Saturday night Carol and I went to see my mother at the rehab center. She’s been there for several weeks now, since she fell and broke her ankle. Maybe in a couple of weeks she can go home. Before Christmas, God willing.

The rehab center is a wonderful place. It’s called Falling Waters. It’s full of people like my mother. People in their seventies, eighties and nineties who have fallen. Broken this bone or that. They all seem to have plenty of visitors. But most of the day they spend alone in their beds and wheelchairs. Waiting for their meals. Waiting for someone to help them go to the bathroom. Waiting for their turn in the therapy room where they are learning to do the things that used to come easy.

After we said goodnight to my mother, we went to a Christmas party in our neighborhood. The hosts had 25 decorated trees in their house. A yard full of inflatables. A stuffed Santa in the living room as big as Paul Bunyan. We had a terrific time — eating and laughing and marveling at all those trees. My mother’s evening was a little less festive. She watched Lawrence Welk on PBS.

Christmas is a bittersweet thing. Fun with family and friends. Missing the dickens out of those who can’t be with us. Those who are in hospitals or nursing homes or rehab centers. Those who are a zillion miles away. Those who have passed.

One person I always miss at Christmas is my Uncle Corwin.

Because my father’s dad died before I was born, and my mother’s dad when I was little, my Uncle Corwin filled my grandfather niche. He was several years older than my father and had a silly feather-duster mustache. Unlike my father, who was always stressed out over something, ranting and raving and shaking his fists at the world, Uncle Corwin was always easy going. And a little goofy. Full of corny jokes. Childlike in all the best ways. He was also very smart. He was valedictorian of his high school class. He worked as a clerk at the post office.

What I loved most about Uncle Corwin was his curiosity. You see, I grew up in a house without books. The only magazines we subscribed to were American Legion and Fur, Fish and Game. But Uncle Corwin had hundreds of books in his ramshackle little house. Books of all kinds. Old novels. Lots of books on science and geography and history. He had National Geographics going back to the 1930s.

I got all those books when he died in 1989. Included in those many, many boxes of books I carted out, was an old manuscript he had written when he was 22. It was a funny travelogue about the road trip he and my father took to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934. It became the inspiration for my first published novel, Going to Chicago.

Corwin was an incredibly talented man. He could write and draw and fix things. He was one of those short wave radio kooks. He had a secret workshop in the back of his garage. It was filled with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos. He had a ball of string that must have been three feet high. His magic room was ten times more magical than my magic room. And ten times dustier.

While everybody in my family loved Uncle Corwin, they did not understand him the way I did. They shook their heads at how he and my Aunt Dorothy lived – in shambles, as my mother used to say – and they couldn’t understand why he never “did anything” with his many talents. He did plenty. But it was all for his own contentment. He was happy just knowing things. Just marveling at things. I learned from him a long ago that the life we live on the inside is way more important than the life we live on the outside.

Without Uncle Corwin, I doubt I would ever have gotten the notion to be a writer. That’s why I use his name on my mysteries.

Every Christmas Eve, Corwin and Dorothy would come over to our house and we’d have ham and potato salad and that frothy green Jello salad. And while my brother and I were begging to go to the living room and open gifts, we’d all have to stay at the dining room table and choke down the fruitcake with gooey hot nutmeg sauce my father made.

When it was finally time for the gifts, I always knew my Uncle Corwin would get me something neat. One year he gave me a little hand-crank printing press with moveable type. I’d print little newspapers and sell them to my parents for a penny. Hey, it paid off my college loans!

Just kidding about that. I was maybe ten or eleven at the time.

Anyway, it’s memory time again. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. A lot of people I wished weren’t gone are gone. My father. Aunt Edie. Aunt Dorothy. Grandma Ruby. Carol’s sister, Joyce. Uncle Corwin.

It’s also time to make future memories for others. For your children and your grandchildren. A favorite niece or nephew. So no matter how tough the holidays get, put on a Santa hat and act a little goofy.

Holidays – holy days — are supposed to be celebrations of life in all its terrifyingly wonderful dimensions. They are supposed to be giddy and gut-wrenching at the same time. They are where joy and sorrow collide. Love and loneliness. Life and death. Mortality and eternity. You cry on the inside and you laugh on the outside. You choke down the fruitcake and then you open your gifts.