# The Way Back *(Howell Creek Radio address for Nov 30, 2013 — )* I heard only the barest outline of this story, but it was enough, or felt like it was enough, to fill in the complete picture. One bleak, grey Novemberish evening a few weeks ago, our friends Abe and Gladys had only just finished their corn harvest and were inside the house. There had been a negotiation over the Christmas music. At first Gladys would have been firm: no Christmas music until after Thanksgiving, presumably wishing to avoid diluting the season. Abe of course agitated for a nearer deadline — Thanksgiving is so late this year, he would have said, we can't wait that long if we're to get our rightful yearly alotment. Eventually they agreed that if it snowed before Thanksgiving and the snow stuck — yes fine, they would play Christmas music. And true to his Hackett genes, Abe began tugging just a little further on the compromise almost as soon as it was struck: as long as snow was even falling, there would, technically, be an unmelted snowflake on the ground at any given point in time, and so, for him, it was enough to say the snow was sticking even at the very moment when it had first begun falling. That evening a line of snow was advancing; you would have found him leaning up against his standing desk, alternately peering out the window and watching the approaching blue streak on his laptop’s radar display, the bookshelf speakers already warm and his finger hovering over the play button, ready to unleash *Silver Bells* as soon as the first flakes hit the ground. * * * This podcast is kind of about music, maybe even specifically holiday music. But I’m going to have to take you all round the houses first before I get there. Specifically, I have to tell you about three places. The first place is the kitchen of a two-bedroom rambler in the suburbs. When I was twelve, I was almost always on kitchen duty after dinner. Right about that time of day when most of the work was over and I wanted most to escape the confines of the indoors, they put me in the kitchen, the most confined place of all. I seem to remember the hot, smelly dishwater; sermons and inspirational music playing from a small, portable radio; plates and cups clacking against each other; and the tedium of trying to move eight peoples’ worth of dinner dishes and the pots and pans through the process with very limited counter space. Over the kitchen sink was a small window. It faced west, and I would look out of it while doing the dishes, towards where the sun was setting, and into a place I had christened the Way Back. The Way Back was a largish area between the back yards of all the houses on our street and the freeway. It was too small to be called a forest, but too big and full of trees to be called an empty lot. The Way Back was like my second home, and the goal every day was to get back there as soon as possible and stay out there for as long as possible; and a tension that grew in me as I washed and dried and washed and dried, while outside the sun measured out the day’s last lighted hours. As soon as the table and counters were wiped and the last pan was drying on the rack I’d be gone, halfway down the hill before the breezeway door slammed behind me, my dishpan hands drying in the evening air as I ran. * * * You might have thought that my heart was in the Way Back, since I spent just about every spare minute there. But the Way Back was actually a compromise: a substitute or stand-in for a place even further in the past. That place was Superior National Forest which covers 3.9 million acres of woods, streams and lakes in Northern Minnesota. That was where I lived when I was six: a place where Mom and I could walk all morning to have lunch on a flat rock in the middle of a stream; and also the place where our barely-domesticated pet dog heard the wolves howling at night, yanked herself free of her leash, and left our family for theirs. That forest was my world — in the literal sense of being a whole large world all to myself; as the birthplace of my play and imagination, it was the first, biggest, and best work of fiction in which I have ever immersed myself; and you know, by the way, I ever move back there, as I someday hope to do, I will join the trees and the mossy boulders as a contented fixture of a perfect place, and never be heard from again. Anyhow: the Way Back, this narrow, wooded lot in the suburbs, slapped up against a busy interstate freeway, was a mere puddle next to the ocean of the Superior National Forest I remembered from my childhood, only barely big enough in my mind to compare. It got its name simply because it was further back from our house than the backyard: not just Back, but *Way* Back — but now I think about it, it was also, for me, a “way back” — an avenue to a larger and much-desired past. * * * I was in the mall with Trixie last Christmas season, or maybe it was the year before. Of course they had Christmas music playing, and I made the mistake I often make of listening to and interpreting the actual words of the song. > Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, > but the very next day, you gave it away So like, you know, I’ve been