Running down a dream

There was a thread of a moon one week before Christmas, just that tiny thinnest fingernail running barely over the horizon, curving backwards and slightly yellow. The valley dark, the pools of the streetlights on country-road long intervals, the spaces between, all dashes. No dots in there, no period small enough to actually count as a period.
Then, with one last orange eye, the streetlights are gone, the city turning off like a switch so that the only part of it left is the great wide lit bowl of it in the rearview, and even that is shrinking.
There's the pell-mell run of the headlights, all thrown out ahead of you, the long angles of the high-beams thrown back hard into the trees, the tree trunks flicking like a movie shown off-speed.

Same songs
And the radio is full of Christmas songs, stuffed tight like a seamed and bulging stocking, packed full as if no living singer could ever find it anywhere in themselves to resist a chance to make a Christmas album.
It's good King Wenceslaus, so very busy with his coming down again and again, over and over, to far too many feasts of Stephen. Little drummer boy, clearly risking carpal tunnel syndrome, rum-pa-pum-pum ad infinitum.
And the silent night that never, ever - sadly - is.
Not even close.
And the car engine opens up under your foot in what is almost the earliest dark of the year, and the inside of the car closes in with the lights on the dash, so you reach down and find the knob and turn it counter-clockwise, so they fade.
Fade the radio, too, hushing it to silence with a sweep of your hand.
Catch the first set of taillights, try to imagine the driver and passenger inside facing forwards as you arc by, set your sights on the next, and it's running into both a climbing hill and a bending-away curve. Then there are the barrens again, and you know that they are holding their breath.
Winter nights, the barrens always hold their breath.
The winter tires whir particular against the pavement, and you can remember a place far out away from streetlights where the snow runs in great rills so that even the smallest snowstorms run wild for empty miles and fetch up sudden against the sides of buildings in drifts three feet high - ricked over, kicked over, bent over - at the top so that there's a curved hollow in the back deep enough for something small and desperate to hide.
And with that, there's a quick-stepping smiling thought that maybe even you will be able to fit in there, curled up and small. A lost child again, bent up tight against the loyal warmth of a small family dog.
You can also hear a voice asking you, you there alone in the car, "who and what the hell do you think you're running from?"
And there's real truth in that.

The other direction
Except you'd explain you're not driving from - you're driving to.
You want to run fast to reach something so simple that you can't even explain, something suddenly Christmas-simple, something so plain that there just aren't words for it.
Or there maybe are, but only in the obverse.
Not presents nor trees, not rush or guilt, not shopping, not buying, not plans or dinners or anything close to complex.
Instead, you seek the acute angle heading straight towards the simple, the arrow to apple every single time.
Maybe it's a fire low and red in the fireplace - square pieces of dry birch, maybe, or maybe the wonder of maple, burning even, embers set in too-great order like a set of scarlet false teeth - and enough snow to whisper hush over an entire city.
The kind of snow that falls like a hat pulled down over your ears, the kind of snow that shuts cars up and eats sirens like food.
Maybe that singular familiar spot just before sleep.
You know the one.
It's the warm spot like a hood tight around your ears while the winter wind is picking away, the ham from the oven with the smell of hot cloves.
It's the way the liners in good gloves work into soft pills like a comfortable and familiar Braille. Maybe a distant person on a telephone, a hundred-thousand miles away and soft like voice-velvet, still immediately recognizable like electric shock.
So all at once you know what it is you seek - know it exactly - and know it all at once.
Know that you want it, even if you don't know how far you have to drive to find it.
And perhaps, you think too, that the drive is also critical to finding it - that nothing is easy, and that you need the necessary falling arc,
the headlong thrown-forward, the needed lean-into-the-hard-wind.
You know. You know all that, and still you also know that sometimes you feel like a bomb, its timer
set, red lights aglow and counting down, the only crucial period remaining left unknown. And life is like that sometimes.
There are many kinds of Christmas, and few of them will ever exactly match the simple line or picture of greeting cards.
The tyranny is believing that they have to, or that you can force them to.
Sometimes, there's nothing you want that can be made by your own hands, no matter how frantic and determined your fingers are.
Muddy Waters sings out of the CD player, echoing and empty, and he says that he feels like going home, and all his guitar strings sound like they're being played loose and rattling on their frets, sounds like accidents, only approximate.
Heading back, the moon right now - right now - should be full, completely full, blue-white full, the road hard-white with dried salt and spilled moonlight, the man in the moon awake and caught yelling his pain, hurt and upended, yelling for all he's worth.
And cheering you home.
Find peace. Especially inside.


Russell Wangersky is The Telegram's editorial page editor. He can be reached by e-mail at rwanger@thetelegram.com.