Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 12

 Simple but complicated

Shirley Richter not only was my wife’s mother, she also was Marice's best friend.

Marice talked on the phone with her mom every day, sometimes for more than an hour.  They shared everything with each other, and whenever Marice had a problem, her mother was the first person she consulted.

When Marice was pregnant with our second child, we went in for an amniocentesis. After the OB/GYN at Big Baylor in Dallas completed the procedure, which she had performed with the help of a powerful sonogram machine, she asked us if we wanted to know the sex of the baby.

Since the amnio results would provide that anyway, we said yes.

“Well,” she said, maneuvering the sonar wand around Marice’s abdomen, “it’s definitely a boy.”

“What?” said a shocked Marice, who had been convinced she was carrying another girl.

“Oh, sure,” the doctor replied confidently. “See, there’s his penis.”

Marice cried all the way home. All her siblings were female, as were her closest cousins. She knew nothing about raising a son. Neither did her mother, the child-raising expert. How, my wife despaired, do you potty train boys? I remained silent, acutely aware that you handle pregnant women delicately even under the best of circumstances.

When we got home, Marice fled upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. A few minutes later, Shirley called to see how the exam had gone.

“How’s Marice?” she asked. She’s upstairs crying, I replied.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Shirley asked, alarmed.

“We’re having a little boy,” I said.

“Oh, I understand. Let me talk to Marice,” said Shirley, all business now, ready to provide aid and comfort.

Mother and daughter weathered the crisis, and Ethan turned out fine. In case you’re wondering, he was potty trained in the regular way – stand here, aim there.

Shirley, the youngest of four children, was the unplanned offspring of her Russian immigrant parents. Her big brothers spoiled her and her parents doted on their baby girl.

In high school, she was popular and – in the vernacular of the day – a dish. There’s a family photograph of her as a cheerleader, her smile bright as sunshine and her hair cropped short and sassy. It’s easy to see why she never lacked for suitors.

She ran her household with an iron fist clothed in a proper white glove. Her husband adored her, her daughters revered her and her large extended family recognized her as the glue that held them all together.

During Passover, she always prepared two Seder dinners on successive nights. Each could seat as many as 30 guests. Shirley believed that no one should be alone on the holidays, and there was always a place at her table for such “orphans.”

She met her future husband, a besmitten Fred Richter, in community college. And while she never got her degree, Shirley was well-read and had a quick mind. For years, she served as the bookkeeper of her brother’s carpet firm. She had strong opinions about almost everything.

Shirley would have liked this ornament. It’s a lot like her. Simple, but complicated. Delicate, but an object of substance, created to withstand the dings and dents of time. It’s as beautiful today as it was on the day we bought it. And it absolutely commands the space on the tree where I place it each year.

At the end of her life, Shirley waged a courageous battle with cancer with her typical grace and generosity, thinking almost always of her family first. As in everything else in her life, she met the end in her own way.

When the time came, she left the hospital and went home. There, surrounded by her three daughters, she died, a woman of dignity and compassion and fortitude.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 11

 

Da Bears!

What, you may well ask, is a Chicago Bears ornament doing on the Christmas tree of a guy who was raised watching the Dallas Cowboys?

The answer is simple enough. Marice’s father, my father-in-law, was a lifelong Bears season-ticket holder. Even in the depths of winter, he’d bundle up as only Chicagoans know how and trudge off to Soldier’s Field to watch his beloved Bears battle in the ice and snow.

Fred Richter was a good man, loving father and devoted husband. He also was a deeply committed Jew even though he was raised in a secular household and came to Judaism late in life.

As a prominent member of his synagogue, Fred was one of the Jewish leaders who went to court in 1977 to stop the Nazis from marching through his northern Chicago suburb of Skokie, then home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.

Their lengthy legal battle and the constitutional issues it raised ultimately convinced Nazi organizers to abandon their scheme to march in Skokie, where they knew the impact and the anguish would grab bigger headlines, and to shift to Chicago instead.

