As the eldest daughter of a U.S. Marine in post-World War Two America, I was used to being uprooted. I’d grown accustomed to endless, trans-Pacific voyages, to interminable airline flights where the drone of the engine nearly drove me mad and the vibration of the propellers blurred my vision so badly that I couldn’t even read to pass the time. When I think back on it now, we always start out before dawn, and our destination is a mystery, a black dot on the green, brown and yellow landscape of my Rand McNally Atlas of the World.
1952. Bread cost sixteen-cents a loaf and a cotton blouse in the Sears and Roebuck catalog was $1.98. Daddy went away – to help mop up the Korean War, Mother said – and my sisters and I moved in with her parents in Cleveland, Ohio. How I loved Grandmother’s house! A stately Victorian, it had an attic and a basement with a dark, twisty stairway to connect them, seven bedrooms, a music room and a library with stuffed deer heads mounted on the walls. “Did Granddaddy shoot them?” I asked my grandmother in horror, trying to picture my grandfather, a kindly physician, aiming and shooting a gun.
“Oh no, dear,” she replied. “He bought them.”
I’d started third grade, and was learning to spell ‘elephant’ and ‘photograph.’ When lunchtime rolled around, I’d skip home to grandmother’s damp, lavender-scented hugs and she’d sit with me while I ate my sandwich – Kraft olive pimento cheese spread on homemade bread -- and Campbell’s cream of tomato soup.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, with Christmas dancing tantalizingly on the horizon, Mother took us shopping. In those days, shopping was a special occasion, so we dressed in our church-going clothes and caught the trolley at the corner of Idlewood and Euclid that would take us to Public Square and Higbee’s Department Store.
Oh, I’d never seen such marvelous windows! Magical displays of old-fashioned toys, train sets, teddy bears and dolls. In one window, fanciful elephants suspended from wires circled a Victorian tree. In another, Santa flew off with a sleigh full of toys. The lights and the music were dazzling. I tugged on my mother’s sleeve. “Look! The sign says Santa Headquarters!”
“And see Santa, you shall,” said my mother. “But first, we must buy you a new coat.” I had no interest whatsoever in a new coat, but Mother insisted, dragging us along to the children’s department where we tried on one coat after another until I agreed that yes, the gray one with the lambskin collar was perfect. It had a matching hat that tied under my chin, as I remember, and leggings that zipped up the sides. I hated the leggings and would later refuse to wear them.
The saleslady wrapped our purchases in tissue and tucked them into a shopping bag which I clutched to my chest as we rode up the elevator. “Tenth floor!” announced the uniformed operator. “Silver Grill Restaurant and Santaland!”
He was the real Santa, too, not one of those false-bearded elves that Santa Claus sends out to far-away places like Berkley, California and Tsingtao, China where we had lived before. I could see where his whiskers took root and grew right out of his cheeks and chin. 
Santa beamed. “What do you want for Christmas, little girl?”
“A cowgirl suit,” I said without hesitation. I stole a glance at my mother and, amazed at my daring, added, “and a two-wheeler bike with balloon tires and a bell that goes ding.”
The old man threw back his head. “Ho, ho, ho! And what color would you like?”
I was ready for that question, too. “Blue.” I could see the bike as clear as day, pictured on a page I’d torn from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and folded away between the pages of Alice in Wonderland.
“We live in Cleveland,” I told Santa as I slid off his knee. “On Idlewood Avenue. We used to live in Albany.”
“Idlewood.” He smoothed his mustache with a white-gloved finger. “Idlewood. I’ll make a note of it. Don’t worry, I’ll find you.” He winked, and I knew that he would.
Three weeks before Christmas, Daddy sent a telegram. Mopping up after the Koreans had taken him to Fort Riley, Kansas, it appeared. He’d found a house for us, too, in nearby Chapman. We were about to be uprooted again.
“Where’s Chapman?” I asked Mother.
“If you balance a map of the United States on the tip of your finger, Chapman will be right where you’re pointing. It’s the geographical center of the United States.”
I escaped to Grandfather’s library and pulled out the Rand McNally. Topeka, the capital of Kansas, was a star. Wichita, a double circle. Chapman, when I found it, was a tiny black dot no bigger than a pinprick. I didn’t want to leave Cleveland for a tiny black dot in the middle of Kansas no bigger than a pinprick, but the dreaded day came nevertheless. Dressed in our new winter coats, we waved goodbye to Grandmother and Grandfather and boarded the train for Chicago, and from Chicago to points west. On the long, overnight ride my sister and I played Go Fish on the Pullman berth, while the baby, just turned three, napped with her head on Mother’s lap.
It was still dark when the conductor knocked on our compartment door. We struggled into our winter coats and followed him down the narrow passageway. Huddled together in the space where the cars coupled together we waited, bucking and swaying, as the brakes screamed and the train shuddered to a halt. It didn’t want to stop in Chapman, Kansas any more than I did.
We stepped onto the siding into … nothing.
No lights, no houses, no cars. We were castaways in a starless night so deep and dark and black that it swallowed us whole, muffling the sound of my mother’s voice urging us along and the chuck-uh, chuck-uh, chuck-uh of the train as it gathered steam and hurried on its way.
