Makeshift Christmas

Imagination stood in for Christmas wrap this year.

“Sit down,” I instructed my various children and my new son-in-law, “and shut your eyes!”

Then I exited stage left, grabbed their bundles of unwrapped presents from the spare bedroom, and returned to the living room where one after the other followed instructions and sat with eyes closed and hands face up on their lap to catch the goods.

“Okay,” I said, “now just imagine there’s a big bow! And shiny ribbon! And gorgeous wrapping paper, all sparkly and shiny! And when you tear that off, there’s a box inside. Then you take the top off the box, and imagine there’s some tissue paper! And you rustle it and rustle it, looking for what’s under it, and finally…”

That’s when I’d hand them their unwrapped sweater…or gloves…or flannel-lined pants…or scarf. We laughed, I got by without a nervous breakdown trying to find two extra hours for present decorating I didn’t have time for, and there was no cleanup of tumbleweed sized balls of cast-off wrapping paper. I guess there’s an upside to this after all.

It’s been that kind of a Christmas. Never tried the “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach to holiday wrap before, but hey, they say necessity is the mother of invention.

Two months ago I couldn’t have foreseen that my eighty-five year old crippled mother would break her leg and need to go to a nursing home for three months, that my eighty-five year old father would need to follow her because of his own serious health problems, that my—ahem, never mind how old—godmother would suddenly wind up in the hospital only a month later in serious pain and distress, and that my father would then deteriorate suddenly and require hospitalization himself.

Two months ago I was still envisioning the kind of Christmas I wrote about two years ago in Tale of the Christmas Axes. The kind of Christmas that evokes echoes of Norman Rockwell with the seasonal decorations around the house and garland around the banister and the tree festooned from top to bottom with hand-embroidered ornaments and a glorious angel atop, a mistletoe ball hanging in the living room, family around the dinner table for a fabulous meal, Christmas music playing softly in the background. I’d even found the crèche this year that had been lost for the past two holidays.

But then life got in the way, and a few thousand miles got put on the car running back and forth again and again to my hometown of Chicago to deal with the unfolding dramas, and Christmas shopping and Christmas baking and Christmas planning and Christmas cards went right out the window. My younger son and I had managed to pick out a live tree a few weeks earlier and get it into the house and upright with the assistance of his lovely girlfriend, but with less than twelve hours left until Christmas officially arrived, the only thing the tree had on it was a few strands of lights. And bah humbug, I was about ready to leave it that way.

But somehow things went right anyway. By the time it was afternoon on Christmas Eve, the kids had come home and the ornament boxes got dragged out of the closet, and then some of our favorite decorations made it onto the branches through no effort of mine. While a new fire crackled in the grate, they then set to rolling out the batch of cookie dough I’d made the day before, and the usual irreverence and laughter and the smell of coffee lit up the kitchen as they came up with new demented ways to decorate the axe-shaped cookies and their “victims.” Yes, we have Christmas stars and bells and pine trees and Santas. But we also ended up with a gingerbread man wearing a Speedo, a couple of Christmas giraffes, some Christmas pineapples, a pirhana, and a cookie decorated like a liquor bottle.

Then after the cookies were baked we raced through passing out my gifts before driving over to a family gift exchange, because I knew I’d be on the road to Chicago and back on Christmas day, visiting at hospitals and nursing homes and basically crashing my cousin’s delicious family dinner on the way home. Not the best timing in the world, but it was the only day in the week that the weatherman could guarantee I’d have dry pavement and clear skies for two hundred fifty miles. I drove home in the dark to an empty house, since the kids had spent the day with their dad. Christmas dinner at my house is going to be a day late. I hope the chicken in wine sauce a few days ago is still good.

Taking inventory of this year, there are a few things we missed. The percentage of ornaments is a little thin this year…though the kids still managed to get the strands of wooden “cranberries” threaded through the branches. We’re missing the angel and the mistletoe ball, the crèche never made it out of storage, and I can’t begin to imagine getting out the garland. Never bought a wreath for the front door, left the big electric outdoor Santa down in the basement, and the singing moose that chimes “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” is nowhere to be seen. We skipped the tinsel on the tree too.

