zom's 12 days of Christmas

Day 5: The Christmas list.

How about a Christmas list? I drafted this one when I was 8 years old. Location: Orlando, Florida. The date: Saturday February 14th, 1970. The list you are about to read is not a Christmas list. That detail is unimportant, really. It is just seasonally appropriate, and I am entering this into evidence as an example of my formative efforts at diplomacy and sweet talk: dubious skills that have that have been the measure of my fortunes in later years. "Granny" retrieved the list from an obscure repository yesterday, almost thirty eight years after the fact, and gave it to my two eager daughters with an assassin's aptitude for their profuse titillation.

February 1970. Florida farmers fretted about remote eventualities like frost damage to their orange and grapefruit groves. In April 1970 I would follow Apollo 13's launch from the comfort of my back lawn in Spring Valley, as if Florida had anything that remotely resembled hills or valleys. Nevertheless Orlando was a good place to have a back lawn: I remarkably witnessed all of the earlier Apollo "moon shots" with my own eyes. Trajectories occasionally lanced an unwitting cloud, and Spanish moss the likes of which proliferates in the tree canopies of Florida's humid interior might obscure my view, but never for long. Florida skies are kind to space enthusiasts. From my vantage point, the very space vehicle that was to explode following an electrical fault in a service module oxygen tank about 200,000 miles and 56 hours later on April 13th looked like any other launch as Houston gave command module pilot Jack Sweigert the order to "throttle up" under my concentrated gaze. Those guys were booking.

NASA's third manned lunar-landing mission was two months away though, and I would see the drama unfold in black and white, related by men in crisp white short sleeved shirts, short back and sides, and sometimes bespectacled with thick set glasses. I had more pressing matters on my mind.

I think I wrote this in English class, because my handwriting records my address as Spring Lake Elementary [School], Orlando. I am not sure why I would have been in school on Saturday. Maybe it was not Saturday the 14th at all. Maybe I just wrote "14th" because I could, and the date only mattered to grown ups. 1970 would be my last year in the US until 1979, too. In keeping with habit Umar, who was to become Rhode Island's greatest ever export, was denying me her company at the other end of the Eastern Seaboard, and Disney World was opening later that year about 7 miles down the road.

So, then, that is the background in a nutshell. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to untangle the diplomatic fog and identify what the mysterious purpose of my list was:

Dear Mommy and Daddy,

I want to have a job. Can I have one?
I want to cut the lawn. Can I?
I want to wash the cars.
I want to clean the rugs.
I want to take the garbage out.
I want to clean the windows.
I want to clean the fireplace.
I want to clean the roof.
When are we going to get a colour TV?
I want to buy some noodles.
I am going to get a carpet for my bedroom.
I want another cat.
I want an English sheep dog.

Your friend,

Steve

An English sheep dog? In central Florida? In my defence, I believe the English teacher put me up to some of those ideas, and the charm offensive worked insofar as we did get a colour TV set - about 5 years later on the other side of the Atlantic. I am not at all sure what Samantha the cat did to cause me to ask for a trade in, and by then the Apollo project was no more.