I asked Santa for an impossible gift. He gave me a friendship with The Oak Ridge Boys.

"Draw me a princess in a castle!" my 6-year-old voice commanded.

The teenager sitting at the Formica tabletop next to me patiently obliged.

"Now draw me a mouse!"

And again, he did.

When I was a kid, my 16-year-old uncle, Kerry, was the center of my world. It had been that way since I was a toddler. He was 10 years older than me, almost to the day, and he indulged my many whims and demands on his time and attention.

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In many ways, Kerry – an aspiring artist with a talent that exceeded his years -- was more like my brother, closer in age to me than he was to my dad, who was by then in his early 30s.

The year was 1981. We were a typically Midwest family, living quietly in Chicago’s suburbs.

I had no idea how much my life would change by Christmas.

Falling in love with music

It’s been nearly four decades, but 1981 was one of my most pivotal years. Looking back, there are two things that I remember.

The first is truly falling in love with music for the first time. The radio was always on in our house, and my dad sang in a barbershop quartet, but I hadn’t ever paid much attention to the rhythm swirling around me.

On Saturdays, my parents — who were typically strict about the television we watched — let us tune in to the Barbara Mandrell and Mandrell Sisters variety show. During its short run, she invited country music group The Oak Ridge Boys on to perform a medley of hits, including their smash single, "Elvira."

It’s not an understatement to say the nonsensical but catchy tune was everywhere in 1981. They played it at baseball games and at pool parties, on radio stations and in bars. And like everyone else, I loved it, listening to it over and over again on our 8-track tape in my mom’s Cadillac. 

By July, Elvira — driven by its memorable bass line: “Giddy-up oom poppa oom poppa mow mow" — was a bona-fide crossover smash, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart.

And I was obsessed with The Oak Ridge Boys and their music.

Learning of death

The second memory came a few short weeks later, as I sat in the front seat of my mom's car. She had parked it in the driveway of my grandmother's house, where she and my dad had dropped me off abruptly the night before.

She took a breath, held my hand and said quietly:

“There was an accident honey. Uncle Kerry went to Heaven.” 

My mom then held me and tried to explain the gravity of what had happened, the concept of death in terms that my 6-year-old mind could understand. The moment is seared in my brain nearly four decades later, though I don’t remember any details of the conversation. I do remember sobbing hysterically, trying to understand how or why I wouldn’t see my teenage uncle again.

Then I asked for a lollipop.

As I got older, I would learn a few details.

Kerry went to a lake with some friends after completing his junior year of high school. He dove into the lake. He didn’t come back up. There was a scene at the hospital, where my grief-stricken father berated his much younger brother’s teenage friends for the tragedy.

My dad never spoke of that day — and rarely of my uncle — again.

Making a special wish

In December 1981, my parents bundled my 3-year-old sister and me into the car for our annual trip to downtown Chicago to see "The Nutcracker" and visit Santa Claus. I had yet to recover from the loss earlier that year and was quiet in the car.

They asked me: “What do you want for Christmas?”

“I am going to tell Santa I want him to bring Uncle Kerry back.”

Silence.

“Sweetheart, what if Santa can’t make that happen?” my mom asked. “Is there something else you might like for Christmas?”

I thought for a moment.

“I guess I would like to meet The Oak Ridge Boys.”

Looking back, I have no idea how or why my then-7-year-old self conflated those ideas into a singular Christmas wish list.

But as a parent with two kids of my own, I appreciate now how desperate and distraught I must have left my mom and dad that holiday season.

Is there anything that exemplifies the spirit of Christmas more than wanting to shower your children with a bit of magic? My mom told me once: “You had already lost so much that year. We couldn’t bear the thought of you not believing in Christmas magic and Santa Claus, too.”

My mom and dad stayed up most of the night talking and worrying. They ultimately decided that if they took me to an Oak Ridge Boys concert, that might be enough to satisfy my childhood wishes.   

The band was playing a series of shows over the New Year’s Eve holiday at the iconic Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, Indiana. But when my mom called for tickets, the voice on the other end of the line laughed at her.

“Ma’am, those shows have been sold out for months.”

In an era that was pre-Ticketmaster resale, StubHub or eBay, my parents were left with the heartbreaking realization that fulfilling my “backup” wish now seemed only slightly more likely than Santa bringing my uncle back.

But that’s when fate, or perhaps serendipity, took over.

Three days later, my mom was cleaning the house. She shut off the vacuum just as the DJ on the always-on radio in the kitchen announced that the station was giving away four tickets to see The Oak Ridge Boys on New Year’s Eve at their sold-out Merrillville show.

Caller nine would win the tickets when the next Oak Ridge Boys song played on the radio.

My mom grabbed the kitchen phone. She sat down at the kitchen table and waited.

It took 45 minutes for the song, "Thank God for Kids," to come on. It was one of my mom's favorites, and she later told me she recognized it from the first note. She dialed the number. She got through.

Caller number nine.