But we had warmth, and love, and laughter, and delight, and once again, Christmas cookies shaped like little bloody axes. As for the rest of the traditional things that got left undone, well…

We can always imagine them too.

"Alles klar"

I thought briefly about packing the shotgun, but the car was nearly full and I was exhausted with 120 miles yet to drive. Having any sort of a weapon in a house with an elderly ex-soldier with dementia issues never sounds like the brightest of ideas during daylight, no matter how "dodgy" the neighborhood. I also left the chain saw behind. Not that I'm sure I couldn't find a use for it...

The car was packed to the brim with my vacuum cleaner, the tool kit (with hex wrenches AND flat head screwdrivers), the cordless drill, extra plates and silverware, clothes for colder weather than the night I'd blasted down to Chicago like a bat out of hell, extra movies on DVD, my latest Oprah magazine, winter jacket, gloves and, of course, my Swiss Army knife which had already been pressed into use. And don't forget the plain black suit and heels, equally appropriate for either a funeral or a court appearance. Next stop, a nearby hardware store for a replacement part for an ancient broken doorknob, a fillup at the local gas station where regular unleaded goes for fifty cents less a gallon than it does in Chicago, a pitstop at Starbucks for some caffeine and a comfort zone, and a cruise through the racks of Best Buy looking for DVDs of Lawrence Welk and the Jackie Gleason show. Didn't find 'em, but at least I tried.

When I finally pulled out of the driveway, the late afternoon sky was starting to darken, heralding temps below freezing just ahead. The setting sun blazed gold from behind swaths of grey and silver clouds to the west, while the three-quarter moon glared brightly like a chunk of ice in the clear eastern sky. Squadrons of geese flew overhead, and a hawk soared over the interstate, utterly unconcerned with the myriad human dramas unfolding below him at seventy miles an hour on six lanes of traffic.

I was headed back to Chicago, my home town, for the worst of all possible reasons. The first frantic dash had been a few days earlier. One minute I was sitting at my desk at work, pushing my way through a neverending pile of paper. The next my cell phone rang with the news that my elderly mother, already in a wheelchair most of the time, had fallen and badly fractured a femur. My equally elderly father, incredibly feeble and showing symptoms of both Parkinson's and cognitive impairment, needed full-time care and supervision while the medical crisis unfolded.

And so I went, and waited, and talked with doctors and social workers and administrators and nurses, and tried to reassure my father that all would eventually be well. This last was a Herculean task. He and my mother had shared the same apartment for thirty years, and his anxiety was palpable.

In the coming days, I tag teamed him with my mother's two sisters--one with a game leg and a psychotic Dalmatian, the other, younger, married to a former firefighter who, in his eighties, proved to be the Rock of Gibraltar every evening as we showed up at their house for dinner and a movie like orphans in a storm. With my father's limited mobility and attention span, we've watched a lot of TV and movies. Took in Gunsmoke episodes, laughed at the Three Stooges, guffawed at the mud-splattered antics of George Clooney and his football team in "Leatherheads." I tried hard to find movies in German, his native tongue, but turned up only two. One, "Schultze Gets the Blues" was so slow paced we switched it off. But not before he surprised me by singing along in German with the characters in a scene where some miners were being congratulated on their retirement.

We also watched Wolfgang Petersen's wrenching WWII epic "Das Boot" again, which we had first shared last summer when he visited. Seeing it again reinforced my twin beliefs that (1) the movie is a genuine classic with a thrilling, haunting musical score, a "must see" for film buffs even with only English subtitles, and (2) the actor playing the stoic, nuanced submarine commander, Jurgen Prochnow, is the most compelling actor I've ever seen on screen. And that includes Russell Crowe in "Gladiator," Viggo Mortenson in "Hidalgo," and Cary Grant in just about anything.

