STREETS OF GHOSTS (OF CHRISTMAS PAST)

portland, the indie darling of just about every booming cultural phenomenon that everywhere else wants to copy from the states, is no place to be on christmas. the indentured servants that run the culture machine go home to share the wealth and wonder with their families (ironically, we'll be released from servitude only in time to be kicked out of town for being over 35), and natives flee the city with significant others for coastal vacations at beach houses purchased by parents before the real estate take off (a favorable market and equity loans mean most of them now have two). as a rule, december weather in portland is grossly unfestive. even if it manages not to be too cold, the rain will still work to spoil your merriment. snow in the city is initially charming, but then crippling effect it has on transportation and commerce puts portlanders in even fouler moods than if it were raining. but then, it's christmas day, 2010, and the endlessly vanilla skies are balmy and mild. i'd consider it a boon on any other day of winter, but today the good weather just seems to be conspiring against anyone left in town to wander through the holiday, making it seem silly to held out hope for a festive mid-winter celebration in the first place.

this is my first portland christmas, and i wonder if i'll ever chance another. it's not that it's so bad, or that i haven't spent other christmases away from family. but those others (all three of the abroad) still seemed capable of making their own magics -- at least in recollection.

budapest was the site of my favorite lie. i'd met someone at a bar (the sort dank place with a maze of dark rooms in the back that still exists in most central european cities). peter, i think we'll call him, was an opera singer. at the time, he was singing baron scarpia in "tosca." it seemed like an easy way to up the romantic ante, so i told him that i was a concert pianist. in reality, i had taken more than a dozen years of lessons and was quite proficient, but i hadn't played anything appreciable from start to finish in no less than a year. lucky for me, peter lived with his ailing father, and by the time we made it to his apartment at night, it was too late to play. my hungarian was non-existent, and peter's english was only enough to tell me that there were too many hungarian words of too many nuances to describe feelings of love for him to be able to explain them all. we met in the middle where he praised the beauty of my talented hands. otherwise, they weren't a part of our courtship.

that week in budapest did well to prepare me for my first european christmas ten days later. the christmas village was up just off király (?) st., and in a maudlin show of shamelessness and poor taste, i had visited the cathedral for an advent mass on the morning after my meeting peter. i had come to the city from istanbul to meet a friend who was coming from berlin. we stayed so long only because we were booted from our hostel and offered an amazing deal on an apartment as recompense. our planned mutual destination was prague, where we arrived just over a week before christmas day.

we spent another week together in the czech republic before my friend flew back home. i had not peter nor any grand lie in prague, but i did meet a young man from poland whom i followed to kraków after being left alone by my friend. i'd originally planned to spend the holiday alone in prague, a city i knew from a previous visit, but my invitation from that young man proved irresistible once i found myself in a lonely situation. what was another five hour train ride?

and then poland. my aunts hadn't been lying. the poles really do leave the end of a bottle for a wayward drunken sailor, and that's what we did with the ends of ours after the bars, which in poland, still a very catholic country, are closed for most of christmas eve until they open for the two hours before evening mass, just enough time for a table of half a dozen friends to nearly finish a couple of bottles of vodka before rushing to st. mary's basilica to push through the throngs outside and fall into the sea of tourists snapping pictures inside, where those friends get drunker on the pomp and circumstance that are simultaneously and eternally the living breath and death rattles of the roman catholic church.

then back to the bar, where a famous theater actor sends bottles to every table in celebration and then denounces a couple of lesbians (present) for being the insensitive orchestrators of the puppet show that is (to the speaker's mind) the contemporary kraków stage. my young man's sixteen year old cousin, an aspiring actress, is all ears.

after nearly all of the vodka in kraków, my young man and i walked back through the snow to his rooms, where i was not allowed to stay (or be seen, for that matter), but into which i sneaked through a ground level window for a short while before returning to my own lodgings. the young man's mother, still a staunch communist (though bigoted in the same direction as her staunchly catholic peers), hadn't been happy with the outcome of an affair between her son and his high school russian teacher. it was time he focused on his studies. i'll admit, however, that her christmas cakes were delicious. and to think that i nearly spilled my smuggled samples trying to squeeze out the window on my way home.

where's the smuggled cake, portland? or the clandestine encounters? can't we, for one day, drop the act? but surely you're tired, too, and you're well over the artifice of my using you just to tell a story. but portland, would that artifice by any other name...? whatever. it's dark, and that works for me: my family knows the way around a bottle, and if i can't see them, well, there's not much for me to do but put my sadness out of mind with drink. plus, you've probably got a beach house to go to, and i'm nearly late for dinner. oh, holy night.