Category: Before

Shelley Long is talking to Santa Claus. He asks if she believes in Santa. She answers, “No, I don’t”.

“Does your son believe in Santa?” he asks.

“Yes . . . He does.” She starts to get choked up.

“Well he must have gotten it from somewhere.”

Shelley Long breaks into tears and begins sobbing.

“Are you sure you don’t believe?”

“Yes. I do. I do believe.” Shelley Long hugs Santa.

Later. Shelley Long is walking down the hall of a hospital. A woman comes up to her and starts talking business. Shelley Long tries to shrug off the other woman. “We’ll deal with this later.” A nurse calls her from the end of the hall, she excuses herself and runs over.

She enters a hospital room and asks, “What’s wrong?”

There’s a doctor blocking our view of the patient. He moves and we see a small boy sitting up in bed. He has a band-aid on his forehead and a scrape painted onto his chin.

“You’re awake!” Shelley Long rushes over and hugs the boy. A moment later, Santa enters the room.

Shelley Long tells the boy, “I want to introduce you to someone.” Referring to Santa, she says, “This is your grandfather.”

The boy asks, “Does that make me an elf or a helper?”

Santa smiles, “That makes you something even more important. That makes you my daughter’s son.”

Santa tells them that it’s time for him to leave. Shelley Long and the boy thank him – for everything.

New scene. Santa is walking down a residential street. A police car drives up. The officer on the passenger side rolls his window down and says hello. Santa returns the hello.

They have a short conversation. Santa tells the police officer that he’s leaving town, going home to Nebraska. The officer points out that his car isn’t going to get him that far. And Santa tells him that he’s taking the train actually, “I’ll see more of the country that way.”

The police officer apologizes for having arrested him earlier.

“That’s alright,” Santa answers.

“The least I can do is give you a ride to the train station. I’d score some points with my kids after what happened earlier.”

Santa accepts the ride. He gets into the back seat and they drive away.

In the next scene they stop the car on a dark street.

“You’ve brought me to the wrong place,” Santa tells them, “This is the old train station.”

The police officer gets out of the car. “Oh, This is the right place alright,” he answers, opening the back door for Santa.

Santa climbs out of the car and stands on the sidewalk, confused. Suddenly, lights come on all around them. There’s a crowd of people standing in front of the old train station. Everything is decorated with Christmas lights. Shelley Long and her son are there with the guy who plays the mayor on Spin City.

Shelley Long tells Santa that this is a public building and it’s going to be set up as a home for children.

“What about your campaign?” Santa sputters.

“I’ll still be campaigning – just not as hard.” She gives a significant look at her son and then at the mayor from Spin City, who kisses her on the forehead.

The crowd breaks into a spontaneous rendition of Deck the Halls. But, as they reach the end of the first chorus, they’re interrupted. Everyone looks up at the sky and it begins to snow. There’s some low murmuring in the crowd.

Shelley Long turns to Santa and says, “Merry Christmas.”

“But it’s June,” Santa says.

Shelley Long shakes her head. “No, it’s not. It’s Christmas.”

The crowd starts singing Deck the Halls again.

Fade to black. Roll Credits.

There was a pigeon stuck inside the post office – I’d seen it flying up against the lobby windows as I’d walked by. That’s what I was thinking about. I was brought back to earth when I heard a loud “Crunch”. A pickup had rear-ended an SUV stopped at a red light just as I was walking up to the corner.

It was just a fender bender. The left end of the SUV’s bumper was pointing out at an odd angle. The front of the pickup was dented badly. The drivers stayed in their cars while the light was red. I stood on the corner with the other pedestrian, a slack-jawed gawker.

When the light changed, the SUV – the car that had been hit – turned slowly and deliberately around the corner. The driver of the pickup hesitated, and after a few moments he pulled his car forward. (There was a sprinkling of debris on the street, including a mostly intact turn signal.) I watched as he pulled into the intersection, where he hesitated again and then continued up the street away from the other car.

I stared, still slack-jawed, thinking the obvious, “He’s going the wrong way. He needs to talk to the other driver.” I had a moment’s hesitation before realizing it was a hit and run. And lost another moment while I realized that that meant I should get the license plate number. I read the numbers off the back of the pickup as it quickly receded into the distance and turned back the way I’d come.

The SUV had parked outside the post office, a block away. I walked over and, without saying anything, was immediately accepted into the conversation the driver was having with two other bystanders.

I gave the driver the license plate number, but pointed out that I’d noticed it wasn’t a Washington plate, but couldn’t tell which state it was from.

She fished around for some paper, settling for the liner notes of a CD, where she wrote down the number. “Did you see what color it was?”

“Yeah. The plate was white with blue trim.”

Another woman walked up, she had the license number too. The driver asked if she’d gotten the state. She answered no, but a man came up behind her and said, “It was Wisconsin.” Then he pointed at the corner opposite ours and said blankly, “There it is.” We looked to where he was pointing, the pickup drove past and drove and continued down the hill away from us.

