One More Visit With Santa

                                           Peppermint Sparkles and Santa Claus (above)

My brother Eric and I were both actors growing up. Though we were both paid to walk on stages at times (an accomplishment in itself!), as a lifelong career, it was not to be.  Life had different ideas for both of us.  

For me, it was a having a family.  Though I still performed occasionally when my kids were small, I knew it would go no further than an extended engagement.  My real vocation was writing for the stage, a craft that allows you to create from anywhere and send your work out to the wider world.  Still, if you’ve ever enjoyed performing for audiences, there are times when that little itch can become a downright irritating rash…that’s when I’ll tune my guitar and start looking for an open mic night.

It happened in a couple of stages for my brother too.  He made it much further than I ever did, actually supporting himself as an actor.  Blessed with a tenor voice that could’ve only come from the angels, he could work musicals or straight shows.  In a pinch a cabaret was fine.  He could do comedy and drama.  What he couldn’t do was keep going thinking that things were going to get easier as his thirties…and his knees…and his tired vocal cords…were slipping away.  

At that point, becoming a cruise director was a logical choice.  Never at a loss when it comes to pressing the flesh, that was half of a cruise director’s job and, oh!  Was he good at it!  You could tell that the vacationers believed that where Eric went was where the fun was.  The job even afforded him the opportunity to get up on stage and joke with the audience as he introduced activities or entertainers.  Occasionally, he would hit it off with a fellow performer and they would work up a song and do a little routine as part of the show.  

Alas, it is a small world even on the largest of cruise ships.  You work from sunrise until well after midnight.  You have minimal privacy, even with a private cabin.  The problems are the same, only the drunken vacationers are different.  If you ever worked in customer service eight hours a day, you know what it means to want an opportunity to shout STFU in someone’s face.  Yet, at the end of the day, you got to go home.  On a cruise ship, you’re already home.

He made it about three years.  Amazing, really, when you think about it.  I’m not sure I would have made it three hours.  Typically I am averse to drunk vacationers unless they happen to be me. 
 

If life as an actor prepares you for anything, it’s being willing to take the big chances.  Eric took his on the mainland, in Florida, so he could continue to enjoy the tropical weather with his new wife, Renee. The job was the same, really, vacationers testing the boundaries of sobriety and propriety at every turn, but Eric was able to go home at night, to his Honey and their little dogs…it made a difference.  He settled in Orlando and bought a house, the first he had ever owned.  He got his voice back.  He had his knees fixed.

My fellow actors know this…you can SAY you are through with theatre but nothing is official until theatre says it is finished with YOU.  As it turns out, Eric had been rehearsing all along…for the role of a lifetime.  The resort where he worked decided to mount a production, a Christmas show, for their guests who come and stay over the holidays.  Who better to spearhead such an effort?  Second and more importantly, who will play Claus?

Well, you’d need someone tall (and Eric is over six foot), able to communicate with an audience full of children (check), maaaaybe a bit on the heavy side (and the good life had left him with a few extra pounds) and of course, always nice to include a Christmas song, so, how about a singer (double check)?  Add in a real beard and some pretty people in elf outfits, you got a show!

It didn’t stop there.  It progressed.  Every year, a little more was added.  Another song, another character.  At the end of the show it snows….yes, snow! In Orlando, Florida!

Being an enterprising man, Eric discovered that there were good paying engagements for a bearded fella with his talent and a certain red suit.  All the way up to the holiday he earned a generous wage at corporate gigs for kids to sit on his lap and share their deepest hopes and desires.  Your average Santa is done on Christmas Eve, as soon as the mall closes.  But this is no ordinary Santa.

For a set of triplet boys, Santa would appear every Christmas morning, unpacking their gifts from his big red bag.  Year after year, the three of them would roll out of bed and be served by the man himself.  I should caution that this didn’t come cheap, but what a memory those parents made for their children.  Can you imagine those boys when their classmates said Santa ‘wasn’t real’?

Even little boys grow up though.  The parents of the triplets decided that at eight years old, at least one of them would be hearing some hard truths about Yuletide legends and was unlikely to keep it to themselves.  There would be one last Christmas visit from jolly old Saint Nick.

But how do you explain your future absences to babies that have grown up with you?  When Claus quits coming does a child stop believing?  It’s such a short time they have to enjoy the fantastical stories we spin around our traditions.  With a few weeks until Christmas, Eric stewed over what he would say.  He finally settled on the truth, or at least a version of the truth.  This is why I say he was preparing for the role of a lifetime.

When he ho-ho-hoed his way into their living room for the last time, he distributed the gifts as he always did and received the appreciation back from the children as usual.  But at the end, Santa had added one little codicil…

“Now boys, I need to talk to you,” he said solemnly, kneeling down on a titanium knee.  The boys moved forward conspiratorially.  I think if he had told the boys to rob a liquor store at that moment, he could’ve been drinking Cristal on the way home. “I’m not going to be able to come see you anymore,” he said to their three shocked faces.  “There are kids younger than you who aren’t sure if they believe in Santa and I need to go and visit THEM on Christmas morning.  Do you understand?”  It took a second, but they came around to agreeing with the jolly old elf.

“One more thing,” he added.  “I will still bring you your presents…don’t worry about that…but I want you to give something to each other, and your Mom and Dad, and help me keep the Christmas spirit alive.  Will you do that for me?”  The boys looked at each other and nodded to Santa with resolve and just the slightest trace of smiles.  He had made the sale.

I don’t know what Eric made during his career on stage. I’m sure it wasn’t as much as he deserved. Even if it was FAR more than I suspect, it wasn’t enough.  

You can’t put a price on believing in Santa for even one more day.

