Having It All

by David Roth

Our reindeer is bald. I didn’t realize this until recently, and a lot of that is down to familiarity, just in the sense that I’d been looking at him every day for a couple weeks, and have done so every year around this time for probably 15 years. I see what was there the day or even the year before to the extent that I see it at all, and that image accumulated over time, and over whatever changes had gone before; it built itself outwards like a coastal shelf, remaining and replacing itself at the same time. I am this way with my own reflection, too. There are photos of someone who looked more or less like me that I both recognize as myself and only barely recognize.

The reindeer sits more or less where it always has. This year there is a nearly empty cognac bottle next to it, and the little plastic column that amplifies our wireless internet signal is behind it; three of its four feet touch the veneer top of the liquor cabinet. It has a shiny red nose made out of a Christmas bauble. Every year when I take it off the high shelf in the closet where it spends the warmer months, something has fallen off of it—the antlers, which were once Christmas tree trimmings with Christmas tree needles on them and now are long knobby twigs, or more worryingly the mismatched and precarious legs.

The reindeer is maybe six inches tall, and made of oblong trimmings that a sidewalk Christmas tree vendor long ago put together into something roughly the shape of a longish, porky, eyeless animal, in this case one wearing a jaunty red bowtie made of ribbon and with its right front leg cocked sassily up due to the irregular chunk of fir standing in as its torso. There were never eyes, and I don’t imagine the reindeer would be in our home, now or really ever, if there had been. Part of the appeal of the thing from the start was that it was imperfect to the point of jankiness. That the antlers were once less like weird nude antennae barely registers now. How it might age was not a consideration at the time; it was not purchased at a time when I really brought much consideration to bear on decisions like that, or anything else. I hoped that my wife would like it, and she does; it smelled like the sidewalk-straddling Christmas tree market from which it was purchased and where it was fashioned by a French-Canadian vendor for reasons that I remember amounting to “it gets boring out here.” 

We kept him, and over time he acquired some significance simply as a result of that. Whatever he used to look like, whatever it was beyond the fact that he fit into the hallway closet that led us to keep this eminently disposable thing in our home, I just see the reindeer, now.