Long Ago
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
I used to lay on the couch in my parents’ living room and watch light glitter through the Christmas tree, bounce off the hodgepodge ornaments: Dad’s Hampshire Pewter medallions, Mom’s wire birds and ceramic bells, my knights and pirates. Mom was in her study, working on the computer and playing Windham Hill Artists’ A Winter Solstice V loud enough for me to hear. In the silver light of the tree, the music made me weep until my stomach hurt, until Mom turned it off and came in to find out why I was crying. Age eight, all I could figure out to say was: the music makes me think of long ago.
Winter is the season for long ago; Christmas is for imagining somewhere you aren’t. In places like Adrian, church lawns are transformed by plastic and electric light into little slices of Bethlehem. Even heathens like us had a Nativity scene: two-dimensional miniatures in hand-painted wood that belonged, I think, to my grandmother. I gravitated towards this, and all displays that reminded me of toys—but better than the Nativity was Dickensville, a line of vaguely-Victorian ceramic houses that Dad religiously expanded during the annual post-Christmas clearance bonanza. By the end, our town had all the staples of a traditional Victorian Christmas village: the steepled church, the grand manor, the bandstand, the New England fishing boat, the treehouse, the lighthouse, the Meijer’s and the Meijer’s Gas Station, all the tie-in buildings from A Christmas Story (including the rare Chop Suey Palace), and the custom-painted fiber optic Civil War Museum.
But the Nativity, and even Dickensville, were nothing but appetizers for the new worlds hidden beneath the tree. Christmas and Legos are sinisterly entwined in my thought and memory, another Scandinavian import as indissoluble with Christmas as mistletoe or holly. I developed a sense of which boxes were Lego boxes by the shape and the rattle; I could tell the difference between a Lego set and a jigsaw puzzle just by the width of the box, by the amount of give in the cardboard. I was a child blessed with Legos: Knight’s Castle, Fort Legorado, and, one hallmark year, by The Black Seas Barracuda, a three-masted pirate ship with red sails. I’d have the Legos assembled by dinner, or at least by the time the post-dinner argument saw Dad retreat to his study. Then, Mom and I would watch The Muppet Christmas Carol while I made up adventures for my new Lego people. My Lego people were always good guys, even the pirates: they were friends, sailing to lands so tantalizingly imagined that I longed to be as small as a Lego man myself, weigh the little plastic anchor and man the little plastic capstan.
Then, you outgrow Legos. Or people assume that you do. Then, you go out with your friends on Christmas night, who you haven’t seen all day, or haven’t seen since you went off to college, or only get to see on the three-or-four days of PTO you get from work. We met at Martin’s parents’ house, back when he used to live on my block. We drank Mountain Dew and played Halo. Later, when Martin bought a house out in the country, Robby and I would drive out on muddy country roads—complaining grimly that there should be snow this time of year—to drink Scotch with Martin, talk about how we used to drink Mountain Dew and play Halo.
Car trips with Robby were always part of Christmas. In his mother’s Sebring we’d drive up to Ann Arbor, a city that was, long ago, as bright and refined a metropolis to us as Bethlehem would have seemed to Mary. The trouble always was finding a present for Robby’s dad—the rest of our parents were easy to placate. We organized a methodical and ruthlessly efficient search pattern—starting first at Salvation Army to buy each other secondhand topcoats, and then (donning same) to the Underground Sounds for new pressings of In The Aeroplane Over the Sea and Consolers of the Lonely. Eventually we’d order burgers and coffee from the sullen staff of The Fleetwood, buy Robby’s dad a magnifying glass or something, and fishtail down Ridge Highway back to Adrian to walk around at night in our new old coats.
I’d like to be there now. Christmas is a holiday that happens in Adrian, and maybe nowhere else. I’d like to see Mom and my friends, my aunt and uncle. I concocted a meticulous and harebrained scheme to drive to Denver, get a direct flight to Detroit, rent a car, quarantine myself in Dad’s old study—just close enough to Christmas to smell the pine. I just don’t think it’s smart, Mom said, and she’s right. Moms sometimes are. This is a year when sentimental journeys can kill, but now that I’m away, I want desperately to be in Adrian: a city where, long ago, I dreamed of nothing but elsewhere.
I used to like to walk alone on Christmas Eve, back when Decembers were cold enough to snow; I’d go down through Trestle Park, where mine would be the first footprints in the clean snow. I’d sit in the still by the River Raisin until I could hear the water moving below the ice, hear the drip drip of snow melting up in the boughs overhead. Sometimes I’d listen to the river, and sometimes I’d listen to Winter Solstice V on my iPod shuffle. Robby would be in Church with his mother, and I wanted to feel whatever he was supposed to be feeling in there—some sense of the shining filament connecting this fixed point on the calendar to the swift current of time, to the soft heartbeat of the universe. Sometimes I could do it. I could concentrate, and make a wintry night in Adrian feel the way the tree used to make me feel; warm and cold at the same time, brief and eternal, near and long ago.
Nathaniel Berry is a writer and editor from Adrian, Michigan. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and is the 2020 Swan Quill & Lantern Lit Society Writer in Residence. He has a 2006 Pontiac Vibe with 250,000 miles on it, and there’s a highway curling just like smoke above his shoulder.
