The day before christmas1/10/2023 ![]() Donny’s family were bearers of their ethnic heritage and his dad grew grapes on an arbor in their tiny yard and made wine-wine it’d be smarter to gargle and spit out than drink, but students are cheap drunks, or, at least drink cheap. The three of us had been drinking, of course, the alchemies of the season, and factor in Donny DelGado’s wine, too. He’d left behind in the dormitory storage room some piece of furniture-an easy chair, I think-but when he went to claim it for our ratty off-campus apartment, it was gone. I remember a night shortly before the term ended for Christmas break. Charlie was always alive in the moment, and his moment ran high on drama. A student wasn’t anything he had ever been, not back in our days in high school, certainly not then, and not since. ”Ĭharlie Webb was in college only to avoid the draft. “Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead. Maybe because I was back from the Viet Nam War and something in the lines spoke to how I was feeling. The poem was called “Alone” and it made an impression on me. On the day I attended class he was speaking about a poet named Walter de la Mare and maybe it was a combination of the eccentric professor and the poet with the weird name, but I stayed, oddly fascinated, sitting at the back of the lecture hall as he presented a poem, which he recited from memory. Another class (one lecture’s worth) was a British Lit course given by a tall gawky guy who wore a bow tie that bobbled on his Adam’s apple as he spoke, and who I later discovered was a renowned scholar. One was a class in Fortran, that’s how long ago it was-and though I didn’t know it at the time, it set me on a road that led to my getting a degree in programming and a career that lasted almost forty years. I didn’t even sign up, just went over to campus and sat in on things that looked halfway interesting. Me, I was out of the army and taking a few classes. In Charlie’s case the dodge didn’t last long. Charlie was in school too, both of them going to avoid being drafted. Our other roommate, Donny DelGado, was younger, in school. I recalled an earlier drunken Charlie Webb in a Christmas season long past, back when we were in our twenties, sharing an apartment over on Mill Street, in the student ghetto. ![]() “Friends through years, friends through tears,” he said. ![]() When he clinked my glass his sloshed a little. He shut off the TV, put in his teeth, then poured it. Charlie was still wearing the pink ribbon that folks wore at the funeral. I’d only partnered with Charlie on the trees as an investor. What the hell I had a closet full of shirts. Though I knew the answer the moment I pulled up. “I just stopped by to see how it’s going.” “I’m gettin’ ready to pour my holiday dinner,” Charlie said. It’s a Wonderful Life was on the little TV. “C’mon in.”Ī fifth of Old Crow stood on the coffee table. “Merry Chrishmish,” Charlie Webb said, words slurred by his missing front teeth, though probably that wasn’t all. Worse when you’d fronted the money for them. ![]() There were plenty of them still there, not a good sign on the day before Christmas. I knocked on the door of the small trailer set up on a city lot amid a mini-forest of cut trees. To learn more about Dave and his books, see this author’s note from The Storyside site.-PM One of our regular contributors, David Daniel, sent us this story called “The Day Before Christmas,” which we are happy to run on the day-before-the-day before Christmas to give our readers extra time to enjoy the story.
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