A Word To Burn Candles

I saw a glib Tweet today. 

I know, I know, I have to narrow that down. 

Senator Mitt Romney posted a warm holiday Tweet. Now, given the news about Michigan, his words have extra heft, but I’m not going down that wormhole today. Instead, I’ll talk about the words of the insect who crawled out from the sludge to tweet, “Mormons aren’t Christian. What are you celebrating?”

One of the best men I know, a devout Mormon from Hamilton, Montana, I wouldn’t have agreed with at all religiously. 

But he saw what needed to be done. My parents were sciatica victims, strapped to their beds by gravity and pain. And Dave Stanton, unasked, came three times a week to chop and haul wood for the fire, just because it needed to be done. He never asked for anything in return. He didn’t care we weren’t Mormons. He didn’t care we didn’t attend church at all. 

That is why I celebrate Christmas, and I’m not Mormon, not any sort of Christian. 

So don’t … just don’t … talk about good men and women with labels that you don’t understand, that you don’t care to understand except they make you feel better or worse about yourself.  

Dave Stanton was stolen way too soon by cancer. 

And now …

My dad has cancer. 

He has had it for more than a year. 

It upends your life, this thing. This growth. 

A word of caution—this will be raw. I’m in my feelings at the moment, because my dad, my rock, the dad I’ve always wanted to be, his lung cancer has metastasized. It’s invading his brain. 

There’s still hope and we’re taking things one thing at a time. 

But this is a time I have a lot to say. One of those liminal points that fools us into thinking we know what we’re talking about. 

1. Religious or not, “Silent Night” is one of the best poems ever written. 
2. Hug your loved ones. You never know when you’ll hear that toxic raindrops have spread, growing darkness in sacred terrain. 
3. Fuck cancer. 
4. Hug your loved ones. 
5. Know you will be okay. You are strong. You are a bright spark in a quantum universe, bright enough to outshine the shadows. You deserve all the love you receive. 
6. Light up the darkness. Irradiate the doubt. There will always be hope, until there is none. 
7. Slap anyone who markets cigarettes. Keep slapping them. 
8. Slap anyone who still supports Trump and his Proto-Fourth Reich. Maybe don’t literally slap them, but scorn them. Ignore them. You can’t change their mind, so cut their cancerous self out of your life. 
9. Not that they don’t deserve a good slap. They’re ignorant, selfish, or both, with a pinch of racism at a minimum.
10. But they aren’t worth it. 
11. Be good. Be loving. Be kind. 
12. Women have the right to choose. My daughter has the right to choose. 
13. Your religion is not my emergency.
14. Help those who need it. When you can.
15. Ask for help when you need it. 
16. Hug your loved ones.
17. Forgive yourself for those friendships that fall by the wayside. 
18. Doesn’t it suck when the thing that everyone warns will happen actually happens?
19. A quiet, frosted Montana morning, with the sound of the axe splitting a cylinder of pine. Remember that. You taught me that. I can split wood, if nothing else. 
20. A dusty afternoon at Candlestick Park, five years of age filtering the story, Bob Brenly hits the game-winning home run after three errors. Dale Murphy must have been there. You sat next to me. It was everything. 
21. Fishing on the shores of Lake Como. No, not that Lake Como. This one. Trying it out because I said I wanted to. Not pushing when I got bored. 
22. Refereeing soccer. Showing me what it meant to be impartial. Getting shoved by a local dumb-ass and coming back to ref some more. 
23. Driving north from Santa Rosa, leaving your favorite coffee cup on the roof of our bright-yellow Volvo hatchback, letting it shatter on the asphalt. Finding a new mug. Carrying on. 
24. Year after year, you have read us How The Grinch Stole Christmas on Christmas Eve, and then we would drive. Drive through Hamilton and through the countryside, through the country roads and past the barns and houses illuminated through the snow and cold. 
25. Fuck cancer. 
26. Don’t let hatred drown you like falling into a vat of motor-oil. 
27. Rest easy. I’ve got this. We will all take this from here.
28. We will do what needs to be done. We will split wood for neighbors. We will forgive the friends who abandon us. We will be kind.

29. Hug your loved ones. Hug them again. I’ll wait.