But I Digress

Let There Be Lights!
My son helped me hang out Christmas lights last week. I sent him up on the roof (hey, good title for a song!) since I am getting a little older and not quite so adept at negotiating rooftops as I was in my cat burglar days. It was great, a true Griswold moment, minus the ugly sweaters, painful pratfalls and blown fuses.
It got me to thinking about this strange tradition. Supposing a semi-apocalyptic tragedy occurred and we are wiped out this holiday season. “Wiped out” as in obliterated, not exhausted from cramming a 65-inch flat screen TV into your new Fiat. I imagine future archeologists would dig through the rubble discovering strings of electrical wiring with remnants of multi colored bulbs. These future diggers would also find shreds of plastic from those giant snow globes, snowmen, Grinches and Snoopys that magically inflate themselves at night in our front yards. “My God, Zoron, they must have bred gigantic robot beagles; what monsters!”
Of course they will still unearth fruitcake, unchanged after hundreds of years. I assume they will speculate these loaves were used as doorstops, paperweights and blunt weapons.
Did you know that the tradition of lighting the Christmas tree dates back to 17th century Germany? They would light candles on their Christmas trees. This was before the advent of electricity and before the advent of Advent calendars filled with Advent-sized Snickers bars. These Germans, unlike their more practical descendants, somehow missed the day in school when teachers explained how open flames can light things on fire, such as wood, sticks and trees. Interestingly, this was also the origin of GEICO life insurance.
By the mid 1950s lights started showing up on houses (what took us so long to take a good idea and beat it to death?) and, like Starbucks, soon lights appeared on anything and everything we could possibly think of. And more.
But I digress.
We tend to analyze things, we modern folk. Maybe too much. I haven’t really thought about it that much. Okay, of course I have, that’s what I do. As I was directing my son to take risks I no longer would, I mused about the significance of this family bonding moment.
I spend a lot of time pondering my role as a father, sometimes at the expense of actually being a father. I found myself thinking, while I tried to put that moment in context, that perhaps I spend too much time and energy placing moments in context. We tend to look for patterns, for the whys, the wherefores (which you clever Shakespeare fans know is the same as whys) and look for greater meanings, for deeper understanding, for archetypal reasons for the things we do. I doubt our ancestors spent as much time as we do.
Mrs. Grog: Grog, what think of Grog Jr. spitting on brand new fire?
Grog: What say? Me watching Brontos beat stuffing out of Pteros! Any nachos left?
Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living, but perhaps there’s such a thing as too much examination. Sometimes maybe it’s enough just to do something because you do it. Was it great that my son helped me out hanging lights? Yes, it was, I really enjoyed it. But I enjoyed it because I like spending time with him; he makes me laugh and I like the young man he is growing into.
Did it have a greater meaning? Would it be a memory he would share with his children later? Who knows? And really, who cares? When I turned off my “what does this mean in the grand scheme of things?” area of my brain, the time seemed to slow down, and I realized I spend a lot of time glancing rather than seeing.
In that moment, unburdened by thoughts of greater meaning, I had the time to actually stop and look into my son’s deep brown eyes. To my delight, I saw a brightness that, in these days of rudderless, rude, aimless, deadened youth, I vowed never to take for granted.
I know what you’re thinking. I just spent 700 words relating how I vowed not to analyze my relationship with my son while, at the same time, that’s exactly what I was doing. But I’m not going to analyze what my analysis and subsequent denial of that analysis means in the grand scheme of things. Mostly because, lucky for you, I’m out of space for this week. And my brain hurts.
Steven welcomes your comments. You can reach him at

st***************@gm***.com











.