Winter Stories

The snow was pelting down heavily onto my windshield, onto the roadway, onto the surrounding country side. Yet I felt unconcerned, and seemed to be a part of the storm as my mind switched to automatic pilot. Steering, braking, accelerating seemed preprogrammed into my muscles and nerves, and my conscious mind, fully alert, gave way to the feelings, images, and remembrances flowing up from somewhere deeper than thought
I was completely awake, yet at the same time I was dreaming as though I were asleep.
I had begun to pay more attention to the inner scenes forming within my "mind's eye.' In fact I had no choice. I didn't know it then, but that darned hat was guiding my thoughts and feelings. I was driving the car in a safe, prudent manner, yet the hat was driving my mind into a land of memories, hopes, half-remembered perceptions from long ago.
And dominant among these perceptions were my memories of Meredith, even my earliest
memory from elementary school, at a birthday party. She was across the table from me, dressed
all in white, her black hair a sharp contrast to the white of the table cloth and of her dress. Her
eyes met mine and she smiled. I grinned like an idiot, and blushed. She stuck out her tongue and
called me goofy. I hated her.
Her mom was noisier than any of the other mothers with their ridiculous baby voices and
shouting and cooing. I told Meredith that she had a noisy mom, noisier than anyone else at the
party. She slapped me in the face, then punched me in the stomach. It was the beginning of a
beautiful relationship.
On I drove into the storm, fully alert. Yet the inner movie of my past life was steadily
un-scrolling at the level of my solar plexus. I saw the two of us at junior high, then in high school
Meredith slim and lovely in her cheerleader's outfit, making me insanely jealous of all the upper
classmen who were hanging around her. She seemed to revel in my misery. Each time one of the
seniors talked to her she glanced in my direction, showing those guys off as though they were her
trophies. It felt like an enormous shredder was whirling around inside my stomach. I hated her. I
loved her.
I married her. Eventually. On a lovely day in spring when the trees were starting to
blossom and the forsythia was in its prime, the two of us, hand in hand, hurried out of a
darkened church into the bright sunshine of a Saturday afternoon, ducking the handfuls of rice
hurled at us from laughing wedding guests waiting outside the church. As I drove on, the scenes from my marriage unfurled steadily upon the inert screen of my inner consciousness, almost subliminally. My eyes strained to see ahead, into the falling snow, as my conscious thoughts focused on the steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator.
Yet my feelings were centered on my marriage of years ago: on our Poconos honeymoon,
then the first meal in our brand-new home when Meredith burned a steamship roast to embers
and we had to send out for pizzas then explain our situation to the firemen who arrived on three
trucks responding to our alarm. (They were good sports, ate up all of our pizza pie, then kindly
gave us the phone numbers of a few good Chinese restaurants to call for our second delivery of
dinner that night.)
There were the arrivals of our babies, at first scary, then routine: Thomas, Richard,
Harry and Jane. Tom, Dick and Harry were Meredith's idea. She claimed the names would help
them bond as adults. They were good kids, I thought; they still are, I grudgingly admitted to myself.
And so it went as I drove on into the storm, heading for my home of twenty years. My
outer thoughts were sharp, alert, focused on my driving. My inner feelings were relaxed,
nostalgic, pleasant, warm, fulfilling. I began to smile in spite of myself. I thought less and less
about separation and divorce. I switched on the radio. The song "Oh There's No Place Like
Home for The Holidays...” filled the dashboard-lit darkness inside of my car. I grew more
anxious to arrive home, to make sure all of my family were safe this Christmas Eve.
At the time I thought merely that my feelings were changing, softening because of the
good fellowship of the season. Eventually I realized that it was the hat.

The power of Santa's hat, its magic, was this: the hat enabled me to view, in my mind's eye, scenes from my past life in the full glow of my perceptions and feelings from the time when the events were actually
happening – as though the past were still immediate in the present.
The results of this were extraordinary. I actually re-experienced my wedding as though I
were still in my middle twenties, as though my whole life still lay ahead of me. I felt, inside of
me, the innocent hopefulness of youth without any of the tired hopelessness that comes from
growing older. I was young again, optimistic and forward looking within my inner thoughts and
feelings. The sensation was exhilarating, as though I had literally revisited my youth. In fact it seemed that time was not only relative, but that it could be reversed, unraveled and rerun, if we so wished.
These feelings and sensations were magnificent, and they opened my affections to all those with whom I was sharing my life. I was overwhelmed with wave upon wave of love. I began to giggle, almost as a child would giggle, then to laugh, then to guffaw loudly. I felt a sense of intense belonging, and of love for the entire universe, the entirety of God's creation.
My God I must have looked like a crazy man. There I was, driving along in a blinding
snowstorm, laughing like a madman. I felt as though I were a part of the storm, somehow
integral with the snowflakes and the howling wind. I know now that this was the influence of the hat. This magnificent daydream resulted, somehow, from my placing Santa's hat upon my head.