Holiday Angst

Marilyn called me today, distraught about a young skunk in our front yard.

“It wobbles, eats grass and then lies on the ground like it’s going to die. I don’t think a car hit it because there is no blood. Maybe someone poisoned it. It was suffering so I called animal control.”

“Be careful,” I told her. “It may have rabies.”

“It’s not foaming at the mouth. I think it is just hurt.”

The conversation put a pall on my anticipation of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and caused me to remember some of the sadder holiday seasons I have spent. Many years ago, creditors put my little oil company into bankruptcy the day before Thanksgiving. My second wife Anne and I spend our last Thanksgiving and Christmas together in 1997 and she died three months later. My Mom died a few weeks from Thanksgiving in 2006.

Holidays should be happy occasions. They are too often times when relationships get out of hand, often exasperated by finances. The holidays are a season to give, a catching point for many young couples – and many older couples amid these terrible economic conditions – who find themselves having a hard time coping, much less giving, during the prolonged holiday season.

Tomorrow I am attending a memorial service for a fellow writer and member of the first writer’s group I ever joined – the Writers of the Purple Pages. Bill was an editor for the State of Oklahoma with aspirations of becoming a published novelist. He had worked on a novel for years about the Oklahoma runestones, hoping to entertain while trying to explain the significance of the ancient mysterious symbols carved in stone in eastern Oklahoma. Bill died of brain cancer, never finishing his magnum opus. When I awake tomorrow, I am sure I will find the body of the young skunk somewhere in my front yard.

Welcome to the world of holiday angst. When life is supposed to be the best, it is often the opposite. Here is my advice. People love and lose, and people live and die, but the sun always rises every morning. Bill and that young skunk have already found a better place. Somewhere in the world, a child is born destined to finish Bill’s book, and somewhere a baby skunk lies curled up against its mother’s warm breast, waiting for spring and a chance to experience its own life.

Louisiana Mystery Writer