Merry Christmas, Layla Grace. I got your name from the church Christmas tree. It’s kind of like Angel Tree, where you buy gifts for kids whose names are on the tree.

Your card was hanging on the branch when I was walking through the lobby. I was talking to people, shaking hands, and that’s when I noticed your photograph hanging there.

You are so pretty. Your hair is the same color as mine. Red. God help you.

When I saw your picture, I thought to myself, she looks like she’d make someone a very good friend. So I lifted your card from the tree and inspected it. And I fell in love with you.

For starters, I really like the name Layla. It’s a good name. I had an aunt named Layla. She smelled like old-lady perfume and her couch was covered in plastic. But she was very nice. And sometimes she babysat me. My mother was always reminding me to behave for Aunt Layla, and not to stress her out because she had IBS.

Your second name, Grace, is also a wonderful name, for obvious reasons. Also, I don’t know if you know this, but the letters in Layla Grace can be rearranged to spell “Lycra Algae.”

So this has to be a sign.

The card said your mother is in prison, your dad died from an overdose. You have not met either of them. You live in foster care. A group home. An orphanage, basically. You’re 7 years old. Your favorite food is ice cream.

The card also says that you’re sweet, and you like playing with dolls. You pretend that you’re their mother. You carry them around, and your foster mom overhears you tell your dolls, “I’ll never leave you, baby.”

So anyway, your Christmas wish list was simple. It was written in your own hand. And may I say, you have superb handwriting.

You wanted kinetic…

A Christmas party. There was a piano in the lobby. I was playing carols while people ate cookies and tossed back drinks. People wore reindeer hats and festive wear. There was a lady in a Grinch mask.

Tonight, sitting beside me on the piano bench was an 11-year-old music critic named Becca.

She was dressed in her nicest Christmas clothes. Red satin pants. Puffy black blouse. Ribbon in her hair. She was squeezed as close to me as she could get. Becca is blind.

“I wish I knew what you looked like,” she said, while I played “Winter Wonderland.” I was playing the part about naming the snowman Parson Brown.

“You aren’t missing much,” I said. “I’m not much to look at.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I’m redheaded. I’m gangly. I have a big nose.”

“And you smell like dogs.”

“So they say.”

Becca and I are close friends. I met her a little over a year ago. I cannot explain how we became so close. Or why. But there you are.

I do not have any other 11-year-old friends. And I can honestly say,

I did not expect to have an 11-year-old pal. But sometimes these things just happen.

Becca started spending weekends at our house. She began going on the road with me, sometimes performing with me at shows. Then we became her legal godparents. It all happened so fast. And now I can’t remember what my life was like before her.

I played “Let it Snow.”

“You’re my best friend,” she said, mid-song.

“You’re mine, too.”

“Seriously?” she said.

“Seriously.”

She leaned into me. “Seriously-seriously?”

Yes. In fact, I wish I could tell this girl how much she means to me. I wish I could tell her that this year, before my wife and I left the country, we had a will drawn up—just in case the Delta airline pilots had a crappy day. We have no heirs, and…

No crying. That was the stipulation. A few years ago, I visited the pediatric oncology wing at the hospital and I promised not to cry. Namely, because in a place like this crying doesn’t help anyone. So I kept a stiff upper lip.

I walked to the nurse’s desk. Checked in. They took me to the kid’s room. He was lying on a hospital bed, dressed in Christmas PJs. He wore a Santa hat over his bald head. He was going to be having surgery today.

“Are you Sean?” said the kid.

“I’ve been called worse,” I said.

“You’re my favorite writer.”

“You need to raise your standards.”

“My mom and I read your stories. First thing in the mornings, when she’s drinking coffee.”

“What are you usually drinking?” I asked.

“Gatorade.”

I sat beside his bed. The boy had a tube running up his nostrils. He asked if I wanted to play video games. I’m not a video game guy. I didn’t grow up with video games. When I was a kid, a boy in our county had the game “Pong,” and it

was broke.

So I watched the boy play his video game. He was getting into it. Explosions on the screen. Lots of gunfire. It was a loud game.

Finally, he handed me the controller. “You try.”

“I’m not a game player.”

“I can show you.”

So he showed me. He tried to teach an uncoordinated middle-aged guy the ins and outs. The child seemed to take pleasure in how truly awful I was.

Finally, I handed him the controller and said, “I think it’s best if I just watch.”

So that’s what happened. For almost an hour I sat there and watched him play. Eventually, we were interrupted when a few nurses came in and informed me that he was about to be prepped for surgery.

His mother and I were asked to leave the room.

I was 15 years old. I walked into the rural library. My father was freshly dead. I was a middle-school dropout. We were poor. It was Christmastime.

