This Christmas, it seems that there are more productions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol than ever. However, my new holiday tradition is the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus “Home for the Holidays” concert, now in its 11th year at the Center for Spiritual Living in Santa Rosa. A hundred and eighty strong, they practically overflowed the stage. And right in front, with the tenors, was Steven Gallagher, one of my very first childhood friends.
The show was brilliant. During The First Noel, I found my eyes tearing up as the chorus hit one particularly sublime chord. Then we practically fell out of our seats during their version of Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer, performed as a plea for acceptance of the LGBTR (R, for Reindeer, of course) culture. The show was packed with gorgeous music, polished voices, sharply dressed men of all stripes, outrageous humor, audience participation and the true spirit of the season. To close, they performed the carol du jour, Silent Night, sung as a round with Peace, Peace. As lovely as this mash-up may be, it has become an instant cliché. But their version soared. Really. They added sign language movements to Silent Night and, once the round was completed, they did one final verse without music or voice, just expressive hand movements accented with the soft rustle of 360 coat and shirt sleeves moving in unison. A truly Silent Night that still gives me chills.
As I said, Steve and I go back a long ways, back before attending UC Davis together, before Tam High, before Boy Scouts, all the way back to Cub Scouts. In fact, Mrs. Gallagher was our Den Mother in Strawberry Pack 33. She guided our feeble efforts to be productive, upstanding citizens and kept us fortified during weekly after-school meetings with her homemade cookies. In my memory, she was a genuine slice of Norman Rockwell.
Not that it was all fun and games. No. We were expected to earn “Arrowheads” on our steady rise from Bobcat rank to Wolf, Bear, Lion, and the loftiest of lofties, Webelo. These Arrowheads weren’t terribly difficult to attain, unless you are only 8 or 9 and have the attention span of a 6-week old cocker spaniel.
Anyway, one November back in the early 1960’s I embarked on earning my Cooking Arrowhead. This involved planning a meal, shopping for ingredients, and preparing it—with parental supervision, of course. Usually, one did this for one’s own family, to avoid bringing shame upon the household should things go understandably awry in the kitchen. But as my brother and father were off on a Boy Scout camping trip, we invited Mrs. Gallagher and the twins, Steven and Scott over for my five-star dinner, which coincided with my birthday.
What I cooked for an entrée is lost in memory, though I suspect it was something chicken-y. What does stick in my mind was the dessert, a layer cake made from a mix. But ever the avant-garde-ist, I decided that the white frosting just wouldn’t do. So I got the food dye from my mother’s spice drawer and, with a little experimentation, achieved a rather startling shade of blue. We turned out most of the lights and wished me a happy birthday as I blew (blue?) out the candles. That’s when we heard The Ghost for the first time.
As we sat there in the semi-darkness, we suddenly heard the tread of muffled steps. It sounded for all the world like old Jacob Marley dragging one foot across the floor of Ebenezer Scrooge’s bed chamber. It went something like this: shhhhh-thunk…shhhh-thunk…shhhh-thunk. Softly, it haunted the living room and kitchen. We listened and giggled nervously, but it wouldn’t go away. Shhhhh-thunk…shhhh-thunk. It was too regular to be a noise from the storm outside; or a branch scraping the side of the house. Perhaps it was a leftover ghost from Halloween two days previous.
Intrigued, Steven, Scott and I fanned out, like so many Hardy Boys, to locate its source. We were certainly “not afraid of no ghosts.” We looked under the couch, behind the chairs and up the chimney. We opened closets and slowly crept down the stairs to the basement. Shhhhh-thunk…shhhh-thunk. Just as we were about to go completely insane (okay, that may be an overstatement), I climbed up to the living room soffit, where the sound seemed to be loudest. That was when I discovered the noise coming from our stereo speakers. Shhhhh-thunk…shhhh-thunk. Then, I remembered I had been playing a record to set the mood for the arrival of our guests and the mysterious sound was the phonograph needle still tracking around the final grooves, over and over, 33 1/3 times per minute: Shhhhh-thunk…shhhh-thunk. That was our Ghost.
Back to the concert. All the proceeds went to benefit Face to Face, a program of the Sonoma AIDS Network, with the goal of encouraging more people to get tested. At one point, the emcee pointed out that nearly everyone in the audience had been touched by HIV/AIDS and asked us to think of someone we knew who was no longer with us. For some reason, my thoughts went back to The Ghost on that dark November night and when the emcee asked us to say the name aloud, I said, “Scott Gallagher.” Sadly, he had been infected with AIDS in the early 1980’s, back when it was still shrouded in mystery, and had passed away shortly thereafter.
Over the years, I have come, more and more, to believe in ghosts. Whether they are real, imagined, or simply echoes in the memory, they reach to us across the ether and across the years to touch our being, especially at this time of year. And especially if we listen with our hearts.
