ABSTRACT
My father did not inspire the love and affection from others that my mother did. He was a reserved man, some say cold; but to me, his “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” he was playful. I would stand on his feet while he did great giant steps around the dining room. He would make paper airplanes—what magic—and again the dining room would be transformed into a playland. We had a sixty-foot spruce tree outside the house, and my father would take me outside to listen. “Do you hear it?” he would ask. “What, Daddy?” “The fairies: they are at the top of the tree. You can hear them when the wind moves.” That was where the tooth fairies live, he explained. And, of course, I believed. Santa, too, was real; except when I heard heavy steps in my room, peeked from the covers, and saw Daddy putting toys in the stocking hung by my (non-working) fireplace. At Christmas he would decorate the tree. No one else could arrange the ornaments correctly, and with a house full of relatives we would line up outside the living room door by order of age. I was last, a position reserved for me: I was special.
