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For some reason, all of my significant partners in life have been atheists.

Today’s Christmas – not a morning that Jews are stirring because there are no gifts and there is no tree.

But here at the LaLa where we live, we have a Christmas Story and it goes something like this, my mother who is now angel knew that there was one thing in my wonderful life I wanted more than anything else – a little bitty baby boy. So while all the other Jews were celebrating the miracle of Hanukkah, how one pot of oil that was supposed to burn for one night burned for eight, we were celebrating our own miracle, the arrival of Tin on my mom’s wing and prayer.

Then on the last night of Hanukkah, when we made our weary way home from Indianapolis, we had friends come by to welcome Tin home and to light the last night of the menorah with us and one of Tin’s aunties brought him a little Santa suit. By Sunday, we dressed him in his little suit and took him out to our neighborhood holiday festival and it was there that I noticed something – that we – me, Tatjana and Tin – are a family but from the response Tin gets from everyone he meets, I realized he belongs to a much larger family than the two of us.

Last night on Christmas eve, we went to a friend’s house for a traditional German dinner of goose and activity. We walked in with Tin in his little suit and everyone reached for him and couldn’t resist his smile. Our friend’s mother was visiting from Germany and they put on a shadow puppet show for us that was so delightful I am still smiling. The theme was Katrina and contractors.

And this morning, while my godless girlfriend slept quietly next to me, our two dogs who were not wanted anywhere else slept peacefully on the floor on either side of us, our cat with AIDS who belonged to an older black woman name Rachel, whose family was going to put him down after she passed, prowled the hall, and on a video monitor I could hear my son who I had traveled miles to meet breathing as he slept in his room at the LaLa. Three wrapped presents await him this morning – his first Christmas – our first Christmas – and as I lay in bed I thanked god for him just as my mother thanked god for me.

Why me Lord? What have I ever done to deserve even one of the pleasures I’ve known? But I digress.

That would have been enough. Until I got to my computer to wish you all a Merry Christmas and found 111 photographs that Marc Pagani took of Tin yesterday and I thought given the levity I felt looking at these photographs, I betcha I could go out the front door of the LaLa to the bayou and walk on water myself this Christmas morning.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 8:24 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.