Merry Christmas from Atlanta!

There were only two reasons to come home, and being with my family over the holidays was reason number two. Reason one, of course, was Stephen Jones Photography.

Last week my family bought a Christmas Tree. However, there was no room in the living room for it, so my parents put it on the coffee table. Where once a lamp, coasters and a few magazines rested, there sprouted a tree reaching a foot or two higher in the air than nature intended. Dad and I clothed it in lights, Sara and her boyfriend came over and we all decorated it with ornaments from the dusty boxes mom brought downstairs from Sara's closet.

Ornaments are like personal artifacts. Not all of them have stories, but many of them are from different times in my life. Sara found ornaments with pictures of us as children, ornaments we made in grade school, ornaments from Happy Meals, ornaments my grandmother once hung on Christmas trees when she was a girl and she and her mother were living alone in Kansas City, estranged from her violent father.

Even the generic ornaments my parents bought from Ace hardware over the years, the balls and butterflies with their brass hooks, told a story. There were ornaments from the seventies when my parents were first dating, ornaments from eighties and nineties when Sara and I were kids, and brand-new ornaments bought just this year that one day will be from this period in our lives.

We drank eggnog and brandy and listened to the London Philharmonic play Vaughn Williams' emotional orchestral arrangments of ancient English folksongs. We talked. We laughed. We were a family. I found myself satisfied for once with my decision to come home.

I've thought long and hard about going back to Korea. Starting a business is hard, but that isn't the reason. I am not a stranger to hard work. In fact, the difficult part of starting a business is finding time to put your feet up and relax. No, I seriously consider going back to Korea because life was so damn easy there.

I can already hear you saying, "But wait! You bitched a lot about Korea." And you'd be right. I did. It was. But not like this.

Teaching was hard, living in Korea tried my patience, but I loved it because it was different. I felt like every day was an opportunity to explore, to learn. Even though my days had a pattern, there was always the chance for something totally mind-blowing to occur. Learning the language and navigating the culture presented challenge enough to keep my mind occupied. Not only that, I had a steady, relatively good paycheck, a challenging job, and lots of spare time. I have none of those things here, especially the spare time. Also, there is something about Atlanta that changes everything. The magic of 'new' is gone.

My waking hours are framed by an emotion resembling remorse. I am starting out on a new path, but it feels old. The excitement of Korea and the Appalachian Trail is absent. My surroundings are so familiar, and with familiarity comes dullness, the unspoken curse of memory.

For the last few years, I have lived away from home. College, Chattanooga, The Trail, Hattiesburg, Korea. Long has it been since I woke to the sound of my parents making breakfast. Strange are sounds that never change. In the space of my absence I have grown a lot, and arrived home far from where I left. But little has changed in those years. The owls still live in the trees towering over my house where it slowly ages in the wooded cove of a midtown neighborhood. My dad still labors every weekend to keep it standing. Some friends have moved away. Others stayed, married, had kids. I see them and remember, and when we speak, one or both of us carries the burden of meaningless memory, recognition without bond, things done or undone that don't matter anymore but still seem to cling to us like a faded tattoo barely visible under our sleeve. We're adults talking to memories of childhood.

The 'oldness' of Atlanta acts as a weight, a burden weighing me down. It is the weight of birth. Everything about me was born in this city, starting with my physical being in the fall of 1979. Within a ten-mile radius from my house is my first day at school, my first friend, my first kiss, my first experiment with drugs, my first broken arm, my first broken heart. If experience is the brick and morter of personality, Atlanta is where I was built, and when you return to the place of your construction, you cannot help but feel the rough hands of the creator upon your soul.

There were plenty of times that creator screwed up. All of my issues, my personality problems, they were all born here, too. Some of them were with me when I was born. Others were the result of experience, and sometimes during my travels throughout the city, I come across these personal epitaphs. There's the corner by Mary Linn Elementary where John Arnold used to beat me up after school, and that's the park where I broke up with a girlfriend I was close to. Here is the school where I spent a year with no friends. All of these experiences left marks on my soul, scars that itch faintly as I drive by.

Anywhere else in the world, I still carried this luggage, but they were easier to ignore. Living in and around Atlanta is to live a lot closer to who I am, the good and the bad. Viewing those old tapes in the cold light of adulthood makes things worse. My shortcomings suddenly take on form and reason. Some of them I feel like I can resolve. Others look to me like boulders stuck in a mountain side. Big. Immobile. Perhaps part of the mountain itself. I must learn to live with them or get around them. This is who you are, because this is who you were.

One thing Atlanta can't do is tell me who I will be, though it has become clear that whoever that person is, he will be shaped by who he was. There is no avoiding it. How I change is entirely dependant upon how I handle the issues and history that Atlanta has held up to my face. Starting Stephen Jones Photography is only part of what is starting in Atlanta. Stephen Jones himself is starting, too. Who he will be is not immediately apparent. Against the fading portrait of my youth I must craft a new work of art.

Some things and some people will fade away. Others will come into the foreground. Interests and passions will be stoked, habits formed, clothes bought and hangouts established. I will catch a break and my business will thrive. Or it won't and I'll find something else to do. It doesn't matter. Over time, the person inside will make it's habitat outside. It takes years. I must be careful about which parts of my past may become part of my future.

The only thing that is new about Atlanta, the only magic that awaits me is within myself. I will bring to this city a person it has never known, and that person will grow and thrive and build a new life. I do not have to be ruled by my past, but in order to move beyond it I must face it and come to terms with it.

I large measure, this is what Christmas is all about: Rebirth. To me, the principle lesson of Christ's birth is that what has happened is trumped by what is and what will be. To live in wholly in the present is an act of confession. To focus on the future is to forgive.

Sometimes I feel like the message of Christmas is lost on most Americans, most of whom mistakenly celebrate it a week later at New Years. Decorating the Christmas Tree with my family has reminded me of the good experiences in my life that live side by side with the bad. I am reminded that life is a mix of good and bad experiences, a series of questions against which we are all tested, and those of us who can smile at it all have passed with flying colors.

Peace

--Notes