Chapter 70: Presents of Various Kinds

Tuesday, December 24, 1985

Even Mom and Dad slept late this morning. Dad had the day off, so we all hung out together or just puttered around the house for most of the day.

Days like this mattered. It was a brief return to the days when this was our life: the four of us, at home, being a family. It was also a reminder that those days were not over, no matter that we had girlfriends, busy lives, and all of that.

There wouldn’t be many of them, but they would be precious, and we would cherish them.

The morning paper had one interesting piece of news. Not unexpected, but it bore watching. NASA had announced that flight STS-51-L (the hopefully-not-doomed next Challenger flight) was being delayed until January 23, 1986. That was, for better or worse, entirely expected. I hadn’t known the exact dates, but I was certain the mission had been planned for late December and moved to late January in my first life.

Until we got to a January day with well-below-normal temperatures, we wouldn’t know if Gene Thomas was going to come through or not. The clock was running, but we would be playing it by ear right up to the last minute unless they simply announced a delay until early February. That would change things significantly and suggest that, either because of my call or because this universe was simply ‘different,’ we had dodged a bullet.

We left around four. I dropped Angie off at the Seilers’ house so she could get ready for church with them. Then I headed to Camille and Francis’s house, where I changed for our outing to Catholic Christmas Eve services.

It turned out to not be hugely different from anything else I’d been to. Oh, there were things in the rituals that felt new or unusual to me, but it was comfortable and I had a good time. People greeted me warmly, and I felt no pressure to explain my religious views to any of them.

As with Mom and Dad’s church, this might well be an occasional thing for the rest of my life. If it was, that would be just fine. Jas and I had a place where we belonged. If and when we moved, we would find another one. Visiting other churches was fun as well, and I imagined that would continue.

The one difference was that Andrew was in town. I had to imagine Camille and Francis had probably spilled some beans about the impending proposals.

After last year’s discussion, I was pretty sure we were on good terms again. It was certainly good to see him, and I said so. He agreed. I think the only issue we’d had was his worrying that I was just some gringo seeing Jasmine as an ‘exotic trophy,’ not seeing her for the amazing woman she was. After all these years, and with a proposal imminent, that concern was likely fully assuaged.

Jas and I took advantage of her bed for some celebration of our own, after which we snuggled up.

“Good thing Santa didn’t get here early,” she said, grinning. “I don’t want him watching.”

I shrugged and said, “Look, the guy knows if we’re sleeping or awake, if we’ve been bad or good ... all that. I think we can safely assume he’s always watching.”

“Eww!” she said, giggling. “Well, he knows I’m naughty, then.”

“Which is very nice.”

“True!”

“Happy almost Christmas, honey.”

She hugged me.

“Is ... is it okay if I feel like I’m sort of counting down the days until ... um ... you know? Because I feel like I’m kinda getting in the way of it being a surprise.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “And natural. We haven’t promised anything...”

“Well, sure, but...”

I hugged her and gave her a quick kiss.

“No promises, but if you want to count down the days, I think ... you’re unlikely to be disappointed. Just ... be prepared for there still being a surprise.”

She giggled a bit.

“I can do that. I will do that. And ... I mean ... it’s kinda going to be a surprise no matter what, because ... the question isn’t, but the timing has to be. Paige and I have been half-expecting it to turn up during breakfast or something. That would have been a total surprise!”

I chuckled and nodded.

“Let’s just say ... Angie and I are very well aware of how lucky we are and have no intention of letting you and Paige come to your senses.”

She giggled a lot.

“Oh, that’s hilarious! Paige and I are the lucky ones!”

“As long as all four of us keep thinking that...”

“Yeah. You’re right. Mama thinks she’s the lucky one. Papa thinks he is. I think they both are. So ... yeah. We all are,” she said.

“I’m not going to hint.”

“Yeah, yeah. Meanie!” she said, giggling. Then she gave me a quick kiss and added, “I don’t want you to. If I could not count down the days, I wouldn’t be doing it. I just can’t help it!”

“It’s going to be fine. Just enjoy everything along the way.”

“Really, that makes it easier. I’m enjoying all of this. It doesn’t hurt anything.”

“Good,” I said.

“Though, if we get back to College Station and I’m still counting ... something’s getting hurt!”

I chuckled and said, “I think we’re safe there.”

“Good!”

We kissed again, then went to sleep.

Wednesday, December 25, 1985

We were up earlier than Camille and Francis and left the house quietly. Angie and Paige were waiting at the curb when we arrived, so we made it to Mom and Dad’s in plenty of time to pick them up and head off to church.

This was the first time in a long time — perhaps ever — that we hadn’t followed the ‘open one present before church’ plan. None of us were concerned, though. Presents would wait.

Heck, maybe we were grown-ups!

Church was exactly as I expected it to be. I was nearly certain that you could have dropped me into any Christmas Morning service from the past decade or more and I wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other, except perhaps by looking at people’s ages. Nothing changed, and that was undoubtedly comforting.

We headed right home afterward. No lunches out today!

