The Year That Santa Didn't Come

It was a house built for Christmas, with two parlors, stained glass windows, fireplaces with marble mantles, and ceilings so high that you could pick the biggest tree on the lot without ever worrying about whether there would be room for the star on top.  

Built in the 1800's with the brick that St. Louis was famous for, it was a house like you see in the movie, "Meet Me in St. Louis," with a long front walk, an imposing double front door, the poetic street name of Longfellow, and a happy family inside.  For two years it had met its promise and had been the perfect backdrop for a magical Christmas that included Santa and wishes coming true.

But this year was different. This year the mom and dad in the house had separated in November and the dad had moved in with a friend until he could find a place of his own. Three and a half year old Alex, the oldest of two little girls, had grown quiet in the weeks since the separation, understanding on whatever level a three year old can understand that something in her life had changed.  Or, perhaps, just missing her dad's tickling before bedtime.  

As she left for her first overnight with her dad in early December, she was more serious than a three year old should be, carrying a Sesame Street suitcase in one hand and a tattered pink blanket in the other. She didn't see the tears falling down her mom's face as the door shut behind them. But she had seen them before. 

I was that mom. And as I shut the door, I was struck as never before that I was not going to be able to give my daughters the greatest gift that my parents gave me--the security of a loving mom and dad in the same house. For the rest of their childhood, my girls would be dividing holidays and carrying suitccases and blankets between houses. 

To Bess, who was only nine months old, the separation of mom and dad would be her normal, with not a single memory of a time when she was a part of a family that lived together and celebrated together. Alex, at three and a half, knew different.  How much she would remember in her later years of mom and dad as a team, I wasn't sure. But her recognition of a loss that year was clear. 

I made myself sick worrying which little girl would suffer worse. Was this a "better to have loved and lost" situation?  I didn't know. 

Their dad and I tried to make it as easy as we could for them and decided to celebrate Christmas togther that last year. He would come over on Christmas Eve to read our traditional Christmas stories and would sleep on the couch that night so he would be there when they woke up in the morning. And he would take care of buying the "big girl bike" that was at the top of Alex's Santa list. I couldn't help thinking that she might be wishing for something else, but without the words to know exactly what it was. 

In those few weeks before Christmas, he was slow about buying the bike and I was quick to nag. He laughed me off in that carefree way that I had once found endearing and assured me that it would be there on Chrismas morning.    

I tried to create some magic that last Christmas. We had the tallest tree we could find, and I let Alex have the blinking lights that I hated but that she loved. The Santa doorbell, with a red nose that played "Rudolph" when pushed, was hung inside where we could push it often, and the two stockings that I made with old quilts were hung low on the mantle where Alex could reach. On Christmas Eve, sleigh bells rang quietly outside the bedroom door of a little girl half asleep, but who might remember in the morning. Cookie crumbs were dropped on presents and outside the fireplace grate to show where Santa had been. Red Christmas pajamas and brightly wrapped presents completed the picture. The bike would be brought in last. He had bought it the day before and fell asleep before I had a chance to see it.

After the girls' presents had been unwrapped, Alex's dad told her that Santa had left one last present in his car.  He went out and returned with a full size, 24 inch bike, twice as tall as Alex, and fit for a twelve year old. It seems that Toys 'R Us sometimes sells out of the smaller bikes before Christmas Eve day.  

I can't pretend that there wasn't tension in the air when he brought in that bike. Or that Alex didn't notice my irritation and menacing glances directed at her dad when she couldn't climb on the bike by herself. 

But I also can't pretend that Alex didn't love that bike. In the days between Christmas and New Years, she sat on it whenever there was someone around to lift her up.   And she resisted every single suggestion I made about taking it back to Toys 'R Us--where Santa had an agreement--and exchange it for one where her feet could touch the pedals. It was only upon the urging of her dad, and his promise of pink streamers and maybe a horn, that she reluctantly climbed off and headed to the store with him. 

