Just after Thanksgiving in 2021, a little
tabletop Christmas tree appeared in a window across the street.
We were still feeling the effects of the Covid
pandemic. The world had reopened, but things hadn't quite been
put back where they belonged.
The tree sat in a first floor window
directly across from my balcony. The apartment is in one of those big
courtyard buildings built just after the First World War. They are all over
Chicagoland… brick walls, rows of windows, tiled foyers and generations of
people who called them home for a short time.
I never knew who lived there, but through
Christmas and well into the winter of 2022, that little tree stayed lit.
… and for reasons I didn't completely
understand at the time, I began looking for it every day.
It became a tiny beacon of reassurance from
across the street. We were all trying to climb out of those strange pandemic
years, but I was also trying to climb out of something of my own. Divorce had
rearranged my life, and there were mornings when I was still trying to figure
out exactly what the new arrangement was supposed to look like.
Then I would look across the street and see
that little tree glowing in the darkness.
The tree returned after Thanksgiving in
2022 and then again the next year and the next. It greeted me on dark December
afternoons when the sun disappeared before dinner and on bitter January
mornings when Riverside was frozen solid.
It became part of my winter.
When I look back someday at the 2020s and
remember how unsettling the beginning of this decade was, I suspect I will
remember that little tabletop Christmas tree in the apartment window across the
street.
Yesterday, when I got home from work, I
noticed something was different.
The
curtains were gone and the windows were bare.
Whoever had lived in that apartment for
the last five years had moved away from the Divorced Dad District and I knew at
once what that meant.
The tree won't be coming back for Christmas
this year.
I thought about The Great Gatsby and
that green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Gatsby could see it across the
water, small and distant, and he filled that light with everything he hoped his
life might someday become.
My light across the way wasn't green. It
was a little Christmas tree glowing through an apartment window.
Unlike Gatsby, I was simply reassured by
knowing it was there.
Maybe that is the difference. Gatsby's green
light pulled him toward a future he desperately wanted. My Christmas tree
helped me through a present I was learning to accept.
Still, there was something similar about
them. A light in the distance can become much more than a light.
We give ordinary things meaning because
sometimes we need them to carry us through certain periods in our lives.
It could be a song on the radio. A familiar conductor
on the morning train into the city. The smell of rain on an August afternoon. A
coffee cup that your mom used when you were a kid.
A tree in a stranger's
window.
They become landmarks in our lives without
anybody ever deciding they should be. What bothers me most isn't that the tree
is gone. It is that I never got to thank the person who put it there.
I never figured out who lived in that
apartment. They had no idea that someone across the street noticed their little
tree year after year.
They had no idea that on those cold
mornings, somebody looked through the darkness and was glad to see it.
That is the funny thing about our lives.
We know the stories we carry inside ourselves, but we rarely know the part we are
playing in somebody else's.
You might be somebody's Christmas tree in
the window and never know it. Someone new will move into that apartment before
the end of the month. New curtains will go up and new furniture will appear.
Maybe there will even be another Christmas tree someday, but it won't be the
tree that carried me through the first half of the 2020s.
That light belonged to a particular stretch
of my life, and now both the person who put it there and the man who first
needed to see it have moved on.
Maybe that is what you are supposed to do
with a beacon eventually. You stop needing it and you keep walking.
Today is National Soft Serve Ice
Cream Day.
The Hole in the Wall in Oak Park brings back
memories for me that stretch nearly forty years. Polar Bear here in the
neighborhood is our go to joint, and Highland Queen always hits the spot when
we are on the other side of Mannheim Road.
Go get yourself a cone today.
… And while you are enjoying it, remember
that there are people walking around carrying stories you know absolutely
nothing about.
Maybe you are even part of one. There is
no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Tell your story, Chalkheads.
