Oh, Christmas Tree

We went to get a Christmas tree today, just my son and me. It was a last minute decision after running a quick errand. The tent was there and it seemed the logical thing to do. His sister was at home, but we didn’t think she would mind if we grabbed a quick Fraser Fir.

Upon entering the tent at our local home improvement store, we were immediately approached by a guy working who offered to assist us. He was young-ish, maybe mid to late twenties. Rugged and dark, he seemed out of place in the tropics. He definitely looked more the part of a lumberjack. I told him I wanted a tree that was short and stout, full-bodied. He pulled a fresh tree off the truck and unwound it from its orange plastic webbing.

My son seemed a little hesitant, as the tree was unveiled. “I don’t know, mom, “ he said, scrutinizing the tree. “Do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” I told him weakly. I wasn’t really convinced, either. It really wasn’t as full as what I had hoped for. I had entered that tent with a different vision. When I thought of the tree in my living room, this the first year I would have to drag it in the house alone and decorate it without a partner, I wanted something really alive and jubilant, as if to distract the kids from the sorrow that filled the house, exaggerated even more during the holidays. In their father’s absence this year, I at least wanted to have festive beauty and perhaps some new traditions, as if to make up for the lack of togetherness.

“That works,” I told Paul Bunyan, nodding at the tree. He took the fir over to trim it and clean it up. I was already having anxiety about the stand, and voiced this concern. I was told I could have brought the stand with me and he would have happily secured the base for me.  I was disappointed I didn’t think to do this to begin with.

We went inside the main store to pay. A man checking out at the register across from us yelled over to me, “You came in and grabbed a tree as quickly as we did. You were in and out of there.”

“Yes, well, I am usually a woman who knows what I want,” I responded to him, still not completely convinced of my purchase, but mentally trying to convince myself everything was going to be okay. I was already having buyer’s remorse, thinking of the pathetic top of our tree, the way it feathered out into nothing and was a little crooked where the star should stand. It seemed a little sad to me. Sparse. Broken.

Back to the lot the boy and I went and Mountain Man had our Charlie Brown tree trimmed and leveled off at the bottom. “Will that work for your stand? Do you need more trimmed off?” It took everything in me to keep a straight face. Clearly, this man didn’t know he was talking to someone who had never wrestled a tree stand before. Someone had always done it for me.

“I guess we will find out, “ I laughed nervously, with increasing anxiety about getting this tree to stand upright on its own. Solo. This was supposed to be the beginning of Christmas joy, but I was dreading the initial display of symbolic noel. I just didn’t know if I could pull it off. Alone.

Once home and more than ninety minutes later, the sad little tree was still not stable in her stand. She wanted to be content, but she leaned this way and that, unable to find her footing no matter how I adjusted the screws. Her trunk was becoming seemingly increasingly agitated by the adjustments, scarred now from repeated attempts to set her straight and make it right. I finally walked away from the operation to tend to kids and dinner and a much-needed run, but I promised the little people we would decorate it tonight. The house was fragrant with lovely pine as we left the house to lose ourselves in other obligations.

Hours later and bedtime looming dangerously in the future, I willed myself back to the tree. Several strings of lights that wouldn’t illuminate called for a detour to Target and brought new clear bulbs and more red ornaments to adorn the tree, a tree I still wasn’t sold on. I couldn’t imagine any number of beautiful ornaments disguising its unhappy appearance, but I was committed. I had chosen it, signed my name on the line. I didn’t want to disappoint the kids. I had to make it work.

It still wasn’t stable in the stand, much as I tinkered and thumped at the trunk. After two near misses and a boy joking “Timber!” one too many times, I reluctantly gave in and texted their father.

“Will you please come help me with the tree stand?”

His response was immediate, “Sure. On my way.”

I hated myself for reaching out to him. Maybe it was an ego thing and I didn’t want to throw in the towel or maybe I felt like I was taking advantage of him, but I did not want to ask for his help. I had wanted to get that tree up and lit all by myself in an act of independence this first year. In an act of courage (or defiance, not sure which), I wanted to set a brave example for the kids. I wanted them to see that life can go on and it can continue—maybe not as we knew it before, but still full of promise and hope and beauty. I didn’t want to buckle and call on their father.

He arrived in less than ten minutes, and I was ever grateful to see him.

We worked together, he and I, but I was becoming increasingly frustrated. Thirty minutes of adjusting the tree, it seemed he had the same opinion I did. “You know, I think that’s a good as it’s going to get. I think it will be okay, it’s just not totally stable.”

