Communications Satellite Tree Ornament

There are objects in my life with sketchy origins. This silvery satellite was possibly a gift from David McCutchen—an artist and inventor who appears in several of these stories. We met in 1980, when I was an editor at the Santa Barbara News & Review. He, like me, is a fan of spaceships, robots, and dinosaurs.

Though I don’t celebrate Christmas, for many years I went to a tree-trimming party hosted by my friend Joan Walsh in Oakland, later San Francisco. Joan had also worked at the News & Review. She moved on to write for The Nation, MSNBC, and CNN; her transition to New York City ended that holiday tradition, at least for me.

Although I donated many ornaments to the tree that Joan and her daughter Nora decorated over the years—a bamboo stork, an ersatz pickle, a tiny conga drum—I could never bring myself to part with this satellite. It seemed in some way a symbol of loneliness, out of place during the holiday season. Looking at it now reminds me how far I am from my old friends. David lives in Portland; Joan is in Harlem; I call Oakland home. We’re each of us in our own orbit. Yet it’s satellites like these that keep us connected, our affection expressed via social media posts and Zoom parties.

That I’ve held on to this ornament saddens me. It might otherwise be providing Joan and Nora a quantum of Christmas pleasure. Maybe it would remind them of me. They’d remember the night they unwrapped it, over plates of holiday ham and martinis: their initial mystification, my convoluted explanation, its placement on a high pine branch.

When I think that way, this satellite embodies a poignant paradox: Some objects don’t really have stories, unless we give them away.