On the day of the march in the summer of 1978, only about 20 knuckle-draggers showed up. When they were met with the jeers and catcalls of 20,000 protesters lining the streets of Chicago, they fled the scene after about 10 minutes.

Fred’s teenage daughter, Marice’s younger sister Marla, was among those anti-Nazi protesters. She can be seen in a video taken that day shouting obscenities at the strutting thugs. I strongly suspect Fred secretly applauded her visceral, if crude, reaction to the strutting morons.

In his younger years, Fred had played football, so his love of the game later in life came naturally. Marice has a couple of photos of her father playing in high school.

In one, he is listening closely to a coach lecture on the field. In the other, he’s trying desperately to catch a pass. His efforts are being hampered by his helmet, which has slipped so low on his forehead that it’s obstructing his view of the ball.

 Sadly, Fred never saw my son play. Alzheimer’s disease robbed him of his memories too soon for that. But I’m sure he would have been a very proud grandpa and, knowing Fred, would have insisted on instructing his grandson in the finer points of the game.

Marice and I framed those photos of her father on the gridiron and gave them to Ethan. They are among his most treasured keepsakes.

When I look at them, I see a serious, good-looking kid, determined to get the job done, a kid who grew into a man I respected and admired. Richter family history doesn’t record it, but I’m willing to bet he caught that damned ball.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 10

 

A nutcracker stands guard.

Nutcrackers are the most ubiquitous Christmas decorations in Gunnels Manse.

When our children were young, Marice discovered a love of nutcrackers, perhaps for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. As a result, nutcrackers abound throughout our Grapevine home at Christmastime.

A giant nutcracker stands in our entryway. Two large nutcrackers guard either side of our fireplace. Smaller nutcrackers fight for attention from shelves, tabletops and consoles.

And more than 20 nutcrackers of all types hang from the branches of The Beast, our Christmas tree.

Here’s a favorite, one of a set of five that Marice discovered on a shopping trip long ago. They are inspired by the artwork of 19^th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who created the modern image of Santa Claus.

These nutcrackers are the heaviest ornaments on The Beast. Placing them is difficult since the strongest branches that can take their weight are not the most visible. But I make an effort because they are beautiful and give the tree a vintage look I love.

Why nutcrackers? Well, why not? The original story on which “The Nutcracker” is based is quite wonderful, the ballet is awesome and Tchaikovsky’s music divine. I’d say that’s inspiration enough.

But there’s another, more personal, reason why Marice and I find nutcrackers irresistible.

When our daughter was young, Marice enrolled her in the Grapevine Dance Academy. There Rachel learned the rudiments of ballet and other dance forms. She loved it and demonstrated real potential.

Each December, Grapevine Dance staged a production of “The Nutcracker” to demonstrate the talents of its students. The older, high school-aged girls danced the featured roles, and the younger ones were cast in minor parts, depending on their age and experience.

Rachel performed in two Nutcrackers, the first as a mouse and the second as a dancing nutcracker. From a parent’s point of view, the programs were magical. The kids worked hard and danced their hearts out. I get a little choked up just thinking about them.

At about the same time, nutcrackers began to come home with Marice from her shopping trips. A coincidence? Hmm, I think not.

The dance academy always struggled to find male dancers for its Nutcrackers. Male ballet students are a little rare in Northeast Tarrant. In Rachel’s last production, the academy director convinced a couple of members of Grapevine High’s football team to help out.

These guys were a far cry from Baryshnikov. Mostly, they just stood stoically on stage while the girls twirled and swooped around them. Occasionally, they were called upon to lift the dancers above their heads, which they managed to do with a modicum of grace and without dropping the girls on their keisters.

That year, the Grapevine Mustangs made the state football playoffs, and the team was scheduled to play out of town on the day of the Saturday performance. It was an afternoon game, and everyone knew the guys were going to be cutting it close to make it back in time.

