I have pretty much always hated the song, Blue Christmas. I'm fairly picky about my holiday songs and it would never make my Desert Island Disc top 10 or top 1000. I always thought of it as a sappy song about girlfriend/boyfriend breakup.
So today I'm heading to work, feeling good after hearing "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" on the oldie station. I'm smiling at folk and holding the elevator door open for others. I've got a swing in my walk.
I go from the parking lot into the hospital and hear the piano strains of the theme to Charlie Brown's Christmas, you know the one. There's often a volunteer playing the piano in the lobby, cheering up all those injured, ill, and old folk moving through the hallways, appointment to appointment, stopping to sit in the lobby chairs.
By the time I reach the front of the lobby, I turn and see a handsome African-American young man at the piano. It's never the same pianist, but more often it's a middle-aged Anglo woman. Well, he stops the Charlie Brown boogie and starts up with the music to Blue Christmas. He is not singing, but I supply the words in my head:
"I'll have a blue Christmas without you
I'll be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Won't be the same dear, if you're not here with me"
and on . . .
and the tears well up. I'm a gonner.
I will be a puddle this holiday season, if Elvis Presley in my head can start me up. And I haven't yet even seen the Budweiser Clydesdales ring jing jingling to the strains of "I'll be home for Christmas."
Somehow I was feeling so safe.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
....i can't imagine anything, except that it's going to be painful, it's going to be tragic, and it's going to be sad....but i do imagine that you won't be alone, you won't be forgotten, and you won't be afraid....
....you are surrounded by love...
((((((((My Sister)))))))))
It will be a blue blue Christmas, but I know you will get through it.
If we are lucky, they will have retired those darn horses.
Oh dear, the song just started playing in my head and I feel tears welling up - I will never be able to hear that song with dry eyes again. (I also never liked it very much)
since green & red, & now blue, have so many memories attached to them, i propose picking a new color, like orange...or purple...or pink...for your xmas decorations/theme this year - start some wild new traditions!
luckily, suzanne, i will be back east with miranda, so i won't have to decorate anything. i did enjoy picking up some ornaments for a gift for friend's party this weekend, without a problem. you know how this grief thing goes, you can't predict what will protect you or do you under!
Post a Comment