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A collection of true vignettes, life slices, and stories about growing up in a rural area. |
| He paid a visit on a chilly December evening two months after my eighth birthday. He brought unasked for and unwanted news. He replaced my blissful ignorance with bitter knowledge and said he was doing me a favor. That night, when The Grinch told me that Santa Claus didn’t exist, he was wearing blue and white striped pajamas. To tell the truth, I’d suspected Santa wasn’t the real McCoy for a few months, but I wasn’t ready to face up to it. Reaching the age where a kid has begun to separate what’s real and what’s not, that boundary was still blurry to me. For instance, my parents reassured me dozens of times that ghosts were only “figments of the imagination”. I maintained, with fire in my voice, to all my friends that I didn’t believe in spirits and monsters, things that go bump in the night, or any trace of mumbo jumbo. Yet, I always slept with my closet door closed. I always leaped into bed in case something was lurking beneath, waiting to grab me. And, whenever I heard ghost stories or saw scary movies, I always shivered with wide-eyed, fear prickles when I turned off the light to go to bed. As for Santa, a few details about his story never quite followed a straight line. For example, I had never seen a deer fly. Maybe reindeer were different, but I doubted it. I also had a difficult time believing Santa and his elves could manufacture all those toys and deliver them to such scattered cities as Tacoma, Topeka, and Tallahassee in a single night. Then there was the bit about the chimney. Not all houses were built with chimneys. Sure, mine was. But it led to a pipe connected to an oil-burning stove. I couldn’t imagine Santa fitting into our chimney – let alone popping out of the tiny stove to deliver a bicycle. Oh, well, maybe in cases like mine, my dad left the door unlocked, and Santa entered our house through the kitchen. You see, I really wanted to believe in Santa. So, I invented little reasons why Santa could perform all those incredible feats. When the moment of truth arrived, the Grinch, who can appear in many forms, strolled through the front door of our house dressed as my brother, Harvey. He had just returned home from his first year in college for a Christmas visit. An overachiever, my big brother was filled to the brim with book knowledge, and he wasn’t bashful about sharing it. But there was one big problem. His willingness to share his knowledge irritated certain members of my family – my mother especially. Harvey once suggested to Mom that steaks were much tastier cooked medium rare (“like the French cook them, you know”) and if you beat potatoes with an electric mixer rather than by hand, they wouldn’t turn out so lumpy. Mom mumbled a retort. “If you don’t like the way I cook, you’re welcome to go to France – but don’t expect any help with your travel expenses.” He couldn’t quite penetrate my father’s thick skin, but sometimes he “showered” his knowledge on Dad as well. For example, there was the time he extolled the virtues of chemical fertilizer for our family garden plot. He continued on and on about “yields per acre in scientific studies." Dad just ignored most of what he said. However, he decided his oldest son deserved an answer. “Ya see there?” He gestured at the long, wooden shed with wire mesh covering its three windows. “We still got near a hundred chickens in there. Every day they crap from their roosts, and once a week, I rake all of it into a wheelbarrow and tip it into that there big pile.” His hand swept in the direction of a small Pikes Peak of poop. “I consider all that chicken manure a gift from those birds. It would be downright wasteful not to put their gift to good use. In fact, it wouldn’t even be polite.” Harvey, missing the humor, persisted trying to instill reason into my father, but Dad just rolled his eyes and resumed shoveling, ignoring his son’s scientific arguments. But for me, it was different. I couldn’t ignore my brother. Harvey was in college. He was my BIG brother – ten years older than I. And he was a star in high school. He played football; he even broke his leg once – a “battle wound” for sure. He was a starter on the basketball team. He filled in at the last moment for the leading man in the high school melodrama, saving the day like Dudley Do-Right. The student body even elected him president of the senior class. I worshiped the earth beneath his feet and the shoes that covered them. On that particular night, he stood in front of the bedroom closet changing into a pair of blue and white striped pajamas. Keeping a poker face, he turned to me, made direct eye contact, and asked in a voice eight months pregnant with meaning, “Little brother, I want to ask you something.” Then, he paused, the corners of his mouth lifting to defy gravity. “Do you think Santa Claus really exists?” Not believing my ears, I answered, “W-what?” He sighed and repeated himself, using different words to make it simpler for me. “Gary, do you believe in Santa Claus?” Not having been asked my opinion on much of anything by my brother, I swallowed, paused, and searched for the right words. Through my lips flowed this well-thought response: “That’s a question I’ve thought about for a long time. Some of my friends have tried to tell me there isn’t one. Others say there is.” Then I hesitated and considered the intense debate between my schoolmates and me regarding the subject. The biggest question we all wondered about was how there could be so many Santas? There was one at Weinbrenner’s, the local market in Port Orchard, and at least two in Bremerton – one at Bremer’s department store and another at J. C. Penney. The answer for the die-hard true-believers always boiled down to the same thing: Santa needed many helpers to get the big job done. These “Santas” were just some of his assistants. I looked back at my brother and, in that leap of faith that comes from wanting to believe, said, “I really do think there’s a Santa Claus.” My big brother just smirked at me, pulled up his pajama bottoms, shook his head, and murmured, “No.” Startled for a moment and not wanting to misunderstand, I asked him to repeat himself. Emphasizing each word with equal force, he responded, “No-Gary-there-isn’t-a-Santa-Claus. I’m just telling you the truth so your friends won’t make fun of you.” He didn’t say any more. I didn’t either. He’d said enough already. I just crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my nose and thought, So my friends won’t make fun of me? And before I drifted off to sleep, I started to sort things out in my mind. My dad probably ate the cookies and drank the milk I left on the dining room table for Santa, and that certainly explains the chimney . . . . But from that moment forward, I began missing something – a package of wonder wrapped in white magic. All because of The Grinch wearing blue and white striped pajamas. |
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