Smoky and Bill, a Holiday Card

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Hey, it's Nate,

and this is something that I've never done before.

I usually, right around this time of year, release a rerun to kind of ease out and rest up before jumping into new episodes at the beginning of January.

And this time I wanted to try a little something different because I had finished the most recent episode, which is episode 210 called Smokey and Bill, and I realized that on the cutting room floor, I was looking down,

and there in those metaphorical scraps

was a snowflake.

And so, this is a sequel to that episode.

You are going to want to listen to that episode or make sure you have listened to that episode first.

That is episode 210, Smokey and Bill.

And here is a little holiday story for you.

And I will talk to you again in January with brand new episodes.

This is the Memory Palace from Nate DeMayo.

Papua New Guinea wasn't Ohio.

Bill was homesick.

Everyone was homesick.

And it was the holidays.

These were men at war, stuck in the South Pacific, nearly a chestnut nor gingerbread man in sight.

It goes with the territory.

So many of the best Christmas songs are about missing home, but it is a miserable state.

It is homesickness for a reason.

Don't sugarcoat it like a plum.

But December 44,

Bill had Smokey.

And she made his spirits bright.

Getting to dote on the little thing.

It was kind of funny.

Anyone would even so much as talk about Christmas and the fuzzball would spin around and waggle.

She was just so cute.

And cute was hard to come by then.

Clearly this dog had been someone's best friend at Christmas time before.

There is that thing that happens if you adopt a dog where you always wonder about their life prior to coming to your house.

That mystery that just kind of hangs out there you talk about.

It is all the more strange when you wind up with a Yorkie in New Guinea.

Must have felt like a Christmas miracle to Bill Wynn.

And then back in Ohio, chestnuts, stockings, silver bells, sleigh bells, jingle bells, the bells of St.

Mary's.

He had all of it.

He was home for Christmas, and it was wonderful.

But right before Christmas, in each of those several Christmas seasons that he had with Smokey, the two of them were on the road.

That's when they had their biggest bookings.

Christmas parties, pageants, variety shows, running through their tricks, soaking in the spotlight and the applause.

It became its own Christmas tradition, with Smokey lighting up at the very mention of the season like a little kid come December.

They didn't do shows in those last couple of years when Smokey got old.

But you can picture her there, amidst the joyful chaos of a Christmas morning, the crumpled wrapping paper, kids getting just what they wanted, napping more than she used to, the lights of a Christmas tree, the glow of a dying fire, maybe curled up on the couch with Bill during the last Christmas of their last winter together.

After Smokey died that one February, and Bill carried her to the park in a shoebox out to that spot under the tree he'd picked out.

Bill got a gift he wasn't expecting, in the form of a phone call that solved the mystery of just how a Yorkshire Terrier wound up in a foxhole in New Guinea.

It was from a woman named Grace, a former Army nurse stationed at a field hospital in Brisbane during the war, and she met a captain there and fell in love, and then they were both transferred to New Guinea where they got engaged and then quickly moved on to Manila where they were married.

As you might guess, they had a little dog who ran away one night, leaving Grace heartbroken.

Especially because the dog had been the very first present the captain had given her.

One December,

she called her Christmas.

This mini-episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in December of 2023.

The show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

If you want to support this show and the unique thing that Radiotopia has built here in the media landscape, you can make a donation to radiotopia.fm slash donate.

You can always send me an email at nate at the memorypalace.org or follow me on Twitter and Facebook at the Memory Palace,

on Blue Sky at Nate DeMayo, and on Instagram at the Memory Palace Podcast.

Sorry, it is so confusing.

Social media is dumb.

I will talk to you in January.

Happy holidays.

Radio Tokyo

from PRX