A Christmas Story

Trace residue of the holiday spirit has turned up once again in the most predictable of places. I reminded Jilly last night that it is time to gird our loins for the Christmas battles to come. Free-floating anxiety can be a dangerous thing if not quickly classified, catalogued, and deposited into the appropriate receptacle. Tranquilizer darts are at the ready; we guard each other’s back in that way.
Our main line of defense in the war against the Santa-Industrial-Complex includes a Yoda hand-puppet that tops our Christmas tree. Yoda, the rat-monkey-dog of Star Wars fame, presides over a mix of traditional and heretical holiday accoutrements. The reality that I cannot be held responsible for my actions during the holiday season is well established. Regarding the Christmas decorations, the task of tempering my desire to mix equal parts Christmas and blasphemy has fallen to Jilly. For this year at least, there will be no anatomically correct barnyard animals or sex toys gracing the branches of our fire-retardant polypropylene facsimile of a Douglas Fir tree.

In order to avoid the impression that our holiday activities include excessive amounts of lamentation, I should set the record straight. Dredged-up memories of crushed childhood dreams do make for some good wallowing and I admit that I’m partial to the seasonal piking of our enemy’s heads. However, after weighing the pros and cons, we no longer indulge in Christmas meltdowns. While I still have a few problems with this “St. Nicholas” business, my Christmas spirit has at least reverted to a pre-1990 state of cautious optimism. Not bad considering I had given it up for dead.

The year 1990 was significant for several reasons. Of all the undesirable events that transpired that year, one in particular stands out. It was the year I lost contact with my eight-year-old daughter. Her mother, sporting a freshly dealt felony conviction for an exceedingly violent assault, chose to run from the law. They crisscrossed the nation with the authorities in pursuit. Long story short, the skills that I had mastered over the years, e.g. expert pigtail installation and skinned-knee repair, were no longer in demand.

For the next seven years, my little girl would leave her childhood scattered along thousands of miles of open roadway with temporary stops in a succession of little towns and big cities from Texas to Timbuktu. She was gone and it was clear that I was not going to get her back, a reality driven home by the fact that I was not her biological father. If your next thought is, “Oh, stepdaughter, that’s different,” I hope you don’t say it out loud, especially if you have a stepchild. My little girl was still learning to walk when I became her father. While I could not have been a more unlikely prospective parent, the bond that developed between my little girl and me was undeniably as powerful as my spiritual connection to my own blood relatives.

Memories of those days drift through my mind on a regular basis. I recall standing at a bus stop. It was the little one’s first day of school and I was anxious to find out how it went. It was also her first bus ride and I had taken extra precautions to be at the right location, at the correct time. The bus pulled up to the curb, empty! Somehow, I had bungled the schedule! I flew into calamity-management-mode and began considering the options. There was a lost little girl wandering down a busy street somewhere! The door to the bus swung open. At the driver’s command, twenty or so little heads popped into view. They were so short you couldn’t see them when they were sitting down. It took several days before I could laugh about that one.

----------------This is my little girl at 3 years old----------------

I remember putting rubber bands on ten-thousand pigtails and staying up late with her when she was sick. I remember an endless supply of hugs and holding her little hand on long walks. There were seven years of birthdays and Christmases and countless times that I carried her on my shoulders while she gripped my ears like handlebars, turning my head in the direction she wanted to go and sometimes making funny engine noises as if she were driving a car. I watched her grow into a caring and loving little person. It all ended in the blink of an eye.

I don’t believe in fate and I am a staunch opponent of the theory that bad things happen for a reason. However, if there is a consistent theme to my life, it is that with every calamity, something good comes of it. So it was that a series of unfortunate events resulted in a protracted search for my purpose in life. The search ended with a stroke of the most unlikely good fortune. I bumped into the lovely and talented Jilly. Within five minutes of our first encounter, she was insulting me and I was slandering her good name. This was clearly love at first sight. We became each other’s best friend, cancelled a big wedding at the last minute, and ran off to a tropical island to get married. I am certain that any life worth living from that time forward is Jilly’s doing.

Not long after Jilly and I met, I received a telephone call in the middle of a busy workday. A voice on the other end of the line asked me to repeat my name and then inquired if I knew her mother. A mule kick would have been less dumbfounding. Somewhere in the prematurely aged tone of a teenager’s voice, I recognized the little girl who used to call me daddy. That was then. She is twenty-three years old now, married to a man worthy of her love, and has two children and one on the way. Since then, there has rarely been a week gone by that I have not had the opportunity to reaffirm my final words before her disappearance, no matter what happened, I would always love her.

As is our tradition this time of year, Jilly and I keep a wary eye on that creepy elf dude with the funny hat. Unfortunate as it is that vigilance should be part of our holiday tradition, it is simply not an option to let down our guard, there has been too much water under the bridge for that to happen. Even so, when I measure the good against the bad, I can’t imagine how I ended up so damn lucky.