We all just stood there, slack-jawed again, until the driver broke the silence, “Alright. Thanks, everyone.”

I walked past the post office again and the pigeon that was stuck inside flew up against the window.

Two long exposure photos from last month.

Various dazed customers wander through Home Depot’s aisles. One of them identifies an employee by his orange apron, walks up to him and describes what he’s looking for. He doesn’t ask where he can find it, he just describes it, “Mortar for tile around a bathtub.”

The employee answers, “Aisle 14.”

Another customer: “A wireless doorbell.”

“Go all the way down and take a left. They’re on the right beside the smoke detectors.”

“A ratchet that can get into small places.”

“Aisle 27, near the end.”

My turn: “A peephole.”

He looks at me like I’m stupid.

“For a door.”

He looks at his feet, still somehow communicating that I’m stupid.

“Like this.” I dig out the old peephole that I’d removed from my front door earlier, a cigarette-sized cylinder with a lens on one end, and hold it up to my eye trying to simulate how one would peer out into the hallway when someone has knocked on his door. Without the door though, it looks like I’m miming someone looking through a tiny telescope.

“See. The problem is that this one has a hole in it, . . . which is kind of ironic I guess.” I hold it out for him to inspect.

He doesn’t look at it. “Aisle 35, next to the doorknobs.”

As I remember it, whenever the power went out when I was a kid, my family would play board games to pass the time. In reality, we may have only done that a couple of times during my most impressionable period. In retrospect I realize that we probably only played games because we couldn’t watch TV.

The power is out in my building. (I’m up the street at an internet cafe now.) My modern cordless phone doesn’t work – I’ve swapped it out for my old Bell System-issued rotary phone. My milk is going sour in the fridge. I took a shower earlier, my bathroom lit only by a weak flashlight. Nothing dramatic, but still kind of exciting. It’s a little meaningless road block that I’m more than happy to accomodate.

It’s dusk. The clouds have cleared away from overhead, settling on the horizon. A jet appears in the upper left corner of the window moving across the sky in the direction of the lower right area of the window – toward the northwest. It leaves a vapor trail behind it, a chalk line across a perfectly clean blackboard.

It disappears into the distance. First the plane is gone, but that end of the vapor trail is still being drawn. Then it’s far enough away that the end of the vapor trail is no longer visible.

I follow the vapor trail back to the corner of the window where it first appeared. It’s starting to fade. Beginning at my end, it’s dissipating, eventually fading to nothing right at the point in the sky where the plane disappeared a few minutes before. It takes the same amount of time for the vapor trail to fade away that it took the plane to travel from one end of the sky to the other.

All the streetlights have come on except the ones on this block.

I dug out an old can of house paint to do a little touch-up painting. I popped the top off and looked down into the can. When the paint fumes wafted up to my nose, the smell immediately took me back to when I painted the apartment almost four years ago. My anxieties shifted to those I had at the time, my mood changed, my posture adjusted itself. It was completely overwhelming for just that one moment. A second later, it had passed. It’s not that 1999 was a really exceptional time, but the sensation was so sudden and strong and also completely unexpected and fleeting.

I’ve dusted off two stories from my old Geocities site and dressed them up in Beans for Breakfast t-shirts and invited them to the Beans for Breakfast second birthday party: The Sound is a story about not getting enough sleep. The Corrrect Answer doesn’t strike as much of an impact as I remember, but I still like the title.

Before sitting down at Top Pot, I scanned the titles of the books that decorate the shelves near my table. A dirty gray volume with the title An Almanac For Moderns caught my eye. I pulled it down and looked through the first few pages. It was published in 1935, written by Donald Culross Peattie. The name “Richard G. Allen” was written on a bookplate pasted onto the inside front cover.

I looked through the book. Starting with the first day of the astrological calendar, there’s a page for every day of the year. There are twelve Lynd Ward illustrations scattered through the book, one for each star sign. For each day there’s a half-formed story, a short reflection on nature, or a “this day in history” anecdote.

I read a few random pages, then turned to the last page to read the essay for my birthday. I skipped back and read today’s essay. Then I flipped back a few pages, stopping where I saw some handwriting. There was an unpunctuated sentence penciled in so lightly that no impression had been made on the page – just a faint lead mark.

I skimmed through the rest of the book, looking for more handwritten notes. There were several words underlined or marked with question marks. A few paragraphs were marked off with a bracket in the inside margin. A handful of pages had an “x” or a checkmark at the top of the page. There were names written on the corner of some pages – “Norman”, “Mike Gates”, “Dad”. These notations were spread sparingly throughout the book – maybe one page in twenty was marked in some way. The line I’d found written under the November 22 essay was the only notation of more than two words. The essay on that page was short – ending halfway down the page. Handwritten right beneath the last line:

Today I went into the army
R.G.A 1943

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