SMELLY SUITCASE

Ella is home and trying to decide whether to lug her smelly suitcase directly over to our temporary storage room, rather than let it stink up the apartment—which requires a little backstory, I realize:

The kids came over for our annual Christmas celebration on the Sunday before Christmas because Ella was flying to San Diego the next day to spend Christmas with her brother. After we emptied stockings and opened presents, Emma made the candle above and Arielle made a pair of… Oh, but that’s not far enough back.

Arielle had arrived on Thursday from Chicago, but decorating the tree together didn’t go according to plan. Only days before, our neighbor, Gina, had announced… Naw, that’s not far enough back either.

The exterminators finally arrived to set rat traps around the outside of our temporary storage room—five weeks after we reported to the management that the rodents were nesting in our Christmas stockings. Then when our neighbor, Gina, visited the storage room after the belated intervention, she reported back that it stank to high heaven. It turned out that a desiccated member of the rat clan was rotting in there. So Ella rescued our tree ornaments and Christmas candles from the smell and brought them back to the apartment. But at the time, she didn’t think to rescue her suitcase.

Days later Arielle arrived from Chicago and announced she’d been accepted to the University of Chicago law school(!) So, to celebrate when she came over—since we didn’t have any champagne—I spiked some eggnog with Fra Angelico liqueur and we toasted to her brilliant career as a lawyer. But when we went to decorate the tree, the tinsel we pulled out of the bag smelled of rat pee. So did the lights. So the three of us headed out into the night to find replacements. We went to a CVS, then a Walgreen’s, that were sold out of tree trimmings, but, as they say, the third time is the…well, you know. The CVS in El Cerrito Plaza had everything we needed. And since we were there anyway, we went over to Barnes and Noble and bought a 1,000-piece puzzle.

Then, when we got home and tried to play our favorite Christmas albums on our boom box while we did the decorating, I couldn’t turn up the volume on Andrea Bocelli’s My Christmas album loud enough for it to sound like more than a murmur, signaling that the boom box was kaput. Fortunately, we were able to stream—on my iMac—not only Josh Grobin’s wonderful duet with Brian McKnight of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” but opera singer Kathleen Battle’s entire A Christmas Celebration album from 1990, which Leia had given me as a cassette when we first became friends—and which became part of my Christmas tradition with the kids after they were born until it wore out.

Anyway, once the tree was resplendent and glittering that Thursday evening, Arielle, Ella, and I worked on our puzzle late into the night.

Now Ella is showing me gifts from her relatives in southern California: among them a wooden foot massager with bumpy spools that turn when you roll your foot over them, a burgundy-colored cardigan that she tries on, and maracuja (passion fruit) jam and herbal tea from her brother Brian. (And here I should probably explain that Ella lived in Bahia, Brazil, from age ten to fourteen. Her father, a geologist, was hired by the oil company Petrobras.)

Next she shows me a coffee table book, also from Brian, called Gordon Parks – The Flavio Story. Parks was an African American photographer who went to a Rio favela (slum) in 1961 to take pictures for Life magazine of the conditions there—and followed a boy named Flavio, she tells me. The slum was called Catacumba—catacomb—which says it all.

And what am I feeling as I study the pictures? A pang of guilt about the money I’ve spent on my doll collection over the years, while boys like Flavio are still wasting away from malnutrition in the slums of Rio.