As curtain time neared, anxiety levels were peaking when a car squealed into the parking lot, and the guys jumped out and ran to don their costumes. Everyone, including members of the audience who knew what was happening, breathed a sigh of relief.

The performance went swimmingly, and the Mustangs in the cast did themselves proud. Afterward, the kids, faces aglow, mingled with the audience in the theater lobby. Our gridiron heroes, their muscled thighs squeezed into tights, stood awkwardly to the side, obviously wishing mightily they were somewhere else.

 I approached and shook their hands, congratulating them for not pulling a muscle on stage that night.

“By the way,” I added mischievously, “I know why you’re doing this. You’re here for the girls.” (To be sure, the featured dancers would have set any high school boy’s heart aflutter.)

The two young men glanced uneasily at each other and said nothing. Satisfied, I grinned and walked away.

In case you’re wondering, the Mustangs won that playoff game. They went on to win state later that month.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part Nine

 

The pets of Christmas

Marice and I are dog people. But we didn’t start out that way.

My wife wasn’t raised with family pets. Her mother thought they were too much trouble or too messy or too, too … something. In college, she and her roommates had a dog, but Marice wasn’t the chief caretaker so she really had no idea about the joys – and challenges – of dog ownership.

When I introduced her to my family, she got her first close-up look of devoted animal lovers. My mother had a succession of dogs that she treated as well as – maybe better than –  she ever treated my sister and me. (Sorry, Mom, but you know it’s true.)

As for my sister, she’s owned multiple dogs and cats for years. I tease her that she’s only one cat shy of being her neighborhood’s “crazy cat lady.”

Marice was amused – make that smugly bemused – by the devotion my family showed toward its pets. She considered it quaint and eccentric.

Our children badgered us for years to get them a dog. I was doubtful about Marice’s comfort level with house pets so I left the decision to her. One day I got a call at work.

“I looked at a puppy today,” Marice said. By her excited tone, I knew the end to this particular story. “She’s the cutest thing. A little West Highland terrier. She’s very sweet and so good tempered. And guess what?

“She’s got your birthday!”

Resistance on my part being pointless, Kiera the Westie became the grand pooh-bah of Gunnels Manse. And Marice officially became a crazy dog person.

She cared for that Westie for 13 happy years, and when Kiera went to chase squirrels across the Rainbow Bridge, Marice quickly found another Westie to take her place. Now Charlotte, Lottie for short, rules our particular roost.

She’s also the toast of our neighborhood, a fact confirmed every day when Marice takes her for a walk. Everyone they encounter wants to stop and admire the little priss.

Buffy, my daughter’s Westie, is Lottie’s partner in crime. They’re two peas in a pod and compete fiercely for our collective attention. They are – why try to deny it? – adorable. As is my son’s shepherd/hound mix, Bailey. Like I said, we’re dog people.

So it’s no surprise that various dog ornaments adorn our Christmas tree. I’m particularly fond of this one. Marice always wants to know where I put it so she can sneak an occasional peak. She bought it because it reminds her of the late, lamented Kiera.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part Seven

 

This must be a Gunnels Christmas tree.

My father was not a particularly expressive man. He was stoic in every sense of the word and viewed the world with a quiet skepticism and suspicion borne of the hardscrabble childhood he had experienced.

One of three brothers, he grew up on a small farm in Eastland County. Times were hard and the living wasn’t easy. His father, by all accounts, was a domineering taskmaster who demanded his family toe the line. His line.

One incident tells the tale. When he was a youngster, my father picked cotton one entire season in order to buy a single-shot .22-caliber target rifle. But when he proudly brought the treasured rifle home, his father appropriated it as his own. It was a lesson my father never forgot: Life can be cruel and capricious and what you cherish most can be taken away.

He eventually retrieved the rifle from his father, and it now belongs to me. Made with an eye toward durability and function, it has a simple beauty to it. And it still shoots straight.

Pearl Harbor changed the trajectory of my father’s life. He left the farm and went off to war, joining his generation of Americans in saving the world from murderous butchers and madmen. Then he came home, married my mother and started a family.

