Date: 2004-12-27
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On a theoretical level, Christmas is invariably an intriguing event in a household consisting of two Nichiren Buddhists who grew up in Protestant homes (my parents), a firmly atheistic radical leftist teenager (my brother), a 90-year-old Presbyterian (my visiting grandmother), and me, with no particular organized religion but a pretty firmly developed sense of my own spirituality, which I nevertheless tend to keep to myself unless explicitly asked by someone who is actually interested. On a practical level, though, if you carefully avoid looking past the surface of things, there is still family and a decorated tree and a mass exchange of gifts all right around the time when the days are starting to get longer again. A regular All-American Assimilated Christmas. Which is not to say in the least that I don¢t love it for the m©lange it is ¢ I do. And I am not a little bit excited about MY NEW TENT, either. (!)¢Tis the season of hiking and camping gear, in fact. Gifts of a lightweight tent (so I don¢t have to carry around a four-person Eureka) and sleeping bag (the old one is enormous), and checks from relatives, promptly applied to the Mountainsmith Chimera I¢ve had my eye on (my old Arc¢Teryx is wonderful and comfortable but it weighs nearly 7 pounds), and a chunk of time spent online trying to see if I can finagle the redemption of a Borders gift card through Amazon satellite stores to finance my purchase of a titanium spork. Haha! The word ¢spork¢ makes me feel dastardly and triumphant at once. It¢s a deadly combination. So now my parents ask me fairly innocuous things like ¢How are you¢ and I look back at them with the sort of manic glint in my eyes that you can feel in your face and sing, ¢I just found a three hundred dollar camera on sale for a hundred and thirty!,¢ and dance around a little bit, sort of like my father does when he is trying to be a velociraptor from Jurassic Park because we are playing Trivial Pursuit and he needs to answer ¢Jurassic Park¢ for the pink pie piece and he can¢t remember the name of the movie but he remembers the velociraptors and thinks if he acts like one the name of the movie will come back to him, and my mother misses the velociraptor dance and tells him to do it again and he looks aggrieved and says he can¢t just be a velociraptor on command, he has to feel the spontaneous impulse. Kind of like that, except that my excuse is better, because I am *really* excited about this camera, and even more excited about hiking the trail. Also I already have the pink pie piece. Both of which are exciting in and of themselves. I¢ve been dreaming of this trip for years, but it¢s only just begun to feel real. It¢s been so easy to slip into the no-man¢s-land of low-paying jobs and humdrum routine and almost forget the trip I¢m saving up for. Having a new tent shouldn¢t make an enormous difference in how present I feel my hike to be, but it does. As does answering questions like ¢What if a bear eats you.¢¢I¢m breaking you in, you realize,¢ I tell my parents. ¢Sam wants to hike the AT, too.¢ Sam is my brother. He is 15. ¢He what?¢ says my father. ¢You heard me,¢ I say. ¢And in eight years he¢s going to be all, ¢I¢m hiking the AT,¢ and YOU¢RE going to be all, ¢Okay!!¢¢ ¢He¢s a boy,¢ says my mother.¢*I* have common sense,¢ I tell her. ¢Which do YOU think is worth more?¢***On Christmas night my father called his sister in Florida and in the course of the conversation mentioned that I¢d spent most of the afternoon in the backyard with my new tent, to which she replied something like, ¢You mean she still wants to do that trip? Oh no. I¢d be freaking out. I¢d NEVER let my kids do that.¢Dad tells me about this. I laugh. ¢What¢d you say?¢ ¢I said, ¢Oh, well, they¢re adults, and if they really wanted to you might let them.¢¢You could have invited her to try and stop me.¢¢Well,¢ he says, ¢I was aiming for tact.¢