He wore a blue mailman’s uniform, not the classic red suit
and fur-trimmed hat but my Uncle Roy filled the shoes of Santa Claus as well as
anyone I’ve ever known. In 1972, he made one little girl’s Christmas both
bright and memorable with two simple actions, both inspired by love. And
because of him, that long-ago Christmas set the scene for my favorite holiday
memory.
I grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, a weary old river town
where the short-lived Pony Express made history and where infamous outlaw Jesse
James met his end. St. Joe sits on the banks of the Missouri River and is just
enough north of Kansas City to retain a sense of small-town life.
Until the age of 10, my world was located within the
boundaries of our neighborhood. We lived
around the corner from the hospital where I was born and near enough to the
Goetz Brewery to hear the whistles the signaled the beginning or end of a
shift. If the wind were right, we could inhale the aroma of cooking hops on the
way to becoming beer.
But the beef packing plant where my dad worked before and
after his Army service closed and so our family moved so he could begin a new
job as a USDA poultry inspector. That move took us from one end of Missouri to
the other, putting me in a new school, a very small town, and a different way
of life. My large family had anchored me
to life and now they were several hundred miles away.
Christmas had always been a multi-generational event held at
our house, an old brick Victorian house. We had a big dinner, Santa never
failed to deliver, and family gathered.
In 1972, our family lived in a small mobile home and at that
time my dad didn’t plan to stay in Neosho. I wrote letters to my cousins and we
often recorded messages on cassettes, mailing those back and forth as
well. I struggled to fit into a new
school where my maxi-dresses and beaded headbands were the oddity, not the
norm.
But my parents decided we would go home for Christmas, to
Granny’s house. While I loved that idea, there was one small problem.
Old-fashioned to the core, raised by a strict English born father who’d served
in Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s Royal Navy and a midwife who was the daughter
of an Irishman, Granny didn’t put up a Christmas tree. She had when her three boys were small,
inspired and cajoled by her German husband.
I craved a tree, but my parents said there just wouldn’t be one and to
get over it.
I said I would but of course I didn’t. And when we arrived
at Granny’s late at night just a few days before the holiday, there was no tree
in the window. With a heavy heart, I trudged upstairs to what had once been my
father and uncle’s bedroom to sleep and found a Douglas fir propped against the
wall.
I hooted and hollered and laughed with joy, hugging Granny,
and thanking her.
“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “That’s
your Uncle Roy’s doing – he said you kids had to have a tree, so he brought
it.”
It wasn’t the prettiest tree. That close to Christmas I
suspect it had been passed over many times. It wasn’t very tall or straight.
Some of the branches were sparse but it was a genuine Christmas tree, and it
wafted the scent of fresh pine into the bedroom.
Our ornaments and lights were in Neosho, decorating the tree
there so we managed to come up with a string or two of old lights along with
some ornaments bought at the dime store downtown. Two days before Christmas we
decorated the tree and it was, at that time, the loveliest tree we’d ever had,
bright with dreams realized and sparkling with love.
The tree was the first of two things my uncle did for me
that year.
The second helped set me on my path to becoming a writer.
That December had been cold and snowy in my hometown. Granny
hadn’t had a chance to head downtown to shop so she asked my uncle if he would
do her holiday gift buying. So, in between his mail route, which he walked
daily in all weathers, delivering a soup bone each week to Aunt Sophie and
cigarettes to Uncle Clare, Uncle Roy went shopping.
Granny’s standard gifts were an article of clothing, a dress
or pretty blouse, or maybe a coat plus a coloring book and a new box of
crayons.
That year, there was much more and one of the items for me
was a paperback Merriam-Webster dictionary.
I was delighted and when once
again I went to thank Granny, she shook her head.
“Don’t thank me,” she told me. “Your uncle picked that out.
He said he could stretch a dollar farther than me.”
At that young age, I already dreamed of becoming a writer.
The previous year a small poem I’d written titled “Olden Days” had been
published on the Saturday kids page of the local newspaper along with other
poems, brief stories, and drawings from local children. I’d wanted a dictionary, but I’d told no one
– not even old St. Nick.
As a book geek in the making would, I carried that small
dictionary with me everywhere. I took it to school and read it – the dictionary
– in my spare moments. I poured over it, cover to cover, delighting in gaining
knowledge about words, opening new pathways, and learning about a wider world.
A few years later, my other grandmother bought me a college
dictionary for a junior high student, and I embraced that gift as well.
But the wonder is that my uncle knew my heart so well. He
somehow divined that I wanted to write, that somewhere beneath my waist-length
hair and giggles a writer lurked, waiting to be nurtured into being.
My uncle died just two years later and didn’t live to see my
early bylines but I like to believe that somewhere, wherever the essence of his
spirit remains, he knows and that Christmas, between the tree I never expected
and the dictionary I needed to feed my writer’s soul, ranks high among the best
of my life.
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