Tag: gifts

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A Partridge in a WHAT?

I have a lot of sympathy for “The 12 Days of Christmas.”

Well, not so much the song itself, unless it’s sung by John Denver and a horde of Muppets. But the guy who keeps sending all this stuff – flocks of birds, hired entertainers, maybe a bit of jewelry – gets an understanding nod of the head for me.

You see, he clearly has no idea what his true love wants for Christmas. But he’s bound and determined to keep trying until he gets it right.

I think most of us would call that “the holidays as usual.”

Even in the age of Amazon, venturing into the holiday season seems to require the strategic acumen of a general, the adaptability of Star Trek’s Borg and the courage of a quarterback facing half a ton of charging linebackers. After a while, the process begins to feel like one of those middle-school math problems: “So if part 2 of your gift is traveling 1000 miles in five days, but part 1 can cover the same distance in four to seven …”

It’s a formula for merry chaos, even when you know each other well. (Witness the year that Heather and I gave each other the same Muppet movie.) And it gets still more challenging when you add kids to the equation.

Heather and I have half-a-dozen nieces and nephews, all but one of whom are older than pre-school but younger than 13. This puts them all firmly in the Danger Zone of gift giving, where safety lies in answering three questions correctly:

  1. What are they interested in now? (As opposed to last year or maybe even last month.)
  2. What do they already have?
  3. What did Grandma and Grandpa already give them before you even saw the list? (Answer: everything.)

A Las Vegas gambler would tremble at those odds.

And yet, we usually navigate the seas pretty well. Part of it comes from a decent memory of what it’s like to be a kid. Still more of it comes from heavy leaning on the Parental Intelligence Agency, reporting out detailed analyses to would-be family Santas since 2010.

But the biggest reason it generally works out is that the best gifts have already been given. Long before Christmas, in fact.

We’ve given sleepovers. And chats. And out-of-state D&D sessions over Zoom. We’ve had the chance to see them learn and grow (sometimes at a distance of hundreds of miles) and for them to know us as more than just names on a package label.

That’s more precious than even five golden rings. After all, the presents you give may come and go (and come again if you didn’t update the Amazon list). But the presence you give lasts.

That’s the love that lights the season. And well beyond.

I hope the 12 Days guy eventually figured that out. I know a lot of my friends and family have. When you’ve given yourself, you’ve given what matters. The packages and presents are just a bonus.

And if those presents include 12 drummers drumming and 11 pipers piping, I sure hope you included some Excedrin, too.  

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Snow Time, Like The Present

Inch by inch, the Subaru crawled over the snow-covered road. Inside the car, the CRUNCH and TEAR of our progress seemed to echo as Dad carefully drove the six long blocks up Gay Street.

It was time to pick up Grandma Elsie. And during the Christmas Blizzard of 1982, that was no small feat.

I can see a number of you nodding along. No surprise. You can always tell the long-time Front Range residents by dropping the words “Christmas” and “1982” into the conversation. That was the year of Bing Crosby’s Revenge, when the snow started coming on Christmas Eve and refused to stop.

That was the Christmas Eve when Dad battled long and hard to clear the front driveway – only to peek out the window during his coffee break and see it covered over again.

That was the Christmas Eve when I left my bicycle on the back porch – and looked out the next morning to see just the tip of one handle breaking the snow.

For my sisters and me, it was the coolest Christmas ever, with the world briefly transformed into our own personal Hoth. (Yes, even then we were Star Wars geeks.) Looking back as an adult, I can only imagine how exhausting it must have been for my folks.

Snow transforms the world, and I still love the beauty and magic that it brings as it makes old landscapes new. But it also carries a price.

It means more work, more caution and less haste.

It means breaking your routine and thinking about what you’re doing and why.

Most of all, it means looking out for your neighbor and lending a hand where you can, whether it’s helping to shove their high-centered car off a snowy median or lending an extra shovel to clear a walk.

And when you’ve made it through one of the Big Ones, you remember. Surviving the Christmas Blizzard of ’82 becomes a badge of pride.

We’ve seen those lessons in other times and places, many of them much less picturesque. Tornado. Wildfire. Flood. All the moments that reach out and test you as a person and a community.

Moments like now.

Years from now, a lot of us (I hope) will be boring kids and grandkids with our stories of the Pandemic of 2020. We’ll have our own tales of the uncertainty, the frustration, the odd things we had to do to get by when the world suddenly sprouted more masks than a Marvel Comics movie.

And hopefully, we’ll also have the same lesson to pass on. That it’s in the times of crisis that your love for your neighbor is truly tested.

We sing a lot about love this time of year. It fills our stories from the haunting lines of “A Christmas Carol” to the cheesiest Hallmark movie on the screen. And whether the tale is profound or trite, one element always comes back – love doesn’t leave you alone.

It doesn’t care about what’s comfortable or normal. It’s likely to ask you to change – to uproot what you thought you knew and rebuild. To think beyond your own skin and sacrifice, whether it’s to help a neighbor or a world.

It’s a hard gift to give. And the best one.

And when the world seems cold, it’s that love that will again light the fire.

The time has come. The season is here. The need is everywhere. Remember the lessons we learned in the snow and reach out with them, even when there’s not a single flake to be seen.

The road has been slow and the progress agonizing. But the destination’s worth it.  

With care, we can reach it together.

Even without four-wheel drive.

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Lens of Love

In the heat of summer, he was there. The game ebbed and flowed around him as players steadily wheeled their chairs from base to base, or reached down for a lightly hit grounder, or waited for the next pitch with an aluminum bat and a coach’s help.

