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BALTIMORE, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- (Editor's note: Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're tackling parenthood in the 21st century -- or being tackled by it. This is the latest in a series of reflections by UPI writers.) In my mind's eye, I can still see him best at this time of year, and the image gets at once clearer and more obscure.
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There he is, hunched over the wires, sparks flying, while he hooks up the transformer, so we can make the trains go fast and slow and belch steam while lumbering over and through the mountains and past the post office and the Texaco station and the tiny houses and the felt green grass that sprouted just about everywhere else. Lights shined in the windows of the houses and along the trolley line and inside the passenger cars of the trains. His ever-present cigarette glowed in the night, and his brilliant blue eyes twinkled. (That may have been in part due to consumption of significant quantities of National Bohemian when the Hoffbergers of Baltimore brewed the beer and Jerry Hoffberger owned the Orioles and had "10 cent beer nights" at the horseshoe-shaped Memorial Stadium.)
In the good years, his five kids would parade down the steps together, somebody carrying the baby Jesus in a towel, others, candles. He would film it all with a camera that had two blinding spotlights, and just seeing them on Christmas morning made you believe in miracles. What else could explain all those stars dancing in your eyes?
He was my father, and this was Christmas at our house. Always, we found piles of gifts stacked at least a few feet deep: electric football, Sizzler racing sets with loop-to-loops, a catcher's mitt, walkie-talkies, trains, a fire truck you could drive. The money seemed to flow as freely as the alcohol, until it didn't. But even then, he would rack up obscene credit card debt, and the stacks of toys would still magically appear.
I loved Christmastime for all it was and for all it wasn't. On Christmas, after all, he wouldn't fly off in drunken rages, and he and my mother wouldn't rip each other apart. He spared his children the belt and didn't force them to kneel on a hard-wood floor as punishment, as maybe his father had spared him at Christmas.
I gaze at the Polaroid shots of him, but they reveal little about the unanswerable questions that go back 30 years now. By the time he left this earth at age 59, he and my mother had been divorced about four years. In those last years, he'd show up at our little town house on Christmas with bags of gifts for everybody but the twinkle in his eyes had disappeared, replaced by a sad gaze in a face that looked hollow and gaunt.
He lived in a house then with two other divorced men and his (formerly our) dog, Snowball. He had an oxygen machine in his room and prayed a lot.
He would never meet the spouses of any of his children, and he would never meet his 11 grandchildren.
A rich kid whose grandfather came to Baltimore from County Roscommon, Ireland, promptly opened a pub and died at 49 of liver and lung disease, my father seemed to know nothing of restraint in the years I knew him best, especially not at Christmas. Whatever we learned about living within your means we got from my mother, who came from a poor family that struggled through the Depression.
Now, at Christmastime, I tell my sons -- ages 7 and 3 -- about the grandfather they never knew and the inestimable joy of this time of year, for him and for us. Once, on my Christmas list, I tell them, I asked Santa for football goal posts for the back yard of our house in suburbia. I tell them about the Christmas garden and the lights that adorned the house inside and out and what one of my brothers calls the "Jesus parade" and those stacks of toys.
And about a man who taught us to dream and to have faith and to pray. How he broke our hearts, that'll have to come when my kids are a little older.
In all those dreamy childhood Christmases, I never recall much talk about why we celebrate the birth of a homeless child and the message of peace and goodwill and how love transcends all else.
Nor do I remember my father's ever saying we couldn't afford something.
The children of two journalists, my kids hear it all the time. They know we can't put up a Christmas garden now -- maybe next year -- or get Wii or a flat-screen TV.
But we can pass on infectious enthusiasm and try to teach them the best gifts aren't on a Christmas list.
