The Last Two Before the Tree

Time is water.

When you are young, time is a river bigger than your imagination. It is the Mississippi or the Mekong. Something so vast as to be infinite. Even in its movement, there is an endlessness.

Then time passes, things change. You grow up. Move out. Move away. But even in that first paddling off, there is no rush to the current. There is only a gentle pulling along, and it is in the direction you can’t wait to go. The tug of time pulls you toward not past. Not away from.

I have always been acutely aware of the passage of time. I have been sensitive to the width of intervals. The school week, the semester, the summer, the year. When I was in college, I palpably felt semesters as if they were stretches of a river. Brief floats along a current toward a pullout where rafts were dragged up on the bank, the ride over.

Other students seemed to mark milestones more than feel the miles. Midterms. Spring break. Finals. The first day back from winter break. Dates on the calendar.

I marked more of an emotional arc. It ran from the relaxed ease of early semester through the roil of midterms and then finally to an emptying out. Dorm rooms vacated one by one as students finished their last finals and headed home for the holidays. The dorm getting quieter and quieter as whole floors dwindled to dark.

I hated that last week of the semester, the end of finals, for the dread of it. Not because of the end of the term itself. Not because of the going home. I was always one of the last to get back. My friends would already be there by the time I did. It would be good to see them. The break would be busy and fun.

There was nothing about going home in the dread.

It was all the leaving. The sensation of it. It was my wide river emptying into a flat basin where divided again and again until it was nothing but diminishing rivulets fanned out across sand like tree roots reaching for the sea.

It was an emptying out that made undeniable how much water had just passed, how much time. College was measured in eighths. Each emptying out was another one past. I met their arrival with a certain benign grief. I have never been in a hurry to rush to the end of things.

Even during the unhappiest stretches of my life, I have never wished away time.

Time is water. I have never wished myself farther down the river. I have wished for easier passage, my boat upon the water. I have never wished for portage. To be anywhere along it is to be alive. Some stretches are testing but others stretches are, my god, just breathtaking in a way you wish you could hold onto with more than pictures.

My son’s childhood has been one of those stretches. It is one of those stretches still – though there is more water under the bridge than remaining. He is a sophomore in high school. In three years, he’ll be in college. I get only three more summers, two more Christmases, and then life will change. I will be buoyed by a true joy at his paddling off, capable, independent. But, oof, there is going to be some crying in my boat. I know that. I am already preparing for that as best one can.

Time is water. Not a day goes by when I don’t feel the current.

I have had moments this year when the sensation of that has been a bit different. Not just a constant tug like that of a receding wave pulling at your ankles on its way past. More like the hull of a rowboat bumping over something submerged. Something unseen. A rock, or log. Not enough to pitch the boat severely. Just a sudden thudding which is jarring mostly because it was unanticipated.

My son and I have a number of traditions. We have a first fishing trip of the year. We have a certain pie we make together usually in late spring. Raspberry-rhubarb. We have an entire series of events around Christmas. A whole program that begins almost immediately after Thanksgiving. We call them Christmas Fun Nights. We have been doing them since my son was four. Traditions, we’ve got a bunch.

I had none with my father. That isn’t an indictment or complaint. It is simply a statement. We didn’t have traditions unique to us. We had the societal traditions of Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas themselves. But we had none proprietary to us. No rituals made from our own repetition. And that is what traditions are. Rituals of repetition. Things done and then done again until cemented as annual.

My son’s and my traditions, I made them up. They didn’t just fall into place. They were seeded with forethought and intention and then nurtured for a reason and with a goal.

I wanted my son to have a permanence - a stability, order, predictability - in a period of disorder. I was newly separated. My son’s life had been cleaved into halves. Things were changing. His routine was changing. There was upheaval in places in his life. I didn’t want our home to be one of them.

I wanted our life – not so much our home specifically, but our life, his world with me - to be impervious to weather. Hurricane proof. I would be there at drop-off and pickup and practice. I’d be there at bedtime and be there when he woke up. All of the world could rage and blow, and none of that would change. I wanted our life together to be rock solid reliable. Granite. A foundation he didn’t even think about because it was simply the geology of the place. There would be no earthquakes here because there are simply no earthquakes here.

