Now that I think about it, there probably was real surprise in her first glimpse of her Barbie Townhouse. Not, perhaps, at the gift itself but that it had been built and remained standing in the morning light. Or maybe it was simpler than that: Maybe she was surprised because she’d planned on building the thing herself.
A Legacy of Love
by Lee Smith
December 23, 1969. When it gets really cold down South, it seems colder than anyplace else. It had been freezing out in the piney woods the day we cut down our Christmas tree—which had been decorated for weeks now in the living room of our little frame house in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I remember the pattern of glittery frost on our uninsulated windows, the chilly wind that slipped under the doors, the sound of our steps as we crunched across the frozen grass of our front yard early that morning. We’d been up for most of the night, timing the pains. I looked back as my young husband gunned the car out of the driveway, headed for the hospital. In the bright morning sun, ice glittered on every branch of every silver tree.
Two people live in that house now, I remember thinking. Soon there will be three.
Six pounds, seven ounces, he came in hollering at the top of his lungs; he had ten fingers and ten toes and a funny flat nose and a pointed head. Just an ordinary, healthy baby boy: a miracle. We named him Josh.
Soon they took him away so that I could rest, but I couldn’t sleep a wink—I was way too excited. When they wheeled him back, he was wearing a bright red Santa hat. A red-and-white felt Christmas stocking hung from his bassinet.
I have that little hat and stocking still.
We don’t have Josh, though. He died in his sleep eight years ago, October 26, 2003. The exact cause of his death was an “acute myocardiopathy,” the collapse of an enlarged heart brought about in part, I believe, by all the weight he had gained while taking antipsychotic drugs. He was 34; he had been sick for half his life doing daily heroic battle with the devastating brain disorder—schizophrenia—that first struck while he was in a program for gifted teen musicians at Berklee College of Music in Boston, the summer between his junior and senior years in high school.
Yet we don’t mourn Josh at Christmastime but celebrate his remarkable life.
Thanks to early diagnosis and medical treatment, which included hospitalization, a residential outpatient program, and vocational training, Josh was eventually able to live on his own. He learned to manage his medication and get to his doctor appointments on time. For the last seven years of his life, he worked at a Japanese restaurant, where he made sushi for lunch and often played piano at night, a mix of jazz, blues and his own compositions.
What a privilege it was to live on this earth with him, to be his mother. Of course, to have children—or simply to experience great love for any person at all—is to throw yourself wide open to the possibility of pain at any moment. But I would never choose otherwise.
Now we have four grandchildren, two of them his namesakes. And this holiday, as always, we will hang Josh’s bright little Santa hat and worn red felt stocking on our Christmas tree.
Merry, Silly Christmas
by Jenny Allen
My best Christmas was the year we had Ken and Barbie at the top of our tree. We had an angel first, for Christmas Day, but then we had Ken and Barbie. Let me explain. When my daughter was four, I hired a ballet dancer to babysit for a few afternoons a week. Randy was tall and confident, with that dancer’s chest-first carriage, and, though he was only 27, a sure, cheerful bossiness. For four years, he and Halley roamed the city on adventures: to climb the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, to smile at the waddling, pint-sized penguins at the zoo. They had their own world, their own passions: a devotion to ice cream, to Elmo, to Pee-wee Herman.
He orchestrated Halley’s birthday parties to a fare-thee-well: One year he declared a Peter Pan theme, made Halley a Tinker Bell outfit with little jingle bells at the hem, and talked my father into making a scary appearance in a big-brimmed pirate hat and a fake hook for a hand. Randy took charge of my grown-up parties, too, dictating what I wore, foraging in thrift shops to find the right rhinestone necklace to go with the dress he’d made me buy.
When Halley was eight, Randy left New York to take over a sleepy ballet company in a small city in Colorado. He taught, he choreographed, he coaxed secretaries and computer salesmen into pliéing across the stage.
Halley missed him terribly—we all did—but he called her and sent her party dresses, and he came to see us at Christmas when he could. The year Halley was ten, we had a new baby. That same year, Randy was diagnosed with AIDS. He told me over the phone, without an ounce of self-pity, that he had so few T cells left that he’d named them Huey, Dewey and Louie.
It seemed insane for him to travel, insane for him to risk one of us sneezing on him and giving him pneumonia, but he had decided, and that was it. He was as cheerful and bossy as ever. Terribly thin, his cheeks hollow but eyes bright, he took Halley all over the city once again, with baby Julie strapped to his chest in a cloth carrier.
“We’ve got to do something about this tree,” he said one day. The tree, with its red ribbon bows, looked fine to me; I was even a little vain about the way every branch shone with ornaments.
A few days later, on New Year’s Eve morning, he summoned our little family. He was wearing the old pirate’s hat, fished out of a costume box and, for hair, curly colored streamers that stuck out of the hat and tumbled down to his shoulders.
As we watched—me irritable at first, wondering how much you were supposed to yield to a dying houseguest, even if you loved him like a brother—he stripped the tree. Then he brought out more curly streamers, heaps of them, and tooters and little party-favor plastic champagne bottles. “Now we’ll turn it into a New Year’s tree,” he declared.