Just to get out of the house one day for a destination that didn't involve the hospital, I loaded him into the car and we visited the Garfield Park Conservatory, reveling in a riot of exotic chrysanthemums and bizarre succulents and lush foliage. We stopped for a while by the indoor pond populated by a colorful variety of ornamental carp and decorated with enormous glass waterlilies by the artist Dale Chihuly whose thousands of colorful glass flowers also famously grace the ceiling of the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. I restrained myself from physically yanking the trio of folks seated in the only bench near the water, and reminded myself that I was lucky to be here at all.

We drove through Humboldt Park in the old neighborhood, where I used to bike and swing and sled as a child and he and I searched for lost marbles on our walks in the woods. We cruised past the fieldhouse and the park's formal gardens and pool flanked by the pair of magnificent bronze bison originally designed for the 1893 World's Fair by Edward Kemeys, the same sculptor who created the signature giant lions guarding the staircase of Chicago's Art Institute. As we drove through the park, he recalled the neighborhood bakery, Rosers, and so we stopped there too, buying a loaf of rye bread and a butter coffee cake smothered with icing. Our drives here and there were often spent just listening to music, but sometimes he would give me a short impromptu lesson in German. I would have to lean close to hear him, because his speech is no longer clear.

My mother continues to improve, and the next days are fraught with uncertainty as to the future for both. But every night, as I have since this crisis began, I tuck him into bed with the words "Guten nacht, mein Papa." Then I kiss him on the cheek and tell him "alles klar." Roughly translated, it means "everything's fine." He smiles and closes his eyes and I turn out the lights.

Alles klar. At least for this night.

Fall Colors

Love in Wood and Wax

The words that made my heart leap, not to mention my adrenaline surge, weren’t “I love you.” They were something more along the lines of “Watch it, she’s coming down!”

I loosened the tension on the nylon rope I’d been pulling on, and made it a priority to get out of the way of the forty foot dead tree falling into the front yard. The man who inhabits a lot of acreage in my heart had just notched the tree with his chain saw, and after a few more hours of hard and dirty work (mostly his but I kept up my end by dragging shards and broken branches to the “burn pile”) it would be turned into firewood to keep me warm the next winter.

My heart glowed…and not just because I was standing next to a bonfire.

I laugh these days at how my definition of romance has changed since I was in my twenties, and what meets the test for a token of affection.

Back in the day long ago when I knew much less about what I didn’t know, the language of love followed a standard script, and the symbols were equally standard issue. Flowers, of course. Candy, of course. Jewelry was always appreciated. Perfume…well that was more an individual choice, but it was the thought that counted. Oh, and don’t forget dinner and a movie. The fancier and more expensive the restaurant, the bigger the thrill.

That was quite a while ago. Going off script has been so liberating!

The man in my life and I tally three ex-spouses and five kids between us, along with a cat and a dog (both mine), and three small fish that live in a tiny aquarium on his kitchen stove island. There are jobs, and bills, and responsibilities, and run-of-the-mill irritations, and heartaches we could have never imagined when we were walking out the high school door in our caps and gowns.

But along the way, we learned to see ordinary things with new eyes, and feel much the richer for it.

That lesson hit me with the force of a hammer one day last summer. My new subcompact car was still as shiny as a new penny when I was informed by my love that according to the manly code of car maintenance, it needed to be properly polished and waxed. I arched one eyebrow, but picked up a wet sponge and started slinging suds without demur. This is a man who owns not only his own buffer, he owns two.

Hours later, as midnight approached, he ruefully concluded that we’d bitten off more than we could properly chew for the evening, and handed me the keys to his F-150 for the drive to work the next day. He’d have the job finished by next evening, he thought.