On Christmas, the surprise of a lifetime was waiting for me in my stocking. The actual tickets were at will call at the theater, so my mom created a handmade ticket, with a picture of The Oak Ridge Boys on it that she had cut out of a magazine.

Forming new friendships

A few days later, my sister and I were dressed in matching, floor-length navy blue velvet and lace gowns, hand-sewn by my grandmother. My dad bought us each a rose, and we took them to our VIP seats.

Midway through the concert we asked my mom if we could please try to bring our roses to the front of the stage. Security let us through, and I took my rose to Joe Bonsall, who has been the curly haired tenor of the band since 1973.

My sister broke away from me and brought her flower to baritone William Lee Golden, easily recognizable for his snow white, nearly waist-long hair and beard.

We were both rewarded with kisses on the cheek and ran back up the aisle to our seats, shrieking with glee.

But fate wasn’t quite done with us.

A brutal snowstorm prevented my dad from driving us back to Chicago that night. And somehow the Star Plaza Theatre had an open hotel room on New Year’s Eve. The next day, as my sister and I played in the hotel’s indoor pool, a woman with the longest, blondest hair I’d ever seen approached my parents.

Her husband, she said, was the sound engineer for The Oak Ridge Boys. The guys in the band thought my sister and I were adorable, the way we brought those flowers up to the stage.

Would we like some autographed pictures? A guitar pick? A couple of drumsticks?

Then she and her husband, Marko Hunt (who runs front of house sound for the band), gave the four of us backstage passes to that night’s show. Seven days after Christmas, I got my wish. I rang in January of 1982 backstage at an Oak Ridge Boys concert, where the singers, their band and crew posed for pictures and generally fawned over my sister and me.

And inexplicably, what should have been a simple Christmas wish fulfilled...somehow blossomed into a true and lasting friendship.

Reflecting on childhood

I don’t remember ever thinking that my childhood was in any way out of the ordinary. My parents were typical suburbanites. My dad was an attorney. My mom a travel agent. We went to church and the movies and on bike rides as a family. Mom served dinner at 6:30 p.m., and all four of us always sat down together at the table.

I was a decidedly shy and awkward kid and my parents were not cool. At least I didn’t recall them being cool.

But looking back, they let us do stuff and bear witness to rock star craziness while we were hanging out with the Oaks and other musicians that we met through them. They put us in situations that I would never even consider with my own children.

And it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Creating special memories

The next time I saw the Oak Ridge Boys was that summer, at a state fair. Other concerts soon followed.

In the fall of 1982 I was in third grade. My teacher for my advanced reading and language arts class assigned all of us a project: We were to interview someone and tape it.

My parents arranged for Marko and I to sit down together. And with his help, they arranged for Bonsall to call me in the middle of dinner — a total surprise.

And so, at the tender age of 8, I conducted my first interview with a major country pop music star. Perhaps setting the stage for my current career? I asked Joe questions like, “What do you do when you forget the words to a song?”

“Stand there and look foolish” was his response.

(To be fair, that was kind of a cheap shot on my part. I knew exactly what happened when he forgot the words to a song. Joe once blanked on the words to Elvira while I sat in the front row of a show. He brought the microphone over to me and let me sing the second verse in my completely tone-deaf and off-key voice.)

I know now that I bore witness to some of the stress and craziness that comes with being a coveted musician.

I wish I could catalog those memories with an adult’s eye and understanding. I have only vague recollections of large, scary-looking security guards; running through corridors past screaming and pushing fans; and late-night parties.

One night my parents put my sister and me to bed in our hotel room and then proceeded to stay up drinking and talking — in the same hotel room — with Skip Mitchell, the band’s lead guitarist and Don Breland, the band’s bass guitar player, among others.

I don’t know how they thought we’d sleep. I guess I did a little. But I have hazy memories of a chair falling (or being thrown) off or near a balcony, of someone yelling at a toilet seat that refused to stay up while they tried to pee and of Skip rambling about how important it was that he keep playing so he could provide for his son.

When I was about 9 or 10, we attended a show somewhere in central Indiana, and someone got the idea to “borrow” the band bus so they could go to a big party outside of Elkhart. 

I remember being so excited that I got to ride on the bus, along with Skip, Don, rhythm guitarist Steve Sanders and others. Someone had a toy dog that barked when you pulled a string in its back. My sister and I played with it before our parents put us to bed in the bunks on the bus.

Then they got out and went to the house party somewhere in the woods until the wee hours of the morning. I woke up long enough to hear loud voices exclaiming that they had backed the bus into a tree in the middle of a snowstorm as we were leaving.

Over time, the members of the Oaks and their band and crew became extended family. Chaperones. I was allowed to see a little of the insanity of touring, but I was mostly protected from the seedier parts of road life.

I got into VIP sections of bars and clubs as a young teenager, and I was able to dance and stay up late, but no one ever let me drink or smoke.

