This is a Christmas story about two Jews from New Jersey who retired to North Carolina and made new friends, in particular a special friend named Logchain, a former trucker and national clogging champion. It’s my Christmas story, too.
The setting: Weaverville, North Carolina, or “vee-wer-wille,” as my Norwegian and Jewish cousin Sissel pronounces it (Norwegians mix up their w’s and v’s). You perhaps are wondering how my Norwegian cousin got to be Jewish. She married into it, same as my sister, and also, at one time, my mother.
In Weaverville, folks bake cakes for new neighbors, mow their own lawns, and go to church on Sunday. Back in Livingston (affectionately known as “Living-stein,” a New York City commuter suburb where Sissel and Ira, her husband, lived and raised their family) folks usually take out dinner from the deli, never mow their own lawns, and go to psychiatrists. “Why do you want to live in North Carolina?” guests at their going-away party asked more critically than quizically. Should we feel guilty for not retiring to Miami? Sissel and Ira wondered. No one offered to visit, not even once.
So Sissel and Ira left their New Jersey home of three decades and opened the next chapter of their lives in a “roomy for two” house on a wooded lot in Weaverville. Ira no longer had to slip out the front door by 7:15 to catch the morning commuter train to New York City, and by all outward appearances they were like anyone else on the curbless country road in the mountains.
Inside, however, they felt themselves changing. Sissel hummed around the house as she unpacked and found new places for old mementos; Ira took his morning walk around the pond with the clockwork regularity with which he had caught the train. Once Sissel tip-toed into the living room and found Ira at his piano, which he hadn’t played in years, although he had played every evening when they were first married.
Despite winter coming, they felt a gentler season approaching in their lives. Perhaps it was simply the renewal that comes with retirement; more likely it was escaping New York, a city gone sour. Perhaps most of all, it was the new neighborhood and new friends. One of their first acquaintances, and a regular around the house, was Logchain.
Logchain was a spry, wiry man, with a face so weathered and and wrinkled it creased in a delicate, folded tracery when he smiled, which was often—a small smile revealing small, tobacco-stained teeth. The sparkle in his eyes was unforgettable, a mischievous twinkle like the Santa Claus in children’s books. The sparkle of his eyes pierced through the deep-set creases like the Colorado River glints, jewel-like and green, surrounded by gullies and canyons.
Logchain was always cheerful and often bashful. His life had been a hard one. He had fought in the Korean War (same as Ira), married a girl from Tennessee and had five children. He drove an 18-wheel rig solo down what seemed a million miles’ worth of white highway lines. The nickname “Logchain” came from a time when his logging truck dragged a chain halfway across Mississippi until another trucker got on the CB radio and yelled, “Hey, Logchain! You’ve got sparks flying behind that thing. Pull up!” The handle stuck.
Logchain had a remarkable sense of balance and was offered a job moonlighting as a “steeplejack.” He would walk exposed I-beams at high-rise construction sites to retrieve things. One time he lost his balance, and once was enough. He fell 20 stories and “broke everything” in his body. The doctors told him he would never walk again, that it was a miracle he was alive. Logchain couldn’t support his family, and his wife left him.
So, in every kind of human pain imaginable, Logchain returned to his parents’ mountain home in North Carolina to recuperate. In the evenings the family would dance—mother, father, nephews, and nieces—just as they always did. Their family was well-known for their clogging, an old soft shoe heel, toe-toe, heel kind of stomping in a square-dance formation. Before they realized it, everybody was happy—including Logchain.
Logchain defied all the doctors. He not only walked again, he danced. And before long, he was able to work. Someone in town told him the new folks were looking for help painting their house, so Logchain knocked on my cousins’ door.
And that’s how Logchain, the former truck driver from a family of national clogging champions and Ira, the Ivy League son of a New York Jewish mercantile family, became acquainted. They quickly became friends, special friends. They “hung out.”
Logchain chopped wood and kept the hearth stoked. (Ira’s family never lit the fireplaces in their Long Island mansion, so Ira didn’t know how.) They would chat and enjoy the crackling warmth only a fire can lend human companionship. As Logchain painted the walls in the bedroom a warmer shade of pink to Sissel’s liking, Ira would lounge in bed, coffee cup in his hand and The Wall Street Journal in his lap, looking up from time to time to comment on the magnificence of Logchain’s progress.
Ira and Logchain “did lunch.” Each day at noon they drove down the Old Weaverville Highway to the Stony Knob diner. Like Logchain, Ira would order pork chops and eggs despite his heart condition (he was never kosher). And when Sissel was away, “the boys” ran the house. One time two Mormons knocked at the door. Logchain answered “We’re all Jewish here!” and slammed the door in their faces. Ira and Logchain chortled like schoolboys over that one.
Logchain often stayed for dinner but never on Friday night. On Fridays Logchain could be found at Stanley’s, the local family restaurant, the only place in town with a bluegrass band. If the crowd wouldn’t loosen up and dance, Logchain would step out onto the floor, a hunched-over figure, still as a statue except for his feet, and clog. He had the easy sure-footedness of a Fred Astaire, the concentration of a brain surgeon. Soon the crowd would be whirling around him almost by sheer magnetic attraction, all in formation, dancing. And, like Logchain, they would soon all feel happy.
