The Christmas tree looked as green as the day we put it up. It always would. Every year we pulled the box from the rafters and matched the color-coded branches to their correct positions on the metal trunk. Leftover tinsel from previous years only made our job easier. I was eight that year, so it must have been our original tree, the one that looked more like a pile of pipe cleaners than a blue spruce. A few years later, my dad would go from staff accountant to chief financial officer and we’d pull together the money for a more real looking fake tree, its perfect symmetry and lack of aroma the only giveaways. Still, I knew I was missing out. Each year, my classmates would brag about pine scented living rooms, and I would nod along uncomfortably like the only one who doesn’t get a joke.
That morning, my sister and I sat next to the pipe cleaner tree in matching all-in-one pajamas with the plastic feet cut out – my mom was terrified of athlete’s foot. We bounced up and down in anticipation. After weeks of staring at the boxes trying to resist a good shaking, we had memorized the entire layout and knew exactly where each person’s gifts belonged. But now there were new things, big things – Santa had obviously made his visit, and the new boxes were wrapped in beautiful gold and green shiny paper not our own thin, dull blue paper with sleds on it. I crossed my fingers hoping for a ghetto blaster so my friends and I could listen to tapes of Madonna instead of my parents’ Beatles records. When my dad finally woke up, my sister and I could hardly contain our excitement, but as this man we hardly knew and mostly feared came down the hall, we quieted down, stopped bouncing, and got serious about the morning’s promise.
“Let’s do this right,” he said as he knelt down by the fireplace and turned the key to start the fire. “There’s something special for you under the tree this year.”
Could he know what was under the shiny gold and green wrapping paper? I was dying to find out and had to fight the urge to run over to the present. He reached behind the tree and pulled out a present covered in sleds. It was about as big as a bread box. I didn’t know what a bread box was, but I knew its size from playing 20 questions with my friends at slumber parties where we sipped hot chocolate, the real kind (not sugarless) next to real trees, smelly trees.
“It’s from your Grandpa William,” said my dad as he handed me the box. Grandpa William was my dad’s father. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I met him for the first time only a few months before.
I quickly forgot about Santa, thrilled to have something from my new grandpa. I ripped open the paper as my dad sat ready with his finger on the Polaroid camera. I tore the wrapping to shreds instead of folding it like my mom would in order to save it for next year. I finally uncovered a Flower Patch Kid. Not a Cabbage Patch Kid, which was what everyone wanted that year, but a Flower Patch kid. I gasped with joy and held it up to the camera.
Later, sometime after my college graduation, my mom and I were looking through her albums and came across that shot. “Yikes, I look like Vanna White,” I told my mom, assuming I hadn’t fooled her even then. No kid could have been that happy about a Flower Patch Kid.
“You sure loved that doll,” she said. “You carried it around everywhere you went.”
I still remember smiling maniacally as if it were the best present on earth. I knew my dad would send the picture to my grandpa, and I wanted him to know how much I loved him and how happy I was to know him now. He had been so much fun when we went to visit him in Tucson. He showed us his favorite restaurant, the Double L, his trailer in the desert outside of town, and his favorite spot in Sabino Canyon. We all went to the Saint Xavier mission and he bought me an Indian necklace with brown stones. I would have rather had the turquoise necklace, but I pretended to love the brown stones, of course.
I was so happy that I never wondered why I hadn’t met him earlier and didn’t notice the coincidence of timing when he dropped dead at the Double L a few months later. I didn’t yet know that my dad had barely spoken with his own father since he was in elementary school and the child support payments stopped coming.
“You know, your dad actually bought that doll for you,” my mom said turning the photo over to check the date.
It made sense. I doubt my grandpa could have afforded even a knock-off toy. I could have been disappointed – the great guy I shared a few shimmering memories with in third grade hadn’t actually thought to send me a gift. But instead of losing a grandpa, I found a father who beneath his frugal and stoic façade, was forgiving, sacrificing, and more loving than I had ever known.
