Excerpted Inspirations #158Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsDec 23, 20240 min readUpdated: Feb 10
![[Continued from last week]
[Twelve-year-old Jeremy Talbot is about to celebrate his first Christmas since his father died of cancer. Hoot is a little stone owl given to him by his father. Blue is his cat, and Tess is a recent friend.]
In the next hour, he was sure, over and over again, that he would waken them all and get caught. First he replaced the skimpy sock she had hung up with one of his own, one of the socks he wore over all the others when he went skating. Then he found a fifty-cent piece he had saved in a little box on his desk. He added an apple. That helped. Yet he knew there had to be more.
The scarf he had bought for her! He fetched it from his bottom dresser drawer. He had wrapped it just in tissue paper so it squashed up small enough to go in.
Now something funny.
He stood there, worried about the minutes ticking by, unable to think. He hadn’t a single funny thing. Not one … Then he had an inspiration. George! George was a tiny plastic frog he had got out of a bubblegum machine. He couldn’t find him right away but then he remembered. He dug his cords out of the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. George was in the left pocket.
There. He stood back and looked. He wished he could write a poem the way his father had but he was lousy at poems. Still her stocking did look beautifully lumpy now.
She hadn’t even bothered to put her name on the one she had hung for herself, although she had made sure the rest had labels. He printed her name, “Melly,” on a sheet of paper from the telephone scratch pad and pinned it on. Now hers looked just like the others.
He had done it! Yet he went on standing there. It needed one more thing, something special, something …
Really he knew what it needed. He was trying not to say it to himself, trying not to give in to his own knowledge.
Hoot. That was what she would love.
But Hoot was his.
“She wouldn’t want me to give it up,” Jeremy told himself.
He knew better. Didn’t her hand go out to it every time she passed his desk? Maybe it was because the owl was so small and yet so unexpectedly heavy. Maybe it was simply because she remembered.
Jeremy went to his room and brought it back. Standing there, the smooth roundness of it still in his hand, still belonging to him, he remembered too.
“You can’t have everything, Melly,” Dad had said, smiling. “Hoot is for Jeremy.”
It wasn’t as if the owl was his only gift from Dad. He had other special things. The copy of Kim, for one. And Blue, of course!
And Tess, he thought with a grin.
He went to the telephone table again and got another sheet of paper. Then he saw it was really getting light outside and he hurried. He didn’t wonder if Mum would remember too. He knew she would.
“You can’t have everything, Mum,” he wrote, “but you can have Hoot. Merry Christmas. Love, Jeremy.”
He taped the piece of paper onto the little owl. He stroked it once more and slipped it in quickly. There. It was done.
He wrapped his arms around his body because the furnace had not come on yet and the air was cold. He felt different.
The joy he had so longed for the night before had come. And yet this was a more difficult joy than he had known other years. It was so real, so wonderful, that he felt almost afraid. He stood very still, looking back to the man he no longer wanted to forget, looking ahead to this Christmas which was now, at last, fully his.
What time was it? It didn’t matter. He could not bear to wait another second. He wanted them, his whole family. Not even glancing at the clock, he flew to wake them.
Jean Little, Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird (1984), pp. 210-213](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6feacf_aca9f66fcc2f4a2a9950f733b470c4b0~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_2222,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6feacf_aca9f66fcc2f4a2a9950f733b470c4b0~mv2.jpg)
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