2008

Rebecca

There was no question about the time of year: Laura Varady came to work every day with real holly pinned to her tidily braided grey hair, and she had bubble lights securely fastened around the edge of her desk. With only a handful of the old Genomex employees re-hired, Laura was doing her best to regain some of the former festive glory. We lingered over lunch planning further festivities.

Laura giggled. "Getting Mason to sign for fripperies is so much easier with you doing the asking."

I grinned. "I've never asked him, but I don't think he every really minded before."

"He had to maintain appearances! My lips are sealed. I'll never tell anyone who doesn't already know," she paused, and nodded towards Emma and Jesse, several tables away, "that Mason is human."

"If you hadn't extracted him every December for the company caroling, he would have missed it, or even created a reason of his own to be there."

"I never chanced finding out." Laura paused, narrowing her eyes in mock conspiratorial fashion. "I had fun doing that, too. Mason is a master at slicing and dicing verbally anyone who annoys him, but he could never do that to me. As soon as I smiled & spoke to him as if he was still the nice young man I knew from the 1980s, his resistance collapsed. Of course, I was careful never to do this in front of other people: that would have undermined his authority."

I smiled. I was well aware of Mason's quirks and foibles (I have more than a few myself…). Personal dignity and pride are not inherently bad qualities, but Mason had put them to special use. Mason had refined Dignity and Bearing into weapons capable of cowing the unprepared, the slovenly, and the stupid.

Happily, he had the good sense to never ever attempt to deploy Dignity and Bearing against the woman who saw him first thing in the morning and who not uncommonly deposited surprise treats of orange Creamsicles for him in the freezer.

"Are you and Mason doing a tree this year?"

"Hmm. I hadn't thought of that." Some ideas require no further reflection to decide that they are absolutely right. This was one of them. "Hmm, yes."

"Rebecca, I've got boxes of ornaments and lights. Most years, I'm too busy to put up more than about half of it with all my kids grown. All you have to do is get an artificial tree about a meter high & I'll give you enough stuff to make quite a display."

"That would be wonderful."

"I've got some exquisite little wooden ornaments from Germany. Bob and Heather brought them back after he was stationed over there. You can even have one of the hokey 'German traditional' pickle ornaments they make just for Americans!"

"Don't give me your family treasures, Laura."

"Don't worry about it. I have a lot of this stuff. This tree of yours has to be special: it'll be the first tree Mason's had in about twenty years and it has to have more than a suggestion of the homey and sentimental. It shouldn't look like a store display." She smiled.

"No problem. Sharpen your axe after work and chop down a prime faux pine."

On the way to the consumer wonderland of Wal-Mart, I drove past a garden store with rows of Christmas trees propped up under bright lights. What caught my eye, however, was the cluster of much smaller live trees by the curb.

A real tree. A living tree. How much better that would be than green-pigmented plastic. But could Mason safely be in proximity to branches and soil?

I pulled over off the street into a now-empty bank parking lot, and called The Expert.

"Samihah, is there a way I can make a real, living Christmas tree reasonably safe for Mason?"

"You cannot make it sterile, but you could drastically reduce the quantity of mold and spores in the air."

"And how would I do that?"

"Get a pot large enough to contain the root ball and any water runoff. Wrap all of that in heavy plastic and tape around the trunk to seal in the soil before taking it all into your quarters."

"That doesn't sound too good for the tree. What about water?"

"You'll only do this for a few days, and that will be tolerable. Beg a large 30 or 50 milliliter plastic syringe from someone in micro, and punch a small hole so you can use the syringe to introduce water. Tape around the syringe so that nearly all the movement of air will be in towards the dirt."

"I'll let you know how it works."

"I want a full report about what Mason says."

I told the guy at the garden store that I wanted a tree for a hospital ward for children, and he cheerfully placed one into a pot, wrapped it all in plastic, and sealed around the trunk with duct tape. He wrestled it onto the passenger seat of my car, and buckled it in.

"Hope the kids like it."

"Oh, I'm sure they will. Thanks."

I left the tree in my car overnight. Laura met me in the parking lot about 9 AM with a heavy duty hand truck from shipping and receiving, transforming what could have an epic struggle into a mild bit of weight lifting. She held doors open for me. Mason, ever the workaholic, rarely returned to quarters during lunch, so I deposited tree and ornaments inside for further attention then.

By lunchtime, even with the active exchange of air, every room inside smelled as wonderful as my car had last night on the drive home. I added a 50 mL syringe, sans needle, to act as a watering port and sealed around that with electrical tape.

Laura's lights and ornaments were exquisite. I taped the string of snowmen lights around the one and only window.

I'd been around Christmas trees all my life, but never decorated one myself. The tree was well-formed and full, but small. Coating it with lights and ornaments, including the hoax-tradition pickle, took hardly any time. Outside, it was overcast and dark. I turned off the lights, turned on the snowmen and tree lights, then stood back to admire my efforts.

Nicely done, Rebecca. And a good thing great-grandfather Steyn never lived to know about this, too.

The afternoon crawled by without even an HPLC leak for my technicians to swear at. I called Laura and thanked her, again, promising a photo.

"The ornaments I could not use, I hung from the snowmen light-string."

"Good idea. He'll love it."

I made certain to be back before Mason, and had the tree and snowmen glowing when the inner steel door sealed behind him. A few moments of silence passed before he said anything.

"It's beautiful, Rebecca."

"Laura's idea. My execution. She's a very sweet lady."

"Indeed, she is."

All the cares and concerns of the day lifted from Mason's face and eyes by the time he stood close before the tree. "There are some very special ornaments here."

"She ransacked her attic."

About this time, Mason noticed the syringe, and reached down to touch a branch, releasing even more piney fragrance.

"It's real," he said softly, almost with reverence.

"Samihah shared her microbial wisdom so I could make it reasonably safe for you."

He turned towards me. "A real tree."

"Landscaping can plant it somewhere on site later. It's not sitting on anything—that's a ball of roots and dirt. It won't die."

"Even better," he smiled. "I always wanted a real tree, but this is my first. A real tree."

"Very real, Mason."