“Christmas is the Real Day of the Dead,” She Said.

This was spoken as she swung around on the bar stool, and I was caught somewhat off-guard with my face buried in the newspaper and my fingers playing along the rim of my whiskey glass.

“How so?” I said, straightening up and taking a sip from the glass. I wasn’t quite ready to look at the eyes that were boring into me.

“How so?” she mimiced. “Because ghosts come home, because home is fucking not there anymore, and the ghosts don’t know where to sit. They wander around wondering just where the fuck to sit. Don’t you get it?”

I took another drink. I had been reading an article about the recent downturn in the housing market, and I was only half finished. I looked down at the paper.

“I guess ghosts have issues,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time. Finally I turned and glanced at her. Not much there that could stand up to a high wind: thin branches reaching out from a defoiliated tree. Yet she had long, dark hair, running with beautiful veins of gray.

“Ghosts don’t have issues,” she said. “They’ve suffered quite enough. WE have fucking issues. I have fucking issues. YOU have fucking issues.”

“The difference is--I make an effort not to let mine get the best of me,” I said.

She stared at me intensely, and then her eyes seemed to moisten. She spun in her chair and crossed the room, sliding into a booth occupied by a group of people who were engrossed in conversation.

I finished my drink, put on my coat and hat, rolled up the newspaper, and stepped outside. A gust of wind blew my hat off and it went into the gutter as cars sped by on the wet road. “Dammit,” I said.

Sure. There was an Oregon town stained by mill smoke. I can’t prove it existed--just take my word for it, okay? The rain was a real power on earth, and men came home from work muddy and beat. I can’t even talk about the weight of the hills and the terrible denseness of the timber, or how fog could so easily smother everything and everywhere. “Work” was something quite different,then, than it is now--more of a struggle to conquer, or survive, and all entangled with the weather and the seasons, and the pathway of the sun, and its settings and its risings.

Sure. People seemed large then. A hero was someone who cut the most trees, loaded the most trucks, plowed the most acres. Heroes were people you knew--not some studied or preposterous image that flickers on a screen. And you should have seen the work the women did--longer hours and more work than was expected of any man.

You simply can’t remember without summoning all those ghosts and all they gave of themselves. The woman in the bar was right, or at least she spoke the truth of her heart’s disconsolations. Christmas is the day the ghosts are most apt to return. We should buy presents, presents of flowers, only for them.

Christmas, as they say, is for kids, or for new families, or for those others who can live in a simple and uncontaminated Present while rarely remembering anything.

For the rest of us, our hearts will be with the ghosts on Christmas Day. New Year’s Eve, we will have a few drinks, and New Year’s Day we will get up early in the gray dawn and move on.