I feel like I need an outfit for my mission, something different than my normal night clothes.  But long gone are the days when my mother would present me with the year’s Christmas nightgown, so my Christmas outfit will not look like it should, not for the real Operation Christmas Eve.  Nevertheless, I do have one thing that is white — a long, cotton, almost dress-like gown; so that will be it, something as close to what it once was, albeit the wrong season’s attire.  I’m not sure other adults identify with this, but, on Christmas Eve, I feel like a little girl, not so much on Christmas Day, but on Christmas Eve, that’s what I feel.  So in that way children know things, I can always tell it’s Christmas Eve, at least at night, even in these kind of times.  Christmas Eve is darker, quieter, prettier even, than any other night.  One year, about ten years ago, I had to work on Christmas Eve.  I had to do this paper for two people who don’t celebrate the holiday.  At about 7:30 p.m., when the paper was done and they were lamenting over commas, I said to them it was my holiday and I was leaving.  I was practically in tears as I walked onto the empty city streets because I thought I had missed Christmas Eve.  But it was Christmas Eve outside.  I could feel it.  That was a year like this one, a lean year, but when I got home, I held my dog and I felt just exactly the same as on years when there were tons of presents.  Still, I think this year I’m even more anxious.  That’s what makes this mission so very important.  I need it to work.  I need my sign.  I need something that will make me feel special.

And so I begin my mission.  The outside Christmas lights are on.  The tree lights are on.  I sit next to my Christmas tree in my bedroom lighted only by those Christmas lights, and wait, with my bunny, my dogs, my birds.  But… nothing.  I brush my hair, and wait some more.  But … nothing.  I walk to the other room and take socks from the armoire, intending to stay warm while I wait some more.  When I walk back into the bedroom, through the sitting room, I pass the wooden chest.  And I wonder.  I wonder if it would be too difficult to find a photo of myself from my childhood.  The one I’m thinking of I remember to be my favorite, and I know I have it.  The photo is of my father and me, sitting on chairs next to my parents’ bed.  My father is playing guitar.  I am singing.  And that photo is of me, the real me, the me that started it all.  My father would teach me music.  He would have me listen to the orchestra on the radio and identify the instruments.  He bought me a guitar, the one he is playing in the photo.  We both played it.  We played and sang those songs we all first learn, like Home on the Range.  We sang and played Johnny Cash.  And in these moments, as in all the after-the-day moments, I wore my princess outfit, my stage outfit if you will – a 1960s black nightie of my mothers, with sheer detail, pinched together with a large safety pin in the front to hold it onto my six-year-old frame.  My parents, my father in particular, encouraged my early stardom; my outrageous stage outfits that were really casted-off nighties of my mother, that black one being the absolute best; my house-dancing; my singing; my very wild conducting of the orchestra in front of the radio; my hair flips; my standing on the furniture to my audience below (parakeets make fabulous audiences); my running through the house; my twirling in place with my arms outstretched way better than even Joe Elliott can do; my every moment of wild abandon.  All of that was perfectly fine, just don’t jump on the bed.  Stand on the bed and perform, yes, just don’t jump.  In my adult life I have become something of the figure-head of the family.  I remember walking across the street in downtown Los Angeles shortly after returning from the events following my mom’s death almost four years ago, realizing, with the death of my mother, I was then the oldest woman left in our family, and overwhelmed by the role I now would have.  It has been years since I felt any of that wild abandon of my youth.  For that matter, it has been years since I even considered my father like that, a product of many other complications.  Nevertheless, somewhere in my mind, that IS my father, that man in that photo is my father.  So my mission would take a slight course correction.  No longer did I feel the sign to make me feel special would come from beyond the windows.  Instead, the sign would be finding that photo of the six-year-old and her precious dad, my greatest teacher, the first man I ever loved, who raised that girl to be someone who would and could do anything, who gave her the encouragement to be her true self, that version of me who is always in me, even in these moments of doubt.  That is my special.

