On December 19th I started the holidays with two blockbuster cultural events. First, I attended a matinee des with my sister, brother-in-law and my four-year-old niece “Nutcrackers” performed by the New York City Ballet. I saw the Nutcracker as a kid in Boston and had faint fond memories of it, but seeing him in New York with a young child was an absolute pleasure.
Vivian, my niece, had heard rumors that there would be mice and was a little anxious for their performance, but when they came on stage and were more silly than creepy, she relaxed, surrendered to the performance and completely sank . The best part was listening to her call out the names of the positions she recognized from the dance class. I’m sure the other listeners were also delighted to hear a fine voice chirp in the quiet moments of the piece: “Jeté! Arabesque! First position! “
Afterwards she said she wanted to be a Sugar Fairy when she grows up, and I heard myself say in a strange, grown-up voice, “If you are in ballet class really hard, this dream may come true! “so that she will certainly blame me when in ten years her ligaments are stretched like rubber and she can’t eat a single potato chip without feeling guilty. But recently she wanted to become a doctor or a butterfly, if she is big, I think ballerina is a reasonable middle ground.
Kristen Roupenian is a writer. Every four weeks she reports on New York’s cultural life in her SZ column “Trans Atlantik Express”.
(Photo: private)
After that, I drove back to my sister and picked up my 75-year-old father, who was staying with her on the holidays, and went with him to the Riverside Church, because we have tickets for Handel’s “Messiah” that was played there by the New York Philharmonic. My family is very dispersed – my sister and I are both in New York now, that is the first time in yearsthat one of us lives in the same city.
My parents are on friendly terms and my mother lives with her significant other in Massachusetts; my father outside of Anchorage, Alaska, and my brother in Utah. It was the first Christmas in four years that I saw my family because of Covid and other life events, and I was both touched and concerned about it. We love each other very much, but it wasn’t always easy, especially with my father.
He was very excited to see the “Messiah” and the performance met all of our expectations. The church is of course overwhelming: a real cathedral. The conductor was a woman with light red hair named Jeanette Sorrel, whom my father obviously fell in love with immediately, and who could blame him for that: she led the musicians not just with the baton, but with her whole person. It was like watching how conducting turns into expressive dancing. The singing was beautiful, especially the countertenor’s voice, which was stunning and surreal like no human voice I’d ever heard before.
“Dad, please, it’s only a few days and you’re seventy-five.”
About halfway through the play, I looked over and my father was crying. I took his hand and it trembled: I realized at that moment that he was very old, much older than I had realized; I thought of how few Christmass we might have left and mourned those we’d missed in recent years, but I was also grateful for this time.
Towards the end the soloist began to sing over and over: “We shall be changed / and we shall be changed” and then sobbed I, I think because that year everything in my life changed. And I have to change myself want change me i know i’m changing, but there are days when it just doesn’t go fast enough, I can’t change enough to adapt to the tumult of my living conditions, and it all feels like it’s unbearable. I was happy to be in this church, but it also felt like I was through something and maybe I didn’t have to torment myself like that. As if I had done enough and the change would come if I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. The next day my sister called and said she tested positive for Covid. She is vaccinated like the rest of the family including my father. But of course the family reunion was canceled. My father refused to respect my sister’s request to isolate herself on the first floor while she was having symptoms. She got pretty sick and when she got into the living room she found my father on the sofa wearing a mask, watching football and insisting on hanging out with his granddaughters no matter how many times my sister said, “Dad, please, it’s only a few days and you are seventyfive. “I tried to persuade him that he had to spend Christmas with me, we would order food and watch a movie, it would not be what we had planned, but it could be nice, but he just said:” Let’s see “Let’s see,” so I knew he was determined to spend Christmas with my nieces no matter what anyone said, and if I accepted my sister’s request to let her keep her quarantine, I would spend Christmas alone.
Separated and sober, forty years old and alone at Christmas
I did. But it didn’t really matter, because on the 22nd I was starting to feel tired and standing next to me, on the 23rd the fever skyrocketed, and I spent the next 24 hours delirious, trembling and unable to get out of bed. When I woke up on Christmas Day the fever had gone down and I spent the day on the sofa watching horror movies, too exhausted to wish I could do anything else.
In the evening my father wrote to tell me they would send me a Christmas dinner. I thought they sent it with an Uber driver, but the doorbell rang and it was my dad with a roast and cake. He wanted to come in. I said no, but he insisted because he felt so sorry for me, freshly separated and sober and forty years old and alone for Christmas, and I was too foggy and tired to hold back.
So he came up and we sat at opposite ends of the room wearing masks, every now and then I would have a fit of coughing and my memory of the evening is rather blurry, but I remember he kept asking me, “Anything else? ” Like telling him some amusing anecdotes, but all I could think of was Am I killing my father right now?, and the dark thought that if he got Covid now, I would at least do my sister a favor, because we could split the guilt between us. Finally he left, and to be honest I was grateful for the cake and for seeing another human face on Christmas day.
The Bermuda Triangle is the name given to the days when so many relapse
I’m writing this column on January 1st and also when I’ve heard that one in fifty people in New York is currently on Covid, my father doesn’t seem to be one of them, which is a bit of luck that neither of us deserves . In alcoholic support groups, they call the days between the three holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve – the Bermuda Triangle because so many people relapse during this time. Partly voluntarily, partly because of the circumstances, I spent all three parties pretty much alone and never really celebrated any of them, and that was shit to be honest, but at least I didn’t drink.
I read a funny tweet the other day that went like this: “I don’t have any New Years resolutions, now it’s time to get things better,” which sums it up pretty well, I think. I hope this year is different and I hope I am different, but when it comes to active self-improvement, I have reached my limit, I think. Now I wait and hope. We shall be changed. So be it.
Translated from the English by Marie Schmidt. You can find more episodes of the “Trans Atlantik Express” column here.