-1994

 

There's a little book I've recently retrieved from hibernation. It has kept patient record for the last half dozen years of all the Christmas presents I've given to friends and family. I feel nostalgic as I wander through past pages and reminisce over various fads. The Chinese culture celebrates "The Year of the Rooster" and "The Year of the Dog". The Odhner recipients may recall "The Year of the Pillow" or "The Year of the Tote Bag". I also notice the list of people as it reflects the ebbing and flowing tides of friendship. Fluctuations reflect new acquaintances, shifting circles of friends, people who move away.

 

Yet I feel my heart jar at a name that long lingered at the pinnacle of my lists... Daddy. He has traveled to a place outside the scope of UPS delivery. Yet curiously I find that painful omission coinciding with the appearance of a brand new name... that of our son Zachary. More curious still is the illogical similarity I sense between these two males in my life, seven decades apart in age, varying two hundred pounds in size and having never met face to face.

 

In his twilight years I became increasingly aware that the gifts that were most precious to my father could not be bought by catalog. It's not that there weren't plenty of ways within my means to bring him joy. There were. One foolproof way was to pick up the phone and call him. The emotion that simple gesture evoked in him was so profuse it could scarcely fit on the telephone wire that carried it. The piece de resistance, however, was the realization that that delight sprung not so much from the chance for a lonely, aging man to find comfort in his daughter's attentive ear as it was from being able to listen to me.

 

Other things that gave him such happiness he could scarcely speak were efforts that didn't seem to benefit him directly. Hearing that I was giving my best to growing in my marriage, or that I was fighting a personal flaw meant he would sleep contentedly that night.

 

In contemplating Christmas gifts for this infant, categories like name brand apparel and battery operated toys seem to slip into the cracks of superfluousness. Like my father, it is hardly that he is somehow not yet human enough to be capable of intense pleasure. He is.

 

Suppose my gifts to him were to include uninterrupted time in my arms, daily tickles, or an evening serenade? What wrapping paper and ribbons could harness those promises and hold them to earth like captured clouds beneath the branches of a Douglas fir? Those two people, in their common tastes for holiday pleasure remind me of the two tips of a crescent moon, who, unsuspected by those of us bound to earth by gravity are really connected in brightness to the orb that only reveals itself to a heavenly perspective.

 

And when I stretch myself to stand on the tiptoes of my mind I glimpse that light...  a light that neither began with the birth of this child nor ends with the death of his grandfather. It is a light that first shone above a Baby for whom the only possible gifts come wrapped not in bags and bows, but in the voices and faces of those we love.