Lite Brite

 

 

 

I usually post a Christmas story here if I'm in the mood. Most of my past Christmases fade into the dust as nothing exceptional sticks out. However, there are a few that do. Two of them I'll tell you about here. One is a great memory for me and the other, quite ugly. This is all true

The Good.

Of course I was up early for Christmas morning when I was five. I had managed to beat everyone at that. Even at that age, if I was the first one up, I knew enough to creep around as to not wake the others. So I crept down the stairs and came upon a sight. The whole living room seemed stuffed with gifts. As a little kid, everything in the world seems so much larger. The living room, the tree, the gifts and anyone older than me. Remember how your perspective was very different then? To me, it seemed that the living room had no more room in it when filled with so many gifts.

I walked up to them, trying to figure out who was getting what. I could see my brother's name and mine on most. The stockings hung up were bulging and on the stairway banister, six fist sized ornamental foiled balls were taped to them. I didn't know they were chocolate candies underneath that foil till I was told later.

When everyone else got up we tore into the gifts. It's such a blur that I really don't remember much except for that my Mom was sitting there on the couch, fully dressed and smoking her Newport cigarettes and drinking her fave earl gray tea. My Dad, was over by another chair, still half asleep in his paisley pjs.

“Richard, it's Christmas...aren't you getting dressed?” my Mom asks Dad

“Yeah...later.” If it wasn't for us kids being noisy, he'd easily go back to sleep right then and there, half sliding out of the lounger.

My Mom's style back then was to dress like Laura Petrie from the Dick van Dyke show. I really don't remember if she ever wore a dress back then. Then again, she was the youngest Mom in our neighborhood and I remember most of the other Mom's dressing in dresses, which looked like printed bags. Thinking back on it too, my Mom had a decent figure to wear something like Laura would wear. I know, I know....sounds gross to rate your own Mom, but compared to the other house-coated ratbag Moms I knew on our street, she was the better “looker.” 

 

Laura Petrie

 

 

The best gift that Christmas morning I got was Lite Brite. I had asked Dad how does it work and he said we'd set it up later as too much was going on now. I could be a fairly patient kid and knew he was right. No matter...Santa had brought the one gift I was wanting above all else. I can wait.

Later on that night, a few uncles had stopped by and of course, being Irish, there was liquor for the adults. My brother's friend, Bobby, had come by to play with my brother's new gifts. I was soon pushed into the background as the adults adulted with their Irish whiskies and my older brother with his older friend did what all older brothers do, shove you away.

“Will you STOP pestering us! Go away! Get Dad to set up that Lite Brite! Beat it!”

I was getting a bit desperate to get my Lite Brite up and running. To me, from seeing it on TV, it was a magical machine and I HAD to see it now. I returned to the kitchen and approached my Mom about it. She then got up from the table and with a “I'll be back,” came with me to my room upstairs.

For an adult, screwing in a 100 watt light bulb into a plastic box, snapping on a peg board, then a paper graphic with another peg board on top of that was not rocket science. It was to me. Hell, I'm five, give me a break! She then told me to look closely at the holes as they were printed with the first letter of each color. “B” for blue, “R” for red and to push the transparent colored pegs into that hole. She sat next to me on the bed as we did this and offered just enough help for me to figure it out. She was good for helping me as a kid but also would let me struggle with things to learn it myself.

As I filled the peg board, the outline of a sailboat was forming. I became excited because the colors were glowing right into my face and I kept telling my Mom how cool this all was. Here's the key memory that I still see today. I turned to her, excited, she looks at me and smiles. We were doing something together. I had her to myself and she seemed just as enthusiastic about this as I was. We both were experiencing this magic machine for the first time. My Dad and his brothers in law were getting louder, drunker in the kitchen. My brother and Bobby I could hear in his room thumping away on the floor doing God Knows What but the best scene in that house was my Mom and I. We were two best friends discovering life's miracles together.

Once the board was all filled up, I asked her to shut off the overhead light so to see this glow in the dark. She did and I was shocked. The full wizardry of the Lite Brite had shown. The colors were so deep, so bright that it just saturated our eyes, causing me to utter, “Ooooooh!”

In winter gray New England, this was Heaven, or it looked like what Heaven would look like, the deepest colors imaginable. I and my Mom were there to see it. We two had found another revelation together. We two included one another, enjoying each other. It's at this age you find out that sharing “fun” with someone increases it by so much more.

The last time I had a reaction to color was at a Pink Floyd concert decades later. The opening song, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” had a single, gallium-arsenide laser appear and bounce around inside the Civic Center. The beam had an electric blue color to it and a ghostly feature, a semi transparency with what looked like static within the beam itself. Gilmour plucked away at his guitar as this other-worldly thing glowed and sizzled 20 feet above my head. This was the first time I had ever seen a laser in real life. The five year old in me thought “Oooooh!”

The Ugly.