I collapsed on the bench near the tree and began to whimper. “But that is not good enough for me. What if it falls and the ornaments break? What if the dog knocks it over? What if it hurts a child?”

In an act of diffusing the situation, my son came over and offered his father the stocking that read his name, the one I made for him our first year married, “Dad, do you want to take your stocking to your house?” My lower lip began to quiver and I suddenly felt numb.

“Sure, buddy. Thanks.”

And this is where my heart really began to understand the gravity of the situation. I felt as empty as that hollow sock that hung lifeless in my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s hand. I opened my mouth to protest, wanting to make it all go away and say that his dad could, of course, leave his stocking with the other three for the sake of cohesiveness, but I stopped. It wasn’t going to work that way. They no longer belonged together. As much as I wanted four stockings hanging from a fireplace, it seemed the obvious choice to offer Marc his stocking to take to his house, painful as it was.

“Why don’t I take this tree and go run out and get you a new one? You can start over with a new one?” He said to me. My heart almost stopped beating with the heavy sadness that filled it. Here, a man I could no longer envision a future with was offering to take the lopsided and defunct tree and go get me another one to replace it. He was willing to assume the sad and sickly tree. I wanted to evaporate into the thin air that I couldn’t seem to pass over my lungs in that moment. Most certainly, I must be The Grinch who had stolen all of the Christmas cheer.

“No, that’s okay. You don’t have to get me a new one. I’ll figure it out tomorrow,” I said.

And then the voice of reason came from my twelve-year-old, “I think everyone is tired and we should just hang it all up for the night.” She was right and we all agreed. But her father still insisted on taking the problematic tree away, so he dragged it to his car and loaded it up, needles littering the living room as they went.

And from the doorway of my house, I watched him load the tree I couldn’t make work and drive away. The needles it left behind felt like broken pieces of my heart as I swept them out the door, hoping that somehow if I cleared them outside, so, too, would the ache in my heart blow away.

I shuffled the kids off to bed and sent him a text.

 “Thank you for taking the tree. I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it work.”

And I meant it—for the tree and so much more.

Photos of My Father

When I was a child, I thought my father was invincible. He wasn’t a man of large stature, quite the contrary, in fact. On his best days, he may have been 5’9”, but his gregarious personality always gave him at least another five inches in height. His lopsided grin would light up a room and his outlandish stories were larger than life. My father didn’t walk as a typical man. He pranced about in a way everyone just knew he loved life.

My dad was a landscape architect in Los Angeles. He kept a lot of high-end clients and big name Hollywood-type jobs, but he would joke that he was just a fieldworker when he surveyed sites for large commercial projects. His olive skin would bake to a golden bronze for the duration of our Southern Californian summers, making him the envy of middle-aged men his age; they were slaves to their indoor cubicles while my father wandered endless properties of The Santa Monica Mountains. I can remember very concrete characteristics about my dad, like his soft, feathery, sand-colored hair and his gray-blue eyes, stormy as the Pacific Ocean on overcast winter days.

My mom said she fell in love with my father for his sense of humor, and my earliest memories of him are punctuated with silliness. He was the one to give us horseback rides through our seventies orange shag carpet, runaway wagon rides down the steep hill behind our house, wrestle us to the floor—tickling us until we begged, “Uncle”, and the one to create nonsense in the kitchen for the sake of entertainment while we ate our meals up at the bar. My dad loved the attentive audience, I am sure of it, but as a kid, I was certain we were the center of his world. He had four kids, but my father tended to each of us as though we were his only.

He had a size 9 shoe and wore an impeccable manicure, though he never did his nails. I remember thinking he had thoughtful hands. They were never idle, and distinctly purposeful in their actions, both work and play. He always wrote in capital block letters, meticulous as a typewriter. I think it was all of his years over a drafting table that made him seem like he was artistically sketching, even if just jotting down measurements of something around the house that needed fixing.  I still associate the smell of Sharpie pens with him because I dare say my father knew few other writing utensils.

 I remember my father’s mannerisms, like wincing while eating food so spicy, his eyes would bleed tears of protest. “Tom!” my mother would scold him, “why do you insist on using so much horseradish/salsa/jalapeno sauce/red pepper/Tabasco?” The offending condiment was subject to change, depending on the dish de jour.  He absolutely loved Mexican food and made no apologies for his laughter over said suffering at the dinner table.

