The Christmas Sweater

One
The wipers cut semicircles through the snow on the windshield. It's good snow, I thought as I slid forward and rested my chin on the vinyl of the front seat.
"Sit back, honey," my mother, Mary, gently commanded. She was thirty-nine years old, but her tired eyes and the streaks of gray infiltrating her otherwise coal black hair made most people think she was much older. If your age was determined by what you'd been through in life, they would have been right.
"But Mom, I can't see the snow when I sit back."
"Okay. But just until we stop for gas."
I scooted up farther and rested my worn Keds on the hump that ran through the middle of our old Pinto station wagon. I was skinny and tall for my age, which made my knees curl up toward my chest. Mom said I was safer in the backseat, but deep down I knew that it wasn't really about safety, it was about the radio. I was constantly playing with it, changing the dial from her boring Perry Como station to something that played real music.
As we continued toward the gas station, I could see the edge of downtown Mount Vernon through the snow. A thousand points of red and green Christmas lights lined the edges of Main Street. Hot summer days in Washington State were rare, but when they happened, the light poles covered in Christmas lights seemed out of place. They hung there in a kind of backward hibernation until a city worker would plug them in and replace the bulbs that didn't wake up. But now, in December, the lights were working their magic, filling us kids with excitement for the season.
That year I was more anxious than excited. I wanted it to be the year that Christmas finally returned to normal. For years, Christmas mornings in our home had been filled with gifts and laughter and smiling faces. But my father had died three years earlier -- and it seemed to me that Christmas had died with him.
Before my father's death I didn't think much about our financial situation. We weren't wealthy, we weren't poor -- we just were. We'd had a nice house in a good neighborhood, a hot dinner every night and, one summer, when I was five years old, we even went to Disneyland. I remember getting dressed up for the airplane ride. The only other vacation I remember happened a few years later when my parents took me to Birch Bay -- which sounds exotic but was really just a rocky beach about an hour away from our home.
Back then we never wanted for anything, except maybe more time together.
My father bought City Bakery when I was young -- it had been in town since the 1800s. He put in long hours at work, leaving almost every morning before the sun (or his son) rose. My mother would get me off to school, clean up around the house a little, start some laundry, and then join him at the bakery for the rest of the day.
After school I would walk to the bakery to help my parents out. On some days the walk took less than half an hour, but it usually took me a lot longer. At least a few days each week I would stop at the edge of downtown in the middle of the bridge that crossed the I5 freeway and watch the cars and trucks whiz by. A lot of kids would stand there and spit onto the roadway below, hoping to hit a car, but I wasn't that kind of kid. I just imagined myself spitting.
I complained a lot about having to be at the bakery so much, especially when my dad made me wash the pots and pans, but secretly I loved to watch him work. Others might have called him a baker, but I thought of him as a master craftsman or a sculptor. Instead of a chisel he used dough, and instead of clay he used frosting -- but the result was always a masterpiece.
Dad and my uncle Bob both apprenticed in their father's bakery from the time they were my age. Donning aprons, they washed a seemingly never-ending line of pots and pans, and they would learn recipes after school. In my dad's case, it wasn't long before the apprentice was more skilled than the master.