Jujubes and porn

For years, I had an unsettling recurring dream. Christmas Eve, had forgotten to buy presents, found myself in a highway service station convenience store (usually specifically the one off the 401 in London that A and I used to stop at on the drive to Windsor, the one with the big magazine racks and no good bottles of water), was frantically grabbing random things from the shelves as gifts. Cans of pringles, ju jubes, cigarettes, magazines.

Kind of like the "I forgot I took this course and now I'm in this exam naked" dream, except all twined with the conflict of Family Occasions, institutionalized generosity, side by side twitchy attempts to find affinity through the thinnest of threads, long-left-behind religious overlay and the implied affront at my no longer honouring it.



My dream became insitutionalized as "ju jubes and porn," a trope for all-the-pressure-which-includes-a-genuine-desire-to-provide-a-token -that-demonstrates -we-care-about-people-but- CHRIST-there's-too-much- intensity-and-unreasonable- expectations. Shopping through December, big sighs, sometimes with real inspiration and delight, sometimes some thudding placeholder. Crazy crazy peregrinations across the province to be part of family.

Two years ago, a deeply snowy cold Christmas, and A and I were on a glum quest, first to Windsor for xmas with her family, then crossing the entire breadth of the province to Ottawa for dinner with my family, my then baby niece. It was a trudge, both of us uneasy with each other, mostly silence between us in the car as we navigated unbearable weather (7 hours to Windsor, instead of 4), played the mercifully long Time Traveller's Wife through my ipod. Warm enough in the disquiet, practiced affection, practiced affinity through the ridiculous treks, but raw patches in the middle, distance unbridgeable. Lavish, perfect gifts to demonstrate the connection we could no longer enact. (A lusted after silver thumb ring and an mp3 player I'd loaded for her, a refurbished spinning bike for me).

While we were doing this, my friend D was iced into his small town on lake huron as his mother breathed her last on Christmas Eve.

So after making our grim way back to Toronto, on the way to Ottawa, we detoured off to the lake for the funeral home visit, homage to a long friendship with D, his mother who was always affectionate to me, his family I hadn't seen in almost two decades. All of them the same, bigger, pudgier, children tall and looming. Stayed the requisite hour, picked our way back out through the icy dark for the almost unthinkable 6.5 hour drive to Ottawa that faced us now.

D and his partner followed us out to the car -- "wait, we have a gift." "A Christmas gift??" I asked, incredulous -- D and I don't do xmas gifts usually anyway, and he'd been completely immersed in his mother's hospital room. "Yeah, yeah," they'd said.

It was in a cheap gift bag, printed with garish elves, tissue paper at attention in that perky fluffed-by-a-gay-boy way. I opened it...

...and it was jujubes. And porn. (Cheap porn, the kind you can get in the mac's milk in small town Ontario. Juggs or something like that).

We laughed, hugged tight, climbed back into the car, my visiting-the-funeral-home skirt settling around me, so wrong for a winter car ride. I ate the jujubes pensively, flicked through the magazine in the illumination of the streetlights as A silently found her way back to the small highway that would keep us moving. The cold dark outside completely oppressive, the journey before us unendurable.

Our last Christmas together, hyperbolic enactment of every family holiday we'd done together, compliant daughters, living out inorganic roles, finding ourselves almost running out of gas at frigid midnight when an unexpected detour around brockville took us off the 401 past a service station and nothing else was open, stretched to an unbearable point of fatigue and anxiety and distance, distance covered and felt between us. Finally crawling into my cousin's house at 2:00 a.m., huddling into sleep, wondering how, why in the hell we were doing this.

Last year, I truncated the family requirements, visited Ottawa before xmas, drove there and back in daylight, had xmas dinner with my chosen family in TO. No huge gifts for anyone. Not quite snatching at ju jubes in a frozen service station, but minimal, thoughtful.

This year, A and I are talking about driving to Windsor together again, three short nights, touching into our respective families and then leaving for our separate, respected lives. Completely different, lighter touch with each other, knowing each other and urging each other into fullness in lives we know the other could never accompany us on.

Then back here, new year lived into with F, a trip to discover some corners of Montreal together.

New stories, woven loosely, completely different, breathable fabric.