My Favorite Gift -- An Empty Box

Tomorrow we're taking down the Christmas tree and putting all the ornaments away for another year. Among the gifts I will pack up is a tiny empty box that gets a prominent spot under the tree or on the mantel every year. It's a three-inch red and white polka dotted cube, with a tag that reads "To Frankie, Love Mother" in my mother's hand. I don't remember what small gift it once held -- probably something mom picked up at a yard sale or an antique mall, or maybe a little jar of jam or something similar. I don't even know why I originally kept it. It probably just got packed up at some point with all of the gift bags and bows. But after mom died almost a decade ago, this bit of emphemera suddently became important. Each year, I have a gift from my mom under my tree. It makes me smile and it makes me sad, the blend of emotions we all have to get used to after we lose someone we loved. Read more!

A Tiny Christmas Miracle

About three weeks or so ago, Frink's mom lost her wedding ring, along with her engagement ring, to which it was connected. Frink's mom is very thin, and it's been cold out. She thought she lost it while Christmas shopping. She had been trying on gloves at J.C. Penney, so she thought maybe it had come off in one of the gloves. She went back to the store and looked in all of the gloves, not once but twice, and called them a couple of times. She tore her house apart, and her purse, and the car. All to no avail. The ring was gone. Her husband, Frink's dad, made funny "jokes" about how much it was going to cost to replace it. Repeatedly.

Anyway, on Christmas morning, after the breakfast had been eaten, the stockings unpacked, and all the gifts unwrapped, a couple of us were cleaning up all the gift wrap. I saw something sparkling on the carpet. I thought someone had lost an earring. I picked it up. And miracle of miracles, it was the ring! Frink's mom had vacuumed that rug many times since she had lost the ring, including just the day before. So we surmised that it must have come off when she was wrapping presents.

She burst into tears when I gave it to her, and she had to sit down because we were afraid she was going to pass out, she was shaking so hard.

It was the best Christmas present ever! Read more!

A Terrible Faux Pas

This is the story of three gifts.

As I write my memoir, I have been struggling to understand my mother's depression and the seething anger that percolated beneath the surface of our family when I was growing up.

Recently, I called my older sister, hoping she might be able to fill in some of the gaps.

“Do you think dad had an affair?” I asked, not expecting an affirmative answer, but not at all surprised when it came.

"Yes."

“What makes you think so?”

“I saw them kissing.”

“Was it Evelyn?”

“Yes. It was when mom took you to the hospital in Denver.” When I was six or seven that is, when I got my doll, Orangeeta.

I suppose I have always wondered about dad and Evelyn, although I rarely allowed these thoughts to become active. Evelyn was a beautiful blonde in her twenties who lived with her parents across the street. I remember a huge smile and bubbly laugh, tight stirrup pants and sweaters. She and my father would go skiing together – my mother never learned to ski - and my father always seemed younger when she was around. Dad liked to joke and be the life of the party, and Evelyn provided an enthusiastic audience.

Somehow it never occurred to me to consider how mom must have felt about this woman. I naively assumed that Evelyn was equally a friend of my mother. Once, when I was 8 or so, I used my allowance to buy mom a picture frame for her birthday. Mom seemed to like it, but her smile froze when I explained that I had chosen the frame because the model in the cardboard picture looked like Evelyn. I was hurt and puzzled when mom shakily asked why I would give her such a thing.

Now, after having experienced the crushing rejection of my own husband’s affair with a woman he found more attractive, I can begin to understand the source of my mother’s pain and bitterness. Later, Evelyn married and moved to Houston, where she and her husband, a professor, were murdered in their bed by a disgruntled graduate student. How did my father grieve this loss? What looks and unspoken words passed between my parents when they heard this news? Whatever they were, my parents kept them private, their arguments, if not their hostility, buried well beneath the surface.

Although I'm sure mom didn't keep score, in my mind, the other gift offsets the terrible faux pas of presenting my mother with a likeness of her husband's pretty mistress.

This gift is also a picture, a cheesy bas relief of a colonial style kitchen, molded in plastic copper. I seem to remember spending 49 cents on it at the five and dime on Main Street when I was quite young. (Allowances were much smaller in those days.) When mom opened the present, I could tell not only that she liked it, but that she was visibly touched.

Much later, when I was an adult, she told me that this tacky picture was one of her favorite gifts. She said that even when I was a little girl, it showed that I paid attention, that I understood her style, and tastes.

This ticky tacky plastic picture hangs in my kitchen. It doesn't match anything, but it reminds me of my mother and the prized gift she once gave to me. Read more!