You can't run away from Christmas no matter how hard you try

Our final stop on Dave and Ken's Excellent Adventure of Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Ken Tingley

Dec 25, 2024

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It finally hit me on Christmas Eve while wrapping the few meager presents I had purchased.

I'd been running away from Christmas for four months.

Dreading it, really.

Planning an alternative universe without snow, or the cold, or the magical winter wonderland my home had become for the holidays as long as I could remember.

I conceded it might be the real reason I worked so hard decorating the Chapman Museum this year.

I knew decorating my house would be too hard and perhaps creating some magic for public consumption would distract me.

There was a sense of emotional survival.

From Thanksgiving in New Orleans, to releasing Gillian's ashes in Hawaii and then across 1,500 miles of driving this past week, the holidays were pushed, not just to a back burner, but as something that was disguised and would not recognize.

While driving, I kept saying to my brother it didn't seem like Christmas.

But of course that was goal.

I told people I had to drive Sophie to New Orleans so we could be with Joseph as a family.

I told myself it was about creating new memories.

It was about new traditions and turning a page.

But as I began the wrapping alone in Joseph's old apartment yesterday afternoon, I finally realized Christmas gets you in the end.

Those treasured memories, while still somewhat painful, will never be erased and of course they shouldn't be. So the tears flowed all over the wrapping paper. Maybe for the last, time, but probably not.

It turned out, you can't run away from that magic completely, especially the kind Gillian created; you can only push it aside temporarily.

I realize this sounds like the plot of a Lifetime Christmas movie, but the larger point is to embrace what you have, covet it and never let go.

I awoke yesterday morning in my New Orleans apartment. I donned by fluffy Santa hat and headed for the grocery store where I got a few smiles and one woman remarking, "You look like Santa Claus." I'm not sure if she was commenting on my age or weight.

Knowing I was lean on presents, I desperately made a few purchases at the supermarket, then headed to pet store to take care of Sophie where I got a couple more smiles for the Santa hat.

The Christmas spirit had arrived late, but there was still time.

While working on my New Orleans bathroom project this fall, I had made many trips to the Home Depot within eyesight of the Superdome. It was during one of those visits around Halloween I spied among the new Christmas displays a eight-foot high stacked penguins display.

As the GPS guided me home Christmas Even, I noticed I was about to pass the Home Depot. It was destiny.

There is the corner was the discounted holiday decorations including six large boxes containing the penguins with half off the October asking price.

The next thing I knew the penguins were being squeezed into the back seat of the car.

When I finished wrapping my presents that afternoon - I think Sophie got more presents than anyone else - I loaded up my presents and donned the fluffy Santa hat that Gillian demanded we wear each Christmas Eve and headed across the street to my son's new place.

It would be the four of us - my brother, Sophie and Joseph - this Christmas Eve.

It was good to see that Joseph had embrace the holiday spirit.

My son had his tree up and the bannister on his staircase draped in greens and lights that would have made his mom proud.

But something was amiss.

There was no Christmas music. That was Gillian's department, too. She had so much Christmas music, it often turned up while we were out by the pool in the summer.

Joseph solved that problem too and Jimmy Buffet was soon singing "Christmas Island."

When I arrived, the scallops wrapped in bacon were ready for the grill - the same way his mom did them - and nice charcuterie board full of snacks awaited.

He seemed to be dealing with her absence in a different way. He was running toward the memory, toward the traditions that were his childhood and it really didn't matter whether there was snow, or cold or the smell of pine in the living room.

Gillian would like Joseph's approach better.

I realized I needed to get on board.

We made new memories this Christmas Eve.

Later that evening, we had a nice Creole dinner down the street and when we returned, we sipped drinks beneath an enormous 15-foot live tree in the lobby of my son's building.

Gillian would have loved that.

And she would have hated me for running away.

So as I bid Christmas Eve adieu, I returned back to the small apartment with the 20-foot high ceiling and started assembling my penguins.

It's what Gillian would have wanted.

Chapman visit

Merry Christmas to one and all and if you have not visited the decorations at the Chapman Museum in Glens Falls, I hope you take the opportunity sometime over the next week. The Chapman reopens on Thursday.

Hours are 10 to 4 p.m. each day and 12 to 4 on Sunday. The Chapman is located at 348 Glen Street with parking behind the building off Bacon Street.

Edmund Pettus Bridge

If you are familiar with the history of the Civil Rights movement, you know about the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Named after a Civil War veteran and Ku Klux Klan member, the bridge was the site of one of the ugliest moments in the Civil Rights movement when in March 1955, Alabama state troopers - some on horseback - attacked and beat peaceful Civil Rights marchers on their way to the state capital in Montgomery.

Seventeen were critically injured, but the images from that day transfixed the country and led to the passage of the National Voting Rights Act.

Like so many things in history, the Edmund Pettus Bridge seems smaller in person compared to the magnitude of the historical moment.

My brother and I stopped and spent a half-hour walking across the bridge and trying to imagine the events of that day.

At as you come down on the far side of the bridge, the National Voting Rights Museum sits in a rough-looking ramshackle building. It was our final stop on our tour south.

But when we arrived shortly after 10 a.m. Monday morning, we found the museum closed. It offered appointments to see the museum if you called ahead.

Instead, we went across the street and read several of the historical markers about what happened there nearly 60 years ago, including one devoted to "Selma lynchings."

Too old?

Considering the reaction to the aging of President Biden during his last turn, you'd think Congress would be more sensitive to aging members.

For instance, if you need to live in a retirement home, is that too old to serve in Congress.

The Dallas Morning News reported this week that 81-year-old Rep. Kay Granger of Texas has not voted in Congress since the summer and recently stepped down as the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee in March when she said she would not seek re-election.

She has apparently been suffering the affects of dementia and moved into an assisted living facility.

It raised questions about Granger's fitness to serve and whether her staff has misled constituents about her health.

Politicians used to release their medical records to show they were in good health and could do the job. They should start doing that again, starting with the current president-elect.

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