I started nurturing these traditions in service of that goal. I began seeding them in my first year as a single father specifically for the value they would accrue in Years 2 and 5 and 10. In predictability lies stability, comfort. The traditions were to be markers on a river bank which imposed order even along a river. The route might be serpentine, but it was not entirely uncharted. It was just miles, some past, some ahead, and along them were annual appointments to play hooky and go catch rainbow trout and bake pies together and watch Rudolph.

We didn’t make our pie this year.

A tradition that began when he was five-years-old and rhubarb was the first thing we harvested from a garden together… this year would have been our twelfth. Instead, we broke it. It wasn’t that I forgot or we forgot. I thought about it numerous times. It came up in conversation. We talked about it. We just never made it.

There were circumstantial (and valid) reasons. In years past, we had ready access to fresh rhubarb. We had been able to pick it ourselves. This year, we didn’t have a sufficient quantity. There was some chance that allowing a little more growing time might do the trick… but then it didn’t. I could have then hunted for some other source. I didn’t. We were both busy – very – so it just slipped away with a sort of passive permission to do so.

On the one hand, I hated breaking a streak of ours… especially one that traces back through so much of my fatherly sentimentality.

(I have pictures of past pies, people. Pies of great reminiscence. Many vintages. Not in a folder or on a hard drive somewhere. On my phone. I have pictures of sentimental past pies… in my pocket... at all times.)

So, that being crazy and all, I hated laying down the streak.

On the other hand, it was a tradition born of serendipitous access to rhubarb. We didn’t have enough this year. It didn’t feel like a gutting death of something beloved to skip an edition. It felt less important this year that we did. We didn’t make the pie.

And that was the bump beneath the boat.

“It felt less important that we did.”

Things change. They shift or evolve or end altogether. That’s life on the river. The original purpose behind these traditions was to create constancy amidst chaos; reliability amidst uncertainty. And they had. But now we are far past the place where those had been the goals because those had been the needs.

My son isn’t four or six or eight. He doesn’t need a summer pie to know that our life is stable, that his is, that the world is stable, and things can be counted on.

What do you do with a tradition you’ve outgrown?

Do you just let it go as something of a time now passed? Do you force it to remain on the calendar out of a sense of obligation?

I wasn’t comfortable with either of those.

I didn’t want to let our pie tradition to just fade away, but I also didn’t want to feel beholden to keeping it up. No matter how positive something may have once been, maintaining it out of guilt is an upside-downing of the thing. It is a joyless persistence… at a thing that should be let to pass.

So, we didn’t make the pie and that was okay… but it bumped. It rocked my little rowboat to and fro a bit, and the reason was because we would be coming up on our Christmas traditions next, and they weren’t just a pie. They might have come to exist for my son per se, but they were never just for him.

Love is sometimes pure. It is never wholly altruistic. There is always a return.

Our traditions, especially the Christmas ones, they were also for me.

The reasons why run deep and are complicated. They have to do with my own childhood and what I want for his, my own need for the stability of a through-line in a relationship so exposed to transition, so certain to change. Ours, his and mine.

The point is, it is never just a plate of sugar cookies.

So, when the pie slipped past unbaked, it left me thinking about our Christmas traditions and the inevitability they would change too. I thought but only in passing about what to do about them this year. Keep on with them as is? Revisit somehow? I didn’t know... but I needed to think about it. Time being water though, two more handfuls slipped through my fingers, and it was already Thanksgiving.

Traditionally, my son’s and my Christmas Fun Nights begin the following Wednesday. That is the night Rockefeller Center first lights its Christmas tree. We have dinner, put cookies in the oven, and watch the lighting. When my son was little-little and the lighting was on past his bedtime, I would tape it and we would then watch it the following night, but time-shifted or not the official start of our Christmas Fun Nights has always been the lighting of the tree.

