Gift

Feet climbed into stockings, into shoes with wiggling toes, as though heavy-lidded eyes on the tips of five snakes darted to and fro seeking communal entrance to a sheltering cave.

A sigh, a groan raced up the telephone wire nerve interchange from those grounded feet, rising through an upside down pachinko game, pinging and slinging sideways then up through the knees - those two half-pendulums - up thighs that once spread to planted seed and later to bear children and then, on occasion, to form a lap, through the swinging hips that knew how to expertly buttress a glass-windowed kitchen door, up the laddered spine with its rungs of pain, past a neck longing for sober kisses or even drunk ones, slotting into a cerebellum with its own take-a-number turnstile: take a number, aching arches, compressed toes, get in line, you'll get your turn of attention next time we assemble at the shoe store.

For now, get on.

For now, for fifty years of now, slipping the shard ends of bone into wrapped leather taught Grandma a chief life lesson which she then gifted to me. Exhorted, even, when she finally put up the "Closed" sign on serving food to mostly paying customers.

"Always buy good shoes."

She looked at me with clear eyes that pierced like sewing needles, stitching me up against a hard world. With a glance she could see down to cold bone, but her half-smile was never a smirk.

"Always buy good shoes, and good scotch." One for standing up, one for sitting down.

Some gifts come at Christmas, some on the day celebrating when your mother did all that work pushing you out into the embrace of others, but maybe the best come any time, for all time:

"Pour me a Scotch, hon', and yourself too, and come sit, and have a drink with your ol' Grandma."

Would love to, Grandma, anytime.

Wherever you are - Merry Christmas.