A New Year’s tree! Of course! We threw the streamers all over the tree, we covered it with the tooters and the tiny champagne bottles. “And now, for the pièce de résistance,” Randy said. Stretching his tall self way up to the top of the tree, he removed its gold papier-mâché angel. Solemnly, carefully, he placed on top Halley’s tuxedoed Ken and her best Barbie, the one in a sparkly ball gown.
“Ta da!” he said, and beamed. It was a wonderful tree, happy and goofy and perfect.
Randy lived for another year and a half. None of us will ever get over his death, not really. But every Christmastime, I raise a glass to Randy—to his tree, to his bossiness, to the Christmas he taught us that courage is a man in a pirate hat with silly streamers for hair.
Dressed To Kill
One mid-October evening, I answered a knock on the door. There in front of me was a boy wearing a Dracula mask. “Trick or treat!” he yelled.
“Nice costume,” I said. “But Halloween’s not for another two weeks.”
“I know,” he said. “But I’m away then.”Jim Robertson
Christmas Out of Season
By Robert Fulghum
August 1998
From All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
One year I didn’t receive many Christmas cards. This troublemaking realization actually came to me one fetid February afternoon out of the back room in my head that is the source of useless information. Guess I needed some reason to really feel crummy, so there it was. But I didn’t say anything about it. I can take it. I am tough. I won’t complain when my cheap friends don’t even care enough to send me a stupid Christmas card. I can do without love. Right.
The following August, I was nesting in the attic, trying to establish some order in the mess, and found stacked in with the holiday decorations a whole box of unopened greeting cards from the previous Christmas. I had tossed them into the box to open at leisure, and then I ran out of leisure in the shambles of the usual Christmas panic, so they got caught up in the bale-it-up-and-stuff-it-in-the-attic-and-we’
ll-straighten-it-out-next-year syndrome.
I hauled the box down, and on a hot mid-August day, mind you, in my bathing suit, sitting in a lawn chair on my deck, with sunglasses, cocoa butter, a quart of iced tea and a puzzled frame of mind, I began to open my Christmas cards. Just to help, I had put a tape of Christmas carols on the portable stereo and cranked up the volume.
Here it all was. Angels, snow, Wise Men, candles and pine boughs, horses and sleighs, the Holy Family, elves and Santa. Messages about love and joy and peace and good will. If that wasn’t enough, there were all those handwritten messages of affections from my cheap friends who had, in fact, come through for the holidays.
I cried. Seldom have I felt so bad and so good at the same time. So wonderfully rotten, elegantly sad, and melancholy and nostalgic and all.
As fate always seems to have it, I was discovered in this condition by a neighbor, who had been attracted to the scene by the sound of Christmas caroling. She laughed. I showed her the cards. She cried. And we had this outrageous Christmas ordeal right there on my deck in the middle of August, singing along with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to the mighty strains of “O Holy Night”: “Faaallll on your kneeees, O heeeeear the angel vooiiicees.”
What can I say? I guess wonder and awe and joy are always there in the attic of one’s mind somewhere, and it doesn’t take a lot to set it off. And much about Christmas is outrageous, whether it comes to you in December or in the heat of an August day.
Feast Or Family
I was a vegetarian until I married a proud meat eater. On Christmas, as our children gathered around the table, my husband announced, “Your mother didn’t know what a turkey was until she met me.”Lorraine Larkin
• • •
During the holidays, my daughter-in-law Heather called to ask me for a fruitcake recipe. As I looked it up, she mentioned that she had told some friends about the cakes she was making, and one of them asked her how she learned to make them. “Easy,” Heather told her. “I called my mother-in-law. She’s the queen of fruitcakes!”Pam Northcott
A Love Like No Other
by Skip Hollandsworth
May 1995
Condensed from Texas Monthly
From the day she was born, doctors had expected Kimberley Marshall to die. She had cystic fibrosis, a baffling genetic disorder. Desperate to keep her baby alive, Kim’s mother, Dawn, took the infant home and for three hours a day she and Kim’s grandmother gently thumped on her chest and back to dislodge the sticky mucus that clogs the lungs of CF patients. Trying to get rid of it, one doctor says, is like sweeping spilled molasses off the floor with a broom.
To everyone’s astonishment, Kim eventually grew strong enough to go to elementary school. She even took ballet lessons and joined a girls’ soccer team.
“There goes the princess,” Dawn would shout from the sidelines, momentarily allowing herself to feel as normal as the other mothers. She imagined Kim to be normal, too, the kind of girl who might go to a high-school dance and lift her head dreamily at the end of the night, as a boy gave her her first kiss.
But Robert Kramer, the first doctor in Dallas to specialize in CF, warned Dawn and her husband, Bill, that it was only a temporary reprieve. Like a serial killer, CF is unstoppable. Although an array of pulmonary treatments and medicines now allows patients to live more productive, pain-free lives, average life expectancy is about 29 years.
As Dr. Kramer predicted, the days soon came when Kim’s body seemed to deflate like a rubber toy with a hole in it, and Dawn would return her to the Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas. The routine became all too familiar: a few months of remission followed by a trip to the hospital’s CF unit.
