Christmas Transgression

For several years I walked past the little tabletop rosemary trees at Trader Joe's. I drove past the Christmas tree lots donned with white lights and rows of fragrant fir and each time I thought of getting a small tree for my room. 
For years, every December I would think of buying a living tree from some nursery, or just a tinny-tiny little one that could fit on my kitchen table.  I remembered the History Channel special that described the winter tree as a pagan ritual, but I also remembered my mother’s threat to me and my sister:
“I hope you know that when I die I’ll be looking down at you from heaven and if you ever have a Christmas tree, I’ll be very disappointed.” 
My sister was so small standing behind me. We seemed, the three of us, illuminated by a bright stage lamp used in theater productions.
And each time I thought of getting a tree, as I drove past the lots, I would caution myself. After all, did I really need to spend $20 on a tree?

Today I walked into the lot. Something had come over me, some type of determination that could not be swayed by price, or dire warnings, or the guilt of a thousand generations. 
The small lot was rich with the sweet-sour smell of northern fir.  Children ran between the rows of towering trees and young couples holding each other close for warmth stood by while their chosen tree was assembled with base and stand. 
Looking around I knew that these were common memories for them all- people who had picked and decorated their trees every year, memories that began before they could form words. For the children, they would perpetuate the tradition. One day these children would bring their own children to these lots, and they would watch as they ran and played and hid behind the cut, fragrant giants. 
I stood virgin to them all, wondering if they could perhaps sense my alien nature, my shinning brightness that had no precedent.

A big black man with an African accent stood beside me as I pointed to the two foot tree. 
“I’ll take that one.” 
The narrow trunk ended at a wooden “x” which was nailed into the bottom, allowing the tree to stand upright. 
“So I just put this whole thing in a bowl of water?’
He looked at me with a perplexed look.  “How are you going to do that?”
I imagined a very large bowl but was unable to bring it out into the open. 
“I don’t know,” I said smiling a little nervously, “I’ve never done this before.”
“You never had a Christmas tree before?”
“No,” I said smiling, shaking my head.
“I don believe it.  You need a bowl,” he said authoritatively.
He took the tree from my hands and used a hammer to knock off the wooden cross it stood on, then attached a plastic bowl and another wooden “x” below it held together by a single nail.

As I walked out of the lot holding the tree in front of me like a giant gift finally attained, a wide, somewhat guilty smile on my face, a feeling of happiness and a rush of energy overtook me.
I felt as if people could tell. Did they see the obvious clash of symbols with my Semitic nose?  I was not supposed to be holding one of these.  No matter how much Brandon Tulley tried to persuade our Hebrew school teacher twenty-five years ago, there was no such thing as a Hanukkah bush.  I could hear my mother’s warning through the day: "not even dead."

I spent the next few days decorating the tree with small shells and pearls and beads from my collection.  A ribbon of bright green sequins wrapped around its trunk.  This was the tree I was not born to have, yet it was here, atop my small fridge.

Made In China

It was night outside the double wide glass doors of the discount store where it smelled faintly of chemicals and leather. Beyond the thick walls housing many items of desire, the moon shone down, bright and brilliant in its glorious fullness.
The taste of mint chocolate ice cream still lingered on the back of her tongue as she wandered the aisles, looking at the assortment of pants and shirts and boots with an apathetic gaze that sometimes crossed over into brief curiosity. She rode the escalator up to the second floor and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored pillars that stretched from the ceiling to the white tiled floor. 
Bright maroon lipstick over her lips, her wild mess of hair restrained by a furry white beret. Her oversized green pajama pants were tucked into the wide cuffs of suede boots. There she was, allowing the moon to travel above, for the night of blinking stars to pass unnoticed as she slowly walked through the two floors of metal racks and clear plastic hangers and more discounts than she could have ever wanted.
Every now and then she picked up something and held it for a while in her hands. These things were all cheap, her mind would immediately come up with several reasons to walk over to the registers, put them in a bag and take them home. There were lots of reasons: warmth, comfort, beauty, but the nagging thoughts kept coming in. 
She looked at the label of the sweater tights she had picked up off the back wall by the shoes: made in China.  She had heard a story on the radio seven hours before about the province of China where most of America’s cheap products came from. 
As she drove to the warehouse to drop off her leftover pastries and bread from the farmer’s market, she listened to the stories of young Chinese workers whose hands had became deformed after several years of repetitive movement. They made the clothes, the hangers, the phones, every item that surrounded her. They wore out the workers, till death or deformity set in, then got new younger ones to fill the positions. There were just that many people in China.
Hours later she wandered the store and felt the hands of the workers on every item. Her seven dollar tights were paid for by those distant unknown lives. She took the elevator up to the second floor where the household goods were waiting. She picked up a shoe organizer and looked on the bottom of the label: made in china.  She looked at a cutlery set that advertised itself as hand-crafted: made in china.
As she walked, looking at the brightly colored things, the shoes and jackets, the rugs and feather pillows, her face sunk more and more.  Her feet shuffled along the ground as she began to absorb the meaninglessness of almost every item. The manufactured need, the desire for more and more. 
She could feel it inside, she wanted that rug, those sweater tights. She could hear the voice in her head, she needed them to stay warm, some were even made of bamboo, was there really any harm?  Did her small almost meaningless purchase really make a difference when there were thousands of stores across America like this one? 
She could feel their hands, their eyes, their lost lives. 
She walked through the aisles, killing time until she could leave and drive to the house were her friend sat with sweet smelling long black hair and stories of explored language. She walked, sinking, changing as the story she had heard earlier moved through her. She could feel the pull of the American need, the hope that with this one new thing everything would be better and change, change forever, change until she needed one more thing- until she needed that other thing, until a new desire clung to reality just beyond her grasp.
Just as one orgasm was ending she would pause and think about the next time it might happen.  There was no rest for desire, for the want to fill it-  she could hear the stories of the people in her mind, the deformed hands, the jumpers off the factory roof, the utter desperation to end repetition.
All done so people like her could buy those cheap sweater socks and discounted shoes. It was for her and millions like her. She walked and walked, hurt by what she saw, but unable to leave.

