My Christmas story

 

Oh, Christmas tree --

The author, 2023

 what a spell

 you cast on me

 For most of my life, I've had a love-hate relationship with Christmas trees. I even told about this a mere 16 years ago on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, in a Baltimore show called Stoop Storytelling. The theme of the night: Holidays From Hell, Part Deux. 

 Blame it on my childhood. When I was growing up, my parents never had a Christmas tree.

 Well, maybe that's understandable. After all, we were Jewish.

 One year, my father took me across our street in Northwest Baltimore, to visit a neighbor family and see what Christmas looked like. It was the home of the Landsmans -- Ray and Dorothy, and more kids than I could quickly count.

 Ray was Baltimore's first Jewish police lieutenant, but Dorothy was Catholic and they came to an agreement that their children (about a dozen of them, all with names beginning with the letter 'J') would be raised in the Catholic faith. 

 They had a tree, presents in various stages of unwrap, the kids running around in seeming chaos, the smell of a ham in the oven wafting out from the kitchen, and Dorothy upstairs in bed nursing the youngest of their brood. The Madonna of Royce Avenue. Close to 70 years later, I still remember it.

 We celebrated Hanukkah, of course. But no, we didn't have the proverbial Hanukkah bush. I had a modest Lionel electric train set, with a small figure-eight track that wrapped around a leg of our rarely-used dining room table. My father Ben set up the train every year for the holiday season, and by New Year's Day it was gone back into storage.

 The Jewish dropout

 Religion was not all that important to me. I had a nasty teacher in Hebrew school -- and early in fourth grade I walked out of the class in anger and never went back. My parents got a call from the school two weeks later asking why I hadn't been attending. 

We had a difficult conversation in which I was threatened with punishment, but the crisis was resolved with a compromise of taking private lessons for my bar mitzvah. And at 13, after the synagogue ceremony through which a boy becomes a man, I became a religion dropout as well.

 At 19, in a courthouse ceremony, I married a girlfriend, Vol, who had been raised in a Christian family -- but like me, religion was not relevant to her life. But there was this little thing that carried forward: She/we had to have a Christmas tree. In our mid-20s we also had a daughter. And in one of my last pictures of us as a family, she and our 4-year-old Jennifer (who later changed her name to FL) are sitting by the tree with presents. 

A few months later, after a decade together, our marriage ended.

 And I got married again. My second wife, Kathleen, also had been raised as a Christian, and like the first she came hard-wired for Christmas. We even once attended the midnight Christmas Eve service at the nearby Lovely Lane -- known as the mother church of American Methodism. It was, in fact, lovely. 

As for our tree, she believed in buying good ornaments -- and for my young daughter, a top-quality stuffed animal lion she named Li-Li (pron: lie-lie) that saw her through some challenging times as she bounced between parents in Baltimore and Florida.

 Marriage number two lasted about four years, and when Kathleen departed I was left with ornaments including a small herd of beautiful silken carousel horses and elephants that had graced our trees.

 The third proves the charm

 And I got married again. Yup, third Christian for this lapsed Jew -- this one not only having had a strong religious upbringing, but playing the organ in church and at age 12 leading a cherub choir. 

Attending Frostburg state college in Western Maryland, she made a point of going to services at every church in town -- eventually becoming the lone white person in the only black church there. The minister. Joe Gipson, became a friend, and after services each Sunday she traveled with him about nine miles down the road to Cumberland for his services at a second black church. She was their pianist.

 And near her 1967 graduation, when Bonnie married the first time, Joe was the soloist singing at her Baltimore church wedding.

 When we embarked on a life together in 1980, in our mid-30s, a Unitarian minister who was a favorite customer in her camera store, Bill Barnett, officiated the wedding in the living room of her little house just south of the city. And six weeks later, the daughter we created together was born.

 We began attending Bill's Unitarian Universalist church in Annapolis, which I enjoyed whenever I managed to stay awake during services. We wanted our daughters to benefit from its ecumenical education program, which was free of dogma and included sex education. Its services drew on beliefs and traditions from multiple faiths, with Christmas seeming to have a far greater joy than Easter. The existence of Christ was pretty much acknowledged, but for some in the congregation not necessarily a resurrection.

