TWO UNFORGETTABLE CHRISTMASES
By
Morgan St. James
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Morgan St. James on Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 by Morgan St. James
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This is a true story
*****
Introduction
I’ve had many careers in my life, but never thought writing would be one of them. However, in the late 1970s I became a writer somewhat by accident.
My partner and I owned an interior design firm in Studio City, California. Through a mixture of talent and luck, we designed some very interesting projects. A few of our clients were sports figures or people in the movie business. Designers West, a prestigious West Coast design magazine, approached us about writing an article for them. Of course, we said yes. What incredible exposure for only the price of writing an article.
But there was a hitch. We were designers, not writers. The photographers took photos to accompany our article, and the deadline for submitting the copy inched closer and closer. Then the deadline date picked up momentum, speeding toward us like a train roaring into the station. The day before the submission was we had nothing—nada, not even a word.
Even though the wastebasket overflowed with crumpled papers, we rejected each stab at writing the how-to article about a beautiful wood floor my partner created from packing crates. The remaining hours ebbed away as the sun descended in the summer sky—a reminder of how little time we had left. So we sipped wine and commiserated. We had failed and would look like fools. Fortunately, desperation sometimes spawns genius.
The idea of writing our article like a noir mystery instead of a serious techie piece penetrated our air of defeat. The editor loved it. That story ran in the August 1978 issue of Designers West Magazine. When I went to the supermarket and saw the magazine on the stand, a wonderful feeling invaded my soul. I was hooked. I was a writer. I still have a copy of that magazine, and if you would like a copy of the story, just email me at stjameswriter@gmail.com.
The rest, as they say, is history. To date I’ve written five mystery novels—three Silver Sisters mysteries with my sister, Phyllice Bradner, and two romantic suspense novels under the pen name Arliss Adams, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, many short stories including two in Chicken Soup for the Soul books.
It is my pleasure to integrate portions of my mother’s memoir with this little tale of two Christmases I’ll never forget. They illustrate the true meaning of the season.
NOTE: Excerpts from the memoir my mother wrote forty years later in 1989 at age eighty are in italics.
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Chapter 1
Miami, Florida 1949
I was nine years old in 1949. That was the year my family moved from Chicago to Miami. They thought the warmer climate would be good for my father’s health but didn’t factor in the dampness. Dad had arthritis and the humid weather was torture for him.
To make matters even worse, work in Miami was seasonal and although he tried as hard as he could, it took a long time to find a steady job. Reality was far from the life they had pictured in a tropical paradise. Every day was a struggle and gradually they went through the small reserve that remained after all the moving expenses were paid.
Al had a sister living in the city of Miami who owned a three unit efficiency building. Each unit contained a living room combined with a kitchen and a bathroom. The kitchen space consisted of a sink and a refrigerator built under the drainboard with cabinets over the drainboard. This living room/kitchen was called a pullman kitchen. The living room had what is known as an Inadoor Bed. It was built into the wall and hidden by a closet door. At night you would open the door and pull the bed down since it was hinged to the wall. These units were furnished and meant to accommodate a single person or a couple, but certainly not four people
.
My Dad’s sister, Aunt Helen, had been one of the deciding factors in the decision to move to Miami. My mother’s brother who lived in Los Angeles was courting us as well, but Aunt Helen said she had a vacancy in her triplex and we could use it until Dad found work. That was something my uncle couldn’t offer, so Miami it was. She never mentioned that it was only one room.
She wrote to us suggesting it might be a good idea if we made a move to Miami and see if that would help Al's arthritis. She said we could use the efficiency until Al could get a job. It sounded pretty good to us, and after a lot of pro and con we decided to move from Chicago to Miami. It wasn't easy going with short funds, but we finally made it. When we got to Helen's place we realized what she meant by an efficiency apartment. It was going to be very tight living for four people so we decided to make the best of it until we could find better accommodations. Phyllice had to sleep with Al and me and Morgan had to sleep on the sofa. We felt like we were sardines in a can.
Since my sister was only four the move didn’t affect her like it did me. I’d had lots of friends in Chicago—kids I’d known since kindergarten. At the first school I attended in Miami, I had no one. I was the outsider—someone to be avoided. As far as my classmates were concerned, I was nothing but a smart Jewish Yankee who wore shoes to school and wasn’t very good at sports. It seemed like it couldn’t get any worse. But it did.
Mom spoke of just finding another apartment in her memoir, but I was old enough to remember that my Dad and Aunt Helen had a big argument about how she had misled him. We packed our things in the middle of the night and moved to a hotel.