After my daughter’s birth, the nurse placed her in my arms and I looked into her face for the first time. I was stunned to see in her round, wrinkly face a vestige of my father, a resemblance so strong it made me catch my breath and instantly brought tears to my eyes.

I know it was a trick of the imagination, a combination of brain neurons created in part by my regret that my father, who had died three years before, never got to see his granddaughter, who today looks nothing like him. But it seemed very real at the time, and my mother and I had a good cry together when I called her with the news.

Later, when my son came along, we named him Ethan Clyde, his middle name a tribute to my Dad. I told E it is a Scottish name, as in the Firth of Clyde. It is, of course, but it’s also an old-fashioned name, a country name. It suited my father, and my son has made peace with it. He and his male cousins will carry on the Gunnels name, for better or worse.

They’ll have to endure, as I have, a lifetime of hearing the name mispronounced. In the seventh grade, my junior high principal, reading a list of names over the intercom to the entire school, pronounced it Gunkells, thus bestowing upon me a despised nickname for the remainder of my school career.

For the record, it’s pronounced GUN-nulls. What’s so damned hard about that?

I’ve always considered this ornament, the largest one on the tree, as a kind of label, a sign designating this is a Gunnels, capital G, Christmas tree. Dad would approve, I think, but he would certainly never admit it out loud.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part Six

 

A reminder of Christmas trees of old

When I was a kid, decorating the family Christmas tree was a family affair. Sort of.

My sister and I were allowed to participate up to a point. But my mother and father strictly governed the process from beginning to end.

My father was a hard-working provider and a man of few words. Think Darren McGavin in “The Christmas Story” with rougher edges. He was in charge of procuring and erecting the tree, which always came from one of several temporary treelots set up across Big Spring each year sometime before Thanksgiving.

Getting the tree to stand up straight was always a struggle, an ordeal my old man endured with muttered curses and baleful stares at my mother. He also strung the lights, a step inevitably complicated by two or three non-functioning bulbs that had to be replaced in mid-installation by frantic trips to TG&Y.

At that point, he’d turn the tree over to my mother. Her job was to cover the tree in ornaments she kept stored in the garage storeroom, a cherished set of family heirlooms in ancient boxes in danger of failing apart. Each held a memory for my mother, and my sister and I were compelled to treat each with careful reverence.

She watched us like a hawk as we attached these treasures to the spots she designated. If we dared to use our own judgment as to placement, she was quick to adjust it to her artistic vision.

The final step was covering the tree in what my sister and I called the “shingles,” the narrow strips of tinsel that were meant to approximate icicles and gave our trees the desired shimmering effect.

 In 2011, my mother was in failing health and unable to live alone in the house she and my father, who died in 1989, built in 1954. She had fallen early that September, and she never fully recovered from its effects.

So in October, she came to stay with my family through the holidays. Since it was hard for her to negotiate the stairs that led to our guest room, I installed a bed for her in our front living room, which was the only place in our house large enough for The Beast, our nine-foot Christmas tree.

That year, The Beast stayed in its canvas bag, and I purchased a smaller tree for our foyer, positioned so that my mother could see its sparkling lights from her bed.

Mom entered a nursing home the following January and died there in March, the day after her 87^th birthday. The holiday season she spent with my family in Grapevine and the months I was allowed to take care of her are precious memories embued with a sweet sadness and longing I can’t put into words.

This ornament, with its vintage image of Old St. Nick, reminds me of those Christmas trees on Morrison Drive in Big Spring and of my mother. She, like her son, considered Christmas the very best time of year.

Bi-District playoff champs: Southlake Carroll 49, Haltom 14

 

A playoff tradition

A real drubbing

The Southlake Carroll Dragons strolled out of the first round of the 6A Division I playoffs last night with a crushing victory over the Haltom Buffaloes, who were making only their second playoff appearance since 2001.

