By Jake Vest

The best way to ruin a song is to live through it. Old Bing wouldn’t sing so sentimentally about a White Christmas if he’d ever spent 10 hours of one in a Toyota with no heater, a dying battery and a disappointed woman.  

I was working in Georgia in the mid-1970s, and it looked like I might be spending the second Christmas of my life away from home. The first had been overseas in the Army. Somehow, Tennessee seemed less accessible this time, even though I didn’t have a Pacific Ocean and North America to cross. 

This is when Carole, a young reporter, dropped by my desk and said she was going to drive through Knoxville on the way to her home in Kentucky and invited me to ride along and share the driving.   

Well, she was much more the stuff of dreams than any snowy holiday would ever be, so the deal was sealed. She would pick me up after my shift ended at 2 a.m. and I would drive through the night while she rested up. My arrival would be a surprise gift for my parents. Carole would drive on, all rested up, have her holiday and then pick me up two days later to reverse the trip. In my version, I would charm her, and we would return a couple. 

It was all visions of sugar plums and tidings of good joy – until I got behind the wheel. I didn’t know she had a stick shift, and she didn’t know I couldn’t drive one. That poor little car died at least a thousand deaths as we went grinding off into the night. 

It was not a well-rested, cheerful woman who dropped me off the next morning. The surprise visit wasn’t so cheerful either.  I arrived to find my parents walking toward their car with packed suitcases, heading off to Nashville to spend Christmas with my older brother’s family. 

My younger brother picked me up to spend the holiday at his house with half a dozen fellow bartenders and three or four cocktail waitresses and former and current girlfriends. That could have been festive except that White Christmas everybody dreams about arrived. 

This wasn’t fluffy Bing Crosby flakes, either. It was good old Northern Southern icy slush. Everybody went to work at various nightclubs and got weathered in. Nobody could come get me, so I was stuck playing backgammon with an Amy Winehouse look-alike who asked me about once every 15 minutes if I was sure I hadn’t brought any whiskey.  

The song “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” still makes me wince. 

The weather got better just in time for me to rendezvous with my ride home. We met at a service station near the interstate, and I found her bundled up and shivering. The heater was out and the battery was so close to dead that she didn’t dare turn the car off. None of the accessories worked.  

The windshield was like frosted glass, and I could see her breath when she said, “Dad told me it was probably because we had to restart so many times.” She didn’t mention that this was due to me stalling it out so much. She didn’t have to. The glare said it all. 

We pulled out onto the highway just as the snow started again. The trip takes less than five hours these days. We did it in a little over 10 with no radio and hardly a word exchanged. 

It was a silent night. And, yeah, that song is pretty much ruined for me, too.