Best Christmas gift ever

I remember a day, many years ago, that dawned gray and raw. Peering down from behind my sixth-floor window, I saw what had been a typical South Bronx street mantled in drifts of untrodden snow. Fat flakes were still falling obliquely against the streetlights, and the Sears Car Repair Center parking lot directly beneath my window looked eerie. Its ingrained splotches of motor oil had been temporarily blanketed, and the candy store/bookie joint across the street looked almost cozy. A stray dog crossed the deserted road, leaving tiny paw prints behind as he picked his way amid the swirling snowfall.

Then my parents came to the doorway of my bedroom, my smiling mother holding my wide-awake sister. “Buon Natale!” Mom said.

I went over to give her a peck on the cheek and shake my father’s proffered hand. The baby gurgled as we walked the few steps into the living room, where the Christmas tree beamed with its multicolored lights.

“Want to open your presents now?” my mother needlessly asked.

“Which ones are mine?”

Although seven or eight gifts resided beneath the tree, I knew a few were imposters: empty boxes wrapped and gladdened with bows, whose function was to increase the festiveness for when company came.

“That one’s yours,” my mother said. “Santa Claus must’ve left it for you.”

On ripping off the paper of the slim box she pointed to, I discovered “The Dell Encyclopedia of Birds.” The cover featured a snowy ptarmigan whose beak was graced with such a smile as birds would smile, were they capable of smiling. I flicked the pages and saw, eyeing me in vertiginous succession, dodoes, eagles, falcons, ravens, swans, nightingales, swallows, skylarks, cranes, doves, owls, kingfishers, albatrosses. Glancing at my mother, I saw a curiously avian smile on her pretty face. When I opened my other gifts beneath the gaily festooned tree, I feigned enthusiasm for the sweater and galoshes she had also bought me.

From the fire engine and doctor’s kit I received one early Christmas (my mother wanted me to become a doctor, I wanted to be a fireman), I progressed to a toy typewriter. The main problem with it was, instead of a keyboard, there was a big knob with a dial that you had to turn to the correct letter or number every time you wanted to stamp out a character. It was more like fiddling with a combination lock than typing.

My most elaborate Christmas gift was a chemistry set that cost $5, a staggering sum for a toy. I took it to bed with me the night I got it, still handling the test tubes and memorizing the names — and warily sniffing the contents — of the little bottles that housed 16 different chemicals. These ranged from stinky sulfur to exotic wonders like sodium ferrocyanide (which I mispronounced fer-ock-YAN-ide) and the utterly unpronounceable phenolphthalein solution. This colorless liquid (the active ingredient in Ex-Lax) turns bright red on contact with alkalis, so all I had to do was add some powder from a different bottle into a test tube with a bit of phenolphthalein in the bottom so as to “change water into wine,” as the brochure phrased it.

My supply of phenolphthalein solution got depleted rapidly, since I changed water into wine several times daily. It turned out that was just about the only experiment I could perform without equipment and supplies we didn’t have on hand. There was no question in my mind of asking my parents to procure the extra materials I needed — the $5 spent on the set had been prodigal enough.

But I received two of my most memorable gifts while sick with the measles, which caused me to miss two weeks of the second grade. On one of the many days I spent in bed, my temperature spiked to 106, and I hallucinated that I was a giant and that my blanket, with my knees propped up beneath it, was a mountain I lived next to. With no TV in the room and living on fruit cocktail, I was trapped in bed with no energy and nothing to do.

One evening, soon after I heard my father come home from work, he appeared at my bedside and asked how I was feeling while handing me two Archie and Veronica comic books. Although they weren’t my favorites comics (I being an ardent Superman fan), I realized that after working on construction on a wintry day, he had stopped on his way home to buy something he knew would cheer me up.

I hadn’t expected such a thoughtful action because I knew how tired and hungry Dad usually seemed when he got home at night. But I was like the boy in “Those Winter Sundays,” a haunting poem by Robert Hayden: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

Merry Christmas, faithful readers!