Somewhere along the Christmas season,
Johanna Spyri’s Heidi emerges from
memory. Not my blue two-wheeler Dad taught me to ride on Detroit’s Joann Street
before he bought his first movie camera—meaning there’s no evidence of my prowess
in mastering independence from training wheels.
And not my first
pair of roller skates, or the matching baby dolls Santa left under the
Christmas tree for my two sisters and me.
Although
I adored these presents with reckless affection, the story of the orphan Heidi and
her devoted Grandfather holds the strongest significance of a well-given gift.
For Heidi came to
me on a mountainside of my natal home in Kentucky which my family had left several
years prior for Dad to barber in Detroit.
Possibly the Yuletide
of my tenth year, my sisters, cousins, and I played outdoors in peddle-pushers
and shirtsleeves. Dad filmed us mothering our new dolls, the main attraction my
cousin Candy’s Patti Playpal—the heart’s desire of every girl in 1959.
Sometime in
daylight of that ideal holiday reunion with my McCoy kinfolk—and what would be
the last time I would stand in the presence of my pretty cousin Candy—she offered
me a package wrapped in red paper.
I remember her
smile, the embarrassing contrast of her long, dark ponytail and frilly dress to my tangled bob and dirty play
clothes. With regret, I consider again my disappointment when I opened a box to
find a thick book titled Heidi.
I’d enjoyed Heidi’s
happy ending in the movie starring Shirley Temple, but I wasn’t a good reader.
I can only hope I mustered enough manners to return a “thank you” to my
thoughtful and long-forgotten cousin for her long-lost gift.
Typical post WW II
parents, neither my mother nor father read literature or took my sisters and me
to a local library. They entrusted our reading skills and literary education to
our public schools.
Although I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, many Shel
Silverstein’s books, and every Christmas Eve Twas the Night Before Christmas to my daughters, I failed to read them
Heidi.
Several years ago approaching another Christmas, I at last purchased a 1925 edition of Johanna Spyri’s best seller. One of those lonely Christmases without my children, Heidi, Grandfather, Peter and his goats, Clara, and the wind in the firs kept me in good company. Those jagged peaks that loomed up austere and even terrible in their harsh barrenness became ever more familiar to her as she gazed at them, until they were no longer terrible, but friendly, and it seemed to her that she had known and loved them all her life. (Chapter One, page 42)
Heidi takes me back to the mountainside and
grandmother I have known and loved all my life. I hope and pray my cousin Candy
knows the same affection.
Dear Reader, inscribed
inside my vintage copy of Heidi I
find, “Merry Xmas, Uncle Pete and Aunt Tray.”
Christmas. Time to
give the gift of the wind in the firs.