Ira always tuned into the radio broadcast from Stanley’s, and I listened along with him. At the end of one broadcast, Logchain grabbed the microphone and said in his slow, deliberate voice: “I want to say hello out there to Susan and her dog, Yukon. And my friends Sissel and Ira.” Then the band leader cut in and dedicated a special number for their new Jewish neighbors: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
The Christmas season was fast approaching and I was there to help Sissel with her annual ritual of baking Norwegian Christmas cookies. I had brought along one of my own rituals: a special ornament for the tree. This year I had chosen a little white book of carols and Scripture called “The Story of Christmas.” Although embossed in gold it was, if the truth be told, a tract. When I became a Christian I knew it would be the one thing I’d never do—pass out a tract. Yet this little white book, which fit snugly in the palm of my hand, filled me with visions of what Christmas was to me as a child: the aroma of pine enveloping the living room, candles melting a halo in the windows’ frost. I was grateful I could remember Christmas as a highlight of childhood. Yet with each advancing Christmas, I see it differently, more of a light in an old, old darkness. I hoped I could read a few Christmas passages out loud before the holiday was over.
The boys took Sissel’s Christmas festivating in stride, even with excitement. When Sissel and I hauled in a plump Scotch pine we got on an $11 bargain at a lot down the road, Logchain immediately set to work trimming the lower branches. Ira got on the phone to everyone back at his company’s New York City office: “How’s the Christmas party? Did you have a tree? Hey, can I ask how much you paid for it? Gosh, down here they only cost $10 . . . Well, the trees for $10 are a little scraggly, but for $11 you get a redwood! They come from this part of the country, you know.”
At dinnertime we took our places around a table laden with a traditional Norwegian spread: red-cabbage sauerkraut, sausage, and krumkake. Ira, in a softened mood, asked his guest to “say a word of thanks.” I knew he meant me, and I knew he meant grace. I also knew I was terrible at saying grace. My tongue gets all twisted when I know people are listening—I relapse to my childhood speech impediments. So I bluffed. I said, “Well, I just want to say I’m thankful for all the good things that have happened this year—especially you all moving here. Mostly, I’m thankful for cousins like you.”
Christmas morning was an anticlimax not the main event of the holiday, for Ira is a night person who spent most of his unmarried and even married leisure time playing piano in Harlem nightclubs. He wanted to get this present-opening business over with. My tongue found itself similarly tied that morning. Instead of reading from the booklet I brought, I showed Ira a newspaper cartoon I had found on how Norwegians mix up their w’s and v’s. Ira laughed weakly and shuffled off with The Wall Street Journal under his arm. Sissel whisked an armful of wrappings to the garage. The room was empty and all the meaning of Christmas seemed to have evacuated.
Logchain did not appear on Christmas Day as he said he would. By late afternoon even Sissel was worried, so she called and found he was in the hospital. We packed a basket of Christmas treats and visited. As the elevator door opened, we saw Logchain ahead of us framed by a large picture window. He stared pensively out over the mountains, the nub of a filterless cigarette squeezed tightly between his fingers. When Sissel called his name, he turned with surprise and obvious delight—there was that quick, boyish smile and the twinkle in his eyes. We talked about what was wrong.
The scar tissue from the I-beam accident had caused intestinal complications, he said. The doctors wanted to operate. We told him we were sure everything would be fine, and he was welcome to recuperate at Sissel and Ira’s house. Sissel left her basked of fruit and krumkake. As we neared the elevator I turned, troubled, then dug into my pocket and pulled out “The Story of Christmas” tract that had met such an unworthy fate earlier in the day. I placed it in Logchain’s leathery hand and said, “God bless you.”
I returned home to Chicago, and Sissel called to keep me updated on any news. Logchain was still in the hospital, she said, but he wanted to thank me for the little white book. The edges were already getting worn from his constant reading of it, Sissel said. A week later Sissel called again. The doctors had tried to operate a second time, but Logchain didn’t make it. She had just returned from his funeral. She said Logchain wanted to thank me deeply for “The Story of Christmas,” those were his last words to her.
Ira took to his bed for awhile after Logchain passed away. He said his back hurt, but really it was life that hurt. One morning Sissel came back from shopping and found Ira at the piano banging out jazz tunes, the songs they had loved as a young couple. He tried a few big-band variations on bluegrass standards from Stanley’s, and he imagined Logchain dancing, which is probably exactly what Logchain was doing at that moment—with a boyish smile and a flashing sparkle in his eyes.
The little “Story of Christmas” booklet belongs to Sissel now. She packed it away in the box with the other Christmas tree ornaments. The box will be opened next year, and perhaps the booklet will be taken down from where it hangs with the plastic snowflakes and shiny glass balls and someone will read it. And perhaps the words will become seeds planted in someone’s heart, that will grow ever green, like a Christmas tree.