My Amazing Sheepskin Dream Coat

You could always tell when Christmas was coming on The Hill, the Italian-immigrant neighborhood in St. Louis where I grew up—the Nativity scene appeared on the lawn of the rectory at St. Ambrose, our church.

The other sure sign was the store windows. They looked a little fancier, with sprayed-on "snow" and the best items on display. It was there, in one of those windows the year I was 10, that I saw the greatest thing I'd ever laid eyes on.

A golden-brown sheepskin coat appeared in the window of Russo's Dry Goods. I'd take the long way home from school just to look at it and daydream about how it would feel buttoned around me. I wanted that coat more than anything, but I knew there was no way in the world I was ever going to get it.

Like most of the men in the neighborhood, my father worked a long, tough day at Laclede-Christy, a clay-pipe factory. He stretched his paycheck to support our family and to pay the mortgage on our house.

We always had food on the table, clothes to wear (I even had mine modeled for me by my big brother, Mickey, who wore them first), and a little to give to our church every week. But that didn't leave anything for luxuries such as a sheepskin coat.

One Sunday evening in early December I stood in front of Russo's staring at the coat, taking in every detail as if there were something I might have missed all the other times I'd come to see it. The buttery brown leather. The fleece lining that looked almost golden in the right light. The cuffs, fitted so that on a windy day cold air wouldn't shoot up your arms.

I pulled my thin cloth jacket a little higher around my neck. It didn't make me feel any warmer. Just the thought of that sheepskin coat did, though, and so close to Christmas, I couldn't think of anything else.

"You see that coat in Russo's window?" I asked as we sat down to dinner that night.

"That'll keep you warm, I guarantee you," said Uncle Tom, who lived with us. "Sheepskin, right?"

My mother set my favorite dish, risotto, on the table. For once I ignored it. "Yeah," I replied. "The coat looks plenty warm." I sneaked a glance at Pop. He smiled, but didn't say anything as he spooned a big helping of risotto onto my plate.

"Probably costs plenty too," Mickey laughed. "That coat would keep you warm even in a St. Louis winter!" We thought St. Louis was the coldest place on earth because we'd never been anywhere else.

"It'd sure be nice to have a coat like that," I hinted.

"It would be nice. A lot of things would be nice . . . " my father murmured, his thought trailing off like my hopes.

"Pop's right," I said to Mickey as we climbed into bed that night. "Lots of things would be nice, but I'm never gonna get 'em."