 At home, of course, we had a Christmas tree. Fortunately, Bonnie took care of decorating it. I just didn't enjoy the task -- or, for that matter, having to buy a damn tree every year. At least Bonnie preferred trees that were a little bare of branches. Lush trees did not show off the ornaments as well. Not quite a sad Charlie Brown tree, but one that looked good with its bare spots in back facing a wall. And usually priced lower than the "good" trees.

 And our collection of ornaments began to grow. The horses and elephants from my days with Kathleen galloped and trumpeted beautifully in company with "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments from 1944 (Bonnie Jean) and 1980 (daughter Lauren), little mice, a rhino and a hippo, lace snowflakes, intricate balls crafted by a blind Frostburg college friend decades ago, a German shepherd harking (not barking) to our dog Miss T, favorite teacher ornaments given to Bonnie by middle school students during her career as an educator, a tiny baseball symbolic of the too-much-attention I gave to my favorite spectator sport.

 And now, a dark turn...

 In 1994, I had a great idea: Why do we have to buy a tree? Why don't we walk into the woods near our home in suburban Pasadena and get one the old-fashioned way. Bonnie reluctantly agreed to my plan. 

Daughter Lauren, then all of 14 years old, was invited to join us on that December night, and was not so keen about the idea.

 "You mean you're going steal a tree?" she said. "Why don't you just buy a tree?"

 "I think poach would be a better term," I replied.

 So it was just me and Bonnie heading out about 11 o'clock, under a full moon on a foggy and unseasonably warm winter night. It seemed incredibly romantic. I drove us in our station wagon the nearly quarter-mile to edge of the woods, and, carrying a saw, was leading the way on its path in my usual fashion -- to make sure any residual spider webs did not reach my bride. 

 A little more than a tenth of mile into the woods, the path takes a curve and as I stepped ahead of Bonnie, she encountered an unexpected obstacle. I heard a thud and a cry of pain, and turned to find she had slipped in a small patch of mud and was thrashing around on the ground.

 I reached to help her up, and saw the bone protruding from her left wrist. We managed to get her standing, and as she was shaking I held her right arm on the short walk back to the parking spot. I gallantly put my jacket on her seat -- well, actually, to keep the seat from getting muddy because Bonnie had mud just about everywhere.

Back home, I helped get her clean and in fresh clothing for our ride to a hospital about seven miles away.

 The orthopedic surgeon on duty assessed the injury, and told us, "I have good news, and bad news Which would you like first?"

 "How about bad news," I suggested.

 "This is one of the worst fractures I've seen. But the good news is that I can fix it."

 I breathed a sigh of relief that proved only temporary. 

 "But I have more bad news," he continued. "First I have to break it again to get it into the right position."

 Bonnie was given some joy juice -- an intravenous painkiller -- and I held her right hand as the doc gave a quick twist to her injured wrist. The cracking sound stays with me even now, nearly 30 years later.

 While Bonnie was recovering from anesthesia after the ensuing surgery, I was dispatched about 3 a.m. to a nearby all-night pharmacy to fill her prescription for a pain med she would need at home. The pharmacist looked at the prescription and asked, "Do you want the name brand or a generic?"

 "What's the difference?" I asked.

 "The generic is 10 dollars, and the name brand is 35."

 Okay. I admit it. I was too cheap to pay for a Christmas tree. But now, I was overwhelmed by guilt. It's like the yin and yang of my Jewish upbringing. What to do?!!

 "Give her the good stuff," I stammered.

 So the upshot is I spent $50 for the emergency room co-pay, $35 for Percocet pills, and didn't even have a tree to show for it. 

 The next day, as Bonnie recuperated at home, I drove two miles up the road to Ace Hardware and found most of the Christmas trees had already been sold. But among those left in the store yard was the perfect tree for Bonnie. Not purely Charlie Brown. Just a nice, not-too-branchy tree. A store employee cut a few inches off the bottom so it would stay fresh resting in the water of our tree stand, and helped me tie it to the station wagon roof rack.

