As you know, this Saturday is Christmas, meaning I'm running out of opportunities to say something profoundly or even profanely Christmassy before it's too late.
Fair enough, but I'd argue, based on my own life, that nothing is ever too late to include my telling you about the most wonderful Christmas of my life and I am neither deterred nor discouraged by the deafening silence with which my recounting of the following story is always greeted within the walls of my own house by my spouse and children.
I had been in (West) Germany only about two months, arriving shortly before Halloween, which, back in the day, wasn't a holiday of any kind in Germany at all-it was strictly a Yank Prank like Thanksgiving only harder to explain to people who weren't American.
My friend, Chris, and I had started out imbibing and feeling very sorry for ourselves, me in the lead on that count (for being stuck in Germany for the holidays, boo-hoo), earlier in the day in the Frankfurt am Main club district, Sachsenhausen, where what seemed like millions of people made the passage from anywhere to anywhere else almost impossible (you thought I was going to type impassable, didn't you? I was tempted).
Eventually, though I have no recollection how, we came to be in a less crowded mid-town pub, near Eschenheimer Tor. Because I am relentlessly competitive, I had consumed a great deal more alcohol much more rapidly than Chris who did a very good job looking out for me since, family tradition, I have a nose for trouble, either finding it or making it.
He
and I were seated at a booth around a table with room for plenty of others
though they would have to move in as we had decided to remain anchored on the
opposing ends, facing one another. As the evening went on, our table filled up
with all manner of revelers. When the most beautiful woman in the world arrived,
there was only one place left to sit, and that was beside me.
I had seen her before but had never worked up the nerve to dare speak to her. And then, there she was. As we made small talk that night, I suddenly blurted out, ‘You look like someone I could fall in love with forever.’ And she smiled as she asked, ‘then, why don’t you?’ We would marry that autumn.
In the four and a half decades (almost to the very day) since all that happened, I've tried to calculate the number of actions and activities that had to take place, just so and in their particular order, so she and I could and would meet but since, luckily for all of us, I chose to be a liberal arts major avoiding contact with any and all math in my life, I am unable to execute those calculations.
I've long since given up trying to make sense of the world as it was then and more especially as it is now. I will tell you that I believe because that's how I was raised and habit is often more lasting than logic, there is a reason for everything we do, and everything that's left undone.
As attractive as I find the 'we're all victims of circumstance/we're all bozos on this bus' lamentations to questions about divinity, humanity, and the universe at large, I can't really leave it there.
If Christmas is a time of love, and Christmas night is when I found mine, how can I not encourage you to be of good cheer during this holiday season and to renew your faith even if you've yet to meet the person who completes you?
A
more luckless loser than I could you not have ever imagined, but a Christmas
miracle was still mine. So, keep your eyes wide and your heart open. There's magic in the air if and when you want it. Merry Christmas!
-bill kenny
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