My brother had was on leave from the Navy for the Christmas of '83 when I picked him up at the airport. While driving home, I had warned him that our Mom was in another depressive episode again, this one stronger than the last. She had fought with depression ever since I was alive and it's cycles just repeated itself. She'd get into a deep funk for about three to four months and then somehow get out of that rut, mostly by herself. The treatments for it were lousy back then in the '70's and she had tired of them not working as promised. Eventually, she gave up on Dr's, psychiatrists and would just tough it out alone.

This bout of depression was worse though in '83. I had known that trying to get her to see a physician was not going to work as she'd completely balk at the idea. So I did what I did most times I saw this in the past, wait it out. She'd come around again in time.

“Holy shit!” my brother says to me when he encountered our Mom again on Christmas Eve. “She's really bad this time around!” He had not seen her in two years so this was a shock to him.

I had told him “Yeah” but was hoping for that turnaround we both had always seen before. It happened so many times in the past like this.

“I don't know man...I don't know.” he commented.

She has lost weight, let her hair turn into a rat's nest and had this completely blank expression on her face most of the time.

“I'm calling her GP tomorrow.” he says.

“She won't do a damn thing, she'll tell the Dr to buzz off...she'll fight any advice he has! She won't on her own accord look for help.” I reply

“Yeah...I know she will, but what else can we do?”

On Christmas morning, my brother gets off the phone, “The Dr says to take the 'bull by the horn' and literally kidnap her to Butler Psychiatric Hospital. He says not to worry about any legal problems with it...and if she fights, just drag her there anyway, anyhow. I'll back you two up.”

So my brother and I come up with a ruse, we were all to just take a ride this morning. She had gone without any resistance. Once inside the main entrance to Butler was when I felt her pulling away from me and him, trying to get back to the car. I just gripped her arm harder and shoved her along towards the ER desk they had there. Within two minutes, three large oak sized men showed up and grabbed her, pulling her along and past two doors that slammed shut behind them. I then heard some mechanical sounds coming from those doors. Automatic locks engaging so I figured. It was that sound of the doors that got me. The gravity of this finally sunk in. My Mom has been locked up in crazy bin.

On the drive home from Butler, my brother turns to me and in his particular black/dark humor says, “Merry Christmas!”

I got the joke. Life was just too absurd at times to make any sense. We both, for some reason, had this kind of humor and outlook on life.

Butler Hospital then, was beautiful. It looked like the best hotel I had ever seen. Quiet, clean with expensive paintings on the walls and other artworks placed in the halls. When my brother and I arrived for a family meeting, we were led by a psychiatric graduate student to the “Locked ward.” On our way there, we had passed through an arboretum filled with bushes, trees, flowers and ivy, all growing inside this large room that led to a staircase and open walkway in the center of the building. It smelled like summer in there, it being just the day after Christmas.

Family meetings include everyone, kids, parents, relatives. I instinctively knew what was about to happen there. This meeting was not about my Mom, it was a surreptitious staged event by the Dr's and assistants to watch the family members as they talked about Mom. They were looking for family dynamics and would find them, I was assured of that. I doubt any other relative knew that they were the subjects that morning. I knew I would be. How? I was a psych major at RIC and had seen this very same thing at a visit to a mental health center we had to witness and then write about.

Dr Martin Furman was her assigned Dr. He had an odd Afrikaner accent which made sense, since he was born and lived in South Africa during Apartheid's heyday, later emigrating to America, landing in Rhode Island as a psychiatric physician at Butler. This guy looked like a German SS officer to me and with that German exactness for detail and mannerisms. This guy wasn't about to fuck around at all, with anything.

Furman starts with me. So I tell him of the past twenty or so years of her illness, life and whatnot. I was fairly truthful but felt a bit defensive as he probed me further on details. It then happened, Furman's match lit the fuse. The interactions of everyone there fired up and accusations, old hurts, bitterness came out. Events happening 20 years before I was born came to light. Three graduate level interns sitting with us then started scribbling away on their legal pads as everyone talked at once. Furman just became quiet and leaned back, just watching everyone else and not really my Mom at all. I myself shut the hell up, not taking part in this as I knew that the people there were dissecting us. I didn't want to be dissected at all. My past, bad decisions and general personality I wasn't about to divulge or even reveal via body language.

Later on, after it was over, my brother and I were checking out that arboretum we saw earlier. It was really nice to see a little, living forest in late December. He then turns to me says, “Oh..I forgot...and Happy New Year too!” Even more of his nihilistic humor!

Things got better within a month. By the times in the early '80s, they had much better drugs and therapies to deal with depression. I would shake Martin Furman's hand today if I happen to come across him. He had managed to make my Mom's life bearable for the next 13 years.

**

It goes without saying that I prefer the Christmas of 1969 better than that of 1983. I had, for a time at least, a Mom who was lucid and stable for it. And when she was healthy, she was there for me and we both enjoyed each other's company. It wasn't all crap and there were times some absolute gems we two had found together. I haven't forgotten about that.