Oliver Smith
Balboa Park Christmas Lights
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Balboa Park Christmas Lights
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The creator's flame rises up.
It doesn't burn.
It sings!
Each note
a blossom
with the fragrance
of eternity.
(Oliver Smith 2001)
Fires rising up as if to burn, but they don't. Even the greatest
dangers render some kind of beauty in their wake, perhaps giving off
the timeless scent of fresh rain or fog billowing off the waters of
some nearby lake or sea. This is how I have come to feel about my life
as I turn fifty, an age I have looked forward to as though it was some
magical point in history, a time when everything would make sense, but
now I realize that life isn't about making sense. It is about being,
and learning how to be.
I didn't quite understand this when I was ten, or was it
twelve? It was the early sixties, before the Beatles, before President
Kennedy's assassination and before the Vietnam War would become an
fixture in our evening newscasts, but it was after my grandparents
moved to Chula Vista, California, just a mile south of San Diego and a mile
north of Tijuana. It was before my soprano voice deserted me and took
away my ability to sing higher than all of the girls in choir, but
after my dad left one night to live somewhere else, a night when my
mother slammed the cabinet doors so hard that they wouldn't stay shut
after each thrust from her angry hands and I heard her yell out that she
was going to get into the car and run off of a cliff.
I didn't want her do this alone so I ran to my bedroom in the
dark and pulled a box from the closet and packed a few things that I
wanted to take. What would have been useful to a young boy on a trip down
the side of a mountain? What toy would I have been clutching tightly
as I joined my mother for that last trip? The little desk I had mode
from left over, grooved cedar panels would have been easy to get into
the car, but that was the thing I was most proud of, sitting there in
the dark, right next to the closet where I huddled in contemplation of
the night on the small seat I had crafted for the desk. It was just big
enough for me to sit down with a sheet of paper and a pencil and form
the letters that made up words that gave me so much pleasure. Not like
the words expressed in anger, confusion and despair from my parents.
"I wish you'd get out…get out," I heard my mother say from
the kitchen, and then there was silence. No more dad in the kitchen. No
more dad in the bedroom. No more scent of after shave, or trips to the
garage where he worked at night.
That was the start of long trips into other nights across the
seemingly endless space of the southwest in the Rambler American that
my mother bought when she was finishing her teaching degree in
Colorado. The fact that the Rambler American was new we my mother
bought it made it special., I didn't have any notion of quality at that
time in my life, only that cars take us from place to place and needed
fuel. I was too young to worry about oil, clutches and transmissions
and what to do when they break down, or the dangers of being a hundred
miles from the nearest gas station, which is exactly where we found
ourselves when my mother took a job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs
school in Tuba City, Arizona.
Tuba City was primarily a government compound, a place for the
Bureau of Indian Affairs Hospital, The Bureau of Indian Affairs
Boarding School and everything that it required to support those
institutions, including a public school for the children of the people
who worked at those to institutions. Since Tuba City was seventy five
miles north of Flagstaff and three hundred miles from Phoenix, we often
found ourselves in the dark on roads far away from any artificial light
and just beyond the ever present fangs of the Navajo Wolf, which I
continually feared as I stared out into the unseen landscape that sped
past the car door that I was nestled against.
It must have been here that I developed the deep longing for
color and warmth offered by the neon and filament luminescence of city
lights, and there was no place that provided that experience more than
Southern California and there was no time of the year when the lights
were more intense than during the holiday season, and there was nothing
that brought those city lights to my mind with more clarity than the
song Silver Bells, which was always playing in the radio in that
Rambler American as we traveled through the mountains west of the ever
anticipated splendor of San Diego and the sea of illumination that
would unfold before us as passed over the summit of the last few
mountains and were poised on the brink of the final descent to the
Pacific and the city I will always associated with Christmas, San
Diego.
We would always pass right by the gate that led up to Mt
Palomar and its telescope, but we were getting to close to our
destination to give any thought the wonders that lay at the top of that
peak, the telescope would simply remain as a small footnote in my mind
over the years, and I can feel the throbbing excitement that
acknowledged the Mt Palomar as a signal that car was close to making
it, that the lights would soon be mine to behold, and that I would be
able to shiver with the thrill of:
City sidewalks, busy sidewalks.
Dressed in holiday style
In the air
There's a feeling
of Christmas
Children laughing
People passing
Meeting smile after smile
And on ev'ry street corner you'll hear
Silver bells, silver bells
It's Christmas time in the city
Ring-a-ling, hear them sing
Soon it will be Christmas day
As usual, we would arrive in San Diego with its confusing freeways
riding high above the downtown. We would get off of the freeway and
my mother would try to remember the way to Chula Vista and my her parents
house one more time. Eventually we would pull up into the driveway at two
in the morning and be greeted by happy, but sleepy hosts.
As an early riser, I was always fascinated with the energy and
brilliance of morning in the salty air just a mile or so from the
Pacific. I would climb the steep hill directly in back of my
grandparents house, which had a fence at the top to mark the back yard
of the house built there. Leading up to our very first visit my
mother told me about the hill and I
immediately assumed that it was a hill going down from the house rather
than going up and my mother made a big deal about how she was going
to "throw me off the hill" when we got there. Needless to say, I was
surprised to see that the hill towered over their house,
but I was quick to scale it and look out to the west.
I was mesmerized by the sight of the
Pacific not far away, the water's surface glistening with the diamond
filled gaze of the morning sun.
That would be the last time I would see the Pacific from that
spot on top of the hill, for subsequent visits revealed the rate of
growth taking place in Southern California in the early sixties,
resulting in new developments that covered the land between my
grandparents neighborhood on the shoreline, obscuring the view, and
never after that did I climb that hill, because the magic of vantage
point was taken away, plus the hill became covered with succulent
plants grown for their ability to hold the surface of the steep incline
in place.
At the base of the hill my grandfather planted two peach trees
that I doted over continuously, frequently offering me ripened peach
and chuckling about how they confused they were because of the lack of
seasonal changes there, which allowed they to bear fruit almost
continually.
Every Christmas trip we made to Chula Vista was marked by
comments about the beautiful Christmas lights on display at Balboa
Park, but our schedule never seemed to provide an opportunity to make
the trip to Balboa. Then once, when everything seemed to be in order
for a trip to see the display, we all jumped into my grandfather's
large black Buick with the intent of seeing the Christmas lights at Balboa
Park. He took the route that passed the
harbor, where warehouses, boat docks and military installations appeared and
disappeared from the windows I stared out from.
Once again I was held in anticipation of seeing the color and
warmth of city lights and their oasis from the desert I found myself
within. Traffic followed its usual course in the mind of a young boy
oblivious to all the rules of semaphores, striped lines and driver
courtesy, when suddenly, the slow motion stream of a shock
sequence clicked into my consciousness as another car broadsided my
grandfather's car, throwing us off to the side and leaving everyone in
the stunned silence of disbelief.
My mother looked over at her father and mumbled something about
his high blood pressure, but it was obvious that no-one was hurt. Even
the driver of the other car, which had run through a red light, was
simply bemused by the result of his inebriation.
The End
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