Instead, we gathered in the living room and passed presents around. By popular request, this was the big present session. Jas and I would also open presents with Camille and Francis, and Angie and Paige would do the same with Tony and Jean, but most of the gifts would be opened here. It simply made more sense to do it while Angie and I were together.

We had seriously considered just getting everyone together, but the parents themselves had vetoed that. Tony and Jean, in particular, had apparently felt it might somehow make it feel a little less significant when they were all together unexpectedly on New Year’s Day, and their argument had carried the day with the others.

Next year? It would likely make sense.

Once we were settled, Angie and I handed out presents. The biggest presents for the parents were photo albums covering our year, carefully chosen from the many photos we’d taken. Some photos were duplicates of existing ones (for instance, a few from the summer-trip album), but mostly they were new.

We had made three, one for each set of parents. They obviously got somewhat different pictures, with their own offspring prioritized, but all of us were well represented in each set. I imagined they would show them to each other and enjoy seeing what we had picked for the others.

The real present for the parents was one none of us could mention: the rendezvous at the Rose Parade. They knew it, and Angie and I knew it. Paige and Jas would only find out at the last minute — hopefully.

Aside from that, the rest of the presents were a lot of fun. Jas gave me a gold neck chain. It was tasteful, not too heavy, and would definitely increase my date-wear options. Paige gave me a gray Harris tweed Scottish flat cap, which would also increase my date-wear options. I suspected I might wear it more often than the trilby, though that was still an option for some things. Angie gave me a new Walkman to replace my somewhat battered (but still working) old one. The new one had a radio and an equalizer.

I enjoyed seeing their reaction to my gifts. As expected, Jas loved her jasmine-blossom art piece. Paige was surprisingly emotional about ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’.

The big winner, though, was Angie. Jasmine’s present was well-chosen: a subscription to a mathematics journal Angie routinely read. For fun. Yes, we all realized how unlikely that was, starting with Angie. The poster I gave her went over very well as well.

But she teared up and sniffled over ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’. Paige credited me with suggesting it, but she still got the hugs and kisses from Angie. It was nearly perfect. First-life Angie had known of the book, but — as we all expected — had thought nothing about it. This Angie saw in it a perfect encapsulation of her love of mathematics, art, and music. Bach had always been one of her favorite classical musicians (now, perhaps, we knew why), she had always loved Escher, and she was now in a position to appreciate the brilliance of Kurt Gödel. I was probably the next closest, but she was clearly far past me. I understood the Computer Science equivalents (the Halting Problem, for instance), but the details of Gödel’s work on incompleteness were beyond me, while Angie seemed to have a very solid handle on them.

Dad and Mom, I think, were a little blown away again. It was one thing to be told that Angie was deep into advanced mathematics (for undergraduates, anyway), another to see her loving mathematical journals and talking with confidence about math far beyond our level. To be fair, even calculus was beyond either of them, but they could grasp the basics in a short conversation. This was very far past that.

Something I had missed finally hit me, and I realized Angie might give Dad something he’d hoped for from me but hadn’t gotten and likely never would. He had always wanted me to be ‘Doctor Marshall.’ I think it broke a tiny piece of his heart when I left graduate school with only a Master’s degree. He understood it — that I wanted to do work that PhD’s didn’t do, and did not want to do work that PhD’s did, at least in the computer industry — but it was always a goal of his to vicariously achieve such a degree through me.

Angie might well be ‘Doctor Marshall’ one day. Mathematics was not computer science, and a quantitative analyst with a PhD was entirely plausible. Besides, she was simply driven to learn in a way I had never been. She might get the credential almost despite herself, simply because she would do everything needed for the degree simply for herself.

It reminded me of a friend of mine in graduate school. He insisted the real test for a PhD was whether you yourself believed you had done work worthy of one. If you didn’t, you didn’t deserve one. If you did, no one could stand in your way of getting one.

Perhaps, and perhaps not, but I could see Angie steamrollering her way through the process with little concern for whoever or whatever got in her way. She was, thus far, simply that good.

Angie sometimes claimed her first-life self struggled to even balance her checkbook or do simple business cases without spreadsheet software. Was this new, or had it always been there, locked behind indifference and lack of exposure? Was my ability to sing new, or had it been there, undiscovered? We were ‘us’ — that was beyond question — but we would never know if we were really the same as we had been.

It didn’t really matter, of course. This was who we were and who we would remain. Jas and Paige would only know the other versions of us from the stories we told, and Angie and I would never revisit the ones we had known.

Heady stuff for Christmas Day, but that’s how things go.

In the end, we all agreed on one thing: Santa must have thought we were very, very good this year, indeed!

Once we were done with presents, we called as many of our friends as we could, wishing them all a Merry Christmas. Janet and Lizzie were happy to hear from us and were looking forward to tomorrow. Jess was, too, and told me she was very much looking forward to seeing us in California. It was just short of ‘too much information,’ and I figured her parents were in earshot. She was flying back on the first, so we wouldn’t see her until Disney, most likely. The parents already knew she might be there, but Jas and Paige didn’t, and I made sure they didn’t hear it today, either.