A Night Heir

     My mother's father walked into our lives from the steps of a Greyhound bus.  Mom had hired a private detective to find him. He'd been riding the rails for years. I was sent to bed before I could picture mom as a young girl and him as a young man. 
    I've few memories of him. His visits were short and few. 
    One day Dad loaded us into the 53 Chevy and drove us through the cow pastures to a pond. My first fishing trip. Worms wiggled wildly on my frightened hand. Grandpa put the worm on my hook, gave the line a solid jerk, and said, "There! You can catch a whale with that line."  Then he told me that long, long ago all this land was under a large sea. 
    I could see a whale older than the hills in that pond. And I knew that I alone could catch him. I caught a perch, then another. They were quick to bite. "What... what would the whale want?" I asked myself. What could he be hungering for all these years? Dad was catching carp on dough balls. Ground up Wheaties and cinnamon and water. My brother was eating as much bait as he could steal. My little fish were far from a whale. Then the hot sun gave me an idea. I opened the cooler and pulled out a grape popsicle.  I put some on my hook and tossed in my bobber.
    The whale sighed and licked my grape popsicle. While no one 
looked I pulled the whale in and silently took him to the trunk of the car. We sat in the open trunk, the front wheels coming off the ground. 
    He was so big that all I could see of him was one soft, old eye, a curl of a wise lip and color of a pale night sky. He was glad to be out of the pond. It had been a very long time since he'd roamed his old home grounds. I petted him; he purred. Soon I could hear my family walking back to the car. I knew I was in a lot of trouble, but the whale promised that no one would see him, no one had seen him for thousands of years. Not only could they not see him, they couldn't even imagine him. He was right. Grandpa held up the two perch that I caught, he winked, and said, "I told you that you could catch a whale." 
    Dad drove us home and he cleaned the fish. I kept the whale under my bed. We had no bath tub in those days. (Just a wash tub like a big bucket.) At night he would tell me stories. Stories rich enough that we could both swim in them. Together we swam in oceans before the ideas, or the efforts, or the  rules of men were born. We swam in talk. I told stories of love, and friendship and we swam like the breeze. 
    One morning, Grandpa stood before us with his one satchel in hand and Mom would say, give him a hug good-bye. My brother and I 
would cry and beg him to stay.  Mom, and even Dad, would side with us. But he always said, he'd been in one place too long and he'd walk down the road and stop a Greyhound bus and leave our lives once again. 
    On this particular morning he rubbed my head, knelt down  and said, "I could never catch a whale, but I knew you could." My eyes got big and when he stood up I saw the whale tucked under his arm. He blew me a kiss as big as a lifetime, flipped a fin, and said, "I'm off to see the rest of this land sea." 
    My Grandfather passed away that winter. He had been picking oranges somewhere in Florida. I've grown now and I've moved away, next to the sea. Sometimes, in the pale night sky, I hear them, and I swim like the breeze about my  empty house. I keep a grape  popsicle in the window.

Christmas in June

    Illinois June mornings come muggy. The sunrises look mystical in the humid air. It's a normal morning. I'm late for work. My head hasn't cleared the sleep out of my face yet. I'm drinking coffee as if it can save my soul. I'm driving a bit too fast for the law, but not hazardously. I pull onto the freeway and begin to burn up the open prairie miles. About two miles out of town I see this Christmas Tree hitch hiking.  I rub my eyes; it's still there, still expecting to be taken seriously. I chug a huge gulp of coffee. The Christmas Tree is still standing by the side of the road. It won't be denied. So I pull over and  pop open the door. This "Standing-along-the-freeway-on-a-hot-and-muggy-June-morning-in-central-Illinois-Christmas-Tree" gets in. I pull back onto the freeway. 
    "Where you headin'?"I ask. 
    In a tired shaken voice it asks, "Can you take me to next Christmas?"
    "Well, I'm only going as far as Peoria."
    "How much farther is next Christmas?". The tree nearly sheds in wonder. 
    "About six months.  And Peoria is only 45 minutes away."
    "Oh", sighed the Christmas Tree.
    We fell silent. 
    Finally, I asked it, "What's your story, Bub?"
    "I spent last Christmas in a nice home. As you can see I was decorated in grand style. I had presents then. They were almost the perfect family, a trendy mom, a GQ dad, and they had 2.3 children. But the woman never slept well. She'd toss and turn all night long. Every morning she'd wake up cranky. One cranky morning before New Years I overheard the mother say , 'Tomorrow, 
let's take down the tree and burn it.' I was terrified. I started singing,  to calm my nerves. My mother use to sing to me when I was a  sapling and the night owls would roost in my branches and taunt me with their, 'Who. Who. Who, we going to poop on?' Or when dreaded bunnies would threaten to eat through my young stalk, I sang  tree songs all night long.
    The next morning the woman awoke from a deep sleep. She had dreamt of her childhood with birds flying down from Spruce trees. They landed on her shoulder and sang songs for her. She hummed all morning long and added, 'maybe we'll keep the tree a while longer.' 
    I sang every night. And every night she slept as happily as a cat. I sang all night and was up all day. This went on and on and on. I'm so sleepy. One night I fell asleep. I awoke in the back yard; the family stripping me, near a blazing fire.  It's a miracle I escaped. "
    "WOW", I said, but the Tree fell asleep before I'd finished my inspiring review. 
    It's funny the things we remember and the necessities we sometimes forget. Many years ago I had been to Chicago and of all the wonders there,  I remembered a fancy mall in the Loop that had a Christmas Shop open year round.
    What the heck, it was Friday.... and Christmas was snoring on my shoulder.  I took a hard right turn at Morton and headed for Chicago.
    The Tree slept through the downtown traffic. It slept through my promises to the store manager. It even slept through the ride in the freight elevator. 
    If you ever go to Water Place Towers in Downtown Chicago and see the Christmas Store you probably won't hear the Christmas Tree singing over the hubbub of the mall noise. But for reasons you won't understand, that night you will sleep like a baby and dream of birds singing joyfully on your shoulder and you will carry the spirit of Christmas with you throughout the day.