Spring in Alberta

(A Christmas Story)

On Christmas Eve of 1930, Old Man Pone was abducted by Aliens. That’s not exactly what happened, just the best way to say it these days. Oh they were creatures from another world, sure enough. But to Pone, when he wandered off sober as a judge from the Holiday Festivities, the “Aliens” were just a couple of friendly blokes trying to fix their truck. Or whatever it was. The party was still young, songs being sung.

Pone was planning some whiskey for the party, too expensive to buy; but the still blew up, the “tool shed” caught fire. Emmy Lou stopped it in time but the flames got their lick in too. Pone’s friends and neighbors buried Emmy the first week in December. Nobody ever said anything about the missing liquor, just another Depression money-making scheme gone bad. Hope and youth were all they had, patching truth like an old tire.

Pone came home late the day of the fire. The company “leased” Pone a truck for peddling to hungry families far from town. Pone talked the bakery into “advancing” unsold leftovers. If his “customers” couldn’t pay, he owed the company anyway. So Pone walked home broke, the still gone up in smoke, and Emmy was in bed, her face all bubbles and burns. You could say Pone got old for Emmy that night.

The medicine that could have saved Emmy was not known to this day, and Emmy wouldn’t have cared anyway. Sad old Pone left the party alone in a blinding snowstorm, on his way back to the Shed he and Emmy built during their honeymoon when the “stock market” crashed. That’s where he met them Space Fellers who took him on a ride, asked questions, fixed him up, and brought him home to 2030. Oh Holy Night!

That’s right; Pone had been gone a hundred years. The ground around Redcliff just above Medicine Hat was bare and brown… and it was warm for a Christmas Day in Alberta. Funny thing, the world Pone came back to wasn’t that much different than the one he left, but it seemed like a repentant Scrooge with the wind whispering, “I’m not the World I was.” A century of war and greed were unknown to Pone.

Still, these new times were Hard Times, and the young folks needed someone who knew how to fix up, patch up, make do or do without. It was the “good times” that almost killed everybody, made ‘em strong on the outside, weak on the inside. They needed stories, too, and Old Man Pone was good for that. You could say a beautiful blue planet had washed herself in tears. But no one says that now, after all those years.

You could say them Space Fellers leaped from our own oceans millions of years ago, that the Universe was a laughing woman. Old Pone saw the star, heard the laughter, and in the days to come he’d say with a wink that he was going to walk out onto that prairie and catch up with his little Emmy Lou; she’s only a smile away. You could even say that on that Christmas Eve in 1930, Old Man Pone met the Angels and came home.

The Almighty has Her own Porpoises.