 I was pretty pleased with myself, and after pulling onto our driveway went into the house and invited Lauren outside to see the wonderful tree I had bought for $10. And looking it over, with more wisdom than any 14-year-old should possess, she stared straight at me and gave me the come-uppance I so cheaply deserved: "I told you so."

 Epilogue 

 Bonnie continued over the years to demand a tree at Christmas, and I coped as well as I could. One year a local garden center was having its last-day going-out-of-business sale, and had a beautiful $500 artificial Christmas tree priced at 90 percent off. I told Bonnie.

 She said no.

 In 2019, my friend and former newspaper colleague Frank Roylance posted on Facebook that he and his wife were downsizing for a move into a condo and did anyone want their artificial Christmas tree -- free! And I jumped at it, begging Bonnie to relent. So off we went, to Frank's house north of the city, and together we managed to get the long and heavy box wedged into our hatchback car.

 We stored it on a high shelf in our backyard shed, but in ensuing years the tree just lay in its long heavy cardboard box. We were not able to set it up for Christmas in 2019, as I had just battled a life-threatening ordeal with a MRSA infection and sepsis.

 And in 2020, the pandemic turned our world upside-down. Bonnie late in the fall had surgery to remove her gallbladder, and there would be no Christmas fanfare. And in early January of 2021, as the first vaccines for Covid were rolling out, we learned that Bonnie had advanced and aggressive pancreatic cancer.

 A few weeks later, Bonnie wrote about the uncertainty of how long she would survive -- hoping that she might be able to attend a nephew's wedding, or see another Christmas with our families. But it was not to be. Her life journey ended in March, 10 days before the arrival of spring. 

 And the tree lay in its box in the shed, until this week.

 Inspired by a friend I have been dating in recent months, and her artificial but lovely tree I had helped assemble in her apartment (yeah, she is a Christian... just the way my life continues to play out... and seriously hard-wired for Christmas), I trudged back to my shed a few days ago and lugged that heavy box into my house. 

 Sunday night, I took it out -- it was in three pieces, the bottom and middle sections very heavy and the top relatively light. I cleared away from the living room half a dozen boxes of some of the too-much-stuff accumulated during four decades in suburbia, pieced the tree together in front of the bay front window, and plugged it in.

 Miraculously, every little light bulb on the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall tree was illuminated.

 On Monday morning, I climbed into the attic and went down to the basement to retrieve boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations, including some that have outlived three marriages and half a century of moves, divorces and loss, and set to work.

 I had never in my entire life trimmed a Christmas tree solo, and I spent hours at the task, sorting through ornaments that came with memories of mostly happy times and joys.

Bonnie's 1944 ornament

 There were the sand dollars netted from the surf on Florida's Gulf coast by our kids in 1989, which they painted for that year's tree and endured for nearly 30 others over the course of our lives. Some were so beautiful and evoked such wonderful memories that I was in tears.

There's even a dragon ornament, purchased at a science fiction convention years ago -- before Game of Thrones hatched three of them into pop culture.

 The tree left only a few inches to spare below the ceiling, and was too tall for one tradition that had been a continuing bad joke: Deciding who gets to put the tree up the angel's butt. Well, that would be me this time. The angel was much too tall, so I set it on the windowsill next to an ornamental Buddha. Several smaller angels, in various sizes, found perches elsewhere on the tree.

 When I was done, I turned off the lights in the house and plugged in the tree.

 I was overwhelmed by its beauty

 And I thought maybe I wasn't really alone, after all. 

My 2023 tree, in its glory

 

Tree dragon

 

A closer look

Going home again

                   Gilbert Sandler's birthplace and childhood home on Cottage Avenue

An adventure back in time

with a Baltimore storyteller

There's no place like home, but it sure has changed

William Smith is living in my sixth-grade classroom. The place where teacher Rebecca Redler once presided over the learning of some three dozen 11-year-olds, a very long time ago.

