Leif's First Christmas - December 24, 1975 - Age 11 months

Christmas for a baby is both exciting and bewildering. All of those new things to see. Lights and pretty shiny things on a tree, fascinating packages under it. People taking pictures. Different music. Leif was taking it all in, looking rather serious and contemplative a lot of the time. Lots of kids are scared of Santa. Leif wasn't that year or the next but when we lived in Nurnberg and he was almost three he was!

These photos were taken in our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas on Christmas Eve 1975 when Leif was eleven months old. Peter A. got a Hot Wheels set with cars and a track and he was having a great time with it. Leif was mesmerized and trying to figure it out. I got a kick out of them together, Peter having a great time showing Leif how fast the cars could go.

Those were beautiful Christmases, when the boys were young. Sometimes I think parents get so wrapped up in all the time and preparation needed for the holidays that they don't realize how magical they are. It's easy to take our children's wonderment and all it adds to Christmas for granted. Don't. It goes by all too fast and you'll wish those days were back again.

No More Christmas Presents for My Leif

This January 1976 photo of Leif playing with the rocking horse he got for Christmas 1975, his first Christmas when he was eleven months old, and so many other Christmas photos of him opening presents or joking around with the family through the years, bring it home to me so forcefully that he won't be here to open any gifts this year, or any year from now to the end of our lives. I don't look for presents for him any more, though I can't help but notice and remark upon things I know he would like, things I wish I could give him.

The holidays and his birthday are particularly hard, as are the monthly reminders, each 9th and 10th, of his death and the day we found him. Tomorrow it will be 20 months since we found him in his apartment. Today it is 20 months since he died. Sometimes I wonder how long I will mark the months that have passed since his death, wonder if I will ever pass those days of the month without remembering. How can the months fly by so fast, taking the time we were with him ever farther into our past, yet the memories seem like yesterday, like he could still just walk through our door.

At a party a couple of nights ago, I hugged a neighbor who lost two children. She asked me how I was doing and I truthfully answered that I was all right most of the time, but not all of it. She said, "It never really gets any easier. You just learn to cope with it. The holidays are the hardest. Even though I have my living son and grandchildren, I will always miss the others. You just have to put on a smile and go on."

Sometimes the smile is real. Sometimes it's a good act.

I'm grateful to have a lot to do, to be busy with real work. It doesn't take away all the sadness but it does keep it at arm's length a good part of the time. It does make me feel useful.

But, it doesn't stop me from thinking, in the interstices, of the eternal question, why? of what we might have done to save him, of what he might have done to save himself, of what we are missing, of what he is missing, of what might have been.

Leif's Sixth Christmas 1981 - Sagamihara, Japan - Almost 7 years old

By Christmas 1981 we had been living in Japan for almost a year-and-a-half. We loved it there. The boys were both enthralled with the Japanese toys, particularly the transforming robots that became jet planes, trucks, and all manner of other things. The robots also could shoot a variety of projectiles and pop off their hands, as well as wield all kinds of fancy weapons.

I don't know exactly when the boys got specific ones, like the Big Dai-X boxed robot toy in the picture, or Godo Siguma, or the other ones, some of which I've talked about on the blog before, but Leif might have gotten one like this for Christmas in 1981 or 1982.

We saved all of the boys' Japanese toys, and now our grandson, Marcus, has them. Leif gave his to Marcus, too. I had saved them in case he ever had a child who might enjoy them, as I doubt there will ever be toys like that again. But Leif never had any children, so he gave both his Japanese toys and his large collection of GI Joe paraphernalia to Marcus.

The Tokima Watch robot is another thing he got as a gift while we were in Japan. That he treasured. There is a small robot that detaches from the face of the watch. It's quite ingenious. It had been packed away for a long time and when I went through everything before moving to Florida, I took this photo and sent it to Leif and Peter A. to ask whose it was. Both of them claimed it, but Leif insisted it was, "MINE, all MINE!" He still wanted it and wasn't willing to give it up. I found it in his apartment after he died.

We celebrated Christmas in Japan in much the same way we did everywhere else. We put up our Christmas tree and Nativity Scene, played Christmas carols, exchanged presents, and had our traditional Norwegian Christmas bread (Julekage) and cookies (Berliner Kranse), but it was just the four of us.

