My Uncle's Shoes

Prisms of Light

                                                                Tom Froehlich 

It was the tree trimming of 1972, the year the small Italian lights became so fashionable, that my father chose to demonstrate his electrical prowess.  When these lights first came on the market, if one light burned out, the entire string went black.  This required taking the additional light provided in the original package, which, of course, my father saved, yea right, and inserting it into each and every existing light socket in an attempt to find the dead bulb.  Being the troubleshooter he was, he first tested all four strings after disentangling them from the spaghetti-like clusterfuck they had been meticulously stored in since last January.  A faulty string of lights had graced a tree of Christmas past.  The guilty string had been, of course, placed in the center of the tree with either end plugged into the string preceding and/or following it.  It remained that way until three days before Christmas when my mother threatened divorce if my dad didn’t remedy the situation.  There was no way he needed an encore of that fiasco.

My larger concern was the importance of bulb placement.  I couldn’t stress the concept strongly enough.  Careful bulb placement was necessary to bring out the beauty of each individual ornament whether to be a Hallmark keepsake or a celestial angel made of flour paste, heavy enough to be registered as a lethal weapon.  My father was more of the mind-set of jam them in so they remain in place until December 25th at the very latest.  This allowed the trauma of light displacement to be experienced right up until Christmas Day.  Light displacement is when the string of lights seems to mysteriously jump off the tree.  The mystery being, why my father deemed the ring and loop system provided by the lighting company to secure the lights in place, complete with diagram, unnecessary.  He felt, year after year, that jamming the lights arbitrarily into the boughs was a far better system.  By the time the tree came down on Christmas day my father had already lost at least a pint of blood from shoving the lights back into place on a daily basis, and being violated by the rapier-like scotch pine needles.  Scotch pine was all the rage that holiday season and I was terribly pleased with my parents’ trendy choice.  This also made light placement ever the more challenging, as scotch pines are very dense. 

Having taken every precaution my father felt necessary, he now jammed the lighted cords into the boughs, wearing a pair of insulated ski mittens for protection, double-checking to ensure the plugs hidden within the tree were secure before we began hanging ornaments.  He then pulled the plug from the electrical socket cutting off “the juice”, as he would say, once again anticipating and therefore eliminating any and all potential electrical hazards. 

We began to hang assorted ornaments collected over the years.  Homemade baked “clay” gingerbread men challenging even the most stout of branches.  Clear hand-blown glass orbs, adorned with stripes of colorful matte paint, manufactured during WWII when the U.S. could no longer import the Bavarian glass from overseas, were used as fillers among the expensive new store-bought ornaments from the new garden center on the edge of town.  I added the finishing touch, swooping my garland with a flourish to be envied by even the window dressers at Macy’s department store in New York City.  Granted, I had never been to Macy’s, or New York for that matter.  Yet, I inherently knew, if there was any competition out there, it was a Macy’s during the holidays. 

We all agreed this was our most beautiful tree ever.  Trust me, that’s not saying much for the trees of Christmas past.  We stood back admiring our handiwork and waited impatiently for our father to plug in the lights that would transform our creation into the magic that is Christmas.  “Here we go, kids”, he announced, as he inserted the plug into the wall socket.  We gazed at the tree, giddy with anticipation. 

The tree was illuminated and created sparkles and prisms of light everywhere.  Herald Square had nothing on us.  We had once again transcended reality until our group “Ahhh!” was cut off somewhere around the seventh “h”.  The look of joy and awe seen in a child’s eyes at Christmas was replaced with panic.  Sure, there are sparkles and prisms of light everywhere, that is everywhere, but the center of the tree.  My father, not the most observant of men, had yet to see the challenge that lay before him.  Only one step behind us, his eyes locked onto the section of the tree devoid of light, taunting him.  And, of course, it is the center string.  Having thought he had covered all of the potential trouble spots, including wiring the tree itself to the curtain rod, he now stood before his nemesis with a look of defeat.  It is difficult not to see the humor in my father’s theatrical defeat, but my mother stifled us with a grinning scowl. 

“Well, I guess it’s back to the hardware store.  I sure as hell hope they’re open”, my father sighed.  Evidently, years before, the hardware store had conspired to take the merry out of his Christmas, by not being available a full twenty-four hours to cater to his tree trimming catastrophes.
 

“Well, honey, didn’t you save the,” my mother asked, answering her own question midway through asking it, “...extra bulb?

We helped our mom stow away empty boxes and straighten up, while my father was at the hardware store.  We all knew it was best that there be only one task at hand however daunting it may be, upon his return.  That, of course, would be locating the interior plugs within the boughs, enabling him to remove the faulty string and replace it with another.  Or so we thought.  Upon my father’s return, he believed he had devised a plan brilliant in its simplicity.  Rather than removing the existing dead strand of lights, which would require removing the decorations and maneuvering around the needle-sharp, flesh-seeking Scotch Pine needles, he would simply cut the dead strand into sections and remove it, replacing it with the new. 
 

Off he went to find his toolbox, which in and of itself, was frightening.  Fumbling around, searching out his wire cutter, he approached his dilemma with the confidence and determination of a skilled surgeon.  He explained the lights would need to remain lit, in order to determine which was the dead strand.  My father always approached these situations with a great deal of enthusiasm and very little forethought.  He grabbed haphazardly for the guilty wire nestled among the boughs and snipped. 

 

Now my family stood in complete darkness, that is, after the violet and orange sparks subsided.  It hadn’t occurred to him, that although he believed the faulty string was inactive due to one if its lights being dead, live juice still ran through its veins.  Not that it mattered, as far as, blowing every fuse in the fuse box, because any string, dead or live would have caused the same damage.  To make matters worse, he discovered he had, in fact, clipped the wire of a fully functioning string.  This, of course, meant yet another trip to the hardware store for another string of lights, for a total of two.  One to replace the original bad string and yet another to replace the good string he had bisected with his wire cutters.  
 

That’s okay, he needed fuses anyway.