thinking about how every year I give someone my heart, whatever that means, because you know, that’s what you do at Christmas, right? And last year, you know, I gave it to you, but then, the very next day, somehow you gave it away to someone *else* — like, you gave *my* heart to some uninterested third party. How does that even work? I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter. So anyhow I’ve been thinking about it. I’m taking a different tack this year — I’ve got a new idea. This year, when I give my heart away, which of course no one would ever think of *not* doing at Christmas, I’m going to give it to — get this — someone *special*. You know, not just some Joe Schmoe? But someone who is actually special? and maybe won’t turn around the next day and give *my* heart to someone else? Ever since I first heard that song, it’s been turning up in stores and elevators everywhere. Somehow this tinny eight-bar jingle has become omnipresent in places of commerce during the holidays. This song is just representative of a whole class of Christmas music that makes me feel like I’m in the kitchen doing dinner dishes again: I just want to get out. It’s uncomfortably warm. It’s sugary and clacky and confused, a kind of white noise for grown-ups — selected like the music you hear through the phone while on hold — for the same reasons, and probably, by the same people: because the melody, the vocals and instrumentation can be forced over the air by distant, tinny crackerjack speakers and suffer some acceptable minimum of distortion. * * * Then there’s another Christmas music scene. Nat King Cole. Bing Crosby. All the familiar Christmas Carols. You know what I mean. If the mall music is like the stuffy, noisy kitchen, this set is more like the Way Back: a wooded place specially set aside between a row of suburban backyards and the freeway that connects the mall to the airport, it’s a place of fresh air and genuine nostalgia. This class of holiday music is really a canon of sincere and accessible praise of the simple pleasures: lights, warm fires, food, snow falling, friendships. And, especially when compared to the kitchen music, there is quite a lot to be said for anything which praises the simple pleasures. And yet, however pleasant it is compared to the kitchen, the Way Back, is still, for me, just a compromise, and it can still feel confining. The strongest example of this in my mind right now is when Trixie and I attended last year’s Christmas Choir concert at Northwestern College. Some officiant prayed a long, specially-scripted prayer at the beginning, and then mandated a solemn silence between songs, no applause until the end please (why ever for I can’t begin to imagine). The songs — quaint, harmless cliches set to pastoral melodies — were interspersed with short videos featuring panned shots of Christmas tree ornaments, and voice-over devotional readings. Technically the songs referenced everything Christians expect in a set of carols: the baby Jesus, the angel choir, the shepherds shimmering into the perfectly warm stables to smile benevolently alongside the cute farm animals. It left me profoundly frustrated. This was a *college*, a place with books and a profoundly fortunate set of people who get paid to do nothing but learn from the past and explain it to us. They ought to have had a window onto the way things really were, and they ought to have let us look through it; instead all they could do was to read us some Bible verses and remind us to take a break from shopping every once in awhile. * * * The 1940s and 50s are a long time ago, I guess — at least, it seems that way, probably because that was before the age of irony, and it really feels like irony has been around forever — my whole lifetime at least, to be sure. It’s where most of us go most of the time when we want to escape back to a place of sincerity for the holidays. But there is a place, a good deal further back than the 1940s and 50s, which stretches out for more than a thousand years and covers several continents: the place where our Western *practice of Christmas*, was born: when we first consolidated, and later elaborated, the midwinter feasts circling the constellation of the Virgin Birth, the solstice, and the Yule sacrifices. This era, for me, like the Superior National Forest, a place that looms huge in memory, and when you go back to visit it, miraculously it seems even bigger than you remember it being as a kid. I am not as educated as I most often sincerely wish I was, and after much reading I still do not feel I really understand this place enough to explain it to others, or to you. But it is large enough to wander in and to enjoy without needing to understand — and the Music is the way back to it. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I’m Joel Dueck. The original recording and transcript of this episode can be found with the rest on our website, . You can go there and subscribe to new episodes via iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, RSS or email. ## Synopsis Radio address for November 30, 2013, a short trip through music, the kitchen, and the woods. Mention is made of the Superior National Forest.