The Christmas Letters (5 page)

Bill thought it would make a man of him, but I don’t know. I don’t know what to think about it. I pray for Joe daily, as for all our boys in this awful and confusing War, and ask you to do the same.

I guess that’s about all, except I should add that Mrs. Pickett—still going strong at 100—got a birthday card from Lyndon Johnson.

May God bless each and every one of you this Christmas Season,

Birdie

2.
Letters from Mary

Dec. 26, 1967

Dear Family,

My apologies for mimeographing this letter to stick in your card, but please consider it a very personal Merry Christmas anyway, from me and Sandy and
ANDREW BIRD COPELAND
who is six months old at this time, almost completely bald but the cutest baby in the whole world according to his proud parents
MR. AND MRS. SANDY COPELAND
of #20 Greenacres Park, Raleigh, N.C., where we have now moved as Sandy says there is more opportunity here in the building trades.

Greenacres Park is actually a
trailer park,
and we are living in a rented trailer which would not have been my first choice, as it is aqua, but it
is
very reasonable since
everything
is furnished—wall-to-wall carpet (yuck—more aqua!), blinds and drapes at the windows, a built-in bar and stools in the little kitchen, etc. All this is lucky for us since we have started our housekeeping on a shoestring, you might say. Of course, the size of this trailer
is
a little bit small for Sandy (who is 6′3″, after all!). He has to walk around hunched over all the time. But he works so much that he is not home a lot, so it is okay, and will suit us fine until we can afford to move to another place. Actually this
trailer reminds me of a dollhouse—remember when I “took care of the dolls” for Daddy? I was so proud of myself. The big difference is, this little doll is
real!

I wonder if everybody is so crazy about their first baby, and so worried about him. Even though Andy is sleeping through the night now, I still wake up every three hours and can’t go back to sleep until I have tiptoed over to his crib just to see if he is still breathing, and I’m happy to report that so far, he is! And one
nice
thing about the size of a trailer is that I can check on Andy constantly. We are never far apart in here!

When Sandy comes home from work in the evenings, he always asks me what I’ve been doing all day, and honestly I don’t know how to answer this question. “I can’t exactly remember,” I tell him, “but whatever it was, it just wore me out!”

The truth is that with a baby, the time flies. Of course I can remember how, as a teenager in the not-so-distant past, I used to get so bored. Sundays, for instance, just dragged on and on. . . . I truly did have “time on my hands” and never even knew it until now, when I don’t have any! Who
was
that girl who used to “moon around” (Mama’s word for it!) and read so much? I feel like she was somebody else, not me, not this new me who always has something to do. Fold the diapers, feed the baby, burp the baby, put him down, peel the potatoes, pick the baby up and change him,
put him in the playpen, put the water on to boil, wash off his pacifier which he has thrown down in the floor, put the potatoes in the boiling water, cut up the chicken, find the pacifier again, wash it off, etc. I won’t go on and on, but you can get the general idea!

It is a major expedition whenever we go out, such as to the grocery store or to the laundromat or the library or the little playground behind the Episcopal Church up the street (St. Michael’s). Or we might go to visit Susan Blankenship in #11, who has just had a baby girl named Melanie, or Marybeth Green in #45, whose John is actually three months older than Andrew, though of course Andrew is much more advanced and smarter. Andrew really enjoys visiting John. They are so cute—they love to play side by side, though they are not old enough to play together yet. This is called “parallel play”—I keep checking out all those books on child development. Sandy teases me about it, but I am just
so terrified
that I will make a mistake. Some mistakes are irrevocable, a thing I never really realized until I had a baby of my own. This thought scares me to death. I feel like everything I have ever done before means nothing, in comparison to taking care of this baby.

Sandy comes from a family of seven, so he thinks I worry too much. For instance Sandy believes in letting a baby cry, that this develops his lungs, but I can’t stand it, snatching Andrew up the very minute he opens his mouth.
And let me tell you, his lungs are developing just fine anyway, thank you very much! Sandy tells me all the time that I am spoiling “that baby” but actually he is just crazy about him too, and calls him “Duke.” (I’m not sure where he got that name!) “Hey, Duke,” Sandy will say, and kind of box with him. They both get the biggest kick out of this little game.

So I want everybody out there to know that I am
fine,
happy as can be in this little aqua blue shoebox of a home with my baby Andrew. We are so busy in here that it is very difficult right now for me to even imagine any other world outside these four walls.

I watch Vietnam on television of course, and often think of you, Joe, but honestly it is hard for me to concentrate too long or to believe that the war is actually
real
and not just another show on television. I know that’s awful, but it’s true. Somehow I believe it would seem more real to me if it
wasn’t
on television all the time. Honestly, my imagination has failed me on this. I’m so glad you will be home soon.

But Joe, I
do
wish you would write, at least to me. I’m sure you are hearing this from all of us, so
do
it! Make copies and send one to everybody, like I am doing here. I’m sure the Army has got a mimeograph machine
someplace!
By the way, it is hard for me to believe you scarcely know Sandy yet. Somehow I think that all the people I love, love
each other as much as I love them, and I forget that you all have hardly met.

Well, I will quit running on and on and tell you now about Sandy’s and my first Christmas dinner together (yesterday). It was a riot! We had a baked hen which barely fit in my oven (I am
trying,
Mama!) and oyster casserole which did not work out because I used
smoked
oysters instead of the real other kind which I guess you are supposed to use. (I had bought these flat square little cans of oysters at the Piggly Wiggly, they were very expensive and blew my whole food budget for the week, but I thought you
had
to have oyster casserole on Christmas, Mama. I thought it was the law!)

