A Christmas Pageant Past

It wasn't a memory as such but a story, Recounted time and again by parents loving and proud. Young men are too occupied chasing visions and fleeing demons To remember. Middle age concerns lean towards practicality, keeping or escaping it. If there was a memory, it had surely been mistreated and lost. Now the Old man had only the words of parents, Who were not much more than children when he was a boy, When he was five. Those were times of solidness. The world seemed bigger, thicker, and heavier, conspiring to Safety through simplicity. The snow more a stuffed, quilted blanket than the sheet of icy crystals He now sees. Christmas lights like huge, shining beetles gorged and bursting with color, Metamorphosed over decades into fragile gnats twinkling and blinking, Toys of Iron, Steel, and Wood thickly painted, Outliving childhood and its memory. This is what the old man could recall. Yet each Christmas the old man would renew himself to His parent's words. Recounting again and again until the child he'd been felt at home. Sometimes the story was sad, sometimes happy, and sometimes funny, But always it ended with the hope and magic of the season, Inside a parent's love. Each year, when the story became less his parent's, More his own, He'd sit with the children of his family's families and he would begin, ?I remember when I was a boy, just about the age you are Now.