The small, public library was decorated for the holiday season. There was plastic holiday crapola everywhere. It was cold outside. I had no winter coat.

I stepped into the library with a blast of sleet and rain. I was wearing a T-shirt. My hair was soaked.

“Where’s your coat?” said the librarian.

“I don’t have one.”

“You don’t have a coat!? It’s 30 degrees outside!”

Shrug.

The librarian’s name was Miss Terry. She was old enough to predate the Roosevelt administration. Her hair was cotton white. Her shoes were Reeboks. Her embroidered sweatshirt read: “Dear Santa, I can explain.”

The library was a converted residential house. And I was a regular here.

“You can’t go around without a coat,” Miss Terry said. “You’ll freeze.”

Shrug Number Two.

I wandered to the fiction section. Fiction was all I was interested in. I read fiction each morning, afternoon, and night. It was escapism, I see that now. And

I was a classic escapist. But then, there were very few happy things in my life. Who wouldn't want to escape?

That day, I checked out two Louis L’Amour books, a few Dick Francis novels. When I brought my selection up to the counter, Miss Terry just looked at me with warm eyes.

“I have a book I want you to read,” she said.

“You do?”

She placed a leatherbound book atop my stack of books. Written by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

“I think you’ll appreciate this one.”

“It looks like a girl book.”

“Try to keep an open mind.”

I took the books home, I read them the way I always read books. Ferociously. But when I read the Lucy Maud Montgomery book, time stood still. And my heart moved sideways in my chest. I had never…

Winter. The year is 1949. The war has been over for a while, but it’s still fresh on everyone’s minds. Which is why people are having babies like crazy. War does that to people.

This new generation of babies will be known as the Baby Boomers, and each day they are being born by the truckload. These children will grow up one day and change the world by inventing revolutionary things such as DNA fingerprinting, the World Wide Web, the portable dialysis machine, and Donny Osmond.

But not all babies are lucky enough to be born into good lives. By which I mean that some babies have fathers who don’t want them. One woman—I will call her Macy—was pregnant with a baby like that.

So Macy’s mother did what lots of small-town mothers did in those days, she sent Macy away. Macy was supposed to go live with her aunt in Illinois, but it didn’t work out. So Macy tried Kansas City. That didn’t work either. And this brings us to the

beginning of our story.

Macy was alone. And penniless. Without a friend in the world. If we were to describe her situation with the blunt terms that my grandfather might have used: “Macy didn’t have a pot to [ugly word] in, or a [ugly word] window to throw it out of.”

She used her last few bucks to buy a bus ticket to Omaha, because she believed that this was a place where she could make a better life. Maybe nobody would ask questions about illegitimate babies in Omaha. Maybe nobody would bat an eye if she told them she was a widow.

So her bus was purring along when some very crummy weather hit. The weather went from snowstorm to deathstorm in only a few hours. History would later remember this weather system as one of the century’s worst blizzards to hit the Plains.

The bus rolled…

A supermarket checkout line. Cheesy holiday music is playing overhead. Not the fun kind of cheesy music, but the kind once heard in Kmart á la 1973.

There is an old man at the head of our long checkout line, standing at the register. He digs through his pockets, but keeps coming up empty handed.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he says to the cashier. “I must’ve left my wallet at home.”

He is embarrassed, and the young cashier is unsure about what to do.

I am watching this entire exchange closely because I am a columnist who writes human interest stories.

We columnists must keep our observational reflexes honed as sharp as wiffle-ball bats. We have to stay ready because we are not real writers.

Writers are inspired artists and poets. Columnists are factory-line workers who take whatever stories they can get.

Your big-time writer is a person with incredibly poignant things to say about life and the profundity of the human condition; they have grand ambitions of someday winning a major literary award,

and possibly having a “New York Times” best-smeller.

Whereas a columnist’s highest aspiration is for someone to cut his or her column out of the paper and hang it on the refrigerator.

So columnists have to work harder than true writers because we can’t rely on inspiration. Besides, our job is not to be inspired, but to constantly find new stories. This is not simple work. Therefore, most of the time you find me writing about key social issues such as, say, my dogs.

But the beauty of all this is, every once in a while a column will actually fall into your lap.

This is a rare thing indeed, and one of the most precious things that can happen to a stringer of words. Your task as a columnist is to be mindful enough to notice this pivotal moment is occurring, then to ignore it and…

The side-of-the-highway café was decorated for Christmas. Plastic balsam trees on formica tables. Beside the napkin dispenser, a nutcracker soldier with a Sharpie graphic drawn on his unmentionables, lending new meaning to the unfortunate soldier’s station in life.

