Revisiting The Spirit Of A Father’s Christmas
I did my best for my father by finding the fullness of Christmas in wrapping an empty box.
In a sense, this blog posting is another Ghost of a Christmas Past.
No, it’s not really a Ghost of the Scrooge variety, although, as you’ll see, it does have some echoes, both good and bad, of when, years past, the halls were decked with some holly as well as some folly.
But overall, this posting brings back, with some edits, a Christmas-themed essay that I wrote in 1997 and which was more broadly published in 1999 in my first book of essays, Notes From The Hidden Years: Reflections on Spirituality, Politics and Other Stuff. So, think of it as one of those Christmas-timed products that had an earlier shelf-life and is now being marketed as a “new and improved” version.
And, marketing aside, it’s new and improved in two ways.
First, I’d like to think that my writing has improved over the past two decades. Of course, as my own editor, I need to fight against the inclination either to justify or not to see missteps in phrases or thoughts that could probably have been said in a better way. And, fortunately, over the initial fifteen or twenty editing sessions, even I was able to pound out a better product.
But the added literary perspective that comes from just having more time – years and years of more time – between when I first wrote the piece and now has helped a lot, too. So have the years and years of practice that comes from writing dozens and dozens of other essays. As a result, it’s clear to me now what should have been clearer in the original essay’s first, second and third (…) drafts. And this re-release has allowed me to do the fixin’. Then, there are the small changes in paragraph structure and format that can have an outsized dramatic effect on the page and to the eye. At least, I think so.
What’s more, this essay’s Second Coming has allowed me to make some basic factual corrections and updates. For example, as originally published, I talked about putting garland on the fireplace “hearth.” Nooo, that wasn’t quite right, unless I intended to talk about immolating the garland. The “hearth” is where the fire burns. What I meant to refer to was the decorative fireplace “mantel,” which is the board above the fireplace’s opening. Then, too, I wrote about the “arguments” that I would have with my wife Denise about my insistence (and her resistance) to my putting tinsel on the Christmas tree one strand at a time. Sharing our house with cats, for whom tinsel can be a really bad intestinal entanglement, ended many years ago our using tinsel and the occasions for those “arguments.” And it was “Lionel” and not “John” Barrymore who played Scrooge in a recording of A Christmas Carol.
But there’s a second and more important way that the following essay is “new and improved” when compared to the original. And it doesn’t have to do with the language, style or basic facts. Instead, years of reflection, and even seeing some recently digitized old home movies, have helped to fill for me this backstory prequel on why the relationship between my father and me, his little drummer son, got so out of tune. And the picture of my father is now better off as a result of it.
In fact, as I re-read this essay as part of thinking about doing a blog posting, I got concerned that the characterizations of my father could come off as too harsh. Not that they weren’t true. But the context wasn’t as complete as it could have been. Put simply, if I was frustrated with and by him, I can feel more clearly now why he was frustrated with and by me. And though the psychological slights and hurts that I felt were real, I can see now how my own actions or inactions towards him helped to foment his own insensitivity and passive aggressivity towards me. Basically, back then, I felt entitled and he felt taken for granted, even if neither of us was consciously aware of either mind-set. Yeah, a really bad combination and a beat that no relationship can really dance well to.
But as I was thinking some more about posting this blog, I still wasn’t sure that I was doing enough with this backstory prequel to get the balance right between telling a good, even if difficult, Christmas story that by its end would give people a warm feeling and having them think that I had crossed over the “Corleone line” of “Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever.” In this case, the “other side” would be my readership. I mean, of course, if my father knew while he was still alive that I was going public with this story (Notes From The Hidden Years was published a year after he had passed on), disinheritance would probably have been just his first step of retribution.
Yet, as you will see in a few inches, I’ve decided to go ahead with the posting. So now you can read the story. On balance, I think that posting is a good thing to do. But don’t worry, I’m not kidding myself. I know that it’s not of the caliber of O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi or of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But what I think it shares with them and their shaded paths to Christmas love, on a much smaller scale of course, is how an ornament’s darker coating can actually enhance the warmth of the light that manages to shine through it.
