christmas plate from 1973 was a gift from my son's late Grandmother. Until this evening it was a collector's item with a measurable market value. I had forgotten about it.

Feeling lonely on Christmas Day, I retrieved it from the shelf where it had been living, value intact, for the past 15 Christmases or so. Adorned with a few goodies it cheered me up. Snowbound tonight, and again feeling a wave of post holiday isolation,I filled the plate with snacks and sat down in front of my virtual connection with the outside world. Caution! Never wash a Haviland Collectors Edition Plate. I did and now the blackmarker signature on the back is smudged for all eternity, rendering it valuable to me alone. The soft blue background supporting images of brightly brushed wild birds and"Noel 1973" instantly summons a barage of visual memories of that Christmas spent in Sidney with my parents in their aging Victorian house.
Eric was 17months old and we had journeyed through the snow, ferrying our first born, my Mother-in-Law, and 2 beloved cats in our green Plymouth Duster.

Upon arrival, we discovered that the aging septic system in my parent's house had given over to a root too deep for my Dad's ingenious plunging system. Thus, Eric's Grandmother, an inveterate New Yorker, was faced with the daunting task of using a chamber pot instead of the plumbing we all take for granted.  I sent my tea-totaling Dad downtown to buy gin. He returned with 2 quarts.
Although they sometimes cause us pain, we rely upon these memories of Christmas past to unite us in a sense of the community of family.  A few tears shed for the times we cannot recreate are part and parcel of the emotional cement of the holiday season.

My own Mother's cement has cracked. The hand of God, or some deamon equal in power, has hit her delete button. All the memories that create our personhood are wiped clean for her.  I called her in Florida yesterday hoping that she might reconnect somewhere in cyberspace with memories of our Christmases past.
For her, I do not exist anymore. I am a name she does not recognize, a life she lived and forgot. Using an arsenal from my music therapy tool kit, I tried singing to her shattered braincells. Silence and more silence was the answer. And so she has become one of a myriad of my memories.

Next week my brother will put my parents' home on the market. It was gifted to him by my mother before her downfall. But, before any sale can commence, he will hire a professional estate cleaning service to erase the tangible vestiges of my parent's lives together. I am grateful the my memory holds intact, the images of where they lived and loved each other for so many years.

I opted to tell my aged Aunt, who lives a few blocks from where my parents lived, about the sale before she drove by and was shocked by the empty house.  Her last ties of family live in that house. It was a mistake to tell her. Although I was just the messenger, I broke her heart.

In a perfect world where families are not separated by distances so great that air travel is the thread uniting them, my aunt and I would grieve together. Social networking and telephones are the unification tools of today. A real hug and the wiping of tears is reality.