Kim always brought along her stuffed animals, her favorite pink blanket and her diary. As children around her died, she’d write down her impressions (“Wendy died at 8:10 this morning! She suffered all night. It’s better this way. Poor little thing”). It was, Dawn thought, Kim’s way of preparing herself for what she knew would someday happen to her.
For a while Kim did what she could to be like the “normals” (her nickname for kids without CF). In high school she earned A’s and B’s and wore long dresses to hide her spindly legs. When classmates asked about her coughing spells, she would say she suffered from asthma. She’d pick up other CF girls in her car and drive along, honking her horn, waving at boys and flashing a jubilant smile.
Still, she could not ignore the reality of her life. Her digestive system was so clogged with mucus that she suffered painful attacks of diarrhea. She developed a neurological disorder that affected her balance and distorted her perception.
Finally, during her senior year, she grew so weak that she had to finish her course work at home. In one of her lowest moments she asked that her picture not be included in her high-school yearbook. “I look like a starvation victim,” she said. Growing increasingly frustrated, Kim argued often with her younger brother and sister. Over and over she watched a videotape of The Blue Lagoon, the story of an adolescent boy and girl who are stranded on an island and fall in love.
David Crenshaw first laid eyes on Kim in the spring of 1986 when both were being treated at Presbyterian. She was 16, thin, pale and beautiful, her red hair falling down the back of her pink nightgown. David was 18. He wore a baggy T-shirt, faded gray pajama pants and large glasses held together by a piece of tape.
“No way she’s going to look twice at you,” teased Doug Kellum, one of the CF unit’s respiratory therapists, who had noticed David staring at her. And, indeed, it was difficult to imagine any attraction between them. Kim loved expensive perfume, makeup and clothes. She would sit for hours in her hospital bed, reading romance novels.
David, on the other hand, was famous for trying to impress girls with crude jokes. Loud and robust, he was something of a legend at Presbyterian. No one had ever heard of a CF patient doing the things David did. For instance, when he wasn’t in the hospital, he raced midget cars at a local dirt track. “Our goal was to raise him as if he weren’t sick,” says David’s father. “Maybe I thought if he stayed tough enough, he could beat it.”
In truth, David never did act particularly sick. A prankster, he conducted wheelchair races and tomato-throwing competitions in the hospital’s third-floor hallway. One night he took some CF patients to a go-cart track in 32-degree weather. “He had this sense of immortality about him,” Dr. Kramer remembers.
For two years David would often walk past Kim’s door, working up the courage to pop in and say hello. Kim would look at him, smile briefly, then go back to reading her book.
David was undaunted. “When she was in the hospital and he was home,” Kellum says, “he’d call me to find out how she was—even though she wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
Surprisingly, it is often in the CF unit that young patients experience their first encounter with romance. “You assume that because CF kids look so weak, they don’t have much of a sex drive,” says Dr. Kramer. “Yet they probably think about it more than regular people. It’s their way of affirming to themselves that they are alive and kicking.”
In late 1988 Kim began an on-again, off-again relationship with another CF patient, a young man named Steve. “I knew it wasn’t going to work out,” David said. “They were afraid of commitment.” And the relationship did finally falter.
In the fall of 1989, when he and Kim were both at home once again, David called and asked her to dinner. Although she said no, David declared, “I’ll be there at 8 p.m., no buts about it.”
Horrified, Kim brought along her sister, Petri, and made her sit with David in the front seat of his car while she sat in the back, refusing to speak. Kim also remained silent through dinner, and gave David a tortured look when he suggested they go dancing at a nightclub. When he took her home, Kim leapt out of the car and ran to her room.
Still, David kep
t showing up at Kim’s house. They went bowling. He took her to watch him race. And, despite everything, love bloomed. On November 17, 1989, Kim wrote in her diary: “Tonight, David and I kissed for the first time. God, please let this relationship work out.”
Six months after their first date, Kim and David announced their engagement—to the shock of their families, friends and doctors. “Both of you are sick,” David’s father said, pleading with him to reconsider. “You can’t possibly take care of yourselves.” “Do you realize that one of you is going to die in the other’s arms?” Dawn asked her daughter tearfully.
Kim and David insisted that they had a right to be together. “I think Kim realized this was going to be the last chance she had to experience love,” Dawn said, finally agreeing to the union.
On October 27, 1990, Kim Marshall, 21, wobbled down the aisle and declared her love for 23-year-old David Crenshaw. The church was filled with the sound of coughing, as Dallas’s CF community came to support them.
The couple lived on their modest monthly disability checks in a one-bedroom apartment. It resembled a hospital room, crammed with oxygen tanks, medicines and a refrigerator stocked with I.V. bottles.
Domestic tasks were difficult: They needed a day to clean the apartment and do the laundry. By nighttime both were exhausted. Yet they were happier than they ever could have imagined. He nicknamed her Tigger (from the children’s book Winnie the Pooh) because of her red hair; she called him Bear because he was cuddly. He was always sending her cards, the mushier the better. She wrote him long love letters. (“We are going to conquer the unconquerable.”)
Treasury of Joy & Inspiration Page 15
