On our first Christmas at the church, we invited our friends Beaver, her boyfriend, and their pet parakeets to join our family for dinner. It had been snowing for days prior and I fired up our kitchen making a bean feast: soaked cattle beans baked for a day with pork, molasses, and spices. The warm aroma mixed with the crisp fragrance of an 8-foot pine tree hung with Christmas lights and toys in the living room made the gothic structure feel like home.
On Christmas morning Jay made shepherd pie while I simmered spiced wine on the burner. Beaver braved the blizzard and brought frozen fiddleheads she had harvested from her family’s farm last spring. I sauteed the greens in butter and served it up simple, a little taste of spring coming eventually. For dessert she had made a blueberry stollen but was completely upstaged by my kid, at 20 years old, who baked a psychedelic seed cake so light and enchanting like it was made by fairies.
We sat by the Christmas tree basking in the joy of togetherness. Beaver played her flute, Jay sang and played his acoustic guitar, I sang and played ukulele, the parakeets chirped happily. We exchanged presents, then Beaver and company drove home. Jay and I continued to sing and play more songs.
During a moment of sleepy contentment, we heard a knock on our front door. I opened the pointed arched door to a young man, big, dark blond hair and mustache, dressed all in black.
“Are there services?” he asked. “We heard music.”
I looked at Jay and our 20-year-old kid. I contemplated the possibility that we might have a troublemaker asking to enter our home. Jay is a fierce protector. I rely on his instincts.
He asked, “Are you a musician?”
“Yes,” the stranger answered.
“Then come in,” Jay invited.
Another stranger joined the man and they both entered our home. The second one was older, balding, and had a dark scruffy beard. He had a brick red shirt underneath his coat, jeans, sneakers.
I could feel the nervous energy. We’d just let in two strangers, grown men, into our home at nine o’clock on a winter night. If they had malicious intent, could we defend ourselves?
The men looked around. From the outside our home looks like a church. We have a steeple tower and tall stained glass windows, but inside the space is filled with our hodge podge of antique furniture, books, designer toys, and music instruments.
Jay strapped his electric guitar on. The first stranger sat at the drum kit. The second man sat and fiddled with the electric bass. They were horrendous. Jay knew what he was doing, of course. It’s his instrument. But the man on the drums was making an awful racket and the man on the bass guitar made halfhearted strums.
‘Tang ina, I couldn’t bear it. “May I?” I asked for my bass guitar. The man turned it over to me.
This prompted a switch around. The first stranger got up from the drums and asked if he could play Jay’s guitar. Jay sat at his drum kit. That was more like it. I played bass to Jay’s beats, and the man surprised us with pretty awesome blues riffs on the guitar. It felt good bumping to the beat as I thumped on those fat bass strings. Everyone was in their element.
“You’re a hot bass player!” the second stranger said. Then he started ranting like he’d been waiting to front a punk rock band all his life.
I wish I could have recorded our jam session on my phone, but I didn’t dare break the spell and change the mood. We kept playing, laughing. We couldn’t stop. It was a moment of pure liberation.
“Are you guys angels?” the second man asked in a pause from his rant.
I was thinking they were angels before he asked it. Later on, Jay told me he was thinking it, too.
1 The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth 2 and said, “My lords, please turn aside to your servant’s house and spend the night and wash your feet. Then you may rise up early and go on your way.”
– Genesis Chapter 19
Never mind the rest of the chapter. The rest of it is fucked up and one of the reasons why I rejected the Judeo-Christian tradition when I was twelve.
But two strangers came to our door asking for services and we had the most fun jam we’ve had in ages. As we quieted down, the men fixated on our kid’s euphonium sitting on the large bookcase, unplayed for years. They took turns attempting to play the horn, prompting our kid to clean it and blow beautiful low notes himself to cap our Christmas night. By ten o’clock, the strangers were gone.
I’m going to file this along with the other strange visitations. An auspicious omen for the coming year. A memory that makes me laugh wildly.
Jay and I played music at an open mic in Maine on New Year’s Eve, then packed the car and drove south to Miami to take our kid back to college after the holidays. We brought the winter with us all the way down to the Carolinas. In South Carolina we stopped for some catfish. I played the piano they had in the corner of their place.
We’re back home now and ready for 2025:
- Write my memoir. I’ve been talking about this for ages, it seems. Write madly, furiously, “like I’m running out of time.”
- Post more regularly on this blog, maycam, and social channels.
- Read more! Read the masters and classics. (Currently reading Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut) Read more POC authors.
- Make clothes out of the handwoven fabrics my Mom brought from the Philippines. (The scarf I am wearing in these photos is handwoven by the Yakan tribe.)
- Give myself more handpoke tattoos.
- Get my songs on music sharing platforms.
- Play music more. Write more songs.
- Walk more year round. Swim more this summer.
- Spend more time with friends. Get out. Invite them in.
- Stay sexy. Stay dangerous. Stay focused.
What are you excited to do in the next 12… uh, 11.5 months?
Love, Lust, and Liberty,