I met Mr. Smith today because of Gilbert Sandler, with whom I share the experience of having attended Baltimore's old Louisa May Alcott School No. 59 -- a generation apart. We both recently celebrated birthdays: Gilbert is 94, while I turned 71.

Gilbert's Facebook photo

Gilbert is one of my heroes. although we never really met socially until today -- excluding a couple of brief conversations during literary events at which some of his collections of Baltimore stories were being sold. He's a remarkable man, and at his age not only has all of his marbles but probably more than I do. He's well-known locally for the brief Baltimore stories he spins weekly on the public radio station WYPR.

We've been Facebook friends for a couple of years, and last week I sent him the usual birthday greeting -- wishing him 364 very merry unbirthdays to follow. He responded by inviting me to lunch. (He seems to think of me as a distinguished journalist for having survived 40 years at the Baltimore Sun, including a stint as night metro editor, before escaping with a buyout nearly a decade ago.)

Over pancakes at Miss Shirley's restaurant near his Roland Park Place seniors community apartment, we shared experiences of growing up roughly a mile apart in Northwest Baltimore, our memories of downtown when it was a place people went to shop (the department stores there are long dead) and where my father worked selling men's clothing. I showed him a few old photos of my father Ben Ettlin -- including his 1931-issued taxicab driver identification, and his many "weddings" as the groom in 1940s Hutzler Bros. department store bridal fashion shows.

Then I suggested we take a drive to the old neighborhood, and see if we could take a peek inside our elementary school, since converted to low-income senior housing, at the corner of Keyworth Avenue and Reisterstown Road -- and where, a generation apart, we had the same first-grade teacher, Esther Freilachoff (the daughter of a Russian-born Hebrew scholar, she taught for half a century -- mostly at Louisa May Alcott -- and died in 1989 at the age of 91).

But first I wanted to show Gilbert the house where I grew up at 3424 Royce Avenue, below St. Ambrose Church. I drove him across a decaying stretch of Park Heights Avenue (an area nearly a mile south of the famed Pimlico Race Course) and turned onto Woodland Avenue.

 There was an old decaying row house in the once-largely-Jewish neighborhood there that had a Star of David ornamentation on the side of a lower roof. But the house I had last seen a year ago was gone -- it and the rest of its row of dead and nearly-dead dwellings demolished and hauled away. It was a vacant lot, among many vacant lots where houses once stood on nearby Homer, Virginia and DuPont avenues. And evidence of a few other felled houses in the area remained as piles of rubble.

I drove down St. Ambrose Avenue, noticing a house which I thought was where one of my childhood friends lived back in the 1950s. It was vacant and boarded. I turned left into a narrow alley and pointed out the rickety back porch of a still-occupied house where, way back when, I played Monopoly with friends including Marsha Rofsky, whose family had owned it.

At the end of the alley we reached Ground Zero of my childhood, Royce Avenue -- where it appeared every one of the brick row houses was still occupied, and in relatively good shape.

Me on my trike, and my late brother, in front of 3424 Royce.

 On the odd-side corner facing us was the Landsman house, residence in those days of Baltimore's first Jewish police lieutenant, his Catholic wife, and their dozen or so kids (two of whom became homicide shift commanders in the same city police department). And a few doors up on the even side was my house, where the old concrete steps had been replaced  but the slate roof seemed worn and in need of repair. I should have brought along the picture of my Russian-Ukrainian grandmother sitting in its porch, holding the baby me.

We headed south about eight blocks along  Reisterstown Road, and Gilbert excitedly pointed to the old school rising into view. We passed Shirley Avenue, where we both had attended (and dropped out of without telling our parents) the old Isaac Davidson Hebrew School (it was vacant when, as I recall, an arsonist finally dispatched the building). And in another short block I turned left onto Keyworth and parked outside the entrance to the building now named Alcott Place. (Gilbert pronounces it All-Cot, while I say Owl-Cot.)