Parenting is a Salary Position

We were in Sanibel Island, Florida, my wife Kathy and I, celebrating our first real vacation in two years.  Staying in a condo 180 feet from the beach, the good life had never seemed so good.   The company we kept, my brother Eric and his wife, Renee, was excellent.  They were recovering from a home sale and relocation.  Kath and I were coming off of a year where our upstairs bathroom had been gutted for months. When your knees are bad and you’re on blood pressure meds…well, you do the math.

For once, we had not planned ourselves into a corner, where we would return from a vacation and go right back to work.  Our flight home arrive was on the evening before Memorial Day.  We had a family gathering scheduled for the Monday afternoon, but not until later in the day.  After decompressing for nine days, we knew we could ease back into the grind with that Monday buffer.  Sleeping in was the only thing on the breakfast menu for Memorial Day.

We were still days away from departing our island paradise when Kath repeated the contents of a text she had received.  “Lucy needs to come home and drop off her car with us and catch a bus to Chicago.”  Lucy is our oldest child, who was just finishing her first year of law school and headed for a paying internship in the Windy City.

“Okay.  When?”  I asked.

“She’s coming in late Sunday, leaving early Monday.”

Well, shit.

I turned to my brother (who has no children) and told him, “This is a perfect illustration of what it is to be a parent.”  I wasn’t angry.  It was a statement of fact.  Babysitters are hourly, parents are salary.  We think we are done at various turning points in their lives but, the truth is, if you embraced being a parent, you will always be a parent.  If not to your own children, then you find others to assist, mentor, lecture or nurture. 

I won’t go into detail about what sort of damage we did on vacation, but it was extensive and self-inflicted.  I have been on vacations with people who fancied themselves partiers.  On Sanibel Island, we spilled more than those braggarts drank.  We got off the plane in Detroit relaxed.  Dog tired, yes, and our livers were screaming the Roberto Duran mantra, “No mas, no mas.”  We grabbed a small dinner and headed back to the house.  Dan, our youngest, came by not long after Lucy arrived and we had some laughs in the mid-evening before he left for his apartment and the rest of us collapsed into familiar mattresses.  We had to meet a bus arriving downtown at 8:45 a.m., so alarms were dutifully set.  Lucy shares my affinity for arriving early for virtually any event, no matter how mundane.  To do otherwise makes us somewhat anxious.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m on blood pressure meds, which means I frequently wake up at night with an urgent need.  After a 4 a.m. roundtrip to the bathroom, I found myself wide awake and suddenly aware that we had no groceries in the house for breakfast.  We had some flakes and some milk, sure, but that simply won’t work for a send-off.  In a house where many of our greatest memories have occurred around the dining room table, breakfast is a religion.  This called for a full spread.  I began making a shopping list in my head.  Knowing there were hours before we had to be at our afternoon gathering, at 5 a.m I went ahead and got up.  At 6 a.m., I recognized I wouldn’t be able to relax until I had bacon and eggs and bread and potatoes for my young Crusader, so I went grocery shopping.  We finished our early morning feast before 8 a.m. and prepared to meet the bus across town.  We arrived with plenty of time to spare.  In an hour’s time, I would be back at home, napping.

There was just one old man waiting for the bus when we arrived.  He appeared to be about seventy and was waiting alone.  He looked at the logoed hoodie and cap I wore and chirped, “You a Cub fan?”  I told him I was a baseball fan.  Turn on a game and I will watch it.  You can get fed up with the big money aspects of the game.  You can be sick to death of the personalities of some of the players, but the game is always beautiful.

“My Dad played for Cincinnati in the thirties,” he told me.  

“They were still the Redlegs then,” I stated, letting him know I knew a little history too.

“That’s right.  He was a catcher.”

My son Dan was a little league catcher.  I gained a whole new appreciation for the position after seeing what he went through.  There’s no wonder they make the best managers.  They see the whole field, they know pitchers and hitters intimately.  The old man said his father hadn’t stuck with it.  There wasn’t much money to be made in baseball then and it was considered kind of a low-class occupation to be a ballplayer.  He continued, “My son, he was a catcher, too.  Drafted by the Mets.  He was at Tidewater when he got the call, his wife was going into labor.  He asked to be allowed to attend the birth of his child.  They told him ‘no’.  He quit baseball that very day.”

He fished in his pocket for a phone.  Figuring the conversation with this stranger was over, I started making my way back to where my wife and daughter were standing.  The old man raised his voice to make sure I heard him.  He was waving his phone at me.  It showed a young man with an even younger boy.  “He was a good Dad,” he asserted and, indeed, there seemed to be real affection in the eyes of the man and the boy.  “We lost him, my son, ten years ago.  Lymphoma.  I begged him to come up here, I said, ‘Son, the people at u of M Hospital are great’ but he insisted he was getting good care.  Maybe he was.  Anyway…”

But there’s really nowhere to go after that, is there?  It is a violation of natural law for a parent to see their child die.   But he continued.  “I speak to my grandson nearly every day.  He’s in the Marines. He tells me, ‘Grampa, you don’t have to worry about me.’  But…well, you know what I’m talking about.”

And I did.  I did know what he was talking about.

The sound of air brakes made us look up as the grey dog came around the corner.  The old man cleared his throat and stuck out his hand.  “It was nice talking with you.  I gotta get moving because I need to sit near the front.  I don’t get around so good.”  His bag was already at the curb and soon he was too.  I turned and Lucy was there.  I had burned up all the time between our arrival and her departure, ostensibly talking baseball with the old man.  I hugged her and told her I loved her and then all too quickly she was on the bus as well.

There was plenty of time when Kath and I got home to do anything I wanted.  But I didn’t nap.  I didn’t even doze.  Suddenly, it seemed like a pleasure to be awake and alive, watching from a distance as my child made steps towards her major league dreams.