Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Something about Christmas and a new decade


There’s something about Christmas [--] maybe it’s the long, cold nights in front of the fire with family and friends, or maybe it’s the holiday’s proximity to the end of the year [--] that makes us contemplative. Seeing folks we haven’t spent time with in a while tends to bring back long forgotten memories. We like to sit around with our coffee or eggnog and remember Christmases past. And being older often enables us to assign meaning to the events of our past lives.
At least, the collision of memories with the extended time spent with friends and family has that effect on me.
Watching some of my younger family members [--] who shall remain anonymous [--] open their abundant and extravagant gifts on Christmas morning, I realized how lucky I am to have grown up, if not poor, then certainly on the cusp.
The best thing about growing up near poor (I’m sure this is horrifying my mother) is that we didn’t know we weren’t rich. Because we had good food on the table, sneakers and a safe neighborhood to run in with other kids of like circumstances we thought life was perfect.
Thinking back now, I realize we were right. The extravagances we didn’t have, we didn’t miss.
Cell phones? My next door neighbor Jack Roper and I had tin cans connected by a string, one in his room, the other in mine, that we talked to each other on in the wee hours of the night when our parents had finally made us go inside. Our conversations were at least as important as those that kids text 24 hours a day now:
“What are you doing? Are you sleepy? What are you going to wear to school? What can we do tomorrow? Have you finished your homework?”
Like Scout and Jem in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the four Roper boys and I even had a hole in a tree where we left secret messages of vital importance: “Meet me by the pecan tree at noon. Bring candy.”
We had secret decoder rings from boxes of cereal, autographed photos of the Cisco Kid, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and even Superman (George Reeves); invisible ink, Whoopee cushions, real metal jacks, caps like Pinky Lee’s.
A Wii with “fake sports” on it? We got our exercise by running full out just because we could and it felt so good, playing baseball, climbing trees, jumping off the garage with a towel around our necks like Batman and Robin, trying to dig holes to China, chasing our dogs ... . Over on Chestnut Street, when Roy Beatson and I got tired, we’d sprawl out on his front porch with coloring books, while his older sister Carole kibitzed and futilely exhorted us to color inside the lines.
Laptop computer? We had notebooks [--] the kind with lined paper [--] pencils, the World Book Encyclopedia, rote knowledge of the multiplication tables up to 12 and infinite curiosity and imagination.
On Christmas morning, we were happy with anything but clothes.
Two presents from Santa Claus stand out in my memory. I must have been 5 or 6 when I opened a particularly large box and found a Dale Evans outfit [--] boots, fringed skirt and vest, hat, even a little toy pistol. You’d have thought I had a box of gold [--] and I did. No treasure would have been greater. I got my daddy to saw off the end of a broom, and Buttermilk and I rode all over.
Another Christmas, I found a brand new, blue bike under the tree. It was small and had tires with smooth, flat treads. My cousin Tim taught me to ride it on the sidewalks of Chestnut Street. He ran behind me holding onto the back fender as I pedaled furiously. Then one day, he let go, and I kept going, not knowing he wasn’t there. I fell a few times, but soon I was riding all over the old neighborhood. Punished once by confinement to the yard, I turned my bike over, and the front tire became the helm of a pirate ship.
And I will never forget that on the day Tim’s pet squirrel Tiny bit all the way through my thumb and I was sick and in pain (mostly from having my hand held in hot water with Epsom salts by Aunt Alma and my cousin Claudette [--] we didn’t go to the doctor at the drop of a hat back then), Tim went downtown to the police department and brought back my bike license. I didn’t consciously realize it when I was lying in bed feeling sorry for myself and wondering if my marble-shooting career was over, but that was my teenage cousin’s way of letting me know he cared.
At Christmas and at the end of one year and the start of another, I wish every kid could be our variety of “poor” [--] to see how our family and friends can enrich our lives and our characters, not by buying us all the latest gadgets and electronic games, but by looking at each other’s faces when we talk, doing the little things that make us human, caring about each other. Maybe that could be a benefit of the recession [--] appreciating each other and playing the Uncle Wiggily game on the kitchen table in the evenings.
The worst time I ever had on Chestnut Street was the day my parents and Aunt Alma decided I was too old (probably 6) to run around just in shorts like my male playmates [--] I had to start wearing a shirt. I fought growing up as long as I could, even after that. I still hate shoes, and I can still do arithmetic in my head.

1 comment:

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