When I drove back to his place a couple of days later, he was just finishing up. Even from a distance he looked exhausted. My approach was masked by the whirr of the shop vac as he whisked the last infinitesimal bits of dust from the car’s interior. I stared at the car, absolutely stunned. It gleamed like a sapphire in the sun, and I could see the knife-edged reflection of overhanging branches and the subtle shading of clouds above in its mirror finish. The car hadn’t looked nearly this good when I drove it away from the showroom. I could put makeup on in its reflection.

I couldn’t have been more moved if he’d surprised me with a truckload of orchids and a pair of tickets to Hawaii. And therein was an awakening.

We don’t feel compelled to follow much of the old script anymore. Dinner and a movie is often chicken breast or pork tenderloin perfectly grilled over charcoal in his back yard or mine, followed by a movie on DVD. Sometimes we go lowbrow, sometimes we shoot for an Oscar winner, and half the time we just fall asleep on the sofa halfway through the movie, too tired from the rest of the week to keep our eyes open past eleven.

I watch a lot more fireflies in the evening. Viewed from the edge of the woods as twilight comes, they twinkle and gleam like sparkling gems on a dark sea, and there’s a sense of mystery and surprise with every tiny light.

I get flowers often, cut from his garden, and they always make me smile. But even more, every day I step out into rose gardens flanking my front door that he planted and mulched last year when we were first starting to date. And as I walk along an Arizona sandstone footpath leading me through coneflowers and delphiniums and coreopsis and daylilies that replaced a field of crushed rock and plastic, remembering a shared experience of dirt and sweat and shredded cedar and a lot of digging, I think every day, “this is the garden that love built.”

This year, I don’t know if I’ll be getting a box of fancy chocolate for Sweetest Day.

But I’m pretty sure that either in my fireplace or in a bonfire in the yard, we’ll be burning some of that firewood, watching the flames dance and the sparks float upwards in the dark. And somehow that seems so much sweeter.

Emergency Makeup Kit

I've laughed over the years--and been laughed at too, usually by one man or another--at the thought that I've got what I call "emergency makeup kits" stockpiled around. They're stocked mostly with tiny makeup sample from bonus times at cosmetic counters--and bagged in one of the myriad colorful little "bonus bags" they came in.

There are emergency supplies, and then there are emergency supplies. My kids have also snickered at the size of the box full of "road emergency" stuff I usually keep in the back of the car simply because it's so big and ridiculously thorough. Shovel, first-aid kit, spare shoes, jacket, gloves, scarves, candles, matches, light bars...and don't forget the Swiss Army Knife sitting in the map holder. This set of gear takes up more than half the car's storage space in back.

The makeup kits are dainty by comparison, but they function as a safety net if I ever need to drop everything while grocery shopping and go meet the Queen of England. To date, I've got three. One's in a drawer in my office, one's in my locker at the Sheriff's Department next door in case I ever get motivated enough to go exercise again over the lunch hour, (ha! ha!), and one's in the glove box of my car.

I didn't foresee I was really going to need one just a few weeks ago. I hadn't gotten any calls from Buckingham Palace, and as for exercise...we'll let that one lie. But halfway through the morning at my desk I found a voicemail from my younger daughter telling me that for a bunch of reasons--none of which she was happy with--what would have been her last night at home before moving across the country was off. It hit me like a two-by-four, and it wasn't long before I was just a puddle of tears.

I'd seen her just a few days before, but had skipped a big "goodbye" because I knew I'd be seeing her, her boyfriend, the grandpug and the spare cat for an overnight in just a few days. Gave her a quick peck on the cheek, a wave and a "see you soon!" The menu was planned for her favorites, I was going to bake brownies as a surprise, you know how it goes. And now that happy evening had vanished, leaving a very big hole. A cop I work with passed by my office door just as I began to dissolve, and ended up on one knee beside me, patting my back to comfort me as I gulped out my sorrow and distress. The perfect man...but he knows who he is and so we won't embarrass him here any further.

