Christmas Bread, part 2

Prose

Last month I shared the poetic version of the story of my father's accident when I was in kindergarten.

This month I want to share the prose version. It's a chapter from the memoir I'm working on--oh, so slowly!

The chapter titled "Evon" is named for the road we lived on then.

Memoir

My daughters have encouraged me to write 21: Growing Up. It will chronicle the twenty-one different addresses at which I lived through age twenty-one.

In 1958, my family moved to 1600 Evon Road in Saginaw, Michigan. It was house number nine. The story includes my brother Marty and my parents, Don and Joan Segar. Our home was a small ranch on countryside farm land.

Evon

The small congregation of First Baptist Church met in a little white chapel. Despite the hour’s drive from Davison, Michigan, Don was faithful to bring his family and preach every service. To be closer to the church, he uprooted Karen from the school where she’d started kindergarten just a few weeks earlier and moved his young family over an October weekend into a rural rental on Evon Road in Saginaw.

On the following Monday, a cold and dreary 5:00 a.m., Don backed out the drive in his ’57 Mercury.

It simply wouldn’t do for a new pastor to be pulled over for a speeding ticket, so he timed his drive from the little white farmhouse to AC Spark Plug, where he had thus far served two of the four years of his tool and die apprenticeship. Traveling at 55 miles per hour on Dixie Highway south, across M-24, to the juncture of Harriet Street and Industrial Avenue in Flint, he calculated that he could reach the plant in plenty of time.

5:30 a.m. He was approaching Birch Run, making good time. The four-door sedan slunk along the road, sleek and progressive with its lower, longer frame, lacking only a single innovation of the ’58 model—the first factory-installed seatbelts. Its green and white body rested on an all-new 122-inch-wheelbase chassis. At an original sticker price of $2,922, it was touted as "a dramatic expression of dream car design." It hugged the road muscularly, like a cougar on the prowl, its V-8 engine purring under a heavy, solidly reinforced hood with double-panel construction, the sheer weight of the “cougar” belying its agility.

Suddenly, the fog suspended a deceptive illusion stretching across the thick black sky ahead—a silver ribbon, a horizontal reflection of the winking moonlight. His headlights, curious, flashed a warning growl. As the car approached it, Don deciphered curving, yellow letters on a dark green backdrop.  The writing was not on a banner strung high above the traffic – it was not on a Welcome to Mayberry sign. 

Don’s brother Bob worked at C & S Motors, a service station in Flint. Into that station earlier in the week had pulled a semi cab that badly needed a mechanic’s tinkering. The driver let Bob perform a free diagnostic test and give him an estimate for repairs, but he refused even the tune-up Bob told him he urgently needed to prevent a breakdown. Instead he chugged away.

That very same truck had just pulled out of another gas station, this time turning left onto Dixie Highway just before the turnoff for Frankenmuth and Birch Run. His misfiring engine stalled. He turned off his lights to conserve enough power to crank the engine and turn it over. But just as Bob had predicted, it was dead. He was going nowhere.

His semi rig sprawled horizontally across the entire highway, blocking all four lanes. He never turned his lights back on as he jogged to the gas station for help. The only warning for oncoming drivers was the curving, yellow letters that acted like reflectors on his dark green trailer panels.

Don was a mere fifty feet away before he realized those yellow letters were on a truck. In a split second, he made his decision. Instead of steering toward the deep ditch on the east side of the road and possibly flipping the car, instead of crashing into the trailer and risking decapitation, he aimed for the truck’s rear dual tires. He slammed on his brakes and hit rigid rubber at about twenty miles per hour.

The metal “cat” screeched.

The truck driver didn’t approach the car to check on Don. Perhaps in shock. Perhaps wrestling with guilt. Perhaps assuming Don was OK or that emergency workers could take better care of any injuries. Perhaps.

Right after the accident, Don complained of his stomach hurting. Someone knocked on his car window, he remembered, and asked him if he was okay. Someone else told him an ambulance was coming. It seemed like at least half an hour that he stayed in the car, stunned and sore and shaky, waiting for emergency medical technicians to lift him out, put him on a stretcher, and transport him. The police, who had quite a ways to travel from their precinct, the area being a lot more rural than it is today, didn’t arrive on the scene until Don had already departed it.

After the 20-minute ride to St. Luke’s Hospital, then in downtown Saginaw, the doctor on duty examined him. Because initially Don seemed fine, he was being processed for release. 

“Don, my name’s Delores, and I’ll be taking care of you before discharge,” the white-hatted nurse in the crisp uniform announced cheerily. She reassured him, smiling.