Two weeks later I found an apartment in a four unit building just a couple of blocks from Helen. That one wasn’t the greatest either. After we moved in we met the other three tenants, and they turned out to be the greatest. The neighbors across the hall had three children, a girl the same age as Morgan, a boy Phyllice's age, and another boy a little older than the daughter. The children got along well and their parents were very congenial. The adults in the building were friendly, so thank God for that. The neighbors downstairs were a very nice couple without children. They had a wonderful boxer dog all the children in the building loved. The other downstairs neighbors had a little three year old girl who suffered from a kidney disease. The poor little tot, she really had a tough time. I told myself maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
On the bright side, we all had a lot of fun. The grils loved to run around and play with Ida Mae, Johnny and Donny, the kids across the hall and they all romped with the boxer named Ginny..
The building we lived in had a very large front lawn with avocado and coconut trees. It didn't take long and Al found work in his line, but his health did not improve. The humidity did as much harm as the cold weather in Chicago. When we moved to Florida it was the early part of the year, so the weather wasn't that hot. As the months passed and it became summer it was almost unbearably hot. I would pack a lunch and get the girls ready to go to the beach. I found out that I could get to the beach with the jitney bus which held nine people.
It took us across the causeway directly to the beach. The girls loved it. We would stay a couple of hours, they cooled off in the ocean and had lots of fun. However, by the end of the summer months we were like dishrags.
Summer ended and I was happy about the idea of changing schools. I hated that school anyway. Although the new apartment was only about ten blocks from Aunt Helen’s triplex, it was in a different zone. I was elated. Maybe this school wouldn’t be so hard on me. Fat chance.
When September came along it was time for Morgan to go to school. The children went to school barefoot, and dressed like hillbillies. They didn't have strict school regulations like up north. A good part of the students were from Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, and they were dirty. Morgan was a very good student in Chicago. The teacher was looking for one of the students to assist her, so naturally she chose Morgan. This wasn't too good for her as the other students were calling her a teacher’s pet. She had no choice but to obey the teacher, so that was that.
What my mother didn’t know, because I didn’t tell her, was that my teacher and one boy in my grade were the only other Jewish people in the school. He was also smart, but he was in a different room so she couldn’t pick him. The Chicago schools were years ahead of the Florida ones, so even if I hadn’t been smart I would have been doomed to “teacher’s petdom.” I’d learned most of what she was teaching a year or two before. As an adult, I suspect she probably felt like an alien as well, so maybe the fact that I was Jewish had something to do with her reaching out to me, but as far as I was concerned, it was no favor.
We weren’t religious, but maybe she felt I was a kindred soul. I tried very hard to discourage her when she kept singling me out. That practically guaranteed no one would be my friend.
There was religion in the schools in Florida at that time and this area was staunch Southern Baptist. Just for a moment, imagine what that was like for a little Jewish kid from a middle-class Chicago neighborhood to find herself in the middle of a bible belt.
We opened our day with the Lord’s Prayer, followed by singing Onward Christian Soldiers. Our music class was all church music and we said the grace in the cafeteria. There were other religious influences, too, but I can’t remember them all.
All the kids belonged to the same church except for me and Charlie Baron, the Jewish boy from New York. I do remember that Charlie was picked to play Jesus in the Christmas play because he had a lovely singing voice. My teacher mumbled something like, “An apt choice, considering.” At the time I didn’t know what she meant.
Back in Chicago, some of my Christian friends had invited me to services at St. Ignatius Church. So, I’d gone, but that was different. I rarely went to temple so it was interesting to check out their religion, and it wasn’t forced upon me.
I didn’t tell my parents about all of the religious things and that no one would be my friend because I’d finally figured out that the only way for me to have any friends in Miami was to join the Baptist Bible Class after school. I have no idea what the reaction would have been if I’d told them the truth. I said I’d joined an after school club and Mom said, “See, honey, I told you it would work out.”
As we got further into the fall it became hurricane season, and sure enough it didn't take long before one was on its way. Everyone was warned over the radio to stock up on canned goods like canned chicken, tuna, salmon and fruits. They also suggested we fill our bathtub with water, and board up the windows. Luckily that old building we were living in had wood shutters, so all we had to do was shut them tight. Everyone was warned to stay off the streets. If you did choose to go out it was at your own risk. In a couple of days. sure as hell, the hurricane hit with a force of 150 miles an hour.