I fled the building sobbing, and drove down to the harbor nearby, where the cold wind off Lake Michigan cooled a lot of things down. A half hour of solitude and mourning later, it was finally time to get back work. I reached in the glove box and found the makeup bag. Moisturizer, eye-liner pencil, eye shadow and brow highlighter, blush, lipstick, perfume. All in itty bitty sizes, with itty bitty applicators, along with an itty bitty mirror. I did the best I could with this Lilliputian repair kit.

But by the time I parked at the courthouse and walked back into the building to spend the rest of the afternoon in court, I had my game face on.

I could always cry it off again on the way home.

Breathing space

It was my second trip to the lakefront in under six hours. The first was a lunch-hour dash to the nearby harbor, slipping into the “emergency sneakers” I keep under my desk for just such occasions. I combined it with a trip to the gas station and a "drive through" at the post office with a quick hike along the breakwater, dodging patches of wet seaweed and fresh puddles for some exercise and a couple of stretches before heading into court for the afternoon. One of the many reasons I love where I work...but still, just a cruelly short taste of the magic of the shore.

On the way home, though, a phone call from my son about a violin lesson made me realize that he wouldn’t expect warmed up spaghetti leftovers until at least eight. And so, as the exit to the state park on Lake Michigan loomed near, I recognized that the evening was warm and it was yet daylight and I had still had the chance to go barefoot at the beach and not get frostbite. Carpe diem. Who knew when I’d have another opportunity as effortless and spontaneous as this one?

I put on the turn signal and exited stage right, leaving the interstate behind in favor of a two lane country road to heaven. It’s that time of year again. Squirrels and chipmunks busily gather and store nuts for winter, guys who love engines start tuning them up and getting them ready to face the cold weather, and I just try to stockpile as many glorious days in the waning sunlight as I can to tide me through the coming months of short, dark, snow-filled winter. Bah humbug!

I paid my five dollar entrance fee for an hour-long pass to the state park. Judging by the fact I still had my annual 2007 park sticker on the windshield, a full year had gone by since I’d been here last. The past year's been a pretty wild ride. A handful of bikers and hikers were just leaving as I pulled into the closet parking stall at the beach. I peeled out of my shoes, grabbed a blanket from the back seat, and left the cell phone in the car.

It was just me and the seagulls. The soft, white sand was crisscrossed by hundreds of their webby footprints. The gulls gathered at the edge of the water, facing into the wind with a rank-and-file military precision. Now that Labor Day has come and gone, humans are scarce on the beach these days. I set the blanket down in the lee of a stand of beach grass, and dug my toes into the cool sand. The water was a shimmering, iridescent blue taffeta with silvery grey undertones. White waves and cross currents broke in airy froth that caught the setting sun. The horizon was broken only by a small sailboat in the distance. I still had a half-cup of coffee from Starbucks left, and the warmth I felt on my insides as I swallowed made for a nice balance with the cool breeze off the water. The seagulls watched me but kept their distance, apparently able to discern that a coffee cup alone without a picnic basket beside it would yield no prizes worth taking flight or scrapping over.

I sat, hypnotized as usual, by the rise and fall of the waves and the low, constant roar of their crashing. Like listening to the world breathe. No easier way that I know of to let your mind break free from the worries and burdens that usually dog every routine step. I think growing up in Chicago has a lot to do with it. When your fondest childhood memories involve sand and waves and sunlight and the smell of Coppertone, I don't think you ever lose that primordial hunger for the nearness of endless water and a horizon without limits.

The shadows from the woods behind me eventually lengthened and overcame the shore, and the whitecaps no longer gleamed brightly in the sun. I didn't need a watch to know it was finally time to go. I drained the last of my coffee, shook off the blanket and made my back to my car. It was still the only vehicle in the lot, looking like a shiny bright blue toy in an acre of striped asphalt.

As I left, I picked up a few white seagull feathers to take home to the cat. I’m sure he would have preferred a live mouse…but at least this would smell like some real prey. Then I nosed the car out of the park and back toward civilization, smiling all the way home.

Harley Davidson 105th!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...