Remembrances of Christmases Past, Part 2
Writing by treason on Tuesday, 27 of December , 2005 at 11:57 am
…And so we moved to Prescott. It was my mother, my sister, me, two cats, and my raccoon. We were sitting at O’Hare waiting for the plane to take us from the city that we knew was home to a place that was completely foreign. And that’s when we heard the voice on the loudspeaker.
“Will the lady with the raccoon please come to the ticket counter?”
I swear it seemed as if everyone in the airport sat down at once. My sister turned to my mother.
“I think they mean you.”
Turns out that my beloved raccoon - who should have been named Houdini - escaped from his cage. His paw was bleeding. Several burly airport workers had him trapped, but were nervous. When my mother ran up to him and picked him up and kissed him on the face, the men exclaimed:
“He’s tame?”
My mother said of course he was - why would she be traveling with a raccoon who was wild? A woman approached my mother with a pink pill in her hand. “Give him this - it’ll calm him down.” (When we had settled in Arizona and the pets were out of their cages, we found that pink pill buried in a corner of the cage, hidden under layers of The Chicago Tribune.)
My sister and I hated leaving Chicago. There was so much there to love. The Cubs, the museums, the zoos, the parks, the Loop, Italian beef sandwiches, pizza, the Jewish delis, the Swedish bakeries, Bill Jackson and Cartoon Town, Franklyn MacCormack, Fahey Flynn, WLS, WCFL, the lake, the river - everything we’d known. The only thing that made Arizona palatable was that we watched High Chaparral and expected something that looked like Tucson. It would be an adventure, we told ourselves.
Prescott was not Tucson. And that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but my sister and mother both hated it. We had nothing to do and no money, so we walked a lot. I remember my sister announcing wherever we went how much she hated “this f*cking town.” I had to compare it to Chicago, too, and I recall that my classmates were tired of hearing how great Chicago was and how awful their home was. I was not scoring any points with the little Prescottonians.
Then one day something strange happened. It occurred to me that I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. I loved Arizona. I loved everything about it - including the giant bugs. We were there barely a year, but it was a year of bliss.
I made great friends and had fantastic adventures. But how could it have been a great year? My father died in April, crushing any fantasy I had that he would retire and move to the desert to reunite with my mother. My raccoon, my best friend in the world, discovered that he was, in fact, a wild animal and he wanted no part of domesticity once he experienced the great outdoors. One day he left and didn’t come back. We saw cicadas for the first time. My mother’s cat was run over in our driveway on my mother’s birthday. The black cat who traveled with us from Chicago spent less time with us once we settled in Arizona and we’d see him from time to time and call to him, but he stayed away. We would see his paw prints in the snow on the dead cat’s grave. Soon after, we stopped seeing him at all.
I can make a long list of all the horrible things that happened in the short time we lived there, but to me it was one long Christmas. I can’t even explain why. I had no clue how poor we were; all I knew is that we were living in a real house instead of an apartment. It didn’t matter that our Rogers Park apartment was superior in many ways to the house - it was still a house. In fact, we lived in two houses while we were there. My half-sister owned the properties and we left one house to move next door to a house that never got warmer than thirty degrees.
My mother left my sister and me there to ice over while she scoped out California. It’s a little blurry, but I think she was there for the holidays. So what made this Christmas so special when I barely remember the details? I’m not sure. I remember bitter cold, my sister struggling in a primitive kitchen with a crappy oven and a deformed turkey, sledding down icy hills on big pieces of wet cardboard, then sitting in front of that oven thawing out toes my sister thought were frostbitten. I remember getting a pair of fuzzy pink slippers. Maybe they were from my aunt and uncle in Phoenix…I’m not sure. And I remember a paperweight - I still have it - that is a small furry seal sitting on a rock. Seal Rock. Did my mother bring this back from California? I have no idea. All I know is that the house was so cold, I was sick, we had no gifts that I can recall except for the slippers and the furry rock, but I was so happy.
So when my mother returned to say that she was taking me to live in California I was devastated.
Category: Uncategorized
- Add this post to
- Del.icio.us -
- Digg -
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
