Okay. I already told
everyone about my stage debut as Innkeeper No. 2 in the St. Joseph’s Elementary
School annual Christmas pageant. If you
haven’t already read about it, you can find it here. I won’t repeat that story again – not that
it isn’t a good story, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble and I
don’t want to bore you.
I didn’t tell you about the doll house, though. That was one of those magical
Christmases. I was about 4 or 5 years
old. My parents and I were living in a
one-bedroom apartment behind my maternal grandparents’ gas station, on our
little town’s Main Street, which was part of a longer highway that extended to
nearby towns and to the small city located about three miles away. It was a noisy, busy highway and my parents
and grandparents were always watching to make sure I didn’t venture onto it and
get myself run over by some passing idiot driver motorist.
The little apartment was cramped and old. A few years later, we would move across Main
Street, into a much bigger house, but for the time being we were roughing it.
My parents didn’t have much money then. My father was working seasonal jobs as a
bricklayer. My mother was not yet working
outside the home. Things were tight. Of course, being a little kid, I didn’t know that. My parents knew it because they were the ones
who had to figure out how to live on peanuts.
There was never a thought, though, of not having Christmas. Of course, we had a tree. In my memory’s eye (which can be mistaken
because, after all, I am now 70 years old and this happened back in the very
early 1950s) it was a small tree. To my
young eyes, it was probably the most beautiful Christmas tree in the
world. I was easy to please.
That Christmas, I woke up, got up out of my bed in the
apartment’s only bedroom and walked into the living room. There, by the tree, was the most beautiful
thing I had ever seen. It was a doll
house. It was unwrapped, probably
because it was too big to wrap with whatever Christmas paper my parents
had. There were other presents, too, but
the doll house was the centerpiece. Of
course, it was just an inexpensive metal one, but to me it was a miniature
palace.
I played with that doll house for years until, eventually,
it became dented and worn out. I don’t
know how it met its end. It was probably
tossed out. But that would be in the
future. On that Christmas morning, it
was the best present ever.
Another thing I remember from around that time is that I was
scared to death of sitting on Santa Claus’ lap.
Nobody could get me to do it. I
was a pathologically shy kid, anyway, and a big, bearded fat man in a red suit
with a loud voice could send me hiding behind my Mom’s coat. Finally, one day, someone (I think it was
Mom) got me to sit on the lap of some Santa or other and tell him what I wanted
for Christmas. I did it very well,
too. I actually talked and I didn’t
cry. Word of my accomplishment got
around the family and my parents’ friends, and they must have thought it was cute
because some of them laughed.
Fast forward to my high school years. By then, everyone knew I could sing and I had
ambitions to become an opera singer. One
Christmas, I found myself part of a small choir rehearsing to sing at the
Midnight Mass at our Catholic parish church.
The choir was being led by a man whose desire to serve far outweighed his
musical ability. He couldn’t even carry
a tune, a real drawback in a choir director.
The choir consisted of two men and three females: my younger sister, another soprano and
myself. We three females had good
singing voices. The two men, on the
other hand, were at least as tone-deaf as the director. This made for an interesting balance. My sister was the youngest of the female
participants, so the other soprano and I were the ones who ended up trying to
make sure the whole thing wasn’t a disaster.
Somehow, we got through the mass, and that particular
singing group disbanded for good. Nobody
was sorry about that.
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