I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(55)

I bet he didn’t think his summer was going to go like this either.

He rolled around with the other shelter puppies on the floor. When I crouched down, he skidded and skated across the linoleum and burrowed between my knees, tail a-wagging. Contrary to plan but consistent with everyone’s desires, I looked up at the vet tech and said, “This one.” I couldn’t believe what I was doing, but I also couldn’t wait to tell John we’d found the exact dog he’d been wanting all his life.

“Remember how you said that one day when you had a real yard, you’d want a big dog, like a yellow Lab?” I asked him that afternoon. “Guess what? I found your yellow Lab puppy.”

“At last—my big dog!” John said.

We all laughed and decided to call the new pup Woodstock, a beagle’s best friend.

Sure enough, Woodstock and John bonded fast. Woodstock let John feed him his mushy vet-approved food from a spoon. Woodstock ran to the front door every evening when he heard John’s car arrive. And as days passed, Woodstock grew . . . kind of. His body got longer and longer, and his legs stayed more or less the same. “What a funny little Lab he is,” we’d say, wondering when his height would catch up with his length.

At his six-month checkup, we asked the vet what she guessed his heritage was. Lab-hound? Lab-shepherd?

“This dog? Oh, he’s some kind of dachshund mix, maybe a little terrier or something,” she said.

Of course he was.





Wish List


Every December, we go through this. It’s like someone hits the “play” button on a favorite holiday song, and we all remember the words we’ve sung countless times.

Here we are again: When I sense it coming, I begin burying my phone at the bottom of my purse with the sound turned off. I’m trying to ignore the calls, emails, and texts from well-meaning relatives, all of whom are asking, Where is the Christmas list?

They want suggestions for what to give the kids, the more specific the better. If I say, “Maybe a book?” they’ll ask, “Which one?”

I don’t know which one. I still haven’t given much thought to holiday shopping. I despise the charmless online gift registry, it’s true, but my reluctance to create—on command—a catalog of child-appropriate gifts is more than just resistance to materialism.

I think it’s about longing: to be taken care of, to let someone else do at least part of the planning. I may be an adult, but some part of me still has a child’s desire to wake up, starry-eyed, and find that gifts have materialized by some kind of magic under the tree—surprises chosen with love and obtained in secret, waiting to be opened in wonder. We don’t outgrow that. On some level, we are all still five-year-olds.



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Then there’s the guilt, of course. I suspect our relatives wouldn’t need ideas for what to give our children if I did a better job of keeping in touch during the rest of the year. If we visited more often—if I were a better daughter and sister—they’d know all my kids’ hobbies and wishes, and I would know theirs. (I haven’t asked anyone for a Christmas list in several years. I hope the recipients don’t hate their gifts from me, but I really do enjoy putting a little imagination into them.)

This is also a practical matter. To compile an itemized inventory of wished-for things and divvy it up among grandparents and aunts and uncles would require time, of which I have no surplus. Tonight, for example, I have four events to attend—two optional-but-encouraged work functions, a fundraiser for my children’s school, and an already rescheduled social gathering. I don’t know if our son’s soccer game will finish in time for the first event or at what point in the evening my husband’s meeting will let out so that he can come home to watch our daughter.

I don’t know what anyone’s going to eat for dinner or when, much less what everyone’s getting for Christmas.

Maybe I’m having a misplaced and cranky response to the rise of entitlement culture. There’s a transactional aspect to giving now, a way of forcing a script onto what used to be spontaneous. This has trickled down from wedding and baby gift registries to birthdays and holidays, not only for adults but for children, too. Online personal registry services have evolved to serve the demand. Apps let you tag items you want, right down to preferred color and size. God forbid someone show you generosity you didn’t explicitly request.

Where’s the line between writing a letter to the North Pole and forking over an itemized file of material desires? The former seems sweet; the latter feels like handing someone a grocery list. Plus, if you ask only for things you know exist, how will you ever be delighted by something you couldn’t have anticipated?

The emphasis on the things themselves suggests that the holiday’s success or failure—as if a holiday could be a success or a failure—hinges on the rightness of the gifts. In fact, that’s what retailers would have us believe. Before the last gingerbread crumbs have been swallowed, the post-holiday sales pipe up, “Didn’t get what you really wanted? Let’s fix that.”

Still, it’s my job as a parent to orchestrate all the steps that make Christmas look like magic, and that means I have to make the decisions. We’re lucky to have family who love our kids, who want to do something nice for them, and I know it’s unkind not to return their calls. I may be an ungrateful bitch sometimes, but I know better than to blow off a grandmother who loves her grandchildren. So I dig the phone out of my purse.