This year, I wasn’t scheduled to have him the night of the tree lighting. I could have changed the schedule. But he had just started track practice the week before and has been exhausted most weeknights. So, we agreed I’d just tape it and we’d watch it over the weekend.

Then, as the weekend neared, we heard that my son’s his aunt and cousin were going to be in town. They wanted to go into the city, have dinner and… go see the tree. My son’s mother asked if she could have him for that. I agreed. So, my son went… and with that, our longest running tradition, the one that was the genesis of our Christmas Fun Nights altogether, got leapfrogged.

Then, in the weeks after, we kept postponing watching the taped lighting. We didn’t kick of Christmas Fun Nights or move on to the next. We didn’t watch the usual Christmas shows and movies. No Rudolph or Elf or Christmas Story. We were both just… tired. He has a heavy courseload plus track. I’m averaging 30 hours a week just in the car. We’re tired.

Christmas Fun Night season, the near entirety of it, just… slipped away… and then it was the week before Christmas.

With the realization that our Christmas traditions, our streak with all of its history, might just break and be no more, I made some time to really think about them. How they came to be. What mattered about them then and matters still.

I first started nurturing them with my son thinking three years out. I was planting in Year 1 for what that would yield in Years 3, 4, and beyond.

So, I did that again this year. I planned for future years.

Three years from now, my son will be in college. It will be his first semester away, his first time through final exams, his first December split between school and break. He will likely come home for Christmas but probably not until the week or two before. He’ll be busy and have plans. I will get some of his time but only in slices. There will be no time for all of our old Christmas Fun Night things.

So, I came up with a highly condensed version. The kind that could fit into a college kid’s schedule even when he only gets home the week before Christmas and has friends to see. An adult version of a plate of warm sugar cookies and a tree lighting on TV.

Ran the idea by my son minus the long long horizon, as just a “Hey, how about we…”. He was onboard.

Booked us a hotel room in the city. Made reservations at a restaurant that is lively and energetic and a bit of a scene. Not a ‘Christmas dinner with your parents’ restaurant. A place with a DJ and a giant Buddha and a menu of small plates and shareables that makes the whole thing a ‘we’ not an ‘each of us’.

Friday, when my son’s school got out for Christmas break, we headed straight into the city, checked into the hotel, and just settled in for a while. On the way to dinner, we walked past a mobbed Rockefeller Center.

Dinner was great. We were both present for it fully in the moment. The food was delicious. The place was fun. It was just right. Afterwards, we walked back down Fifth Avenue past St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Rockefeller Center. It was 10:30 and cold. There was still a crowd. We didn’t feel like navigating through the sea of tourists, so we just walked back to the hotel, flopped down on the beds, both tired, each checking our phones.

At midnight, we were both still up. I had a picture in mind. Not a photograph; a moment. It was the reason I had booked that hotel. It was time.

So, I got up off the bed and said “Come on. Let’s go walk back by the tree.”

My son just groaned with an air of “I can’t believe you’re going to make me do this.” Only an air. As he was pulling himself up off the bed, I said, “I just think--” before he cut me off to finish my sentence with “I know. If we don’t go, we might regret it.” and pulled on his sweatshirt. He hadn’t needed any coaxing. That hadn’t been what I was going to say, but, hey, why steal defeat from the jaws of victory.

So he bundled up and I did too and off we went back out across a sleepy midtown to the world’s most famous Christmas tree.

The plaza was empty but for us.

I took a few pictures with my phone and then we just stood there under the lights, a father who could not love his kid any more than he does, and his 16-year-old son only two more Christmases from college.

When my son was a very little boy, the lighting of that tree – the event of it – was a touchstone. It was reliable and regular. It was the start of a whole set of traditions.

This year, we did almost none of them.

Instead, we went into the city two nights before Christmas Eve, walked to Rockefeller Center well past midnight, and had the place to ourselves.

The last two before the tree… lit just for us.

A father and his son, there for something in its 13th year but also its 1st.

A tradition changed but not really.

Because it was never about the cookies.