It seemed like hours, but it was probably only seconds before the headlights of a car sliced through the darkness. Puffing clouds of exhaust into the cold night air, my father’s Chrysler had been idling near the crossing. The driver’s side door flew open and he emerged, unfolded his gangly six-and-a-half-foot frame, shook out the kinks and strode in our direction. We surrounded him like puppies, hugging his legs, then piled into the car and drove to the house he had rented.
The next morning, when it was light enough to see, my sister, arms folded across her chest, made her pronouncement. “This house is no good.”
I agreed. Grandmother’s house had a proper stone fireplace with a wide mantel that held photographs in silver frames, a Chinese vase with silk flowers, and a clock that played the Westminster chimes every quarter of an hour. Our house had a stumpy gas-fired heater sitting on a ceramic slab, with fat round exhaust pipes leading from the back of it out holes cut into the wall. Santa Claus could never come down that!
I looked helplessly at my sister. What could we do?
Glumly, we settled in, unpacking boxes, putting our books and toys away in the bedroom we shared on a glass-enclosed porch. At night the wind would roar across the Kansas plain, sharp and cold, gathering speed, rattling our windows.
We started school – again – and began making new friends. I got a part in the Christmas play, not a solo – it was too late for that --but as one of a Multitude of the Heavenly Hosts Praising God and Singing.
A stray cat came to live in the barn.
Walking to and from school, I puzzled over the chimney problem. But the chimney problem paled in comparison to a much bigger stumbling block: how was Santa Claus going to find me in Chapman, Kansas?
After school one day, I decided to ask my mother about it. I found her in the kitchen, kneading dough, humming “Put Another Nickel in the Nickelodeon”, a song I remembered from Your Hit Parade, back when we lived in Albany, New York and had a TV. In Albany they had television stations. Stray Cat sunned herself in the window. An electric Westclox that was already there when we moved in hummed on the wall, its hands pointing to 3:25.
Resting the heels of her hands on the dough, Mother said, “Santa knows where you live, Marcia.”
I sucked in my lower lip and shook my head. “But I told Santa we lived in Cleveland,” I said, feeling desperate.
Mother wiped her hands on her apron. “Why don’t we send Santa a change of address card?” She helped me find a postcard with a stamp already printed on it in purple, and when I had finished writing out my name and new address, we walked to the post office together. I watched, solemnly, as the card was gobbled up by the mail slot, the first stop on its long journey to the North Pole. And yet I worried. Thousands of children wrote to Santa Claus every year! My card might get there in time, but Santa would never have time to read it! I was doomed. Even the Advent Calendar we’d taped to the basement door failed to cheer me. Each open window only reminded me of the inevitable. Christmas would come, but Santa Claus wouldn’t.
The days crawled by. The temperature fell. Stray Cat moved from the barn into the house.
You couldn’t get oysters in Chapman, Kansas, so on Christmas Eve, Mother made chicken and dumplings, with steamed plum pudding for dessert. Afterwards, we decorated the tree and hung our empty stockings on nails Daddy had pounded half-way into the windowsill nearest the heater.
Daddy had unpacked the record player, too, and we huddled under an afghan on the sofa listening to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Basil Rathbone as Scrooge. After Tiny Tim said, ‘God bless us every one’, we laid out cookies and milk for Santa and a carrot for the reindeer, then traipsed off to bed. I pulled the comforter over my head, too anxious to sleep and too tired not to.
In a restless dream doors banged, something crashed, someone, somewhere was whispering shhhhhhhhhhhh.
I sat up and looked around. In the next bed, my sister slept soundly, but the banging went on.
Could it be Santa?
I threw off the covers and slipped out of bed. Halfway down the staircase, I squatted, barefoot, held onto the banister and peered through the posts. Light spilled into the hallway from the half-open living room door.
Santa had been there! The evidence was everywhere. The stockings we’d hung were misshapen, fat to overflowing; wrapped gifts were piled under the tree.
And my father was there, too, sitting on the living room floor with his long legs folded under him, his toolbox at hand. He grunted, gently swore. With one hand he held two pieces of metal together; with the other, he patted around on the carpet until he found a wrench. Then he turned, dragging the object he was working on into view.
It was a big, blue bicycle with balloon tires and a silver bell that I was absolutely certain would go ding.
I gasped, but Daddy didn’t hear me. Heart pounding, I tiptoed up the stairs and dove under the covers, burrowing deep into the spot on the mattress that was still warm. I grinned into the dark, hugging myself hard to keep from exploding with joy.
The next day I discovered that there had been two miracles that Christmas Eve. Stray Cat gave birth to kittens in my toy box, and Santa Claus had found me! Against all odds, he’d found me in Chapman, Kansas. And when he’d realized we had no chimney, the clever fellow had simply hauled that bike out of his sleigh and up our back porch steps, dragged it through the kitchen and into our living room, delivering it just in time for Daddy to put together by Christmas morning.
I remembered Santa’s smile, and the wink. Just as he promised, Santa Claus had come through.