I think of him sitting at that dining room table, poring over the morning newspaper, with his forehead cradled in one hand, while the other casually balanced an unraveling cigarette.  Those were the days when smoking was still widely practiced and highly acceptable even indoors. Even in California. I can vividly picture the looming cloud of tobacco exhaust scribbled around his head with the morning sunlight streaming through our oversized picture window. For as foul as the thought of that habit is to me now, smoking was somehow synonymous with my father, and I likened the smell of it in his hair and clothes with an immortal man.

Turned out my father wasn’t immortal at all. He was very much human. He died unexpectedly of heart disease at 54 years young. A track star in adolescence, and while not the portrait of health, my dad wasn’t exactly the heart attack victim profile. He was never even slightly overweight, though his often eighty-hour workweek didn’t agree with his blood pressure. His sudden death in sleep was shocking and left me void of acceptance and understanding for a very long time. I was twenty-three when he died, but overnight I found myself feeling like a lost child.

My father wasn’t a perfect man. He made many mistakes and I hated him for the years that followed my parents’ divorce. In life, it’s so easy to keep a record of wrongs against people, but when they die, it seems we manage to only remember their really beautiful qualities. I think knowing what I know now about life and love and marriage and mistakes, it’s so much easier to forgive a man I wanted to forget for so long and instead keep the precious few memories I have of him to honor all of the things he did right.

As an adult, I find so many of the memories of my father have faded. It was never something I intended to happen…they just sort of got away from me as new experiences began to occupy the forefront of my brain and the older ones were slowly filed into the dark, less assessable compartments. It was too painful to think that my father had lost his invincible status and easier to just think of him as invisible, out in the frayed periphery of my past life but no longer in the forefront.

It’s been fifteen years since my father passed away, and I still cannot bring myself to rummage through old photos of him. It’s actually only very recently that I can willingly retrieve some of the memories I have of him from my childhood.  Somehow the pictures of him in my head are less painful than those on paper.  Perhaps I still want to immortalize him in my own way, not as the camera depicted him. I don’t think of his soft, sandy hair slowly giving way to gray or his weather-worn face wearing any wrinkles. Photos would betray the vibrant picture I keep of my youthful father in my head.

I know that one day I will want to go through the old photo albums for a more authentic story of my father and I will be willing to share the photographs of the grandfather my children came up shy of meeting by only a handful of years. I will use those pictures to illustrate the hilarity of him picnicking with us on the beach in Malibu, making pistachio pudding as he danced on the avocado green linoleum kitchen floor, and building intricate clubhouses in our wooded backyard. And if my kids ever ask, I am going to tell them to take an abundance of pictures of their own father, because we know no man lives forever, and the details of his life—no matter how noble or insignificant—inevitably erode over time.

It's the Little Things

This morning I ran with Barry. We decided to run about 90 minutes, so we headed north for a change, weaving in and out of costal homes with their perfectly manicured lawns. When we got back to South Beach where we began, we walked to the ocean to take a dip. I was cold and the ocean looked angry, so I voiced my apprehension. The wind was blowing a fierce current and the chop was out of control. The sand, however, was soft and peaceful under my bare toes, and there were seagulls as far as the eye could see lined up to absorb the sun’s goodness in the cool morning air.

It truly was picturesque. My running partner even commented on the light’s perfection on the horizon with the backdrop of the first of the day’s fishermen casting offshore. I told him I might skip the swim. After calling me some names, he ran ahead and jumped in. Knowing I would regret not going, I reluctantly walked to the water’s edge, anticipating the bite that would greet my body upon first getting wet. He shamed me with more of his stupid sarcasm for not getting in with more enthusiasm. Almost without thinking, I sprinted into the water and dove under the first big set that came our way. It took my breath away, but it was exhilarating to be tossed around, tumbled in the greenest water I have seen yet this season, because I knew I was alive. If you told me I was a mermaid, I would have believed you.

“It’s really not that bad,” I said, now grinning ear to ear.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

We bobbed around for a few minutes until thoughts of the day's responsibilities interrupted our ocean reprieve and nagged until they could no longer be ignored. I felt my tired quads, heavy, as I climbed out of the sea trench the shore break had worn into the sand. All of my senses were heightened. The sharp shells under my feet reminded me of how fortunate we are to live on the beach. I delighted in the smell of saltwater on my skin. The seagulls were still standing next to the lifeguard tower, an enormous flock of them in perfect stoic formation, as if little soldiers waiting for their orders.  I couldn’t help myself. I ran in full sprint and charged through the center of their battalion, scattering them to the sky. They scolded me with angry screams.