On top of all this worry, what do you think happened? Morgan came down with a high fever and ached all over. We called the doctor, but he said he was sorry he couldn't go out in the hurricane. He claimed we would have to do the best that we could. Al and I worked on her with alcohol rubs, aspirin, and whatever we could think of. We finally broke her fever from 105 degrees to 100 degrees.
The morning after the hurricane when we opened the shutters, the lawn was covered with avocados and coconuts. Our neighbor across the hall, who was one of those people who made wonderful things without a recipe, had her children gather the coconuts and bring them upstairs. She started baking coconut pies and cakes, we all had our fill that week until they were coming out of our ears. We used the avocados for salads and dips.
For me life in Miami was nothing like what we had known in our cheerful apartment in Chicago. Mom was a real trouper, though, and kept a smile on her face. She even managed to maintain a sunny attitude. Almost overnight she’d gone from being an average housewife to a money management wizard. That woman conjured up every possible way of stretching her meager household allowance.
We lived walking distance from a dairy and as an adult I realized we drank powdered milk because we couldn’t afford real milk. Mom made light of it when I asked why we didn’t go to the dairy, and I thought the powdered stuff was pretty cool, particularly when Mom let me mix it. As for butter, she bought anemic looking packages of white stuff called Oleo Margarine (remember this was 1949). The bag had a big yellow spot in the center and kneading it turned the icky white stuff and acceptable shade of yellow. Dad had done some work in trade for a case of garbanzo beans, called chi chi beans. I swear, that woman could have written a book entitled “101 Ways to Fix Chi Chi Beans.” As she put those beans on the table every night prepared in different ways, she made everything seem so normal, quite frankly, my sister and I had no idea that we were poor now.
I guess it was getting to Mom, too. She was beginning to look older and a little bit of her natural glow had faded.
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Chapter 2
Christmas is Coming
With Hanukah approaching, even though Mom didn’t say anything, I could see there would be no gifts. I yearned to be back in Chicago with all my heart. I was miserable and hated Miami as only a kid who feels like a misfit can.
Aunt Helen and Dad were back on speaking terms, although he really wasn’t over feeling that he’d been deceived. She always celebrated Christmas, not Hanukah, and she decided to bring us a little Christmas tree. I don’t think it was more than three feet tall. Our neighborhood in Chicago was mostly Jewish and this was my first time I’d ever had a Christmas tree in my house. I’d admired and envied the ones my Christian friends had, but the thought had never crossed my mind that I’d actually have one of my own someday.
I watched in awe as Aunt Helen asked for a tablecloth and Mom handed her an old one. She spread it on one of the living room tables and we set the tree up on it. Then she pulled ornaments out of a big paper bag and we all hung the balls and other ornaments and tossed shiny silver tinsel on the little tree. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen with its silver and gold balls and sparkly star, and it was mine. It was the first time since we’d moved to Miami that I felt special.
Aunt Helen reached into another bag and even put some gaily wrapped packages under the magical tree. There were a few for each of us. Phyllice and I danced around the little tree singing. We were happy. We would have some gifts after all. Then reality hit. What would happen when Dad came home and saw the tree?
Mom agonized, Aunt Helen said not to worry, and my sister and I sent our pleas up to heaven. Around the time he was due home, we decided to wait in the kitchen. When we heard the front door open, it was a tense moment. He called out, “I’m home and I’m hungry as a bear. Where are you, Rosetta?” We waited. The next thing we heard was “What the…?”
We knew he’d seen the tree. He stomped into the kitchen and said, “Who the devil brought a Christmas tree into the house?” The three of us pointed to Aunt Helen who had a grin on her face that made her look like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
“Look, Al, this is a hard time for your girls. Let them have the tree. It’s only a little one. There’s nothing religious about it. You can think of it as a symbol of the season if you have to, but let them enjoy it.”
My father had a loud booming voice. We used to say you could hear it a block away. But not at that moment.
He looked at the tree with its bright decorations and gifts, and for a heartbeat a shadow of sadness crossed his face and his eyes glistened. In a very soft tone, he said, “Thank you, Helen. You’re right. Why not let the girls enjoy it?”
Then he smiled and we knew the tree had worked its magic on him too. “You know, Sis, it actually makes this place look a little more bearable. Thanks, again.”
When we opened our gifts on Christmas morning I had a prized possession. I guess Aunt Helen had seen how I devoured books about dogs. At nine years old, I read one or two books a week. As the wrappings fell away, I held a copy of Albert Payson Terhune’s Lad, A Dog in my hand. That night I read several chapters.
After the day Aunt Helen brought us our beautiful little tree, we always celebrated both Christmas and Hanukah.
