Yule Log (Live!), Christmas 1983 – Bryan Miller

Gerald didn’t know what to say to that.

“Well, uh, thank you, sir, and let me just say —”

“Merry Christmas, Jeremy! Keep that fire burning.”

A little after eleven, Gerald realized he’d neglected to bring lunch. He fed two fresh logs into the flames, tugged on his coat, and hurried outside to the Datsun, which was stubbled with a fresh beard of snow. He let the wind blast it clean as he sped down the empty highway to the Golden Garden, a tiny strip-mall Chinese restaurant. The sign out front read “Open 365 Days A Year!”

Humid, oily air blew in from the open door. Inside, two cooks in unsullied chef’s whites sat around a table playing cards with a pair of almond-eyed women. They smoked from a communal pack of Marlboro Reds laying open in middle of the table among bowls of steaming food not found on the sweet-and-sour takeout menu: gummy white tentacles unfurling from a yellow curry lake, alien-looking turnips with bushy green tops, whole pink shrimp resting atop an anthill of white sticky rice. The younger of the two women slapped-down cards and shouted something triumphant-sounding in Chinese. Then she nodded Gerald’s way and sidled behind the counter. She shifted into English to take his order of ham fried rice with egg rolls.

“Will be about fifteen minutes. You are our first customer of the day!” She said it like he won something. Then she snapped a series of staccato syllables to the cooks, who made the international hand gesture for Yeah yeah I’m coming as they stubbed out their cigarettes.

Gerald noticed an OPEN sign glowing neon blue in a storefront across the barren parking lot. Marley’s Wine & Spirits. He ducked out of the restaurant and into the liquor store, a narrow joint with thin, sticky carpeting that stretched back through two isles of booze. Behind the counter, a bearded clerk with transition-lens glasses sat reading a magazine about handguns.

“Merry Christmas,” Gerald said.

“It’s only a holiday if you choose for it to be,” the clerk replied without looking up from his magazine.

Gerald jerked his thumb toward the world outside the fogged windows. “Tell them that.”

“You know what day Rosh Hashanah is?”

Gerald shrugged.

“Jewish New Year. I don’t know the date myself. Passes by every year and I don’t even notice. But to some folks that’s a holiday. That’s for you to decide.”

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  1. Vaughan says:

    I love that story.

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