Mom's Birthday Candle

My mother was born on December 14^th 1918. One Saturday morning in early December 1961 my 7 year-old sister and I decided we needed to buy my mother a birthday present. We asked my mom for some money to buy her a gift and she reluctantly gave us $3 or $4. As luck would have it, my father had planned to do some Christmas shopping that day at Lazarus Department Store, located in downtown Columbus. With money in hand, my sister and I went along.

At the Lazarus front doors, we kids split up from my dad, promising to meet him later at some predetermined location. Over the next half hour or so the two of us explored a number of different store departments in search of the perfect birthday present for my mom. We looked at baseball gloves, ballet slippers, even cheap cuckoo clocks, but we found nothing that we both thought my mother would like. Then, like a miracle, my sister and I came upon an approximately four foot-tall, electric Christmas candle made of heavy-duty plastic. Down the side of the candle in big yellow letters was the word NOEL. We just knew my mother would love it.

We hid the candle in the garage until we could wrap it, complete with stick-on bow. A few days later, on my mother’s birthday, we presented her with our fabulous gift. To our utter shock, frustration surfaced upon my mom’s face the instant the candle was wrestled free of the wrapping paper. “This is not an appropriate gift for someone’s birthday,” she grumbled. She then pushed it away as she shook her head in agitation. I remember it like it was yesterday. My sister and I were crestfallen.

Over the years the candle became known as “Mom’s Birthday Candle”. It was never referred to as “The Christmas Candle”, or “The Noel Candle”. Never. The oversized candle with the light bulb inside the big, yellow, plastic flame was simply “Mom’s Birthday Candle”. And every Christmas for almost 50 years it could be found brightening my Mom’s porch. Now and then over the various holiday seasons my mother would journey outside to wipe off the candle with a rag, or replace a burned-out light bulb. And if the weather turned really foul, she would bring the candle inside to safety.

One December several years ago, a few months before my mother died, I was carrying the candle through the living room, bound for the front porch. Along the way I traveled by my mother as she relaxed in her favorite chair. “Time to set-out your birthday candle,” I said casually.

“I remember the first time I saw that candle,” my mother quietly stated. “I was angry.”

I stopped and turned towards her. “Yeah, I remember. Believe me, I remember.”

“It wasn’t just that you bought me a big, plastic candle, it’s that you used my money to buy it.”

“It was a dumb gift,” I admitted with a shrug and a grin.

“At first I thought it was the stupidest gift in the world,” my mother remarked, “but I’ve received a lot of birthday presents in my life, and the truth is, very few have come to mean more to me than that big candle. So maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a stupid gift after all.”

Mom, wherever you are, I just want you to know; this holiday season your birthday candle will be glowing.

My Old West

In about a month or so I’ll be flying to Las Vegas. I’m starting to make reservations and so forth. I’ll spend a day or two in Vegas and then travel around that general region of the country for about a week. I’ll go to Death Valley, which is great in the wintertime, and visit other assorted sites in the region. Other than an evening or so of gambling in Vegas, I would be uninterested in going out west if I had not grown up on various TV Westerns.

As a kid I watched all the TV western shows, and there were a lot of them; The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, and Maverick to name just a few. I watched The Roy Rogers Show too, but I did not enjoy that program as much as some of the others. First, I did not like the way Roy dressed. He was just too immaculate to be a real cowboy. He wore those beautiful, fancy, unscuffed boots. Tucked into the boots were the leg bottoms of a pair of somewhat effeminate, tight, stretch pants. His shirts would make Liberace proud. They were way too colorful and fancy, and they were often adored with this girly leather fringe. Around Roy’s neck could be found a kerchief. Although I was watching Roy in black and white, I had this strange feeling that the kerchief was some shade of lavender. His hat was painfully impeccable.

I remember one early episode where in the finale Roy rode his “golden palomino” Trigger across the countryside in pursuit of a horseback bank robber. When Roy finally captured and subdued the robber after firing a couple of shots from his way-too-shiny sixgun, the town sheriff arrived driving something like a ’52 Dodge DeSoto. Up to the moment the sheriff came on the scene there was nary an indication that the story was taking place in the mid-20^th Century, if it in fact was. I mean, maybe it was a sci-fi episode with the sheriff and his automobile arriving from the future via a time machine. When these inconsistencies happened -and I was to learn that they often did on that show- I always assumed that Roy was simply way behind the times and had refused to mess with automobile technology, opting instead for the old-fashion horse. Thirty years later my father unknowingly supported this theory with his refusal to acknowledge the advent of the computer.

Anyway, despite my opinion of Roy, I’m going to be heading to the West, if not exactly the Old West. In order to follow the correct trail, I’ll be hooking up my GPS to a rented car with heated seats and cruise control. I’m sure that all these highfalutin gizmos will have Roy turning over in his grave. Okay Roy, I might be a tenderfoot, but at least I’m not afraid of get a little dirt on my pants. And by the way, those will be men's pants.