In these photos, Leif is actually wearing a jacket that belonged to Peter Anthony, who had worn it just the year before. It was a bit large, but Leif was astonishingly big for his age and wore hand-me-downs from Peter A., who was 6 years older, within a year or two.

I like the cute nose-to-nose photo of Leif and his dad. When I look back on all the years of our children's childhoods, it seems to me that some of the very best years were the three we spent in Japan.

Leif - Ultraman & Mechanical Panda - Yomiuriland, Japan - May 1981 - Age 6

These two photos and the one of Leif riding standing on the motorcycle ride pretending to be one of the Kamen Rider Super One characters were taken at an amusement park in Tokyo called Yomiuriland. In these two photos you can see him riding what appears to be Ultraman "flying" like Superman, and on a large mechanical panda. The animal actually walks around. I'd never seen anything like it.

We had some many interesting and unusual experiences in Japan. The three years we spent there were some of the most fascinating of our lives. Even things that would normally be mundane were an adventure there.

We arrived in Japan the summer of 1980, transferring from Germany. What an amazing difference in cultures!

We were fortunate to be there at a time when the dollar was still strong and went far, plus the army at that time had weekend day trips around the area to see the sights for just $2.00 per person. We took advantage of as many of those as we could. If my memory is correct, the trip to Yomiuriland was one of those.

Our sons were adaptable and liked to go places, so we saw a lot, some of it fun stuff for kids like the parks and zoos, and some that were cultural treasures or historical sites.

However, just going to a department store was a family adventure. The Japanese live in small homes or apartments and don't have yards to play in like many Americans do, so they make use of other spaces for fun for kids and outdoor recreation for the family. For instance, we saw tennis courts on the roofs of buildings.

In the area where we lived, the department stores had playgrounds for kids on the roofs. These playgrounds had some equipment for climbing and other traditional stuff, but they all featured these rides, such as the ones I've posted. Japanese families that went shopping could take their kids to the rooftop and let them run around and have fun . . . and of course, drop a few Yen to let them ride the rides. They had rides for even very tiny children.

These playgrounds were only part of the attraction of the Japanese department stores. The main one for our sons was, of course, the toy department. When we lived in Germany (the second time was 1977-1980), children were not common sight in public, and they were watched carefully in department stores, where it was highly frowned upon for them to touch anything even in the toy department.

Imagine the delight of our boys to find that in Japan, children were taken everywhere and in the toy departments they had toys actually out of the boxes on tables where kids could play with them and try them out. What an enlightened attitude! I remember one day remarking to a young man who was either a salesman in a toy department or perhaps the head of it, that we really liked this. He said, as though it were self-evident, "How else are they supposed to know if they like the toys or not?" We brought a lot of Japanese toys back to the USA with us, and we still have them, or, more accurately, Peter Anthony has his Japanese toys and Leif gave his to Marcus. These toys were mostly transforming robots. Their engineering was amazing, and they were very well made.

The third attraction at the department stores was the grocery store in the basement level. Here we could spend an hour just wandering through and looking at all the fascinating kinds of food we hadn't seen before, hear the salespeople yelling "Irrashaimase" and beckoning us to try samples. An adventurous person who was willing to try foods they didn't recognize could probably taste their way to a full lunch. My sons were not that adventurous, but they did enjoy looking at all of it, and there were things they liked us to buy. We liked mochi, for instance.

There were no fancy upscale department stores in the area where we lived, but there were two that were several floors high that were chain stores, rather like a high rise Japanese version of Walmart. These were Chujitsuya (which most Americans called "The Flower Stores" because that was its logo) and Ito-Yokado (which we called the Dove Store, because its logo was a big white dove. We enjoyed frequent trips to both of them, and I still drink coffee nearly every day from a cup I bought at a Dove Store sidewalk sale which says, "If I don't do it, it doesn't get done," a good reminder.

The local Sagamihara Chujitsuya store is apparently no longer there, a pity as we spent a lot of happy hours browsing there and coming home with "treasures."

For upscale, glittering, fancy department stores we had to go to Machida (closest), Tokyo, Shinjuku or Yokohama.

Leif in a Japanese Space Ship Ride - May 1983 - Age 8

Japan had a lot of interesting things to ride on and in, both regular transportation vehicles and kids' rides like this one. You can tell he was having a good time.

Both our sons had exceptional imaginations and could play elaborate imagination games. The especially favored futuristic, sci fi, space scenarios, and this continued in many forms into their adult lives.