In the hospital for hours already, Don asked for some medication for pain in his shoulders. Without a seatbelt, he had slammed forward. His right knee throbbed, having left a knobby imprint under the dashboard next to the steering column – a dent that stayed in the Mercury even after it was repaired. His cuts and bruises stung. The impact of the steering wheel on his abdomen and face, just above his chin, made his head pound and his stomach ache.

“You just lie right here while I get something to check you out,”  Delores said.

After what seemed forever, she returned. As she pumped up the blood pressure cuff, however, it didn’t seem to be measuring properly. She pumped it up and tried again, and again. Systolic pressure failed to reach even 70. She dropped the sphygmomanometer and ran.

New service from Ma Bell hadn’t yet been connected since the Segars’ move-in that weekend. In those days, customers had to call several days in advance for a technician to come to the home and hardwire their telephones. In the hospital, Don could not remember their exact address either, so a policeman had to knock on doors to find the right house to notify Joan of the accident.

“ You need to go to the hospital.”  He delivered his message, leaving her in a quandary.  She had neither a driver’s license nor a car to get there. In consternation, she threw on her coat and grabbed the baby, bundling him in a blanket and shouting for Karen at the same time.

“We’re going to the neighbors. Put your jacket on. Hurry!” Karen scurried after Joan down the steps of the porch, under which Karen’s pet toad Squeaky would make his home.

They scurried across the driveway where Karen would accidentally drop a rock on her little brother Marty’s toe, a rock the size of a man’s fist that she had to lift with two hands, but which was not as heavy as her guilt for causing her brother’s tears.

They scurried across the plowed-under field that would burst with vegetables the next summer. They scurried into the next-door neighbor’s wide yard, past his bare Montmorency cherry trees that Karen would later climb and from which she would spit out the sour fruit that she decided she did not like.

They scurried past the house of that neighbor, the widower she would learn to call “Grandpa” Swatzke, the grizzly old man whose tree she climbed. A gregarious geezer who both mystified and terrified her. Who launched tobacco juice from his moist brown mouth across half his front room into a brass spittoon. Who played an accordion that he squeezed and swelled against his broad middle, stretching the buttons on his ragged sweater, while his long-tailed hairless mutt cavorted on its hind legs and howled to the raucous, wheezing music. “Dance!” Grandpa would command, but Karen – too timid and too Baptist – would just lower and shake her head.

They scurried to the next house, where Grandpa’s son and his wife managed a farm for him. The couple dropped off the children at the home of church members, the Montgomery family, and then drove Joan to the hospital.

Delores was just covering Don with a full-bed oxygen tent and scrambling with others to wheel him to the operating room when Joan rushed down the hall. Don’s bed lurched from the doorway like a coffin on wheels, with him buried in wrinkles of plastic. Orderlies, like pallbearers, blocked her view of him. She couldn’t touch his hand or his mumbled words that limply ruffled the translucent sheeting.

By the time Don’s bed-gurney reached the next door in the hallway, he was unconscious. Two of his arteries had ruptured sometime before noon. Dr. Warring Manning III sliced diagonally into his abdomen, an 8-inch-long swath from just above his naval to his appendix, to find the source of the internal bleeding that had resulted in hypovolemic shock.

Joan was suffering from shock of a different nature. Never having been around seriously sick people, much less hospitals, she couldn’t think. She couldn’t speak. In the hustle, she was waved to a waiting room and ignored. Anxiety anesthetized her mind and her memory.  She later could recall nothing of what happened next, what the doctor told her after her lengthy vigil in the waiting room, how long she waited there, whether anyone came to wait with her, or when exactly Don’s brother Bob arrived at the hospital—only that he did.

While Don was in the recovery room, a police officer arrived as well. Don was awake though still unable to converse at that point, but since the officer already had his “facts” straight, there was no need for talking. He simply informed Don, “You should have kept your car under control,” slipped a traffic ticket under his pillow, and left. The ticket, justly, was invalidated when Don was well enough to complain, which he did – loudly – at City Hall.

Two weeks after the accident, Karen watched church deacons carry her father up the porch steps at the side of the house and place him in his bed, where he stayed for six weeks. That night, she huddled in the top bunk of the closet-sized room she shared with Marty. To fall asleep, she stared at the light switch plate, a merry clown dressed in red and blue illuminated by the glimmer in the hallway of a 60-watt bulb that sent a feeble shaft through her slightly-cracked-open door. She awoke in the morning in a heap on the floor, not knowing how she got there.

Her mother and she managed her toddler brother and the house, alone, while Don recuperated.

Joan had to learn how to drive and how to stoke the coal furnace in the basement, opening the furnace door, shoveling the coal that had been delivered through the coal chute, and chucking it onto the fire. Once she loaded the furnace with so much coal that the chimney belched a plume of fire six feet high. She ran up and down the steep wooden steps in a panic. “Close the damper!” Don yelled from his bed. “Throw on the ashes!” Narrowly, Joan averted burning the house down.

