Through the years I have had quite a few book covers. This one is the most visually interesting but so is this one.

A father, even a middling on like I was, knows that Christmas can never be Christmas without the input and participation of children.

This meant that for many years Christmas with my two daughters and two granddaughters was that inevitable personal torture of sitting through another Nutcracker. The last one I ever attended ended with a big bang as my two granddaughters and I shared crepes with the Sugar Plum Fairy.  

But there is another Christmas tradition that has been afoot now in Vancouver. The Arts Club Theatre Company mounts one or two Christmas plays every year around now.

My granddaughter Lauren, 13 (in that in-between stage that one moment makes her a child and at another an adult woman) and I caught both A Christmas Story (on November 11^th) and It’s A Wonderful Life last night. The former is playing at the Stanley the latter at the Granville Island Stage. I am familiar with both plays particularly It’s a Wonderful Life. Alone both plays would have dragged on. But watching my Lauren’s face brought back for me a vision that I was there for the first time.

Seeing (experiencing) something for the first time is perhaps one of the wonders of youth. Not too long ago while driving in Vancouver I was listening to a Beethoven piano bagatelle. It was so spectacular that I stopped and called my Vancouver Symphony pianist friend Linda Lee Thomas. Her husband Jon Washburn answered. I told him of my excitement. His comment I have never forgotten, “Ah to listen to something for the first time!” He said it in a way that made it clear that my gain was his loss.

Both plays, A Christmas Story (with direction and choreography by Valerie Eastman) and It’s a Wonderful Life directed by Santa’s first cousin Dean Paul Gibson have the expected but necessary in my books schmaltz and both use that waning expression of our times “merry Christmas”. Both feature children in the cast and a rosy Christmas of Christmases past before the advent of Black Fridays.

For those who might have gotten this far in this blog I will reveal below (well below) my connection (as a child) with a Daisy BB gun which is the underlying theme of A Christmas Story.

It is It’s a Wonderful Life (with just the right amount of un-tampering of a good thing by Dean Paul Gibson) that made last night a special night for my Lauren and her grandfather.

It’s a Wonderful Life, the Vancouver version, rotates around three actors. One is angel Clarence played by Bernard Cuffling, the very warm Mary Bailey played by Jennifer Lines (is there any young boy that did not at least one time fall for a woman like her?) and the always dazzling guilty pleasure (I plead no excuse for that) of watching Lindsey Angell (as Violet) walk around in those dresses (costume design by Rebeckka Sarensen-Kjelstrup). Angell’s Violet I am sure could make the wheelchair ridden nasty man Henry Potter (played by Alex Willows) jump up from it.

I propose right now that Mr. Millerd consider mounting A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Angell as Maggie. I can’t wait for that Teddy. Big Daddy Pollitt, naturally would be played by David Marr, Uncle Billy in It's Wonderful Life.

But it is Bernard Cuffling who makes It’s a Wonderful Life the kind of play I can see over and over every year. To watch what Cuffling does with the two grabbed bullets from the air is always a dazzling surprise even though I know what’s coming. Cuffling is now 70 and I know that Joseph and his Boss will make sure (with some help from Millerd) to surprise us all with his delightful performance for many Christmases more.

After the show Mr. Gibson satisfied my whim to photograph Clarence the Angel (with his wings) with my granddaughter. As I told Lauren, “One day when you have children and you tell them that you once posed with a real angel they will not believe you.” Her quick reply, was, “I will have the photograph to show them.”

In 1954 when I was 12 my family and I moved to Mexico City. For that first Christmas I demanded a Daisy BB rifle. I have to point out here that I was a tad more sophisticated than Ralphie (played by Valin Shinyei in the Arts Club Theatre production). I did not want that Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle. No I wanted the pump gun. It was under the tree that Christmas.  For days I walked to nearby factories and shot at and broke as many windows as I could see.

I have never forgotten.

A few weeks ago I had to go to the hospital to have my bladder “tested”. The procedure was not painful and made easier because my doctor had two assistants, one a woman, the other a man and both had just the right kind of attitude. Particularly the woman as she would be witnessing (not a problem for her but certainly for me) an aspect of my body that is usually most private. The male nurse was Filipino so I told him that my nick name in Tagalog is Suput (sometimes written Supot). The nick name was given to me by Nonong Quézon, the son of the first Filipino president after the country was given its independence by the United States after WWII. The term, suput, means uncircumcised. I told the male nurse that he would soon confirm the accuracy of the epithet, not a good one in the southern island of Mindanao which is Muslim.

I left the session a tad minimized in my concept of being a human being. I thought that the procedure was simply an indignity (and of many more to come) of old age. On my way out I ran into a sprightly old man who told me he was 92 when I said, “Ah, the indignity of old age!”

On November 19th early in the morning my 18 year-old female cat died in her sleep. She had the usual kidney disease and always wanted to eat but she was still getting thinner. She obsessively drank water all the time. But she became constipated so we took her to the vet who prescribed and performed an enema. I never thought such a procedure was used with animals. Although my Plata was a cat I still thought this was an indignity. We brought her home and by early morning she died with her eyes open. I had placed her by the kitchen heat register. Rosemary went down in the middle of the night called me to say, "I think Plata is dead."

I have read too many crime novels as I told Rosemary, “I am going to put her into a shoe box before rigor mortis sets in.”

Only a week before Plata’s death, I had told my 13 year-old granddaughter that Plata would go to the new house one way or another. Lauren instantly understood. A mere three hours after Plata died I took her to the new house and buried her under our old garden ferns that I had put into the ground a few days before. Somehow in all my sorrow knowing that Plata will be with us on 7^th Avenue is comforting.

Looking at Plata’s lifeless body, still warm, and not being able to discern any life in those previously lively eyes, threw me into a sadness that was most acute. At the same time I thought that death, at least as perceived on a cat inside a shoe box, was a most undignified occurrence. I would call it the indignity of death.

Brother Edwin, I am sure would have had some sort of comforting but philosophical words for this. But he cannot be reached as he too, in my eyes has suffered the ultimate human indignity, death.