There was a nun at the counter. Black skirt. Modest veil. New Balances. Her hands were vascular roadmaps, clasped in prayer. She hadn’t moved in several minutes.

“Ma’am,” a young waitress finally intervened. “Are you okay?”

The Sister lifted her head and ceased praying over her pancakes. “I’m alright,” the nun replied. “I just have a lot to pray for today.”

“Oh,” said the waitress. “Sorry to bother you.”

“You’re not bothering me. Is there anything YOU need prayer for, sweetie?”

The waitress must have been 18 years old.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. We can ask God for anything, and he’ll hear us.”

The waitress shrugged. “Can you pray that I earn enough money to get my daughter a new iPhone? She really wants one, and I don’t know how I’m going to swing it this year. It’s important.”

The Sister smiled. Then, the old woman looked

at the guy sitting next to her. He wore a trucker hat.

“What about you?” she asked. “Do you need anything from God?”

He nodded. “Can you pray that my loan goes through? I just made a down payment on a new house, if I don’t get this loan we’ll be stuck in a rental house forever, and my wife just can’t live that way anymore.”

The old woman turned to look at the cook. A middle-aged guy. Chopping onions. “How about you, sweetie?”

The cook wore a serious face. “My wife’s sister is flying in town this week for Christmas, to stay at our house.”

The Sister nodded. “What do you want me to pray for?”

“Pray that the airline goes on strike.”

Other people began chiming in. Everyone, it turned out, had a list…

A few weeks ago I received a letter postmarked from Nunavut, Canada. An invitation said that I had been selected along with a few other fledgling writers for an exclusive, one-on-one interview with a very important person who wears a red suit and owns a lot of reindeer and is not Oprah Winfrey.

The next day, I was on a plane from Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, flying to Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Our plane landed in a bunch of Midwestern gray snow. And I mean a bunch of snow.

Milwaukee was as cold as a witch’s underwire. I don’t know why anyone would choose to live in Milwaukee in the winter. Which brings up a joke my mother’s friend Judy, from Milwaukee always tells:

“What do you call a good-looking woman on the streets of Milwaukee?” “You call her frozen to death.”

So the layover wasn’t too bad. Neither were my other connecting flights to Tacoma, British Columbia, and Fairbanks International Airport.

When I reached Alaska, things were touch-and-go. I caught a commuter flight

to Deadhorse Airport, near Prudhoe Bay—which is basically the edge of the world where the temperature drops to forty below zero sometimes.

The next commuter plane was piloted by a Norwegian guy named Arvid who, while we were flying through a heavy blizzard, remarked, “I have never flown in an actual blizzard before.”

So things were going great. When we finally touched down, Arvid made the Sign of the Cross, and I changed my trousers.

We were on the remote Fosheim Peninsula at a research facility on Ellesmere Island. This facility has been continuously manned since 1947 and was covered in about ten feet of snowdrift. But the men who run the place are very friendly. Which is remarkable considering they are isolated from modern civilization and most of them smell like they have never been in a committed relationship with a woman.

Jôrse showed me to my…

Christmas Eve, 1978. It was late. The rural Pennsylvania highway was empty. All over America, stockings were hung by the carbon monoxide detectors with care. Children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of mortgage foreclosures danced through their parents’ heads.

And Todd was standing on the shoulder of a county highway, freezing his backside off.

The snow was falling like TV static. He was trembling.

Now his Honda Concerto was broken down, dead, parked on the rumble strip like a monument to Japanese auto engineering. And since this was an age before cellphones, he was up a well-known creek without the aid of an oar.

The snow fell harder. Todd pulled his coat tighter.

Headlights appeared behind him.

Todd waved his arms like a cast member on “Gilligan’s Island.”

The high beams illuminated the spindrifts of snow, the air brakes squealed, and the semi truck vibrated the Earth as it eased onto the shoulder. The tractor trailer was the size of a rural school district. There was a wreath on the grille.

Todd should have been glad someone stopped to help, but he wasn’t. His heart sank into his stomach because he recognized that wreath. He knew that truck.

Descending from the cab was a man dressed in plaid, wearing steel-toed ropers. It was Todd’s dad.

It was the last person he wanted to see.

Todd and his estranged father were enemies. His father had left home when Todd was six to drive an eighteen-wheeler across the U.S.. The man had been absent from his life until Todd hit his mid-thirties. Over the last few years, the old man had been trying to reconnect with his broken family, but as far as Todd was concerned, it was too late for reunions. Todd didn’t hold a grudge per se. He embraced it.

His father looked beneath the hood of Todd’s car. His old man had always been good…