He never intruded, rarely drew attention. But through his lens, the Monday night softball game became magic. No – through his lens, the game revealed the magic it already held, as the joy and eagerness of each player made them shine like stars.

This was the Ed Navarro that Heather and I knew.

And this was the Ed that Missy loved.

By now, you’ve probably heard or read about Ed’s passing. He was one of those guys who makes a community work, the sort where you read the obituary and say “Wait – he did that, too?” The piece in the Times-Call hit all the beats – co-founder of El Comité, passionate local lawyer and advocate for the Hispanic community, and always ready to capture a local activity or a youth sporting event with his perfectly placed camera.

Most of it, I’m a little embarrassed to say, was new to me. That’s how it often is with the people in our lives; we see the small piece that intersects our own, unaware that we’re dealing with a leading actor in the show.

But then, I’m not sure how many knew the piece we saw, either. The part that greeted the Monday night crowd at Clark Centennial Park.

The part that was a fixture at the summertime “Softball for All.”

Some of you have seen me write about the summer softball program here for the disabled; the one that runs for three innings with plenty of cheers, no outs and no score. Every year, our ward Missy lives for the next season to arrive, when she can don her Niwot Nightmares T-shirt and grab a bat, a glove, and a coach’s arm for support as she travels the bases.

I teasingly call her “Hollywood” during the season because she strides the field like a celebrity, often stopping to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd with a wave or even a bow. And like any good celebrity, her room is full of the photos of her accomplishments, on the walls and filling well-thumbed albums.

Every one of those photos came from Ed Navarro.

Each year, at the end of the season, the teams hold an ice-cream social at the Longmont Senior Center. And each year, they and their families arrive to find the walls covered with dozens, if not hundreds, of photographs from Ed that he had taken at the games. Each player could bring home their own, the shots that revealed their own inner Mantle and Galarraga and A-Rod. And each got to keep an album with shots of everyone. The later years even included a CD in the album that held every shot.

We always cheered him and gave him a card and a gift. It could never have been enough. Not compared to what he gave us.

Not compared to the love that shone from every wall.

The funny thing is, we hold up folks like Ed as special. And they are. They’re priceless. But their greatest power, I think, is to remind us that anyone can be an Ed.

We all have something to offer. We all have something to share. It might be a moment’s kindness. It might be a talent that creates a memory. It might be something, anything, that says “You’re human. You matter. You are loved and seen.”

It’s easy to forget that sometimes, to feel alone. When we reach out, we rebuild the family. And that lifts all of us up.

We can all be important in someone’s eyes.

Ed’s eyes captured memories and shared them freely. And in those memories, a whole league was revealed as All-Stars.

Thank you, sir.

Our caps are off to you.

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A Little Something Extra

I read the email twice. Three times. It didn’t change. It wasn’t a prank.

Which meant I really did have three and a half days of vacation I hadn’t known about.

Wow.

How?

It didn’t seem possible. Not this year, anyway. “Lucky” 2013 had been the Year of the Minor Family Emergency for our house, after all. It was like a dark version of Old McDonald’s Farm: here a flu, there a strain, everywhere a … ah, you got the idea.

With each micro-crisis, another couple of days off got eaten up. Soon sick time was gone and the rest was going, like some survivor in a post-apocalyptic movie who throws Louis XIV furniture on the fire just to hold off a blizzard.

Finally, I’d counted off the last of my time. Or thought I had, anyway. But there it was.

Part of me gave three cheers for reporter math skills.

The rest reached back to grade school. And the year of the Christmas Map.

It had been a pretty successful holiday that year, all things considered. My sisters and I had carried off our usual plot to wake Grandma on Christmas morning, who then helped us softly sing off-kilter carols as we waited for Mom and Dad:

 

While shepherds washed their socks by night, all seated round the tub …

 

Followed quickly by that seasonal favorite:

 

Good King Wensceslas looked out, in his pink pajamas …

 

The day dawned into family and fun and books and games and the sorts of childhood memories you want to have on Dec. 25. But as we started to break up the morning revelry, Dad took a glance at the tree and then at me.

“I think you missed one.”

I looked again.

Long and skinny, it looked like a forgotten roll of wrapping paper tucked out of the way. A few quick rips revealed the truth: it was a map. One of those great Rand McNally-style wall maps of the U.S., with bright colors and thick sprinklings of small towns, perfect for journeys of the imagination.

It hadn’t been on any list or in any letter to Santa. But the surprise made it all the more fun, an unexpected present sneaking in the door.

And I’d almost missed it.

It’s easy to do, and not just with the ones that look like gift-wrap. I think many of us count stresses more readily than blessings these days – the stacked-up highway traffic, the cough that takes three weeks to leave, the bill that’s waiting still one more week to get paid. We all know the list and it starts to get deadening after a while, to the nerves and the soul.

But then there are the other moments. The ones hidden behind the tree.

For me, this year, a lot of those gifts have been wrapped in people. Like the friend who unexpectedly appeared at the grocery store, in time to help change a flat tire. Or the one who sent us a puzzle book in the mail one day, just because. Or even the online acquaintance who’s never met me but sent a shoutout during the flood to be sure I was OK.

Unexpected gifts, all of them.

Wonderful to give. Even better to be, especially at this time of year. After all, what is this season about if not a present that no one was expecting?

I wonder whose gift I can be.

I suppose I’ve got an extra three and a half days to figure it out.