Advent, in the Wrong Order

On Hope Incarnate

I have been adamant that after 40 years of living, I do not have a single, hopeful bone in my broken and healing body. No one has ever dared call me carefree. Optimism is a joke I laugh at with cruel certainty. I see the world as it is, I try to find the beauty that exists, and I hold on to it like when I was 13 learning to waterski. No one warned me to drop the bar when the wake took my skis out from under me. The idea of hope feels like a wall of water hitting me over and over in the face.

Try as I might, I could not eat one more bite of melted leek and roasted chestnut stuffing. The turkey carcass languishing in the fridge sent the dog running every time the door swung open; heavy with Worcestershire sauce, Red Currant jelly, and jars of jostling Castelvetrano olives.

We hosted Thanksgiving for 22 people with five kids and I am still finding plastic ice cream spoons and cornbread crumbs squished between couch cushions like track marks. Tonight we fed the kids grocery store chicken nuggets and declared we were going out. With older children, we can do that now.

Over lemongrass ribs, glass noodles and a Pinot Noir from Willamette Valley we revisited the vignettes that make our story a trilogy, almost always culminating in various Thai restaurants in different countries. Our memories are always lemongrass-scented. The first date, when I ordered a vegetarian dish that may as well have only been Thai chilis; with a few broccoli stalks strewn between. It was hard to smile without choking. The night I joined his family for dinner before he left for law school abroad, the table heavy with dumplings and satay. The evening in London, newly married, when I couldn’t stomach another chippy and we wandered straight into a red awning in Saint Ann’s for a Panang curry that melted the ice that froze every syllable spoken to each other that day.

Not everyone has the kind of history we do- the one when I can grab a forkful of Moo Ping from across the table and see exactly what he looked like at 17, 27, 37. There is a white cardigan swinging in the recesses of my closet, dingy with age. It was my 16th birthday gift- I still remember how he wrapped it. Not everyone has carried the kind of pain we have, either- the one where we can see the lines on our faces, the purple circles under our eyes- that one, just there- and know exactly when they came to be. And know we were the cause.

When we were dating we wrote out places we longed to visit on a stack of notecards in my childhood bedroom.

There are places we’ve been that felt like we were waking up for the first time in a long time, like the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz (Paris). Places that felt as though the world was so much bigger than we ever knew or gave credit for with Sugarloaf mountains and monkeys who steal your dripping ice cream cone right out of your hands (Brazil). There were places so unlike one another but that felt like the truest sense of home with jazz and cream tea and rain and smoke and humidity and bagpipes and shortbread and etouffee (Edinburgh and New Orleans, in that order). We’ve also been to hell. That never made a notecard but if I had one now I would write it in because not many return to badly tell the story.

There are plenty on the list we haven’t made it to (Greece and Turkey, the Pacific Northwest, Italy, Costa Rica, the elusive land of financial security, and, oh! Thailand.). And it may never be so. It has never stopped us from holding the notecards and wondering aloud. It has never stopped our lined faces and our hunched backs and our precarious smiles and our deep laughter and our tears from pouring another glass of wine and plotting the next adventure.

When I was 13 and getting dragged behind the boat through the deepest waters of Lake Winnipesaukee I distinctly remember hearing my Aunt’s voice screeching above the motor and the sound of rushing water-

“LET GO! LET THE BAR GO!”

I was reluctant to do so- though I was swallowing enough water to drown. It was getting dark. I wasn’t confident they would be able to circle around and find me. I didn’t want to be left bobbing in the middle of the lake, waterlogged and alone.

Dropping the bar was the ultimate act of hope.

Just like sitting at a table smeared with red curry and hot tea, planning an adventure after you’ve come back from the dead.

Of course, I do not have hope, I thought.

I am it.