And, finally, there’s one more concern I could have. But fortunately, I also have a resolution to it, courtesy of another essay from Notes From the Hidden Years. This one, also father-related, is entitled “I Finally Sang For My Father.” And it goes like this:
“The problem with it is this: If you believe it works one way, you sort of have to believe it works the other way, as well. Communion – a sharing of thoughts and feelings – with the dead, that is. For true believers, it’s a two-way street….
“So, in the face of the common complaint that God and the folks around Him don’t hear our prayers, there’s also the flip side worry that they, in fact, may hear more than we want. Of course, there’s not much we can do about that. Certainly, sabotaging the speaker system up there is not in the cards. But we have to remember that they now have a capacity to remix our words and voices into the most alluring and endearing of songs. I guess that means that the musician who marvels at the acoustics of Carnegie Hall and thinks they are a little bit of Heaven may, after all, just be right.”
The Little Drummer Son
I never thought that I’d feel this way. Christmas was coming, and I wasn’t really looking forward to it.
Oh, of course, I love to see our house once it’s finally decorated. Over the years, I’ve taken special pride in the Christmas tree in our living room. With the help of my wife Denise, whose taste in ornaments blends the quirky into the fanciful and beautiful, our tree looks like a holiday table centerpiece pumped up on steroids. Many steroids. The Dickens’ Village in the bay window is not of department store caliber, but it’s not bad for someone, like myself, with limited artistic abilities. After all, how many people would think to take chips of slate from their front walkway and turn them – with the help of a little whiteout for blurred inscriptions – into tombstones for the churchyard cemetery home of the Ghost of Christmas Future? And the garland on and around the fireplace mantel softens the stone and amplifies the warmth that spills out from the burning logs.
But even with all of this in the finished picture, the approach of Christmas this year seemed more drudge than dream to me. Look at the flip side of what I’ve just described. Decorating our Christmas tree is a twenty-four-hour ordeal in which I need to be part electrician, part engineer and part designer. Then there are the inevitable little marital arguments with Denise, frequently centering around my insistence on putting the tinsel on the tree one strand at a time. Add in the expectations that “Chuck and Denise always have a beautiful tree.” It makes us feel like a baseball team that’s defending its World Series title year in and year out. As for the Dickens’ Village, hiding electrical wires under the fake cotton snow without overturning people or tilting buildings is not the most difficult thing in the world. But it ranks right up there with swirling white frosting on a cake to make it look like the picture on the Betty Crocker cake mix box. Finally, getting the garland around the fireplace to fall evenly and gracefully is a three-minute job that can take a half hour.
I’m not even getting into the whole notion of Christmas cards, which I’m increasingly convinced is a tradition born of a time when only one spouse worked outside of the home and which is now kept on life support by some good will and a lot of plain old guilt.
Now, I’m not saying that I felt like an apprentice Scrooge. But honestly, if Christmas had been eight instead of four weeks away, it would have been just fine with me. That’s a universe of difference from, when I was a kid, pestering my brother Tom with the question, “How many hours ’till Santa Claus comes?”
Then, there were the other pressures on my life. My job as a lawyer (although more accurately described as the “consigliere”) to the Democrats on the Nassau County Legislature was mostly satisfying, but I perpetually felt that I was three days short of being where I wanted to be in my work. Thank God, Denise’s recovery from her post-cancer radiation treatment was doing well, but I knew we would be going for another check-up soon, and that’s always an anxious time.
There was also reading that I wanted to get to, but never could do, as well as a lot of little jobs around the house that would take two or three weeks of twelve-hour days to complete.
And, then, there was my father.
It is with both sadness and frustration that I write that my relationship with him has been proper, but has never been as emotionally supportive or close as I would have liked, however he may have tried. How could it be otherwise? I’m someone who has my mother’s sense of humor, my brother’s sense of absurdity, and my own sense that apparent vulnerability can be both an ally and a servant of strength. The split screen of my crying at the end of Man of La Mancha and my father’s dismissive characterization of it as being a show “about a lot of crazy people” pretty much gives the full picture of why our relationship never blended together. On top of this, he has an imprecision in language and direction and an impatience in temperament that made it very difficult to work with him on the kinds of things that can lead to the bonding between a father and son.
He is also confused by my apparent success at being socially acceptable. After all, I am not a good dancer. And when I responded to his question of “How do you get along with people at work,” by saying in a soft tone, “They love me,” he responded without skipping a beat with the question, “Why?” I found it hard to interpret that in any way other than my father’s saying to me, “Why are you loveable?” A little bit hard for a son to take and simply impossible for him to forget.