I ran in dizzy circles, as if to discourage them from coming back immediately, the most persistent ones still hovering in circles above me, contemplating their next move. Soaking wet with matted, sandy hair and looking like the madman I was, I could not have been more pleased with myself. Then I remembered Barry and turned around to find him standing at the water’s edge, staring at me and smiling, but shaking his head in what I am still not sure was wonder or dismay at this display of childish behavior.

One way in which Barry is very good is his ability to relate to others. He recognizes and speaks the language of what is most important to his friends and associates. I have always admired him for this, in addition to his self-deprecating humor.

“You know,” he began, pausing as though he were choosing his words carefully, “that act really was of photo quality, but the only thing that would have made it better for you, I’m sure, is if those birds had laid waste on me as they flew overhead.”

"It's the little things," I said in agreement. 

Intentional Love

In a world where many of us chase material goods to fill our unfathomable voids and look to other people to complete us, I found myself distracted with thoughts of reckless acts and damaged hearts in desperate need of mending.

Mostly, today I was lost among the small and most simply wondrous things, questioning not what the desires of my heart are, but rather, what are its intentions?  I would like to think the desires and intentions of my heart are the same: love.

Breakfast for Dinner

I photographed a banyan tree down the street from my house the other day. I couldn't get past this one's knotty limbs and gnarled roots. Banyans always seem to have so much personality to me. It's a kind of character that comes with age and the wisdom of weathering the hurricanes here. They feel sturdy and secure; I always find comfort in their unmovable strength and commitment to contentment.

This one, however, had the look of hands wringing in angst and uncertainty. Her branches hung in tangled knots and came together with wretched looking hands, preoccupied with the future, uncertain of storms ahead. I can relate. As parents, we always worry of trouble brewing. And then we have days that reassure us everything is going to be okay.

Ever have one of those nights when you feel like all is well in the world and you feel like a good parent because you know your kids are happy and well fed and warm? Tonight was one of those nights. The air is turning this evening with a rare cold front headed our way. It's January, but someone forgot to turn the calendar to winter in Florida, with the last several days in the eighties. 

Tonight, however, the wind picked up, and with that came cooler temperatures of sixty-five degrees. Upon leaving for swim practice, I sent the kids off with the parkas they haven’t worn in a year.

After dropping them at their swim workout, and heading to the gym to lift, we stopped at The Fresh Market on the way back to the house. We had settled on breakfast for dinner--unconventional, but sounded like appropriate comfort food for the weather. I love the smell of chlorine on my kids' skin after they get out of the pool, mixed with the flowery scent of their shampoo, wet hair plastered to their little heads. I love that tonight they clamored into the car snuggly warm with hoods up.

After the getting necessary breakfast items at the market, we zipped to the house, and as they showered, I made them breakfast for dinner. The house was warm with the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs. I flipped pillowy pancakes and warmed the syrup. I brewed them mugs of hot chocolate in the Keurig and topped it with fluffy whipped cream, something they rarely get.

My girl was tired and grumpy and had little to say. The moody preteen she is turning into, my eleven-year-old inhaled her food and then disappeared into her room to clean it as asked before leaving for a slumber party tomorrow night. The boy was all aflutter, talk, talk, talking my ear off about this and that and then some more. He happily chewed his bacon with care, a troublesome loose tooth one topic of many in our conversation, and asked for a second helping of pancakes. 

There was warmth all around, the smells from the kitchen made me wonder if that’s what pioneer days smelled of, like cooking over a smoky fire. The scientist was nearby, madly clicking away at the keyboard, finishing data for the day, the dog was snoozing happily on his new bed in the corner, and it was just peaceful. I love that feeling of contentment. I love knowing that tomorrow is Friday and that means no homework after a long week of grueling after school math, and my kids are happy with loads of social activities and fun things lined up for a busy weekend ahead.

It’s nights like these that I really appreciate what parenting is all about. It’s hard and it’s draining and often times, it feels thankless, but when my little boy wraps his arms around me and tells me that was the “best breakfast” he has had in nine years, somehow all of the hard work and long days are well worth it. I hope my kids remember these nights as warm and comfortable as I consider them. I'm thankful that the only thing brewing tonight was the Keurig. 

I think I might console that banyan with a cup of hot chocolate and offer her some pancakes one day soon.