Part 12

I reached over to turn on the radio again, thinking the hourly excerpt from the Messiah might be over by then. I should have brought a tape from home, but I'd barely had time to change my suit. Just when my eyes were averted for an instant, the Christmas-tree bedecked vehicle in front of me decided to drop its load. I felt my car go bump, bump, and slammed on my brakes before I even looked up. The car behind me skidded and swerved to one side, then leaned on his horn as if he'd run into an iceberg. I just hit the emergency lights and leaned on my own horn. The guy in front, perhaps hearing the tooting chorus behind him, stopped just down the road, and like an idiot, put his Jeep into reverse and came hurtling back toward me. He skidded to a stop and put on his emergency lights.

What kind of jerk ties down a Christmas tree so loosely that it flops off in the middle of a freeway? We were only doing twenty miles an hour--in the rain, no less. I thought I would have to get out and check the extent of the damage, and I wasn't happy about slogging in the rain with my dress shoes on. Hallelujah, the jerk stopped, anyway, so I could at least get the name of his insurance company--I'd already memorized his personal license number (which doesn't bear repeating--I'd always thought the DMV had standards of decency).

I hopped out, trying to pull up the collar of my overcoat even though it wouldn't quite cover my head, and started walking forward to have a few choice words with Mister Country Jamboree in the over-endowed automobile. Of course, CJ (as I then dubbed the driver) bounded out of the Jeep and headed my way, tucking in his shirt as he walked. One look at him, and I almost turned around and left--CJ could have been Paul Bunyan's twin brother. He had the shirt to prove it, too: red and black lumberjack style checks, with the top three buttons undone, and chest hair that was thicker than my beard. He also wore cowboy boots and wide red suspenders.

"Holy moley, mister!" he yelled with a tone of real concern. "You alright?"

I was about to lay into him when his gum-chewing girlfriend appeared from behind, tucking herself into his armpit. "Oh!" she squealed, "Ah'm so sorry! Looks like our tree smashed up your brand new car!"

My car wasn't exactly brand new, but I looked around to where she pointed. Sure enough, the front grill was bent in and one headlight had gone out, the glass completely smashed. The tree itself was nestled cozily under the car, nuzzling up against the oil pan.

The look of childish helplessness on both their faces--and frankly what I considered might be a moderate dose of dull wittedness--somehow got to me just then, and I couldn't quite bring myself to swear at them. Besides, the fastest thing to do would be to shrug it off with a happy face, extract their battered shrubbery from beneath my car, and be on my way. I decided that silliness would carry the day. "Merry Christmas!" I called, throwing out my arms. "Sorry about your tree!" Both of them lit up in grins.

"Look--he ain't even mad," the guy said to his girlfriend.

She batted her lashes in astonishment. "We're awfully sorry about this," she chimed, wagging her head.

It only took a minute to get the tree out from under the car. All the while, I was thinking of how to explain it to the patrolman who would undoubtedly appear in a moment: it's just another roadkill, officer, nothing to be alarmed about; I'm sure it happens all the time, what with all these trees swooping down on unsuspecting holiday merrymakers.

The tree was pretty battered up around the lower branches, but it really could have sufficed to cheer someone's holiday--if one cut off a couple feet from the bottom and turned the bad side toward the wall so it couldn't be seen. You only decorate half the tree anyway, right? I started trying to explain this to my countrified acquaintances, but they would have none of it.

"Look, mister," CJ drawled, propping up the tree with one hand. "We busted out yer headlight. Hell, the least I can do is give ya the tree."

The woman tilted her head and shot out a hand to touch my arm. She had a horrified look in her wide eyes that I could see even through her dripping mascara. "You ain't already got one do ya, mister?"

I glanced at my watch and tried to weasel out of it. I'd already nixed the idea of a Christmas tree--told my family (meaning my daughter, Jenny) we weren't having one that year, and that was final. They just shed all over the carpets and had to be tossed out at precisely the right moment in January or the city garbage folks wouldn't pick them up. We'd had a tree one year that sat around well into February because we missed the magic pick-up date. I finally chopped it into little bits and threw it out a piece at a time over the next six weeks. I had no use whatever for a Christmas tree.

In the end, I didn't want to argue with them--it was cold, exceedingly wet, and I was already going to be late for the concert. So CJ helped me load the mortally wounded conifer into my trunk. We groped around for the twine, but couldn't find it, so he battened down the lid with his girlfriend's belt. She had high-tailed it back into the Jeep to wait for him out of the rain. He whispered into my ear while he cinched up the belt. "She don't really need her belt," he said. "I'd have it off her in another couple o' miles anyways." He gave me a wink and wished me a Merry Christmas.

By the time I arrived at the hall, the concert had long since begun and it was almost intermission. I detest arriving late for these things, and I had to wait around the lobby until the first part was over. I was thankful I'd not been any later. Jenny would have been sorely disappointed if I'd missed her big debut: about twenty minutes from the time I arrived in the lobby, she was scheduled to begin her first public performance as a featured soloist--playing "Harold in Italy". If you don't know it, it's a fine piece of music, but it's not in the frequently-performed repertoire, because it's sort of a half-fledged concerto for viola. Not the violin or the cello--the viola: underdog of all orchestral instruments.

My daughter Jenny wasn't always a violist. We started her out right on the violin--something I considered a respectable instrument for a young lady. My ex-wife and I had faint hopes that someday she'd be a concert violinist--Jenny was that good from the time she picked up her first quarter-sized fiddle. We spent a fortune on expensive teachers, and as soon as she was ready, we started her on the long track: youth symphony. But just after her fourteenth birthday, something happened to her brain. I don't mean a pre-mature stroke or some kind of lesion. She came home one day with this hideous dreamy look in her eyes, and she puttered around the kitchen nervously helping me cook. She wasn't talking very much.

I didn't want to probe, figuring she'd tell me what was on her mind when she was ready. "I have to go to Milan next month," I said, trying to be cheerful.

She was tearing lettuce leaves into microscopic fragments, and she looked up. "Will you see Grandma?"

Jenny meant my mother--fountainhead of all family quirks. As a bright-eyed Italian girl of seventeen she married her American sweetheart and came to the States. It turned out to be a terrible marriage, and years later, after dutifully raising four kids, she divorced my father, American style, and went home to the Old Country. Jenny had only met her a few times, but when they did meet you couldn't pry them apart.

"Uh-huh. I thought I might take you along, if you can stand it," I teased. I pulled the salad bowl away from her and tossed in the tomato I had been cutting. "We'll leave the day before spring-break."

She brightened a bit at that, and with a very limp wrist, laid a whole leaf of lettuce on top of the chopped tomato. "Can we stop in Vienna?"

"Oh, I don't know, Jenny... Maybe for a day or two."

She put on a weak smile. "Can we go to the opera?" she asked softly. Jenny's enthusiasm for opera was phenomenal. She must have inherited that from my mother, too--I always thought half the reason she went back to Milan was because they did too many German operas in San Francisco.

"Only if you can drag Grandma along." I picked up the salad and two bowls, then waltzed away toward the dining room.

Over dinner she made her momentous announcement. I had just put a big bite of steak into my mouth and was chewing thoughtfully. I even recall we were listening to something by Prokofiev.

"Daddy, I'm going to switch," she said quickly with an air of non-chalance.

I paused, finished chewing, and then fell right into the pit. "That's fine, honey..." Another pause. She wasn't looking right at me, and I leaned over to try to catch her eye. "You're going to switch what?"