The year of the bike turned out to be the last Christmas we spent in the big Longfellow house. By June, the girls and I had moved to a down sized, two bedroom, Cape Cod with none of the charm or beauty of the old house. Yet, much of the magic seemed to follow us. We continued to buy big Christmas trees, even though we always worried about room for the star. We rarely missed celebrating Christmas mornings with their dad, opening only the stockings until he arrived.   Sometimes we were kept waiting longer than we liked, but we waited nonetheless.  And we learned to find joy and security in our more modest houses and non-traditional family. Only a little of the magic was gone.  

I'm  pretty sure that the year of the bike was the year that Alex quit believing in Santa. Not because of a skinny Santa or a fake beard, but because it was more important for her to believe that her dad had brought her that bike.  

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The Lonely Drive

The transfer is always hard--the part of a visit where both grandmas drive to a midpoint in Indianapolis and transfer the grandson.

This time I was on the giving side, saying goodbye in the parking lot of Starbucks and leaving quickly with little more than a grande coffee and a few broken animal cookies in a circus box. 

There was no chattering from the backseat during my drive home--the only sounds being the rattles from my car, which I worry may be ominous but tend to ignore, and the occasional voice of Rush Limbaugh as I searched for radio stations to distract me. I wasn't in the mood for outrage and kept searching until I found an appropriate sound track for my tears.  

He turned 18 months old this visit, an age that found him mimicking and adding new words at a pace rivaling how quickly I now forget them.

He arrived with just the basics--Mommy, Daddy, Abbey (his dog) and cookie.

I got blamed for that last one. He went home from my last visit saying it loud and clear. And so often that Alex visualized all my meals void of the fruits and vegetables that she had requested--a pile of cookies forming his sole food group.

I did better this time. He was transfered with a vocabulary of useful words like "up" and "down" and "train" and "truck" and "bus" and "cheese." And "achoo," which could come back to haunt me since his version sounds a little too much like asshole. Time will tell.

We enjoyed a few new treats too. Like ice cream. But I'm a quick learner. I never once used the word. He just says, "mmm, mmm good." 

And he says "nemaw," his version of grandma. 

Mmm, mmm, good, indeed.

George and Patricia

    Jim and I were at the marina at Lake Mattoon this summer getting registration stickers for a new paddleboat.  I was waiting in the car while Jim went inside to fill out the paperwork when I noticed a red pickup truck parked nearby.  An older woman (and by older, i’m meaning someone who looked like she graduated from high school at least a few years before I did) was sitting quietly in the passenger seat.  Nothing unusual about the woman, nothing unusual about a truck with a boat hitch at the marina, nothing usual about the truck itself--except that written on the side of the passenger door was simply the name “Patricia.”

    Shortly thereafter, an older man wearing bib overalls (and by older, I’m meaning someone who looked like he graduated from high school at least a few years before JIm did) came out of the marina office, climbed into the truck, and drove away, but not before he did a three point turn that enabled me to read what was clearly written on the driver’s side door of the truck.  That door simply said “George.”

    Now, I can’t swear that the couple in the red truck were Patricia and George, but I’m guessing they were.  And I don’t really know anything about the erstwhile Patricia and George.  I don’t know if they’ve been married a long time, if they live in Neoga or Mattoon, if they head out to Lake Mattoon to fish or if they just like to putter around the lake on a little johnboat.  I don’t know if they dote on a couple of grandkids or cheer for the Cardinals.  But I’m pretty sure that there are some significant ways that they are different from Jim and me.  

    Every year when Jim and I sign our income tax forms we trade off who gets to sign on the first line as Signee and who has to sign on the second line as Spouse, even though it’s been years since there’s been a W2 form with my name on it attached.  I’m guessing that Patricia and George don’t have that debate.  Every time Jim and I head to the car to drive somewhere, we look at each other and ask, ‘Want to drive?’  (And since I tend to drive a bit faster and Jim likes to read, I usually end up in the drivers seat.) I’m guessing that Patricia and George don’t have that conversation.  And I’m pretty sure that there’s not a car at Patricia and George’s home that has ‘Patricia on the driver’s side door and ‘George’ on the passenger door.

