Black and White and Winter Nights

I don’t love winter but for as long as I can remember I’ve loved the winter sky for the constellation Orion. A warm summer night is full of crickets and fireflies and maybe the smell of trampled mint or roses or lingering barbeque. The air is thick and heavy and you feel solid and terrestrial in all the best ways. On a clear winter night, the quiet feels infinite, the air is sharp in our lungs and the sky above is darkly endless, the stars immeasurable and somehow brighter. And Orion is there, a celestial sentinel, guarding the millions, the billions, under his purview. I know that, factually, those stars are millions of miles apart. That their light is hundreds of years old. That even Orion’s story is not so much planetary protector as it is mythological predator. But for whatever reason, Orion on a cold winter night makes me feel wonderfully small, and insignificant, and protected, and connected to the universe in an elemental way.

When I was a child, I can remember riding to dance class, back roads of rural Ohio, with Orion riding shotgun outside the passenger window. My father took me to dance class, all those winter nights, and waited in the drab anteroom with the other parents, all the while knowing that I would never know a kick ball change from a scissor step. Now, on Tuesdays, my husband takes our daughter to dance class, where he waits through lyrical, brings dinner, then waits through ballet. It’s comforting, that routine. Even beyond the generational continuity, we’re one of millions of little stories going on under the winter sky, and it’s reassuring to know that across the world we’re all taking our daughters (or sons) to dance class, like our parents did before us.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything. I haven’t been able to think of five words to link together lately. I’ve been bowed by the world events that keep beating the positivity out of the holiday season. As I’ve mentioned before, I have no personal connection to these tragedies, beyond a human one, and that makes me feel a bit self-conscious in my gloom. How histrionic am I to feel like I have a share of the grief of those who have lost everything? And yet that’s the point. It’s a human story, and it feels like we’re getting it wrong lately. The grief should be universal, shouldn’t it? Collective heartache for an uneasy world.

My 9-year-old daughter recently had to write a short essay on connecting unrelated ideas. She choose to connect the plot of Once Upon a Time to “all the shootings lately,” because she saw both as a fight between good and evil. I was proud of her perception, but also distressed that this is her childhood. I can remember in college once, a professor asked us if we believed in evil. Evil sounded so melodramatic. We were uncomfortable with it. Growing up post-Cold War, good versus evil was comic book fodder. Columbine happened while I was in college, a year or so after that discussion, and 9/11 directly after college, but they didn’t inform my childhood. After the San Bernadino shootings, there were several articles I saw about explaining tragic events to children. And yet, with the news coverage on in the background, my children asked no questions. Only a year or two ago, I wouldn’t have had it on while they were around, but by now they already know why they do lockdown drills at school. I turned it off because I couldn’t handle any more, but when I asked if they had any questions, they said no. And there’s the additional tragedy.

My children fight every single night while they brush their teeth. Every single night. Over toothpaste, over the prime spot in front of the sink, whose turn it is to shower first … in the morning. Ten hours later. Suggesting that they take turns – and by suggesting I mean yelling up the stairs, “ONE. Just ONE of you in the bathroom at a time, or I swear there will be no quiet time and it will be lights out immediately!” – doesn’t seem to matter. They’re willing to risk the consequences to get one more verbal, or sneaky physical, jab in. They’re fighting. I’m yelling at them to stop yelling. And then I eat seven cherry cordial Hershey’s kisses and promise, loudly, that everyone is going to bed an hour early tomorrow, because if we’re fighting about who dropped the toothpaste cap, clearly no one in this house is getting enough sleep. Also, what does it matter? No one was going to put it back on the tube, anyway.

And yet, they also remind me to gather up jackets for their winter clothing drive, and they spend their own money on canned goods for the local food pantry, and they set up lemonade stands for horse rescue and worry about the feelings of their friends, and sometimes coexist peacefully in magical small spaces. We’re all a little black, a little white, a lot gray. A little saint, a little sinner, a lot human. The world is the same way, even when it seems like more dark is crowding in. We worry in broad stokes about humanity, about our neighbors and the “them” across hemispheres, while we sometimes we forget to end the day with kind words at home (but seriously, you’re just stalling now. Go. To. Bed.)

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness will not drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” Outside, there are no bedtime battles, no worries about Christmas budgets or incomplete homework, but just deep, blessed winter silence, and the sky has been dark since 5pm. And just like in my childhood, the air is cold but reviving. The starlight from Orion is just getting to us, but it originated 700 years ago, amid the 14^th century’s black plague and Hundred Years’ War, while Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, whose prologue I had to memorize in high school, seven centuries later (and whose first lines I can still remember). Sometimes it’s comforting to remember that the world had already seen it all already. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. It’s tempting just to shut it all out, to turn off the news and only read lifestyle articles. But I know for sure I don’t want to leave my children a legacy of detachment, an awful neutrality in the face of good and evil. No one is stopping any of us from making our own light, or speaking out against the dark, and if I can teach them that, I don’t care if they never agree about whose turn it is to shower first.