So I pull the trunk over to my bed, right next to my little, white Christmas tree, climb on the bed and kneel up and pull the string of my overhead ceiling lamp, part of a ceiling fan over my bed.  I have a princess bed mind you, enormous, so that I can hold court there with my pets, with four, tall, carved posters that each almost reach the ceiling, more evidence that I overdo everything.  I remove the pile of photos from the wooden trunk and place them on the bed, leaving the other contents – the clippings and the letters — in the truck.  I look through the photos, but my desired photo is not in there.  I go throughout the house to make sure I actually have all of the old boxes and their contents actually in the trunk, and confirm that I do.  I worry.  I worry something happened to this photo, now convinced that just holding it in my hands is going to make my life better.  And I decide I’ll go through the entire trunk, the contents of which I haven’t seen in a very long time, and something I don’t look at because I don’t like looking back.  First I hold the snow globe.  It’s old now.  I look at the little deer in there and wonder when it was that I started to like animals.  I can’t remember.  I shake the globe just a little, just enough for the snow to rise because … nobody likes a blizzard.  And I feel it now.  I feel like I’m little.  I feel the snow that blanketed the yard, the patio, the world of my youth, another memory that seems so distant.  I place the snow globe down, and pick out the things of the chest, one by one, on a quest to find that photo, to be found, or so I hope, inside something else.

Many of the items I don’t know I’ve saved.  Some I do.  All I remember once I see them.  The clippings are brittle.  July 1969, the Calgary newspaper’s front page, One Giant Step for Mankind: that sets the earliest date.  Others talk about the astronauts’ lives, others about Apollo 13, about Apollo 14, about the moon-vehicle, about Challenger.  On the back side of these clippings are other stories or advertisements, people attired in outfits straight out of the tv show Mad Men.  I can feel the times.  There are business cards of my father, first as an engineer, then as Vice President, then as President, then as … owner; stationary of the primary business, a name representing a time I have long since let go.  I feel it though.  There are ribbons – they look like award ribbons — saying baron and cattle baron — a prestigious, society, charity ball in Dallas of that name.  There is a long ribbon that says Homecoming.  There are newspaper articles about my family, about a family I knew who were like us, names and times familiar, but almost just a story to me now, a time that seems as if it never happened.  There are jokes written on those articles in my mom’s distinctive handwriting, usually funny even in light of the news that these articles state, something like her note on the margin of one asking if the children would be pledged, her retort to that particular 1982 article saying all assets would be pledged to the lenders.  There is an article that mentioned an accidental and tragic explosion of an industrial plant.  That plant was my father’s.  There are articles about me, about my dance, about being a high school baton twirler, about being at whatever event, and two newspaper supplements with the lists of the people who passed the 1990 California bar exam.  I don’t look, but I know my name is amongst those listed.  I have no recollection of even getting those newspapers.  There are programs … plays I saw, football games I saw, football games I performed in, graduations I was in.  There are two car brochures, one for the 1970 Buicks, my family’s first new car, a blue Le Sabre, and the 1978 Camaro.  I wanted that yellow one on the cover, well except that I wanted it to have a white interior, not tan; the photo featured a tan interior.  There is a report card, mine from second grade; the teacher writes that I am consistently good in my studies in all subjects, that I like to work with my hands, that I am creative and artistic.  I think of the time proximity of that report card to that photo I want to find.  In that photo I would have been in first grade.