    George and Patricia reminded me more of my late parents’ generation than my own.  Although my parents didn’t have a pickup truck, and although there weren’t any names painted on the doors of their Chevy sedan, it was always a given that if they were going somewhere together that Marshall would be driving and Leslie would be in the passenger seat.

   Maybe it was that resemblance to my parents but I was touched by George and Patricia.  It’s not uncommon to see names on pickup trucks in Neoga, but those names are almost always male.  Sometimes, those names have ‘and son’ added on.  But hurrah for George, who, although he clearly wanted the drivers seat, also clearly wanted the world to know who he wanted by his side!

   As, for over fifty years, did my Dad!

Waiting In Line For an iPhone 5

I left my phone at home yesterday. Again. Not on purpose. I just forgot to put it in my purse. Which I do fairly often. It never really bothers me. 

I'll be on a plane or at a play and they'll make an announcement to turn off all mechanical devices and I'll look in my purse and be a little surprised when the phone's actually there.

Sometimes I even leave it at home on purpose. Not usually for the whole day, but when I run to the store, or walk the dog, or go out to eat.

I think it's a generational thing. Alex and Bess are never without their phones. They're lost without them. If they were at a play and saw they didn't have their phone, they'd probably go back home to get it, or borrow their seatmate's phone to call someone to bring it to them, or panic.

I'm much more casual about it."Oops, I forgot my phone."

It might make a difference if I was expecting important calls or tweets, but I rarely am.

  

And it might make a difference if my phone did all the things that most phones do these days--like play games, receive emails, take videos, write novels. Mine's a flip phone that only does calls and takes pictures. Or at least I think it takes pictures. I never actually do that. 

If you're running for President and making a speech in front of a group that you think is like-minded enough that you can say what's really on your mind, you're going to be safe with me. You'll have dissed 47% of the population before I even figure out if my phone has an audio and video function. That is, of course, if I remembered to bring it.

I think it would make a difference if I grew up thinking everybody was reachable at all times and that I should be too. Which I didn't. And don't. I grew up with land lines and pay phones and being paged at airports.

I was at an airport a couple weeks ago and heard a page, and was immediately on the alert. I wanted to connect with that other person who forgets their phone. 

Back in the day, we didn't even have voice mail or answering machines, let alone text. If you called and nobody answered, you didn't much worry about it. You just called back later. The pay phones even gave you your dime back.

These days I have to be a little more careful. Because Alex and Bess worry when I don't answer. Like the time I went shopping after work and didn't take my phone. It was 7:00 p.m., I wasn't home, and Bess was so worried she started calling people to see if they knew where I was. Even people in different states.

"Hello?!" Is this the same daughter that stayed out all night knowing that I would be waiting up and worrying on the couch?

    

I thought this was a generational thing too. Moms worry and kids think you shouldn't. It kind of makes me happy to realize that I can get payback by doing nothing other than leaving my phone at home.

    

I read some articles recently about privacy issues with cell phones. And I couldn't help but remember the days of party lines, when we actually shared phone lines with other people. Families who lived in the country shared with a whole bunch of other folks, each with their own distinctive ring. But if you wanted to listen in on what Ethel down the road was saying all you had to do was quietly pick up the handset.*

*(a handset is the piece of an antique rotary phone that you hold in your hand, speaking into the bottom half while holding the top half to your ear. It's connected to the base by a coiled cord that tangles easily, but that can be untangled by holding the end closest to the base high in the air and letting the handset dangle.) 

Just now I read about people camping out at night to get the newest version of a phone that's at least six versions away from the one that I'm perfectly happy with, but could no longer buy because it's extinct.

It kind of makes me feel that I'm a little extinct too.

It kind of makes me want to go and camp out in that line.

If I do, I think I'm going to leave my phone at home. Boy will that make Alex and Bess worry.