Meanwhile, Karen tried to adjust to her new school. Her father would later say that his formerly chatty little girl at age five stopped talking. She printed her name with a backwards K, scraped her sandpaper-covered blocks in time to “Here We Go Looby Loo” and marched in line round and round the piano that her teacher played, lay on the aqua towel she had brought from home for nap time, and endured the angst of aloneness.

The long lashes and big brown eyes of another kindergartner captivated Karen. Her crush on Ralph, however, was crushed soon and suddenly. Susan, a towhead so advanced for her age that she was already missing two front teeth, stood in front of Karen on the playground, between her and Ralph, grinning blackly through the gap in her upper teeth.

Up Susan whisked her dress. Down she pulled her panties. And Ralph had his first lesson in female anatomy. Karen stood still in shock, her eyes glued to Susan’s backside, too ashamed to raise her eyes to look at Ralph again, later too ashamed even to raise her voice to speak to anyone about the incident.

She fled from the scene but could not flee from her conscience: Guilt by association condemned her. Silence sentenced her.

It was Christmas Eve, which fell on the regular mid-week prayer service, and Don was well enough to return to the pulpit. That Wednesday night was a miraculous one that left Don in tears. Delores Slivenksy attended. Don spotted the kind, good nurse as he sat on the platform behind and to the side of Deacon Franzel, who waved his layman’s arms to lead carols.

Of course, Don told the emotion-riddled story of his near-death experience and detailed Delores’s critical part in it. At the closing prayer, she raised her hand to accept Christ as her Savior and came forward boldly when Don gave the invitation. She had helped save Don; on that holy night, he helped save her. Later, her whole family became Christians, active members of the church, and close friends of the family, so close that Delores shared a prized recipe for her native Finnish sweet bread.

Don basked in the sentimentality of shared salvation. Joan eagerly enjoyed the friendship. Karen fancied the bread.

In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran wrote, “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” Sorrow and joy spring from the same duct. They are so closely related that their tears cannot be distinguished. We cry for both. The wonder of “Away in a Manger” and the pain of the “Via Dolorosa.” Without grief, could gladness even exist? Death and life. Suffering and rejoicing. Repentance and restoration. Sadness and anger. Loneliness as well as pleasure and love and contentment. So complete, they fill our hearts to the breaking point.

In a similar way, a rich, heart-warming aroma of baking bread fills a kitchen. Delores’s recipe has become known in the Boniface household as the Christmas bread. It fittingly symbolizes the tension between life’s polar opposites. The day before the family’s annual Christmas gathering, the moist, soft yeast dough undergoes several risings and punchings down until it is properly elastic and tensile and ready to be braided and coiled into fat, round loaves. Flavored with cardamom, the precious spice of hospitality, it tantalizes all believers in miracles to slather on the frosting and gobble down a generous twist, warm from the oven. Karen bakes it every Christmas and shakes red holly berry sprinkles and green jimmies over the snowy buttercream frosting capping its peaks. Then she serves it as the focal point of the family’s traditional brunch.

The oak pedestal table with all its leaves is laid with a white cloth and Christmas dishes, white plates and cups that depict – primarily in red and green – a merry outdoor scene with long-skirted skaters, bundled-up children sliding on sleds and building snowmen, a horse-drawn sleigh, and Christmas trees a twinkle in the snow. In the center of the table, are crowded together dishes brimming with scrambled eggs, crisply fried bacon strips, petite breakfast sausages with browned pan drippings deliciously clinging to them, cheesy hash browns, and a bowl of fresh fruits, peeled, cored, cut and mixed delightfully in their own juices—fresh apples, blueberries, strawberries, pineapple wedges, mandarin oranges, and sparkling ruby pomegranate jewels.

Next to the plates, the tableware is set neatly. Above the knives, the teacups are carefully positioned; and above the forks, the lead crystal flutes to hold sparkling grape juice for the Christmas toast. Next to the forks, the napkins in festive rings. Atop the plates, the name cards—needlepoint Christmas stockings, so stuffed their wrapped contents spill onto the plate, tempting children to transgress the “Do not open until after we eat” command. A grandchild is appointed to call the family to the table, ringing a fine bone china bell of Elizabethan Staffordshire, purchased on a trip to London, hand decorated with an evergreen tree, laden with baubles and toys and candy worthy of the glory of Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present. 

Finally, lighting a candle in the center of the beautifully decorated loaf, Karen parades it from the kitchen and leads everyone to sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus. The family celebrates salvation, the season of joy, and all things good. They reflect on the blessings of the year, laugh and cry over memories, and spend time just being together, without rush to unpack stockings and unwrap gifts.

All sit around the table digesting the Christmas bread and the large helpings of love.