Father Christmas

Christmas 1989, Left to Right, Top to Bottom: My dad (Bernie), Aunt Bernadine, Me, Grandma Eva

After a life-altering trip to the Middle East, a jet-lagged Thanksgiving, and ringing in the holidays with the removal of kidney stones, my thoughts were a muddled hodgepodge of gratitude and self-pity. I just couldn’t get into the spirit of the season and worse, I had nothing to say.

Then I received a letter from Cousin Beth. The letter included a story about my dad, Bernie, with whom, I didn’t grow up. My mother “ran away with me” when I was one. I grew up with my stepfather, but learned when I was eight, via finding my birth certificate, that I had another dad. When I was 18, I met him. Bernie was drying out and fighting for his life in a Milwaukee, VA hospital. He was and had been an alcoholic for most of his life, at least since he served in the Korean War.

It was over ten years later, 1989, when I was a enjoying a film-making career in Los Angeles, that I decided to go home to Wisconsin for Christmas. I contacted Bernie and made arrangements for the two of us to visit his mother, Grandma Eva, who was living with my father’s twin sister, Aunt Bernadine. Yes, Bernie (Bernard) and Bernadine.

As winters in Wisconsin can be, it was a brutal, blue day. The kind where the sky is pale blue, as is the snow…and one’s lips. I picked up Bernie where he lived, in a room above a skid row tavern called Mike’s on State. He was more jittery with nerves over seeing me than he was from the cold. It’s also very likely he shook from a lack of alcohol coursing through his veins.

As I nosed my rental car towards the freeway, he asked me to stop at the liquor store. He wanted to get something to take to the family. I was mistrusting and hesitant, but pulled into the parking lot of a ramshackle convenience store anyway. Bernie went in and came out with a paper bag wrapped around a bottle. We weren’t on the road more than five minutes, after some polite catch-up conversation, when the edges of that bag were curled down, and the cap screwed off the pint. Bernie took a few necessary pulls.

I knew there wouldn’t be anything left for the family.

It was about an hour’s drive on the intestate to Aunt Bernadine’s. Half way there, Bernie ordered me to pull over. “I can’t,” I said. “It’s against the law.” The urgency in his voice was a bit unnerving. Why did I have to pull over? He asked a few more times, and I, in turn, emphasized it was illegal.

Bernie grew quiet. But he took the bottle out of the bag and slid the bag beneath him. He also grabbed my copy of U.S. News & World Report. After that, I kept my eyes on the road as weather conditions were getting worse. We didn’t have much more to talk about, so I concentrated, and Bernie drank.

Aunt Bernadine lived in the country. The scenery there was pure and bright—right out of the last scenes of White Christmas. Bernie was anxious to get out of the car, while I lagged behind grabbing some now forgotten hostess gift. That’s when I saw what the urgency had been about. The paper bag and the magazine were sodden wet. Bernie had had to relieve himself…and I didn’t let him.

Inside, we were greeted with emotions just as pure and bright as the landscape. After shedding coats, sharing hugs, and Bernie making a trip to the bathroom, Aunt Bernadine served a platter of venison sausage and Wisconsin cheddar with crackers. I’m sure there were cookies (everyone bakes German goodies on that side of the family) and coffee as well. It’s all kind of a blur, except for the atmosphere, thick with love and devotion. Forgiveness was in the air. Acceptance permeated the conversation. Grandma Eva, like a long reigning queen, deserved and received the most attention.

I can’t recall much of the ride back to Mike’s tavern. I know it was dark and even more blustery as we pulled up to the curb. The headlights reflected off the sleeting snow, creating glitter. Bernie, his hand on the car’s door handle, turned to me. “You want to come in for a drink?”

I thought for a moment. “No, thanks. This is your life, not mine.”

He  nodded and looked very old as he uncurled from the seat and stepped into the night. I watched him walk away; his shoulders hunched against the cold. A neon sign, in Mike’s window, encrusted with that crystalline snow strained to blink red, offering refuge. If I had been wiser, less judgmental, I might have heeded my mother’s often given advice to “get off my high horse.” I would have shed my vanity and pride for not having inherited or acquired the disease of alcoholism. I would have, as those three kings had so long ago, followed that star into the night, that blinking red sign that said tavern.

Instead, I drove away to my comfortable and warm hotel room, and Bernie died the following March, in his flophouse room, above Mike’s on State, alone.

What would I do differently? I would have been proud of Bernie, dressed so smartly, his hair meticulously combed while accompanying me to see his mother. I would have broken the law and pulled over on that interstate so Bernie could relieve himself of so much and keep his dignity. I would have followed him into Mike’s bar and had that drink with him. I would have most certainly called him Dad and told him I loved him.