My best Christmas was the year we had Ken and Barbie at the top
of our tree. We had an angel first for Christmas Day, but then we had Ken and
Barbie. Let me explain. When my daughter was four, I hired a ballet dancer to
babysit for a few afternoons a week. Randy was tall and confident, with that
dancer’s chest-first carriage, and though he was only 27, a sure cheerful
bossiness. For four years, he and Halley roamed the city on adventures: to
climb the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, to smile at the waddling,
pint-sized penguins at the zoo. They had their own world, their own passions: a
devotion to ice cream to Elmo to Pee-wee Herman.
He
orchestrated Halley’s birthday parties to a fare-thee-well: One year he
declared a Peter Pan theme, made Halley a Tinker Bell outfit with little jingle
bells at the hem, and talked my father into making a scary appearance in a
big-brimmed pirate hat and a fake hook for a hand. Randy took charge of my
grown-up parties, too, dictating what I wore, foraging in thrift shops to find
the right rhinestone necklace to go with the dress he’d made me buy.
When
Halley was eight, Randy left New York to take over a sleepy ballet company in a
small city in Colorado. He taught, he choreographed, he coaxed secretaries and
computer salesmen into pliéing across the stage.
Halley
missed him terribly; we all did, but he called her and sent her party dresses,
and he came to see us at Christmas when he could. The year Halley was ten, we
had a new baby. That same year, Randy was diagnosed with AIDS. He told me over
the phone, without an ounce of self-pity, that he had so few T cells left that
he’d named them Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
It
seemed insane for him to travel, insane for him to risk one of us sneezing on
him and giving him pneumonia, but he had decided, and that was it. He was as
cheerful and bossy as ever. Terribly thin, his cheeks hollow but eyes bright,
he took Halley all over the city once again, with baby Julie strapped to his
chest in a cloth carrier.
“We’ve
got to do something about this tree,” he said one day. The tree, with its red
ribbon bows, looked fine to me; I was even a little vain about the way every
branch shone with ornaments.
A
few days later, on New Year’s Eve morning, he summoned our little family. He
was wearing the old pirate’s hat, fished out of a costume box and for hair,
curly colored streamers that stuck out of the hat and tumbled down to his
shoulders.
As
we watched — me irritable at first, wondering how much you were supposed to
yield to a dying houseguest, even if you loved him like a brother — he stripped
the tree. Then he brought out more curly streamers, heaps of them, and tooters
and little party-favor plastic champagne bottles. “Now we’ll turn it into a New
Year’s tree,” he declared.
A
New Year’s tree! Of course! We threw the streamers all over the tree, we
covered it with the tooters and the tiny champagne bottles. “And now, for the
pièce de résistance,” Randy said. Stretching his tall self way up to the top of
the tree, he removed its gold papier-mâché angel. Solemnly, carefully, he
placed on top Halley’s tuxedoed Ken and her best Barbie, the one in a sparkly
ball gown.
“Ta
da!” he said, and beamed. It was a wonderful tree, happy and goofy and perfect.
Randy
lived for another year and a half. None of us will ever get over his death, not
really. But every Christmastime, I raise a glass to Randy — to his tree, to his
bossiness, to the Christmas he taught us that courage is a man in a pirate hat
with silly streamers for hair.
https://www.facebook.com/myfavoritechristmasstories
https://www.facebook.com/myfavoritechristmasstories
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