I kept this on the back of a grocery list, one line a morning, one for each door he opened, because I had a feeling I'd want to remember it. I've cleaned it up a little. Not much.

But you need the part before December first, or none of it makes sense.

Before December

Every November, I ask my husband what he wants for Christmas.

Every November, he gives me the same answer.

"Nothing. We already have too much stuff."

He isn't wrong. He has the tools he wanted. He has enough sweaters for three winters. He has a garage shelf full of things he plans to organize "one of these weekends," and he has been planning it since our daughter was in braces.

Walt is seventy-one. He does not need anything, and he will tell you so.

So for about twenty years I've bought him the same thing, which is a nice shirt he thanks me for and wears to church.

Last year I decided I was done with the shirt.

I looked at the usual advent calendars. Chocolate. Coffee. Little bottles of hot sauce, which he would have eaten in a week and then complained about.

None of them felt like him.

Here is what does feel like him.

What Walt still stops to look at, at seventy-one, is old campervans.

He can spot one in a parking lot from half a block away and tell you exactly what he likes about it. The shape of the windows, the two-tone paint. The little pop-up roof, which he says is the whole point. He'll slow the car down. He's slowed the car down for a campervan with me late for a dentist appointment.

When our kids were young, we took more road trips than we could afford and packed more gear than we ever used. We slept in campgrounds and ate breakfast at picnic tables, and we once drove forty miles before realizing the cooler was still sitting beside the garage.

(It was Walt's job to load the cooler. It is still, thirty years later, a sore subject.)

I'm not telling you this because we miss being young. We don't, particularly. Our knees are fine and our kids call.

I'm telling you because those trips are the easiest thing in the world to get Walt talking about, and I'd forgotten that.

Then, in the middle of looking for something else entirely, I found an advent calendar filled with little campervans.

Twenty-four doors, one for each day until Christmas, and behind most of them a tiny van.

It was playful, but it wasn't another box of candy.

And for once, I could picture him opening every door instead of forgetting about it after the first week.

That was the whole reason I bought it. Not because I thought it would change anything. Because I could see him at the table on a Tuesday, opening a little door.

I hid it in the linen closet, where Walt has never once looked for anything.

Then December came, and I started writing things down.

December 1. Door one.

Put the box on the kitchen table beside his coffee.

He looked at the bright orange cover, which said Little Wanderers across the top in letters you could read from the hallway, and said, "You know I'm seventy-one, right?"

"Open the first door," I told him.

He opened the first door.

The first little camper was small enough to sit in his palm. He turned it over, checked the wheels, the way he checks the wheels on EVERYTHING, and set it beside the sugar bowl. Then he read the paper and didn't say another word about it.

An hour later the camper had moved. It was on the windowsill, facing out.

Afternoon: our grandson Owen, nine, came over, spotted the box, and asked what was behind door two before he'd taken his coat off.

Walt told him they'd have to wait until tomorrow morning.

Owen looked at his grandfather the way nine-year-olds look at people who have just said something insane.

They would have to wait until the next morning. That's the rule, and the box wins EVERY argument about it, twenty-four times.

December 2. Door two.

Phone rang at 7:15, before breakfast.

"Which one was it?"

A green one, with a roof rack. Owen wanted to know if it had the pop-up top. It didn't. Walt held it up to the kitchen window like the boy could see it through the phone.

Owen doesn't live with us and can't come by every day, so this is how most of the month went. Some mornings at our table.

Most mornings on the phone with his mouth full of cereal.

December 4. Door four.

A brown one.

Walt looked at it for a second and said "Tennessee," and that was the rainy campground where the tent leaked and we slept in the car and the kids thought it was the best night of the trip.

Owen had never heard that one. He asked if the car had a roof rack. Everything is roof racks now.

December 7. Saturday. Door seven, and the story I've heard four hundred times.

A red one, and Owen was here in person for it.

The red one led to the can opener. We forgot it, on the trip to the lake, and Walt opened a can of beans with a screwdriver and a rock.

I have heard this story roughly four hundred times. Owen had heard it maybe six. He still asked for the part about the rock twice.

I should say, so you don't picture something that didn't happen: not every door did this. Some mornings it was "huh, that's a nice one," and back to the paper. But three or four of them did, and three or four turned out to be plenty.

December 11. Door eleven.

A little bus with luggage strapped to the roof.

That one reminded Owen, not Walt, that Grandpa used to pack six folding chairs for a family of four.

"Why six?"

"In case."

"In case of WHAT?"

Walt did not have an answer for that in 1994 and he did not have one on December eleventh.

Every door was a different van, and every different van was a different story. A couple of days it wasn't a van at all. A cooler one morning, a folding chair another, which Owen found hilarious and Walt found suspicious.

December 13. Door thirteen. The line on the shelf.

By now the campers had formed a crooked little line across the shelf near the breakfast table.

Walt arranged them by color.

Owen rearranged them by which one he thought could survive the longest trip.

Walt put them back by color when Owen left. Owen put them back by trip-worthiness the next Saturday. Nobody mentioned it. This went on for the rest of the month.