From the Bench
JUST ANOTHER CHRISTMAS STORY
I had resisted my wife’s entreaties for a Christmas tree. We got by fine without one since we moved up from the big city five Christmases ago, I reasoned.
"This year is different," she said. "Everybody will be here. Twenty-two at last count. What will they think if we don’t have a tree?"
"Maybe they will think that somebody, at last, has come to his senses," I said.
So she went out to Cheek’s and came home with a freshly-cut tree, prickly needles, sticky gum, and all.
I knew I would have to put it up. I shouldn’t have. It’s the first time I have ever been called Ebenezer.
"Put up your own lights," I groused, once it was up.
I wasn’t even planning to write a Christmas column this year. First time in five years. A four-week sabbatical from the writing gig, plus fatigue and soreness from the new sunroom project, had squeezed out all the inspiration and ego, leaving the soured rind of a soul jaded by years of holiday commotion.
That was the plan.
Then I got the phone call. Funny how something as simple as a phone call can change the plan.
"It sounds like a kid," said my wife, handing me the phone.
It was. I’ll call him Tommy, not his real name. But he’s a real boy, and this is a real story.
He wanted to know when we could get together. I had promised the last time we met, just before the Christmas break, that we would try to get together and "do something" over the holidays.
What "something" would be, I had no idea. Been a long time since I dealt with an eight-year-old boy. But I got his phone number and promised I would call him back…and I will.
Tommy and I have been meeting for an hour the past seven or eight weeks during school. They call it "mentoring", and I suppose it means different things to different people.
For us, it is mostly conversation. Talking. Discussing. And, most important, listening. There’s a lot of that. Sometimes Tommy reads for me, but not enough to interfere with our talks.
He has told me about his family, especially about his brothers. He met them briefly when they were born, just long enough to miss them. There is a sadness in his voice, a yearning, a hope that somehow, sometime, it will be made right and they will be together again.
After I promised to call him back, he said something else.
"I wrote a letter to my brother. Would you like for me to read it?"
"Sure," I said.
It was about what you would expect from an eight-year-old. Simple. Direct. But well written.
Tommy told his brother what he had been doing, and about getting ready for Christmas. He hoped his brother was happy, and wished he could be with him.
"I could take care of you and change your diaper," he finished.
"I think he will like that," I said. "When are you going to mail it? Your brother lives in (I mentioned the town, which I won’t include here), doesn’t he?"
"Yes, but this is to my other brother, the one who died," he explained.
Tommy talks often of his two brothers. One came home for a day and then went to live somewhere else. The other died at birth, or shortly thereafter.
He remembers the funeral and the burial. There is a sadness and a longing when he talks about it.
How do you react to a letter to a dead person? I didn’t know. I’m still not sure.
When we finished talking, I promised to call him back. Then I remembered the ornament he had given me at the Christmas luncheon. A triangle made of popsycle sticks with a picture of Tommy in the middle. I took it from the bedside table and hung it high on the tree.
Only then did it begin to sink in. My Christmas story had come to me in the simple message of a little boy, and I began to wonder at the gift he had sent me.
It had all the elements you would expect for Christmas.
A simple story in an humble, out-of-the way place
A baby.
Love. Caring.
Hope.
And most of all it had the message of the baby who Christmas honors…….the faith of a child, believing that anything is possible.
Have a blessed Christmas.