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 [My Worst Date cover]

My Worst Date

An Excerpt from the Chapter "Cold Christmas"



Mom was planning to go to Key West for Christmas.

"Let's invite Glenn to go with us," she said.

Not, not, not.

Fortunately she was too late. Everything was already booked. I don't know why anyone would want to go to Key West anyway. Unless you drank so much you wanted to go somewhere that people drank even more than you did. Beaches? Zero. Architecture? Two on a one-to-ten if you like dinky little frame cottages. People? Please. There is no beauty in Key West. Only torn off jeans shorts. I think Mom thinks it's more relaxed. I'll give her that. If a coma is your idea of relaxation.

I was very happy to stay in Miami Beach. And besides, what would the sleeping accommodations be in Key West? A motel room with two double beds? A cottage with two bedrooms? There could be no good solution.

And then it turned cold. I kind of love when we have a kind of winter here for a few days. Everyone gets hysterical that they have to wear a cardigan sweater. They run around saying things like "It's 65 degrees!"

This Christmas will be a special time because of the chill. There's a cold wind blowing in the night, right through the cracks of the louvered windows. Glenn has been staying with us every night so he went out and got a big roll of plastic and stretched it over the screens in the bedrooms to cut out the wind. The bedrooms are all on the back in the direction of the beach, so they were getting the most wind. Mom dug out blankets from the cedar-lined closet, so we can all huddle under our heaps of wool at night.

In the morning the sidewalks have a kind of glaze from the fog having frozen in the night, and the air is silvery. No clouds, just this silvery air going up and up and up.


Actually, I hate Christmas. All these Moms and Dads trying to fake feelings they don't really have for each other, and probably hardly have for their children. And certainly don't have for their own parents, the old doddering farts. It's all that sort of "Let's Pretend" kind of stuff, that people run out at Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, carried to the maximum. And the children are all excited about things they're going to get for nothing. Stuff, stuff, stuff. And it's all for free, free, free. Do I go too far?

Mom and I always try to make it as real as possible. Since we're in the tropics we don't have a Christmas tree but try to do something festive in a Christmassy way. Last year we bought a lot of red lights and wound the entire trunk of the royal palm in our front yard with them. So the trunk was this glittering kind of pillar rising as high as the house. I had to climb the ladder and do the top part. Mom held it at the bottom. It was fun.


This year we're going to make miniature palm trees of the pillars on the front porch and use the red lights to wind around the pillars. I cut fake palm leaves out of green cardboard and taped them around the top of the pillars. There are only four of them and not so terribly high. Tomorrow I'll start winding the lights. We'll probably have to buy some more.

It's all right that it's cold. Let's just hope it doesn't rain. And melt my cardboard palm trees. And electrocute us all when we put on the lights.

We'll have Christmas dinner at The Strand. Neither Mom nor I like the kind of food people eat at Christmas. Turkey really isn't very tasty. And all those mashed potatoes and yams and things. I do like stuffing, but it seems kind of silly to eat something just to get at what's inside. And then there are those broccoli sprouts. Where did anyone get the idea that they were food?

We'll have a nice supper at home on Christmas Eve and then we'll exchange our presents. I've been shilly-shallying around trying to decide what to get Mom and decided I'd get her an old silver Hermes bracelet I saw in one of the Deco antique stores. It's made like miniature horse bits I guess, but each link is a different design. It's cool, with a very secure kind of little clasp so it can't fall off. I want to get her something that won't wear out, like a cashmere sweater. And I'm certainly not going to get her something practical like a new ironing board. She needs one but she can get that for herself. I want her to have something that she can look at years from now and remember how I was, how we were, what our lives were like way back then, that Christmas long ago when I gave her a silver bracelet.

I don't know what to get Glenn. Maybe a cashmere sweater. I can afford it. Navy blue. That will eventually wear out.

Yesterday we went for a walk down on the beach. The three of us. The seas were very high. Pale green and silvery, piling and crashing high. Glenn went in but I was afraid to. Mom and I stood and hugged each other while he tore in and dove over a wave and then gestured to us to come in. We just huddled and shook our heads. I had this feeling that the sea was like my life. I wasn't sure but what it was too strong for me. That it might just sweep me away. I've never been in such stormy, strong seas, and maybe right now isn't the time to try it out. I wondered what would happen to us, Mom and me, if Glenn was swept away and we never saw him again. It's too much of a chance, tearing lives apart just by jumping in the ocean.

When he came running out, water running down his body, his hair slicked down over his eyes, that beautiful body rushing towards us, shivering, reaching for the towel with its arms outstretched, it was sort of like Jesus running towards us. Our savior. Is there a crucifixion waiting down the line? For which one of us I wonder?


Copyright © 1997, David Leddick.



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