A New York Christmas, December late 1950s-December 2007 by Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name:Lisa Forestier)
From MemoryArchive
Who: Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name:Lisa Forestier) What: A New York Christmas When: December late-1950s-December 2007 Where: New York City
Original Memory
It was at the end of the 1950s when our usual family Christmas get-together took place in New York City instead of Garrett Park-Rockville, Maryland. Our British relatives -- the Waterfields -- were "posted" to New York. (The father John and mother Lee were in the British Foreign Service and had taken up residence in a lovely apartment overlooking Central Park. The kids were coming for the holidays from school in the UK.) Mommy and Daddy had gone up before our school closed for the holidays. The Thomases, Tennys, Cumberlands et al. were due. My brother, sister and I stayed behind with our neighbors down the road a ways -- the Snyders -- until school closed. Then we followed the travel plans made for us. It was bitterly cold that winter and we stayed indoors inside the cozy farmhouse. One of my few sustained forays outside was to live out a foolhardy plan to walk across the frozen pond below the buildings. About halfway across the ice began to groan and sizzle. O God, I thought! I'm not going to make it! I looked around me, at the buildings above, at the rim of the pond all the way around and the farmland beyond. It seemed to me that I was right in the center of the pond with as good a chance going forward as back. Time seemed as frozen as the pond, suspended, out of time, God's "Lights, Camera, Action!". Then I carefully went on my way and safely reached the opposite bank. Nothing in the whole vacation, as impressive as New York City and Central Park and the apartments overlooking it were, stayed in my heart like that memory. And that memory, poet that I was, had metaphoric power that was apparent to me at the time.
Pentimento
Recently, I was reading the obituary of John Waterfield that appeared in the LONDON TIMES shortly after his death December 21, 2002. {See:www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries.article1070075.ece}, over a year after 9/11 and two years after the passing of my own Dad in December 2000. Of all the possible ways to refer to his private life, one of the few place names and the only AMERICAN place name was New York. That his second wife had her residence there was memtioned. That his first wife, our blood relative through the McGee side of the family, went to Barnard College there and lived in Greenwich Village -- before joining the American Foreign Service and being posted to Moscow where she met John and the rest was history -- was not memtioned. However, that New York was deemed that important at all impressed me and brought back the old memory. There was an errant piece that fell into the jigsaw puzzle then. New York, New York. The enduring melody and siren song. Perhaps he heard it too and I never knew. My memory had limited him in a certain way. "Start spreadin' the news..."
