Sometime in the holiday season of 1952, my aunt Jane was hurrying through the main floor of the State Street Marshall Field’s in Chicago, a grand landmark department store. In those days, the main floor of Field’s was a full city block square, three stories tall, and studded with enormous columns that held up the nine retail floors above. Around the pillars and their overscale capitals were fabulous holiday decorations, on a scale to suit the setting. Gigantic round-bellied snowmen leaning outward, and shiny Christmas balls two feet in diameter, hung with wide red ribbons and enormous bows. On the marble floor were aisle after aisle of shining cases with the best of goods arrayed for well-dressed Chicagoans. Oh, it was a palace.
My aunt was thirty-five then, a petite and energetic woman, properly gloved and hatted and wrapped in a winter coat. She carried a pocketbook and, for some reason, on this particular December afternoon, she also carried little me, her namesake. I suppose I was properly gloved and hatted, too, and decorous, looking up at the looming snowmen, which were bigger than I was. I was a biddable child, I think, and it must have been quite a shock to Jane when I leaned out of her arms and reached for the Bubble Tree.
“You nearly tipped me over,” she said, “You were looking and looking at something on one of the counters. You fell in love with it, I think.”
I think I did, and perhaps it was the first fall after milk and mother – a tabletop tree, electrified, and on the end of every branch, lights bi-colored and glass-tubed, each one bubbling hard toward its tip.
As the story goes, my eyes were large and round and filled with light as I reached. Jane, frugal Jane, stopped at the glass-topped counter and bought the bubble tree, lugging the big box home on the train, and later that night setting it on the tea cart against the bay window. We all watched it light up and start to warm, its image doubled by the storm window, and magnified by the many little curving panes. Outside, the snow fell, I suppose, and it was cold. Inside, I sat with my grandparents and my namesake aunt and watched the bright bubbling begin.
* * *
We don’t have a bay window in this house, but at holiday time, we put all the leaves in our dining room table and run it right up against the window, crowding the Tree against the pane. It is all upward movement and color, doubled by reflection and multiplied by memory. In the dark outside, behind the reflection of our faces, framed by stars, I can sometimes see the shadows of my aunt and grandmother, eyes smiling at little me as they move toward the kitchen.
It’s Christmas!
* * *
From “How The Bubble Tree Came To Me”. Photo by the author.
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