My cramping hand
clutched desperately for the flimsy limb in the top of a forty-foot
pine tree, swaying in the first winter gusts of the year. Hanging on
for dear life, I uttered a silent prayer that I would
survive—preferably with all limbs and head intact. Of course I
already had doubts about my head. After all, what in the hell was an
out-of-shape, overweight forty-five-year-old man doing in the top of
a giant pine tree anyway?Bear attack? Wilderness panic? No, my
friends, it was something much more insidious and frightening.
Christmas spirit.
Those of you who know me are probably
already shaking your heads. My reputation as a devoted Scrooge is
long and well deserved. People I don’t even know stop me in the
store in the middle of August. “Only five more months ‘til
Christmas,” they chuckle merrily as my eyes bug out of my head.
Everybody knows I hate the holidays. But as I getter older, I also
seem to get a little wiser. All this hating is not good for the soul.
Hating things you can’t change is pointless and self-destructive.
Instead of hating Christmas, maybe like old Ebenezer and the Grinch,
I could learn to love it. So after the Great Thanksgiving/Smoked
Turkey/ Home Inferno (see earlier blog) I decided I’d actually put
up some lights this year.
It had literally
been years since I had bothered to put any up lights. I had no idea
what worked and what didn’t and the whole mess looked like an
octopus eating spaghetti in a string factory. Naturally the few that
were easy to untangle where the ones that didn’t work. The ones
that worked I managed to drop and shatter many of the bulbs. Hours
went by. Finally, through persistence, cannibalism and redneck
technology, I was able to cobble together several working strings of
lights.
Where to put them?
I could decorate the front of the house but we never go out there in
the evening. Who was I trying to cheer up? The neighbors? Hell no.
Those people wouldn’t even help a guy fight a fire at one in the
morning. No I was trying to cheer myself up so I strung them around
our back patio. The end result was kind of nice, but a little
lacking… Then I started to eye the giant pine tree that dominates
our backyard. The previous owners had bought a live Christmas tree
one year and, when they were done, planted it in the middle of the
yard. The thing is now a Sequoia. It’s home to all sorts of
critters and birds. I’ve seen whole flocks of birds fly out of it.
Rodents, rabbits, stray cats and, I think, a couple spotted owls live
in there. We once lost a dog for a week in this tree. El Chupacabra
and Bigfoot party in there once and while.
So anyway there I
am standing on my back patio holding a string of Christmas lights and
eyeing the tallest pine tree in Arizona. The rest I guess is
predictable.
I strung together
all the remaining lights that still worked, climbed atop the roof of
my house and tied a rock to the end of the lights. Thus I made a
giant rope of lights and proceeded to attempt to lasso the pine tree.
Surprisingly my plan worked. On my second or third toss I managed to
snag an upper limb. All that remained was to climb down and carefully
wrap the string of lights around and around the tree. Of course this
proved more difficult than it seemed. The string of lights kept
snagging on lower branches and required careful looping and swinging
of the lights to lay them in place. Imagine a giant jump rope. My
wife and son came out and helped me for a while—even though I’m
quite sure they thought I was absolutely nuts. That’s the kind of
sport they are. When someone in your family is borderline deranged,
you learn to humor them.
Things were pretty
much under control when she went back into the house. I was making
progress. Just one remaining snag… I stood on the top of a
stepladder to get a better angle, started swinging my jump rope
string of lights and made another beautiful loop up into the tree
exactly where I wanted. It landed on a large nest in a branch
directly above me. It was perfect shot—except the nest it smacked
turned out not to be a nest. More of a hive really. A giant beehive.
Suddenly there are about four million bees zooming towards my head.
Something told me there weren’t going to sing me Christmas carols.
Those who believe
that man was never meant to fly has never stood atop a step ladder
while being attacked by a swarm of bees. I don’t actually remember
jumping from the ladder, but suddenly I was halfway across the yard
and I still hadn’t touched the ground. I can honestly say I have
never moved faster in my life. I would’ve won Olympic Gold if
beehive sprinting were an event. I was halfway down the block before
I even slowed down.
Carefully, I slowly
crept back into the yard and snuck into the house when the bees
weren’t looking. There I waited them out. Then, just before dark, I
went back outside and finished the job. With the satisfaction of a
job well done, I plugged the lights in and stepped back to view my
masterpiece.
The top of tree did
not light up.
Unbelievingly, I
carefully looked to see if the top string got unplugged. Nope. It was
plugged. They just didn’t light up. I couldn’t believe it. After
all that work… It was incredibly depressing. I couldn’t go to
sleep that night. Then, when I did, I dreamed of exploding lights and
laughing bees. The next day I got up and went to work. But all I
thought about where those lights. On the way home that night, I
bought two more strings of lights, drove directly home and started
unwrapping the tree. I pulled down every strand of lights off that
@*&%#$ tree and climbed back on the roof with a new lasso.
The problem was,
after a day of meat-cutting, my arm sucked. The first toss missed the
tree entirely. The lights sailed past and flew to the ground with
giant crash. An entire string of lights was smashed. Undaunted I
hooked up a new set and tossed it again. Another bad toss. This one
went left and low. Way too low. Unfortunately it hooked on the tree
good and when I tried to retrieve it, I ended up snapping a string in
half. Now I’m angry. In a matter of minutes, not only have
completely undid all my work, but I’ve wrecked two strings of
lights in the process. I was so mad I briefly considered picking a
fight with bees. Instead I went in the house and yelled at the dog.
I brooded on those
damn lights until my next day off. It happened to be Arizona’s
coldest day in five years but I didn’t care. I went to the dollar
store and bought ten more strings of lights. The tree was getting
decorated—whether I lived to see it or not. This time, however, I
knew I had to throw caution to the wind. This time I was going to
climb to the top of the tree myself.
I don’t know what
kind of pine tree it is exactly, but the thing is thick. I got out my
aluminum extension ladder and found that, fully extended the ladder
barely reached from the outside of the tree to the tree trunk—about
five feet off the ground. Oh well, that gave me an avenue into the
tree. From there I began to climb. There were so many tree branches,
however, I had to worm and contort myself upwards. There were massive
piles of dry pine needles everywhere—and they infested my hair, my
ears, my clothes and even my eyes. Pine sap soon covered my hands and
clothes. As I got towards the top of the tree, a cold wind began
blowing. My hands started cramping from clutching the branches. The
tree began to tilt backwards from my weight.
Actually, it was
kind of fun.
Then another gust
of wind blew me back further. A bee buzzed around my head. I knew it
was time to get the job done and get the hell out of there. Clutching
the tree trunk with one hand, I attempted to tie the end of the
string of lights around a branch as high as I could reach. Easier
said than done. The wind started blowing the top of tree back and
forth. I started to get seasick. Three bees buzzed around my head.
Finally I just
wrapped the string around a branch three times, knowing full well it
wouldn’t hold and shinnied, fell, tumbled down the tree and hacked
my way out. Finished, I didn’t even bother turning the damn things
on to see if they worked. I just plugged them into the timer and
walked away.
Later that night,
after the dinner table was cleared and the family was settling down
in the living room, I asked my wife to take a little walk with me.
It’s freezing out, she said. “Come on just out to the street and
back.” We walked out into our cold, dark neighborhood and walked
out to the street. “Wow.” The tree was lit up from top to bottom.
We stood and admired it for a long time.
“It’s
beautiful, “ she said and then turned and uttered the words that
sent shivers down my spine. “But it makes the rest of the yard
look dark. Maybe you should…”
All across the
neighborhood, a terrible scream echoed through the night.
--December 2006
