It was the year his parents separated, which would have put him in fourth grade, during the last gasp of the ’60s. Guilt had driven them both to overindulgence with the gifts. His father drove back over to the family home in the morning to watch him tear through his bounty of presents. Gerald had bought them the customary one present each: for his mother, a faux-crystal swan to add to the aviary of bird trinkets she kept on a high shelf in the hallway, and for his father, a bottle of Drakar Noir cologne.
What his father had actually asked Gerald for was to sing a duet with him on a reel-to-reel home audio recorder he’d borrowed from a friend at work. Specifically, his father wanted Gerald to join him in “You Are My Sunshine,” a tune both his parents used to sing to him when he was sick. His father’s plan was to play the tape for Gerald’s mother on Christmas. One last Hail Mary to stave off the divorce. But eight-year-old Gerald balked at the idea of singing on tape. He flatly refused. After several minutes of cajoling, his father sighed and resigned himself to packing the recorder away.
* * *
A ringing phone startled Gerald out of the snowglobe fantasy of his Christmas memory. He looked at the light flashing on the main-line station phone, hesitated a second, answered it.
“Hello,” he said, then quickly corrected himself. “I mean, KTIA News, merry… holidays.”
“Lord in heaven, man, do you call that a fire?”
Deke McClusky spoke loudly over a fuzzed cacophony of chatter and jangling stemware.
“Were you a boy scout, son?”
“Um, in the early seventies.”
“Did you receive a merit badge for fire-starting?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Well then we’ve found the source of our problem. That fire is looking downright sickly. I don’t think it could melt ice cubes.”
The phone’s corkscrewed cord wouldn’t stretch all the way back to Studio C, so Gerald had to lay the receiver on the desktop to go back and check on the fire. Sure enough, it had dimmed to a crimson mound. Gerald piled two fresh logs onto the coals before speed walking back to the phone.
“Now that’s a fire fit for an American Christmas,” Deke said. In the background, someone was shouting Deke’s name—actually, saying “Deekers!” — but the old man ignored them. “This Holiday Hearth Yule Log Special speaks to the very core of our mission here at KTIA. We’re not just a news channel, we’re a community hub. This fire is for all the citizens of Rapid City to gather around together. Metaphorically, I mean, alone in their homes. This is about getting back to Christ and the values Ronnie has been talking about.”
I love that story.