Christmas Morning in Lockhart

MERRY CHRISTMAS MORNING TO ALL YA’LL.

I’m writing a couple of hours before sunrise on Christmas morning, sitting on the back deck with my laptop, shivering a little. Nita’s still asleep, but pretty soon I’ll awaken her with a kiss, roamin’ hands, and the temptation of hot coffee.  

I’m one of those guys who sometimes goes into a funk around sunset. I remember the old Kingston Trio song lyric, “about this time of day I gets to feeling low, wondering who’s my baby’s latest beau.” After 45 years with Nita, that’s not my personal sunset remorse, but that time of day still grabs me sometimes. Pretty sunset colors aside, late afternoons often leave me moody.

On the other hand, I love being awake and outside for sunrise.  Awake and outside at sunrise every now and then, that is. Today is such a day. I love birthdays, and Jesus’ birthday works fine for me as a get-up-early-day, even with no toys to set out under the tree.

And today, Christmas Morning of 2015 has significance to Nita and me. It will the very first Christmas morning since we started this shared-life gig in 1972 that we have risen in a house with just us two in it.  Huh, how about that.

I expect we’ll sip that tempting coffee, open each other’s gifts, and then just sit,talking about our sons, daughters-in-law, and grandkids for a bit with no one else around.  We’ll see lots of family later today and in the days ahead, but this morning it’s just us two. In other circumstances, I’d be depressed about a Christmas dawn without the chaos of kids, but today, I’m rejoicing at the chance to walk a new path with NitaBird, no one else in sight.

Even as newlyweds, we traveled to parents for Christmas--and then we were parents, and still traveled to our parents' homes during the holidays. We’ve hosted parents and grandparents in little Lockhart for Christmas, we even went skiing in New Mexico with kids and family one Christmas. But we’ve never awakened and been just Phil and Nita on Christmas morning for the opening of gifts to each other. How’d we miss that?

Speaking of 1972, our first Christmas together, that was the year we gave our parents what we thought was the coolest gift ever. We were smug and naïve, but at 23 and 24, smug and naïve was the norm in our day, and likely still is. Regardless, here’s the gift:

 

That photo is of the cover of the extremely limited edition of the record album we “cut” for our parents as Christmas presents.  Nita sang, and I was the sound technician and graphic designer of the cover. She was the flower, I was the gardener. Worked for me just fine back then, works for me just fine 45 years later. She’s still singing and I’m still grubbing away.

We recorded the songs with Nita sitting on the floor in the living room of our apartment in Austin, hence the album name. Clever, huh? We’d bought a cheap microphone at the University Co-op and plugged it in to the reel-to-reel tape deck we’d bought earlier in that first year of our marriage. Nita accompanied herself on her guitar, bought by a friend in Mexico a few years before, and on the old upright piano that her mother bought used in the 1950’s.

The album is eighteen songs recorded by solo lady folk singers of the era. Joan Biaz was probably Nita’s favorite. We took our newly made amateur tape to a recently-opened professional recording studio in Austin. The owner was polite, humoring us, I imagine, and quoted us a decent price for making two master records from our tape, stressing each would be fragile and would scratch very easily. 

Then he put our tape reel on his machine and listened to the first song. Then the second. Then he started looking sidelong at Nita while he kept listening.

Finally, he clicked off the machine, spun around on his stool, and asked if we could afford to come in and record the songs in his studio. He knew a good guitar player who would charge much. He sounded like he was impressed with Nita’s voice. 

We were living on $450 a month then, and after bills had about $50 a month for groceries. Though Nita was properly flattered, she declined.  In the end, he ran the tape through some sound filters to clean up the background static, and made the two master records for $80. To this day I don’t know if he screwed us or was exceedingly kind.

 All that to say, one tune is my favorite: Amazing Grace. That’s about as good a song as there is to consider on Christmas morning. This was before Judy Collins included Amazing Grace on an album the next year, beginning the song's journey to become THE national anthem for Christian America. Didn’t hurt, I suppose, that Spock or somebody was buried in space in a Star Trek movie with Amazing Grace being played on a bagpipe.

Nita sang it in three-part harmony, doing each part herself, a feature allowed by our miraculous Japanese tape recorder. That is, it would record three-part harmony if I was deft enough to rewind the tape and restart it at the exact right spot each time for the new overlay of sound,  keeping the recording volume not too high and not too low, while Nita wore big headphones to hear the previously recorded parts while she sang. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

Of course, I’m real biased, but I think my girl’s version is better than the one Judy Collins recorded. But, to be fair, Judy’s lovely song of grace sold several hundred thousand copies and Nita’s was restricted to two gift records. It’s tough to be a pioneer.

As to the cover, 1972 was before any computer-assisted-design software. Hell, it was while Michael Dell and Bill Gates were little shrimps. They probably were bullied geeks in grade school about that time.  Anyway, I took the black and white photos, profile and front, of my new wife with an old 35 mm Minolta SLR camera I’d bought used. I blew up the negatives on a borrowed enlarger in the kitchen pantry of our apartment, and made the prints that went into the two-perspective image on the cover and cut out Nita’s profile. And lastly, I covered two old album sleeves with yellow kitchen shelf paper, and used stick-on architect letters for the cover title. Twice for all this stuff, and the back of each album cover.

I guess our parents were pleased with the gifts. I was impressed. Nita was humble, but secretly proud, I think.  No career as a folk-singer followed, but a lifelong love of singing has. Nor did I become a professional graphic designer or sound technician.

Good memories, but none of that really matters now. It happened a long time ago, and since then Nita and I have had 43 years of happy shared lives. We have three grandkids now, and maybe one of them will pick up musically where Granny Nita left off.

And now, the sun is up, it’s Christmas morning and I have a gal to smooch, gifts under the tree to give her, and gifts from her to unwrap.  The kids and grandkids can wait a bit.

Merry Christmas!