Memories Across Bike Rides and Continents

I rode my bike to her house for no reason other than a destination on a free afternoon and the vague hope of a dime for the Dairy Bar that was next door. Through four alleys, across the high school parking lot, then north on Second Street past three houses--a short six blocks, which I might have timed at about five minutes if I had been old enough to own a watch, which I wasn't.

She was my in-town grandma, known as "Ma," and was usually found in the garden or the field of strawberries in the first few rows of the cornfield directly South of her house. We picked strawberries and rhubarb, or onions and carrots, or sometimes just weeded and looked for garden snakes slithering through the rows. Both of us were brown from time outdoors, but she less so because of the bonnet she sometimes wore.

She fed me no-bake cookies and butter and sugar sandwiches on white bread before we sat down on the front steps and snapped peas or green beans into metal bowls for Sunday dinners. If there was no gardening to do, she let me sew on her sewing machine with the foot pedal that I couldn't reach, and which made it a two person project.

I picked switches off the weeping willow tree, whipped them through the air, and then trailed them from my handlebars as I rode back home.

My other grandma carried the full name, but lived in Tennessee, requiring a road trip and an overnight stay in a small roadside motel with a tiny swimming pool if we were lucky. We drove on two lane highways, through rolling hills and mountains that made the ride feel like a roller coaster, before reaching her house on Peach Orchard Drive--a street that rose high above the town sitting in the valley below and that felt far away from the plains of south-central Illinois.

She was waiting for us on the front porch, and I wonder now how long she must have waited in the days before cell phones could announce our imminent arrival. As she got up to greet us, she called out to me by yelling "Yeannie," never quite conquering the "J" sound of my name that was foreign to her native Norwegian tongue.

There were bowls of candy in the living room that she let us eat without limits and a box of jewelry in her bedroom that she let us play with without asking. In the morning she fed us little pancakes rolled up with jelly inside and then followed us outside and clapped with glee as we showed her the cartwheels and somersaults that we had perfected since our last visit.

She sent packages at Christmas and on birthdays and came to our house for a week's visit every spring or fall.  I took her to my Brownie meeting to talk about growing up in Norway and skiing to school and was smug knowing I would be the only one who could find Norway on the map.  

My grandson came last week. I fed him fruits and vegetables (like his mom requested), and ice cream sandwiches and cookies and happy meals (like she didn't).

We blew bubbles at parks, took walks in wagons and strollers, and went down slides at playgrounds. He stood at the top of every slide like his mom had warned, and I had to sit him down before counting "un, deux, trois," which was his signal to go. We fed goats, rode a pony, had our faces licked by puppies, and watched ducks ignore us no matter how loud we yelled for them.

We played with puzzles and blocks, found Elmo in books, and sang "Old McDonald" too many times. He chewed on books at the bookstore (leaving teeth marks for me to discover later), held on to my leg when we met new people, and climbed into my lap each night before he fell asleep.

After ten days we flew to DC to meet up with his mom and, three days later, I left him at the boarding gate waiting for a plane headed for Paris,  where he would spend a day, before boarding a second plane headed for his home on yet another continent. 

I waved good-bye at the gate and held back tears, hoping that a grandson's memories can survive across both time and continents.

                                           

Thank Goodness It's Thursday

I walked out the door the other day and my first thought was, "Oh good, it's Thursday, two crosswords in the paper today."

So much for TGIF. I work on Saturdays, so weekends don't mean a lot.

It's mostly little things that I look forward to these days. Enough rain that I don't have to water my flowers every day. I don't have a hose or an outside hook-up, so watering means a lot of trips back and forth from the sink to my little outdoor space. The flowers are nice. The watering isn't.

"The Closer" on TV on Monday nights. I looked forward to that show. I'm a little worried about having to find a replacement.

Thinking of something to write about and getting some comments.

Finding a copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey" at a garage sale. Not that this one has ever  happened. People seem to be holding on to it. I  look forward to finding a copy so I can see why.