Ten months after we arrived in Miami, Dad finally threw in the towel and we moved back to Chicago.
Al and I talked things over and decided that as long as the climate didn't help him. and didn't agree very well with me or the girls, it was time to move back to Chicago and start all over again
The biggest problem was that there was a scarcity in apartments. The landlords were asking a bonus for any vacancies, and they were not ashamed to ask for $1000 for a one bedroom apartment.
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Chapter 3
Chicago, 1950
The apartment was in our old neighborhood, and my friends welcomed me back to Joyce Kilmer Elementary with open arms. It didn’t take long for life in Miami to seem like a bad dream. That’s because kids only see what their parents allow them to, or at least that was the case for us.
Mine had fierce pride and if they had problems, they didn’t want us to know it. They made payments on new furniture that was nothing like the shabby mismatched pieces in the Miami apartment. Dad laid a tile floor in the entry hall and was back to kidding around and telling jokes. They truly seemed happy. All in all, it felt like life was back to normal. We even got a little bright green parakeet we named Petey who filled the apartment with his chatter
I didn’t know that the $1,000 it took to secure the apartment was nearly every penny my parents had. Back in those days, $1,000 was a fortune. By the time Christmas rolled around, although things were better, money was still very tight so it was destined to be another lean holiday season. As much as we’d loved the tree in Miami, we didn’t have a tree that year because we couldn’t afford one, but my little sister and I hung our stockings on the fireplace mantle in our new living room, excited about all of the things Santa was going to bring.
Then came the somber moment when Mom and Dad sat us down and said they had something very important to tell us. Mom sat with her hands in her lap, eyes downcast, while Dad shifted nervously, then dropped the bomb.
“Girls, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to say this, but there simply isn’t any money for presents. I’m so sorry. Your mother and I know next year will be better. It just cost an awful lot to move to Florida and back and buy new furniture and everything.”
Mom said, “You know we love both of you very much, but I think it would be a good idea for you to take the stockings down. It’s better to do that now so you don’t find them empty in the morning.”
Kids have blind faith, and we believed something wonderful would happen to change that. Mom shook her head sadly when we said we wanted to leave the stockings hanging.
In the morning something wonderful had happened! The stockings were filled with a few beautifully wrapped packages. Nothing much, just a pencil in one, a pad of paper in another—little cheap things like that. Much to my delight I even discovered a few pieces of foil-wrapped chocolate in mine and Phyllice had a Tootsie Pop. I don’t know where they got the money for those little gifts that night or where they even found a store open to buy them. Maybe they went to the drug store on the corner. The thing that’s important is that when they saw we had such great faith that it would be okay, they couldn’t bear to disappoint us.
To this day, my sister and I remember those gifts lovingly. We have talked about it often, particularly when we hear a kid complaining that they didn’t get a really expensive gift they’d asked for. Those little things in our stockings were more precious to us than the most expensive item the toy stores had to offer.
Knowing how much our parents loved us was the true gift that Christmas morning so long ago.
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Morgan St. James
Morgan St. James, co-authors the humorous Silver Sisters Mystery series with her sister Phyllice Bradner and two romantic/suspense novels and a short story written under the pen name Arliss Adams. Her short stories appear in Chicken Soup Soul books and various anthologies. In September 2011 the third Silver Sisters Mystery, Vanishing Act in Vegas was released as well as Writer’s Tricks of the Trade: 39 Things You Need to Know About the ABCs of Writing Fiction. Her Writers’ Tricks of the Trade blog and monthly newsletter are filled with helpful tips, tricks and techniques for writers at any stage of their career.
www.silversistersmysteries.com,
http://writerstricksofthetrade.blogspot.com
Other books by Morgan St. James
Writers’ Tricks of the Trade: 39 Things You Need to Know About the ABCs of Writing Fiction
Silver Sisters Mysteries
A Corpse in the Soup
Seven Deadly Samovars
Vanishing Act in Vegas
Twist of Fate series (written as Arliss Adams)
Devil’s Dance
The Devil’s Due
Kindle and eBook Only
Women on the Edge
Miracles Come on Horseback
Eight Surefire Ways to Know if You’re a Jewish Mother
Stories in these anthologies
Chicken Soup for the Shopper’s Soul
Chicken Soup for People Who Make a Difference
The Mystery of the Green Mist
Dreamspell Nightmares
Dreamspell Revenge
The World Outside the Window
Writers’ Bloc II
Monthly Newsletter (found at http://writerstricksofthetrade.blogspot.com)
Writers’ Tricks of the Trade - Publishes on the 15th of the month