God Father Christmas

Graham’s Christmas letters were always neatly typed and funny enough that, even as a kid, I looked forward to reading them. Back in Canada, he had hoped one day to be a playwright, but ended up living illegally in New York, taking on a series of editing contracts that even he found too dull to describe in any detail. He was my godfather, although I doubt he remembered. He took on the responsibility only after my mother promised she’d never hold him to it, and skipped the ceremony, concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get back across the border.

I was enthralled by this man I’d never met, by the letters, by his hand-painted postcards, the random photos in the family album growing up with my mother, the trick shot he took of himself looking unimpressed by his new toupée. When I thought I might want to be a writer myself, I worked up a fantasy of dropping by his apartment and introducing myself. I was going to dedicate my first science-fiction novel to this illegal alien, until the day he took a ferry to one of the more isolated islands near his favourite city, and the letters stopped.

Inspired by Minuit Crapaud. Photo by Graham Murray with himself, circa 1957.