The Buffs had no answer for Carroll’s high-powered offense, led for the fifth straight game by senior Hunter Holden, standing in for Quinn Ewers, the Dragons’ injured superstar quarterback.

Next up for the Dragons will be the 8-2 Odessa Permian Panthers, who slipped past El Paso Franklin 37-26 to reach the area round. Carroll, 9-1, will meet the Mojo at Abilene Christian University’s Wildcat Stadium at 4 p.m. Friday.

The Dragons scored on five of their first six possessions last night, their TD streak ruined when Holden threw the first of two interceptions. The Buffalos took advantage of the miscue, marching quickly downfield before Keenan Bailey muscled 17 yards into the endzone.

 Asserting control

Carroll asserted control at that point, however, hanging 42 unanswered points on hapless Haltom. It rolled up 536 yards in total offense against the Buffs, who could manage only 246.

RJ Maryland

Without Holden’s errant passes, and a rare fumble by RJ Maryland at the Haltom 5, the Dragons might have hung 70 points on their overwhelmed visitors.

Holden compensated for his misthrows with an outstanding performance. He completed 12 of 16 passes for 223 yards and three TDs, while running for a 4^th.

After Haltom tied the game late in the first quarter, Holden lofted a 69-yard pass to Maryland, which handed the Dragons the lead and initiated the scoring spree that dismantled the Buffalos.

And Holden spread the wealth, connecting with Maryland (2-123), Landon Samson (6-55) and Brady Boyd (3-43) for scores.

Sophomore Owen Allen also had a standout night, taking advantage of the holes torn in the Haltom line by Carroll’s surging offensive front line. He rushed for 190 yards on 10 carries and accounted for 3 TDs. His second score came on a heart-pounding 84-yard dash that began when he blasted through the Buff D-line untouched and then outraced the field to the endzone.

Stepping up

The Carroll defense stepped up in a big way last night, smothering Buffalo quarterback Jace Washington and limiting Allen Reyonolds, Haltom’s leading rusher, to 63 yards. The final Buff score came after the Dragons began extensive substitutions.

On a sad note, backup quarterback Kaden Anderson, a sophomore who took over for Holden in the 3^rd quarter, went out with a knee injury, probably for the year.

The Dragons, leading 49-14, were threatening to score after senior defensive lineman Jim Cates recovered a fumble at the Haltom 36. Behind the hard charging of senior RB Wesley Craddock, Carroll surged to the 3. A couple of plays later, a delay of game penalty sent them back to the 12.

From there, Anderson swung around the right end and fought his way back to the 3, where he was slammed down hard by a Buff defender. Dragon fans waited in silence as he was helped off the field in obvious pain.

It’s too bad when such injuries occur late in a game in which the outcome has long since been decided. But you can’t fault backups for playing full-tilt when they get the opportunity.  Anderson has shown great promise in his limited exposure to Friday night lights. Here’s hoping he mends quickly and completely.

And now the Mighty Mojo stands between Carroll and a deep run into the playoffs. Permian has had a good year. It’s back in the West Texas district to which my hometown of Big Spring belonged when it played in the largest UIL classification, which in those years was 4A.

The better team

But the Panthers are not the unstoppable force they were when Buzz Bissinger wrote “Friday Night Lights,” the book that made Mojo nationally famous and gave high school football its now ubiquitous nickname.

Carroll is the better team, with or without its five-star quarterback, the worthy Ewers. But anything can happen in the playoffs, particularly in the weirdness created by this plague-impacted season. So a trip west to my old stomping grounds may be in order, despite the dismal timing and other complicating factors.

On a final note, I’m not sure how I feel about bringing so many kids on the field at halftime last night to create the Texas outline and perform the “Lids” routine, both playoff traditions. In these perilous times, it seemed a bit reckless with the kids’ safety.

That said, I’ll freely admit it sure looked good and felt good to do something normal, to participate in such a comforting ritual in the time of COVID.

Fingers crossed, I hope we don’t have reason to regret the decision. Meanwhile, stay safe and wear your mask.

 Go Dragons!