Steve, who by then was lead singer of the Oak Ridge Boys (he replaced Golden for a period of years in the mid-1980s) invited me to join him and his wife at a hotel/concert hall down the Strip in Las Vegas.

They were going to hang out with Duran Duran after their show and thought I might like to come along. That was the one time my parents refused.

I am not sure I’ve gotten over it.

Seeing the hard times

As with any friendship, ours was tested. The band went through a trying time in the mid to late 1980s, and it appeared they would break up.

At a concert amid the turmoil, I started crying and looked up at the president of the Oaks organization, lead singer Duane Allen, and I told him I was afraid I’d never see him again. He was just about to take the stage, but he told me that he believed everything happens for a reason and that God has a plan.

We just need to trust in it, he said, and things will work out the way they should.

He was right. The band didn’t break up, and we continued to grow and evolve together. I asked Joe to write a recommendation letter for me for college. He obliged.

As I moved past college and into adulthood, I saw my friends less and less.

My parents still traveled to see them several times a year, but I was increasingly focused on my own career, starting a family and raising my own children.

I brought my now 8-year-old son to a show in Phoenix when he was a baby. But mostly I relied on my parents for updates on how everyone was doing.

That changed last April.

I was Features Director at The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com, a USA TODAY Network paper in Phoenix. And I was in charge of coordinating coverage for a three-day country music festival in the desert outside the city.

The Oak Ridge Boys were on the Sunday bill, scheduled to do a set in the late afternoon. And Duane told me they’d be joining Blake Shelton, the evening’s headliner, on stage for the festival’s final performance.

The guys had recorded a track with Shelton on his 2016 album, “If I’m Honest.”

For the first time in years, I was able to spend an extended amount of time with Marko, keyboardist Ron Fairchild, Joe and Duane and others.

We talked about my kids, their kids and, in many cases, grandkids, touring, my job. And my parents.

Mom and Dad had just been in Nashville for an extended trip a week or so prior.

In recent years, they had formed a close friendship with a friend who has an incredible singing voice, and the three of them traveled to Music City so he could record an album, with support and an assist from members of The Oak Ridge Boys.

They remarked how well my dad, who had fallen and suffered a traumatic brain injury four years prior, was doing, and how everyone was in such good spirits.

That was Sunday, April 13.

Four days later, my father passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.

Giving the gift of love and friendship

I wasn’t there when my dad died.

My mom found him, collapsed in the bedroom late Thursday night. There were multiple attempts to revive him at the hospital, and frantic phone calls to both my husband and me from my sister and brother-in-law.

I was still recovering from 14-hour work days at the music festival, and I slept through them all.

As my mom, sister and I left the hospital early Friday morning in a fog, my mom asked me to help with the notifications.

Among the first people she asked me to call were Marko, Joe and Duane.

I left messages and it was only a matter of minutes before I began hearing back. Word spread. Former members of the band and crew called, as did wives and children.

Several members of my staff at azcentral found out my dad had passed away because The Oak Ridge Boys mourned the loss of their old friend on social media.

Marko came to the funeral. The others called and lifted up my mom with prayers and good thoughts in the trying weeks and months that followed.

A few weeks ago I asked Duane, “What was it about my parents that caused you guys to want to be friends with us? How did that happen? It seems we all had nothing in common.”

He mentioned to me — which I had long since forgotten — that my parents had sent him a copy of that first interview that I had done for that class project back in 1982.

In our overachieving way, we turned it into a "20/20"-type formatted show set to music and primitive graphics.

And Duane said the attention to detail we put into that and how obviously grateful we were that they had participated “created a very special place” in his heart for us. He said that my parents later “connected on music and other musical tastes, baseball and sports in general, politics and writing.”

But the thing he sent that speaks to me most is this: Whenever his faith was tested, my parents were quick to call on him, to lift him up, to just be a friend. And he tried to make sure he always did the same for them.

“In our lifetime, we do not have that many very close friends,” Duane wrote me. “(But) for our friends, there is no limit to what we would do for each other. I call your mom and dad (may he rest in peace) some of my dearest friends.”

I teared up sharing those words when I told this story publicly for the first time at an IndyStar Storytelling event earlier this month, and again last week, as I watched members of my heartbroken extended family hop on a cross-country overnight flight after a show in Seattle.

They had made a promise to another dear friend, former President George H.W. Bush, that they would sing "Amazing Grace" at his funeral.

This will be my second Christmas without my father and my first living in a new city away from my mom, sister and the rest of my family.

But I am not despondent or gloomy. Because of a heartbroken little girl’s Christmas wish, because of a mom’s desire to fulfill it, because of whatever power allowed her to be Caller Number Nine that day, and because of the power of two little girls with two roses, I’ve been given the gift of love and of friendship, many times over. 

And it’s always there, waiting when you need it.

Ginger Rough, IndyStar's Senior News Director, told this story at an event that was part of the IndyStar Storytellers Project. The next Storytellers event will be Feb. 12 at the Grove Haus in Fountain Square. The topic will be love stories. Want to tell yours? Learn more.