Editor's note: This column first appeared in 2015. A couple of references are out of date. Mom is gone now, though she lives in Christmas memories.
On a Saturday morning that spring, I sat alone, having breakfast at Leo's in Hillcrest. A text came in from Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business and regular estate-sale scavenger.
She said she was at that moment looking quite possibly at the very item I'd written longingly about in a Christmas column.
She was at an estate sale at a house maybe five blocks away. I hurried over and went upstairs.
Indeed, she'd found it, or, more precisely, one very much like it.
There was a brief discussion of estate-sale strategy. You could take a chance that the item wouldn't sell, in which case you could get it for less on Sunday afternoon.
I took no chance. Full price. Right now. Into my Jeep. Then into the attic--until it was time.
And now it is time.
If all went according to recent tradition last evening, at or about midnight, I sat in a comfortable chair next to a deeply warming splash of Jameson's.
I turned off all lamps, overhead lights, smartphones, laptops and television sets. I gathered the beagles Roscoe and Sophie at my feet. Shalah was nearby, pleased to behold my rare serenity.
In the darkness, I gazed upon, and lost myself in, the vintage 6-foot aluminum Christmas tree, circa '65, in the corner, a wonder of glorious nostalgia and tackiness.
I watched the slow-circling color wheel transform the shiny tinfoil of the tree to a calm deep blue and then a peaceful yellow and then a shining green and then an understated red, and then back around.
I listened for the brief grinding sound each time the wheel reintroduced blue.
I escaped to my childhood, to life at 10 to 12 in that flat-topped, four-room house at the end of a graveled lane in southwest Little Rock. I recalled a tree like this one, and a permanently creaking color wheel a little bigger and better than this modern online discovery.
I was returned to that hardwood floor of the mid-1960s, flat on my stomach, eyes fixed, deep in my happy certainty that this exotic aluminum tree--framed by a picture window outlined in blinking lights--was surely the most magnificent among all monuments of the season.
I remembered the happiness and safety of those 1960s Christmas seasons--of, in fact, an entire childhood.
I was thankful for the hardworking and low-income parents who provided that happy and safe childhood, and the little fundamentalist church that nurtured it, and the public school that educated it, and the community that encouraged it, and the backyard that was a field of dreams--a baseball park, a football stadium, a basketball arena, a golf course.
It was there I threw and caught the passes, even punted high and ran to make the fair catch. It was there I provided the roar of the crowd and the play-by-play announcing and color commentary.
I remembered concocting a baseball card for myself, one with impressive statistics and a brief biography that included the nickname: "Fly Ball Brummett."
I remembered my dad telling me that you don't want to hit fly balls, boy, because they get caught for outs. And I explained to him that fly balls sent airborne by "Fly Ball Brummett" arced like gentle bombs to distant places that no one could reach.
He said I was talking about line drives. I said these go higher than that.
We'd argue that way, and more seriously, for a few more years, and then each of us would realize that the other was smarter than we had thought. Then we got along pretty well.
Cigarettes took him much too young, younger than I am now. My mom gave me his cufflinks and tie clasp that Christmas. I fled the room teary, much as he'd fled the room that Sunday afternoon when I coaxed enough Okinawa memories out of him that he mentioned "Sarge."
After a half-hour or so of tinfoiled hypnosis, I headed to bed. And I thought about Mom, now in a long-term care facility with what they call "cognitive decline," and whether she remembered if only for a fleeting moment that aluminum tree and color wheel of our cozy little home.
It's more likely that she remembers instead the very thing I'd spent those moments remembering--the safety and happiness of childhood, her own, which is where she spends most of her time now.
There are far worse places to be.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.