Noble

Another love letter to Liza!

In the days that followed our meeting at a football game in October of 1966, Oh, the words that I spoke to my brother when I told him about you:  comely, fair, regal, classy, lovely, gorgeous, outstanding, keenly intelligent, better than the rest, striking, lofty in bearing, possessed of a wonderful figure, stunning in appearance, with that porcelain English skin.  We were in his law office when I told him that she was “the one,” the girl I would marry.  How I did go on!  And since then, my love, you have only grown in superlatives — like devoted, dedicated, faithful, and eminently good.

In a word, Liza, you are noble. 

One of my earliest remembrances of that word came at Christmastime when we always had a noble fir tree, which my mom went crazy to decorate.  Audrey considered the noble to be the classiest, the most beautiful, better than all the other trees; and thanks to the high ceilings in our living room, and the huge number of ornaments that she had amassed, we always had at least an eight-to-nine-footer.  The noble had those perfect layers of branches, which provided the open spaces to hang her heirloom glass balls, her hand-made bows, her collection of whimsical unbreakables, and those ornament clusters of hers that lay on the branches, attached with glossy red ribbons that were my job to iron each year.  You could have placed the tree in the atrium at Macy’s.  Instead, it stood just inside the French doors to our living room, and to passers-by it was a wondrous Christmas tableau.                  

When at the age of ninety-three Audrey came to live with us, she brought her holiday treasure trove, and that just provided another opportunity to observe the content of your loving character.  A lesser woman might have balked at her mother-in-law’s Christmas tree mania, but you did not.  You never expressed anything like … “Well, he loves his mother’s cooking and tree-decorating better than mine.” 

You knew that as a kid I cherished those moments of lying beneath my mom’s tree and looking up and out through the wonder of it.  You embraced her artistry and her stuff, and then you grafted her vision onto your own.  You took it to another level and gave our family a new and unique set of traditions.  Our children have loved our Christmas treasures, and you have allowed and encouraged them to appreciate their Grammy.  You have risen to the occasion of the most noble and arboreal artistry.  When I see the love and labor you have put in year after year to adorn our tree and our house, it feels like a personal gift to me.  Thank you.

Noble Fir.  Noble Girl.

Merry Christmas.

Love, Me