Well, it
looked
okay, the cracker crumbs having formed a nice golden crust just the way they are supposed to, but the minute I bit into it, I knew something was the matter. But Sandy did not even know the difference because he had never tasted oysters before anyway. Luckily, Sandy will eat
anything,
and he thought it was delicious! We ate Christmas dinner on the floor—on our aqua shag carpet, that is! — since we don’t have a table yet (though Sandy is going to build us one soon, he can build
anything,
if he can get off from work long enough to do it) while Andrew slept on his blanket right beside us. And when we got up to do the dishes, we saw it had started to snow! So we bundled poor
little sleepy Andrew up in that red snowsuit you sent, Mama, and took him out in his first snowfall ever, which was coming down so thick and fast at first that we couldn’t even see beyond our little row of trailers, to the street.

The streetlight made a perfect cone of light, full of whirling flakes, as we stood beneath it and stuck our tongues out to catch the flakes and tried to make Andrew stick his tongue out, too. How sweet and cold those snowflakes were, melting on our tongues, I will never forget it.

And then before we knew it, everybody from the other trailers had come out too, and we met neighbors we had never even
seen
before! such as a crazy old lady named Miss Pike, who wears the most makeup you have ever seen and used to teach singing lessons, opera I believe, and a fat little man named Leonard Dodd who described himself as an “inventor” (though I don’t know what he invents), and another man named Gerald Ruffin who looked very aristocratic, but wore a plaid robe and red velvet bedroom shoes and was drunk as a lord. Somebody whispered that he used to be a lawyer but had fallen on hard times. He was in politics, too. He is from one of the most prominent families in the state. I guess he must be the black sheep of
that
family! We all talked about the snow, and passed around some of the fudge you sent, Mama, and then the Teeter sisters
had us in for coffee. You have never seen as much junk as they have squeezed into their trailer—they call it “brick-a-brack.” It covers every surface that is not already covered by a doily. All their coffee cups were made of flowery bone china, with gold rims. Gerald Ruffin’s hands were shaking so much that his cup rattled on his saucer like a castanet. Well, I could go on and on. . . . (No doubt this is the same impulse which used to lead me to write
The Small Review!).
Anyway, I don’t know whether it was that coffee or pure excitement, but I couldn’t sleep a wink all night long. I lay snuggled up to Sandy like a spoon in a drawer and listened to Andrew make his snuffly little sounds in sleep, and peeped out the porthole window at my portion of the sky, which was full of whirling flakes, no two alike in the universe, and thought about my baby, and my husband, and Daddy, and all of you, and my heart was full to bursting.

Merry Christmas and love from your very poor but very happy,

Mary Copeland

P.S. I will
spare
you my recipe for oyster casserole! Oh, I also made up a big batch of Sticks and Stones for Sandy to give his boss. They were a big hit. So if Sandy gets that raise he’s hoping for, it will be all thanks to me, his
wife,
MARY COPELAND
!

Dec. 23, 1970

To My Dear Family and All Our Good Friends at Greenacres Park,

There’s so much going on and so many people I want to tell that I’m making Xerox copies of this letter.

I just can’t believe that this is the last Christmas we will spend here! In fact, this is the very
last week
we will spend here—we are scheduled to move into our new home at 1508 Rosemary Street on Dec. 29th.

Actually, our “new” house is old, having been built in the 1920s, but I just love it, with big square rooms and crown molding, a beautiful cherry wood banister going up to the second floor, and three fireplaces with fancy mantelpieces. I must admit it is in pretty bad shape at the present time, needing a lot of paint and some plumbing work, not to mention a new porch and a new kitchen, but since this is how we got it, I don’t mind. See, the landlord was advertising it as a “fixer-upper,” and since I am married to a “fixer-upper,” I answered the ad myself and struck a deal. A
great
deal, I might add! We will be living rent free in exchange for Sandy’s services, and the landlord is paying for materials, of course. So 1971 will find us all the way across town, it’s almost like being out in the country.

We will need the space, since (as most of you already know) I am pregnant with
twins,
can you believe it? They will be born in mid-February, I am hoping for Valentine’s Day. I thought I was getting awfully big, awfully fast, but I never, ever, thought of
twins!
until the doctor told us. (And
now
Mama says that actually she had little twin sisters herself, up in West Virginia, she just “forgot to mention” that they were twins. One of them died young and the other is our Aunt Margaret.) Anyway, twins do run in the family, for sure.

And so we will be getting a ready-made family real fast! We could never stay in this trailer after the twins are born—we just wouldn’t fit—but in a lot of ways, I hate to leave. We have been so happy here. Sandy says I am crazy, but I swear I will even miss all this
AQUA
—can you believe it?

Most especially I will miss all of you, and want to take this opportunity to say so. Miss Pike, thanks so much for keeping Andrew for me whenever I got into some kind of a
bind,
which you know I am prone to do! and for teaching him the little songs on the piano, that was very sweet. Ditto to the Teeter sisters, I am sorry about the teapot and the Japanese porcelain lady. Thanks to you, Mr. Dodd, for expanding my mind. (I will never forget what you told me about how you invent things: “First,” you said, “I imagine a need . . .”)
GOOD LUCK
, Mr. Dodd. Don’t forget to close your door and lock it when you go out, ditto your car when you park it, now what will you do without me?