The letters and cards are next.  There are many of these.  I keep every letter, every communication, that anyone who means something to me ever sends.  They are beautiful.  In there are early letters from my parents.  My mother’s all say things like “my first little love”.  There is an envelope from my father that has writing on the front and the back of the envelope.  I have to turn the envelope over in the middle of each word to read it.  After much effort, I see that it says “you are the apple of my eye, love your daddy”.  The later ones from my father talk about business.  They are often on post it notes.  He tells me about tax extensions, about moving, about getting a frac tank for the plant after it blew up.  My father was such a force that people literally left him pipes and tanks and “stuff” so that he could try, from that generosity of articles left by strangers, to rebuild.  He sounds optimistic, like out of that scrap, “we” will rebuild.  He never says “me”, “my”, “I”, always “we”.  There is a letter from my father to my mother, a photocopy, one my brother sent me from an entire drawer that my mother kept until one fateful day when, after her divorce, she threw them out.  The letters were the daily correspondence between the two of them, written in my fifth year of life, when my father worked doing hard manual labor in the oil fields in the far north of Alberta to save enough money for my mother, brother and sister to move from Texas to Canada.  The letter mentions me; it says he was happy I was so excited to talk to him on the phone the night before.  There were few of those calls though, the reason the letters were so many in number.  The letter mentions my mother’s statements that she went to look at Oldsmobiles; my father said he was proud of that decision, Olds were good cars, that car would be good for “our family”, and that he wanted her to look for a good 1966 model because he didn’t like the looks of the 1967s.  He was brief in this letter, the entirety fitting on one page, but with all of that business, he was very loving.  And there was no complaining, save for him missing my mom, no complaining in those tough times while he worked in what I know to have been conditions so cold the vehicle engines had to be left running all the time or the engines would freeze.  No complaining, … and you know nobody likes a blizzard.  Now I know I have to find that photo… because that’s where my strength comes from, from that time, and feeling strong is half-way to feeling special.  But still, I don’t see the photo.

I go back to the last stack, the one of the photographs, some loose, most in the paper photo-developer holders.  I look at them more carefully, starting from the top.  There are photos of my mom at 16.  She was so pretty.  There are photos of my parents dressed to go to parties.  There are photos of me at various ages; I particularly like the photos of me as a baton twirler in high school, and this one of me at 16 with hair so fluffy it would put any rock star to shame.  I can’t believe that’s my hair, and not frizzy 80s’ hair, but beautifully soft, curled-on-the-bottom, long hair.  For a minute, I wonder if it’s possible to still look like that.  I don’t remember having so many photos.  I keep going.  There are photos of our farm, of me walking with our dog at the farm, of our beach house (that one got washed away in a hurricane), of me walking with our dog at the beach house, of graduations (I had three of those), of my friends, of my best friend from sixth grade on a horse, of my best friend in college, of a few boys I liked, of my best friend from law school, of me in Paris, of me at my desk, of me with blonde hair, of me with my sister, my mother, my brother — the images of my life passing before my eyes like a kaleidoscope of emotion, a life full of strife, and triumph and love, a very special life.  And finally, just when I’m about to come to tears thinking this precious picture of my dad teaching me music while I wear my black “star-girl” nightie-outfit is gone forever, I pick up the last four or so photos.  There are a couple photos that are stuck together.  I pull those apart, and this little photo falls out.  I don’t even look at the last two.  I leave the little photo right where it is.  I place all the contents, except for the snow globe and that photo, back into the trunk.  I look at the clock.  It’s a little before midnight.  I kneel up and pull the string that turns off the overhead light.  I pick up the snow globe, and walk the length of the windows, through the sitting room, past the balcony door, to the next set of those windows, then reach behind the daybed that sits in the living room below those windows, and unplug the extension cord that powers the outside Christmas lights.  I walk back into the sitting room and look out those windows to the hill beyond, a hill now fully dark.  The only light of my room is from the Christmas tree next to my bed.  The clock says 11:59 p.m.  I want to make it into bed before midnight.  As fast as I can, I open the trunk, place the snow globe back in, close the trunk, rush to my bed, pick up the photo and hold it for just a second.  I remember dancing around in that black star outfit, and do just one little spin around.  I place the photo on my night stand, and then reach behind the bed and unplug the tree.  As the room becomes dark, save for the light of the clock in my world, my world of now where close-by is the photo that for me symbolizes all that is special, my bunny runs by trunk, and I close my eyes.  Just as the clock reads midnight, I smile.  I smile the smile of a six-year old girl on Christmas Eve.

(Author’s note: while there has been poetic license taken with the times, all facts are true and chronicle the actual occurrences and the actual contents of my trunk.)