Eleven
“I don’t want to grow up.”
My granddaughter is excited about Christmas and eager to turn eleven, but this is what she’s thinking about right now. In the next hour, she will claim she is “very responsible,” despite piles of clothes on the floor in her room offering evidence to the contrary, then ask for a cellphone for Christmas. Or her birthday, which will come three days after Santa.
“Santa’s not real,” she would tell you in a mostly-confident statement of fact. But she understands the role Santa plays in American culture. She also knows she can’t stop time. She is a reader. She knows lots of things.
She starts singing “Deck the Halls.”
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A small artificial tree sits on the table by the front door. It’s sparsely decorated with mostly handmade ornaments from the past six Christmases she’s lived with me. Some feature photos of a girl who once was, and still is on the inside. There are a few Harry Potter ornaments, too, remnants of a season when she proudly read every single book, stretching her understanding of words and worlds while claiming with confidence that Hogwarts was real. (Santa was still real then, too.)
I am silently suffering the holiday season like a soldier crawling across a field strewn with barbed wire. This is not because of childhood trauma. One couldn’t ask for more wonderful and wonder-filled holiday memories. The glow of the tree lights on the ceiling. The smell of pine needles and peppermint. The unceasing hum of Christmas music.
My mother, the piano teacher and church organist, would play the piano. My father would sing, often changing words in a familiar carol to fit the moment and make someone smile or laugh.
Today, Mom is a thousand miles away, Dad even farther. Or closer. I don’t know how to measure the distance between the living and the dead. Music is left to our whims and wishes and granted by Siri or Alexa.
My granddaughter hasn’t asked for much Christmas music this year.
I am thankful for that.
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She has carefully placed all the birthday presents around her in a circle on the floor. She sits in the middle, like she is about to perform some magical ritual. She turned 11 yesterday, but has not yet received a letter from Hogwarts.
Perhaps this is her way of increasing the odds.
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12:01. The apartment is mostly quiet, apart from the thumping of celebratory feet from the floor above me. This is the sixth different upstairs tenant since I moved in 14 years ago. Some have been deathly quiet. Others, annoyingly loud. This one leans toward the latter.
It’s the sixteenth year in a row without someone to kiss at midnight. Or is it the seventeenth? After the first five, the years start to melt into one another, turning the past into a puddle.
I try not to step in those puddles.
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My granddaughter has a friend over today. They’ve just finished playing with the pretend food toys she desperately wanted this year. Melissa & Doug toys. “I don’t mind that they’re meant for younger kids,” she says. “I just like playing restaurant.” I tell her that’s good practice for the real world and she gives me one of those, “Really, Papa?” smirks. She’s gotten good at smirks.
The two of them are role-playing something else now. In this make-believe game they are much older, much more responsible. They have to be to care for their imaginary children and pets.
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The Christmas tree is back in its box. We only lost one ornament to the ravages of time this year. Construction paper doesn’t hold up quite as well as the hopes of the child who made it.
My granddaughter has taken a break from playing with her friend and is standing by the sliding door, looking out at the first day of the new year. The clouds are low. The trees are bare. The squirrels are hungry.
She is eleven.
I think she is looking for Hedwig.
[I’ve recently joined the Post.News social media site, and will attempt to post there regularly. To keep this blog from feeling lonely, I will occasionally crosspost here. I know this one isn’t specifically writing-related, but it’s writing. And that counts for something.]