t was many years ago yet separated now by parchment-thin spaces in my mind when I was a boy and, ambition-filled, marched out on Christmas day armed with cap guns and plastic grenades along with my friend Ernest to do war on the Brown twins who lived across the alley. Freezing cold it was, a sun-dogged sky, ice hard and rutted under foot, as we faced each other, young warriors bound to render each other a grizzly death, excited in our blood-lust of friendship and enemy-ship that would surely last a lifetime and beyond. I see this now with a mind-clarity that has not tarnished, has not dimmed.

Why was it that this year I was mindful of childhood pleasures, youthful fears, as I emerged from my house on a cold Christmas morning, sliding and tapping my cane, nearly crashing on ice-laden cement?

"Are you o.k.?" Mary McBaden said, who happened to be going by, a lonely soul I met frequently on my walks. She cleaned hotel rooms and she and her drunkard husband were always at battle with creditors. Her hands were worn but firm and strong, and this was not the first time she had steadied me in my dottering helplessness, hopelessness.

"Oh, Mary," I said, "it is glorious, this Christmas Day."

And truly it was, our boots crunching the new powdery snow, the two of us escaping our otherwise sanctuaries, she with her husband pouring sweet booze down his gullet and me with television-transfixed children yowling as my wife basted the turkey that was browning happily in 350 degree furor.

One thing about arctic cold - you can smell and taste with the clarity that the sound of a ringing bell has in a Tibetan mountain retreat. Mary's perfume, was it called "An Evening in Paris"? brought to mind a night in a sweaty gymnasium in a town called Left Armpit yet it carried memory of the touch of a girl's arm, her young breasts against me, my hand around her waist during the last dance.

And, once around the block Mary and I went, who was the master, who was the dog, we each must return to the kennel, hadn't we? I had mastered the ice now, I felt like one of those youth on roller blades. We had passed by the house where the Indian family lived and smelt the curry meal, like every other day. Some things do not change.

Anyone seeing us going by, she holding my arm, me talking, would have thought us a long-time married couple out for a walk, happy in our mutual reliance, her eyes, my words.

What if Mary had accompanied me on my journey from Christmas to Christmas, as vivid red and green withdrew into softer shades, shed color and then slipped entirely into the dark? Would an understanding soul have quelled and softened the bank of stormy images etched in my memory? Would elevation of loving touch and responding sound have compensated for loss of sight?

Soon, though, we had done the circuit. Time to slip back into the maelstrom.