I had him sit in the warm car, out of the wind, as I approached the steps down into the ground-level entranceway. The door was locked, but a resident opened it -- and with no one at the reception desk, kindly waited for me to get Gilbert and let us in. Then another resident arrived, William Smith, and I introduced us -- me, a graduate from 1957, and Gilbert in Louisa May Alcott's mid-year February Class of 1934.

The ground floor was a lot different from our school days -- the huge (by kid standards) gymnasium and the group bathrooms (in Gilbert's day, the boys' side including a long group urinal with water cascading down its back wall) were gone, replaced by a few apartments.

 Then we rode the elevator (there was none in our days -- its shaft and an adjoining stairway were carved right through the first-floor principal's office in the building's overhaul for housing)  to the third floor, where Mr. Smith's apartment is located. It is, by my memory, the very classroom of the late Mrs. Redler where I last sat in June of '57, but now a spacious efficiency apartment.

Mr. Smith, a deceptively young-looking 71, happily showed us his home, then took us up another elevator -- one that runs between the third and fourth floors. There was no fourth floor back in our school days, but the high-ceiling space between its old exposed structural beams had a bright, new wooden floor, with a group meeting, party and sitting space, and spacious work center with computer stations for the residents.

I had visited Alcott Place maybe 15 or 20 years ago, and remembered the blackboards that had been removed from classrooms and reinstalled along the hallways. Someone had used multi-colored chalk to draw beautiful religious scenes on them. But now the drawings, sadly, were gone; a couple had what at a glance appeared to be announcements in large white chalk lettering.

But the building was immaculately clean, and a serene space within a neighborhood that otherwise appears Third-Worldly in its decay.

Gilbert was leery about it, but I wanted to drive by his old house a few blocks away on Cottage Avenue. He worried that it had become the kind of place where people get shot, but I was assuring -- it was daylight, after all, and the bad stuff more likely happens after dark.

We rode south on Park Heights Avenue and turned left on Ulman Avenue -- and there on our left side near the corner was a huge memorial of balloons, spent candles and a fashionable black derby hat, the kind of display that crops up at murder scenes in much of the city. Indeed, a peek at my old newspaper's online archive turned up the grim confirmation that a 25-year-old man had been fatally shot there six days earlier.

Ulman leads into Cottage Avenue where, as I had earlier on St. Ambrose and Royce avenues, Gilbert pointed out houses and the names of childhood pals who had lived in them in the 1930s.

Then we reached 3608 Cottage Avenue, a brick mid-row house with a white-shingled bow upper floor outcropping with three windows. Behind it was a room that had special meaning for my friend. "I was born in that bedroom," Gilbert said.

The tall windows and front door were boarded with heavy plywood, the house -- like countless thousands of others in this city -- vacant.

Then we headed back to Roland Park Place, wondering about whether one really can ever go home again.

Gilbert emailed me later this wisdom: "You can indeed go home again. You just have to understand the journey. And time and change."

Gilbert Sandler is a Navy veteran of the Pacific campaign in World War II, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1949 from the University of Pennsylvania and an MLA from Johns Hopkins University in 1967. Among other adventures, he has had careers in advertising, public relations and freelance writing, and is the founder, benefactor and proud booster of an award-winning debating program at his high school, City College. He is the author of the books "The Neighborhood,"  "Baltimore Glimpses Revisited," "Jewish Baltimore," "Small Town Baltimore," and "Wartime Baltimore."

You can listen to some of his Baltimore Glimpses radio stories at the old WYPR web site. 

(Addenda: Gilbert died nearly two years after our tour, at the age of 95.)

 

Below is a photo gallery of the annual May Day celebration on the playfield at School 59 -- these taken in 1951 when my brother was a sixth-grader there, and I was in kindergarten.

Dancing around the May pole. In the background, houses on Park Heights Ave.

That's me in the School 59 T-shirt, and my mother (pre-nosejob) in the dark glasses behind my Royce Avenue friend Howard Gersch and his mother

May Day was a big deal in those days at city elementaries.

And for many kids, it was a costume-dressy event.