Before The Journey

There once was a magician who lived alone in a cave.  From time to time, other travelers and seekers would find the cave as it was next to a fresh water source and close to the dirt path that led all the way over mountains and forests and deserts to the land of spices and smoke.  Sometimes students came and brought him sacks of tea and paper and ink.  Sometimes the children of the nearest mountain village would leave sweets at the mouth of the cave and rice in burlap bundles.  Mostly, he was alone, left with the slow steady rhythm of his own breath and the restless occasional cracking of the rocks surrounding him, the sounds all houses make when they think they’re alone.
He had been there before his hair ever turned white, when his muscles had been firm, and though he had been there for decades, he was aware of how little time there really was, how birth seemed to have come just a few days before. Because of his acute awareness of time, he practiced his art with urgency and strict attention. He kept detailed notes about experiments, their results and the methods employed.  There were charts that outlined his emotions, his health, the weather and time of year.
In his dreams, he saw another world where there were tall buildings made of glass and steel.  He had dreamt of this place for many months. Upon waking, he felt the lingering desire to voyage deeper into the dream, to go so far in that there would be no memory of a cave.  The place in his dream was not better, it was only different, with smells and textures that did not exist where he sat.  He wanted to look into the eyes of the people and see what they had to share.
For months he tried various things.  He played in his dreams and covered himself in the smoke of local plants.  He chanted and organized and re-organized the order in which he set up the space around him and the methods in which he relaxed and let himself drift into dreams.  Sometimes, when the spell was working, it seemed like he could reach out and touch the glass of the tall buildings, but just as he stretched out his arm and moved his fingertips towards the glass, he would awake suddenly, aware that something had brought him back. He had not made full contact.
One night, he waited for the full moon to crest above him.  He could feel the light changing, growing stronger. Though he had no direct sight from the deep interior of the cave, the waters inside him vibrated in louder ripples as the moon rose over the mountain range. Sensations rippled over his skin, it felt lighter, smoother, stronger somehow. He waited, patiently breathing, allowing his body to move as slowly and calmly as the moon that gently rose. When the energy peaked, his body began to rock.  His eyes no longer perceived the clear lines of his world, they shifted like a color show and melted into each other.
He journeyed that night into the world of glass and steel, walking through streets that showed no signs of the earth, where the trees seemed planted as ornaments rather than mighty elements in the natural landscape. 
He wandered for hours, looking intently at the people that crossed his path.  They were women and men in bodies like his own, but their attention seemed taken, turned inward on earthly matters, squandered on abstractions and worries. He could sense their tension more acutely than ever, as though none could remember their true purpose. They walked past him like ghosts, never taking their eyes off the ground or off the objects in their palms. He noted their presence and posture.
He continued his walk, collecting his notes of the other world.  Soon he came upon a piece of paper that seemed misplaced on the sidewalk.  He stooped to pick it up and was startled to see his own writing on the paper.  He looked at it more and realized they were the instructions he had written to himself prior to the journey.  He looked at it with different eyes now.  Not the man that had thought of dreaming, the man that thought of going to other worlds, but this new man now, the man he was after touching glass and steel, the man that walked among ghosts.
He was struck by the second and third lines of his instructions.  Before every journey it was his habit to write out a list of directives, things we would need to remember while travelling, the incantations he would need in order to come back to the cave chamber.  He kept them in his right hand pocket always, a place he could easily remember to check when he felt the time was right. It was strange now to find it on the ground, easily lost or blown off by the wind. 
He looked at the writing, at his familiar script. But he felt a slight alarm as he noticed the extra embellishments on the curls of several script characters. It was a minor detail of handwriting, but he knew himself well enough to know what it meant. 
Over the years and countless hours of inner exploration, he had come to glimpse the many parts of himself, the light, the dark, the terrors another man would have hid away in fear.  The benevolent teacher and the raw animal.  There were a thousand faces in between the extremes of his machine and he had met with each one, he had come to know their habits and he knew the extra curls in his script indicated that several of his egos were active, manifesting themselves in his writing. 
Without realizing it at the time, back in the cave, he had begun his journey with them inside, active, unbeknownst to him, they had piggy-backed through his dreams, stepping with him through the door.  Had he known, had he paid enough attention, as he surely should have, he would have caught a glimpse of their presence.  It was a mistake, a dangerous one, bringing them along into this altered land, in this altered state, was a hazard. They could lead him to a very nasty place, a place dripping with identifications and worldly demons and monsters hard to defeat. 
He had not been careful enough. But he could begin again now. 
He stood on the sidewalk and placed himself in the center of a circle, imagining its firm golden walls.  He closed his eyes and began to breath rapidly, letting the palpitations in his stomach push those creatures to the surface of his flesh.  He felt them emerging and he saw their contorted faces in the awful visions before his eyes. Each breath pushed them further to the surface. 
He stood in place for many minutes, breathing rapidly with intense concentration, visualizing a clear, cleansed circle around him until finally he could feel that that his inner landscape had shifted.  He slowed his breathing and began to walk once again.  The sidewalk ahead was illuminated in the glare from a dozen mirrored buildings in the high sun. He walked through them, letting his intuition pull him forward.