All That Glitters Is Gold

Christmas was pretty low key and nice. I slept in a bit, but did get up with that same sort of prickly excitement in my belly that I once got with opening presents as a child. We made some breakfast, put Kickers down for a nap after he beheaded a pop-up book chicken that besides being pop-up has the added benefit of a crowing sound effect, and then lay on the couch and watched The Simpsons Movie.

We also got a taste of a white Christmas when it snowed for about an hour, never accumulating, but somehow striking that perfect Christmas string.

We then went on over to Mandy and Jason’s for Christmas dinner and more than a few holiday shots. Good dinner, good drinks, good friends, no family to thoroughly mess things up; a pretty awesome day all said and done.

Coming back to work this morning was a bit of a thorn in my side, if said thorn got to my side by being first shoved down my throat by a greased up fist and then pushed through the system by a razor wire toilet plunger until wiped up by a paycheck and daintily placed in my side. I was telling someone earlier that I have been in the workforce for nearly 20 years at this point, but school has ingrained it into me that the week between Christmas and New Years should be an absolute shut down. One thing that did sweeten the morning was a forwarded You Tube clip.

I watched an 8 year old play the outgoing solo of Stairway with an accuracy that put any number of dorm room stoners to shame. But then for hours I’ve had “Stairway to Heaven” stuck in my head – and then the opening keyboard lines to “Misty Mountain Hop”. It reminded me of a story from when I was working at a gas station back in those early days of the above mentioned years in the workforce.

I would like to tie it up and say it’s a delightful example of a Christmas miracle, but I would be a liar.

At the gas station, there was an older Iranian man named Fazol who worked the full service pumps. He was a kind man who would occasionally let his passions get the better of him, but a sweet man. One day I was listening to the wonderfully originally titled “Get The Led Out” on one of LA’s rock format stations when Fazol came in with a customer credit card. I looked him in the eyes and said, “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.”

Fazol looked at me with questioning eyes for a moment and then said, “is this Shakespeare?”

“As close as we get here Fazol,” I replied.

Fazol took it upon himself to learn this little gem, and would often enter the snack shack section of the station and do his recitation with a heavy Farsi accent and it always sounded something like, “starvay to hauven.” Oh, how that made me happy to see a sixty-something Iranian immigrant quote Led Zeppelin with such measured dedication.