But all those things will have to wait. For the next seven days, I have another little thing to look forward to--Flynn is coming to stay.

Alex has some training in DC and, in a complicated transfer plan, 15 month old Flynn is coming to spend some time with grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. I get him for 10 days and then spend another few days with him and Alex in DC before they fly back to Africa.

Thursday's crosswords and Monday TV will be taking a backseat for a while because I have a lot to do. I haven't been in charge of a one year old for 26 years and my apartment shows it.  

I'm terrified, I'm excited, I'm putting away all sharp edged tables. I'm moving cleaning supplies. Razors on the edge of the bathtub? What was I thinking? They get put up. How high can a one year old reach? Top shelf behind a closed door seems safe.

But why don't I have safety strips in the bathtub?

They go on my list. It's getting long. Diapers, snacks, divided plate, sippie cup, fruit, food that someone with four teeth can eat, wipes... 

I quit looking for "Fifty Shades of Grey" and started buying toys at garage sales. I went grocery shopping and bought juice instead of soda.

I mopped my kitchen floor. Not for the first time, but I'll probably do it again this week, and that would be a record.

I'm pretty sure the day will come when I'm ready to sit back and say, "Oh good, it's Thursday, two crosswords in the paper today." 

When I can breath and quit seeing everything in terms of breakable or non, potentially harmful or safe. When a day that isn't completely filled up with thoughts of a one year old will be something to look forward to.

Monday nights without "The Closer"? I'm not worried about them any more. I'm going to have pictures to go through, furniture to move back, good times to look back on.

Although I'll probably wish I remembered where I hid those razors? 

Cleaning Out My Memory

I'll be talking to Bess, and we'll be having a nice conversation, and then she'll ask me what I did yesterday.

Yesterday? I have no clue what I did yesterday.

But when I was six we went to Santa Claus, Indiana and rode the....Damn! What's the word I'm looking for? I think it starts with a "c." "C-o" maybe.

This is going to drive me crazy! I'm off to the dictionary. There are 44 pages of "c-o" words in Webster's Collegiate. All small print. Still, I can handle it. My finger scrolls down the list and then stops. I've forgotten what I was looking for.

I remember when I was ten and decided to read all the words in the dictionary. I got as far "asparagus" and stopped. I hated asparagus. It was mushy, and an ugly olive green color, and had these strings that stuck in your teeth.

But I don't need to remember that! I love asparagus now. All I need to remember is not to overcook it and not to buy it in a can. Delete, delete, delete!

I need to delete all this useless information rolling around in my memory so I have room for what I did yesterday.

I don't need to know where all the McDonalds with playgrounds are located in St. Louis.  I don't live in St. Louis anymore and my youngest kid is 27. Time to delete.

And, yes, Clinton brought some shame to the presidency. I remember all the details. Everyone else seems to have forgotten it.Why shouldn't I? Delete.

How to diagram sentences? Pfft! I could do it in my sleep. All the while remembering Mrs. Elliott standing in front of the class in her jersey dress telling us how important it was. But, really, I've become quite comfortable with dangling participles. Delete.

My first grade teacher's name? I don't need to remember that. I can always make one up. If a classmate remembers it differently and I stick to my guns, they'll just blame it on their own bad memory. Delete.

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Delete. Delete. Delete. I don't want to hear that one ever again.

How good the chicken at Chick-fil-A tastes? I'm pretty sure I can delete. Because it's never going to taste that good again.

All those slogans from the '60's like "Give Peace a Chance" and "Make Love Not War"? They don't seem to be of much use these days. Delete.

And while I'm at it, I need to get rid of all those words like "neat" and "groovy" and "bummer" and "nifty." When's the last time I used them? Well, okay, I'll keep "neat." The rest go.

Things are looking clearer already. I'm pretty sure the word I was looking for was "colossal." A few more deletes and I might even remember that I went shopping yesterday.

Whoa! That came out of nowhere--winded right through all that useless information and landed on center stage.

If only I could remember if I bought anything and where I put it.

Delete, delete, delete....