And he has also considered my work in public policy for the satisfaction of “doing good” a major waste of a Columbia Law School education. Without exception, whenever I’ve told him that I had gotten a raise, he would respond that I should be making more. While as a matter of social justice he may be right, a brief intermission between my news and his raising the bar would have been nice.
But, in fairness, I also have to be clear that my father never denied me any physical needs. I had a lot of toys when I was growing up. I went on a lot of great vacations with my family, and I never had to work for a day to pay for any of my education. I still wonder whether I would have gotten into Columbia with my very mediocre LSAT scores (even with a 3.86 grade point average from a college that had a reputation for non-grade inflation) if I had not filled in the box at the top of my application asking whether I was seeking financial aid by checking “NO.”
I also remember the time during a busy Christmas season many years ago when he went to several record stores looking for the Lionel Barrymore version of A Christmas Carol that I had gotten obsessed with but which was not in our family’s record collection. I’m now aware of how going from one store to another to satisfy a seemingly idiosyncratic Christmas wish list can be a real pain in the ass and can build up more than a little resentment. But he did it for me, nevertheless.
Now, these many years later, my father is no longer able to go from store to store before Christmas. At 84, his body is wearing out. Neither his heart nor his liver is working the way they should. He has problems with his prostate, his stomach, his eyes and his balance. On top of that, his thought processes that were always grindingly methodical are now in very much slow, slow motion.
But, in a real sense, his biggest problem is that for him the meaning of life has been built on power: physical and financial power. His entertainment heroes, Babe Ruth and Frank Sinatra, embodied both. Now, as his physical power has dramatically declined and as his financial power is but a shadow of the past, his only goal in life is one of restoration. But he’d might as well be the French monarchy. It is not to be.
So, the man who could play baseball better than I could ever wish, who could lift more weights than I could ever carry or who could climb higher on a fire engine’s extension ladder than I could ever dare could now not even easily bend down to pick up the mail from the floor of his front foyer. During the second week of December, he mentioned to me that if he had a box under the mail slot, then he wouldn’t need to bend down as much to get the mail. He could just pick up the box and the mail along with it in one motion.
That night, as I frequently do, I fell asleep reading in a chair around 10:00. Denise had fallen asleep not far from me on the couch watching TV. (So much for what a Newsday reporter once referred to in a conversation as “Westbury’s power couple.”) I woke up around 1:30 am and felt the need to accomplish something before going to bed.
And I had a few choices.
I could read some more newspapers. I could begin to write out Christmas cards or get out some other correspondence. Or I could work on my father’s mail recovery box.
It was then that I found the Christmas spirit.
I put aside what I really wanted to do and found a large box. Actually, finding it was not all that difficult because, by coincidence, there was one in the hallway of our house on the way out to the garbage. Using the kind of ingenuity that I had seen my father resort to many times, I taped the flaps of the box up and open so that the box was now almost two feet high and much easier for him to grasp and pick up. This job took only a few minutes.
But there was another problem. This box had been through several house moves. So, on its sides were words like “attic,” “books” and “pottery.” And the writing was for function and not art. Clearly, neatness didn’t count. True, I could have left it that way, but I felt that my father was experiencing enough indignities already. He didn’t need to have something placed in his very fashionable foyer that looked like the hand-me-down of a well-travelled college student. So, I got some black wrapping paper covered with a pattern of large gold Christmas stars. I, then, covered the box with the paper, using enough tape to weigh down and sink a junior Titanic.
Much more a comment on my wrapping non-abilities than on the difficulty of the job, it took me quite a while to do this. As the clock-hands passed “2:00,” I was tempted to stop and put the rest of the job off until the next day after I had come home from work. But I thought, “He really wants this box, and it’s really a pain for him to pick up the mail without it.” In fact, my father had just told me that he had recently been using his feet to push the mail along the floor and towards the hallway stairs. He would, then, sit on the stairs and lean over and down to pick the mail off of the floor. But it didn’t seem to me that any person, familial relationship aside, should have to do that if it wasn’t really necessary.
So, I put the finishing touches on the box before going to bed.
The next morning, I passed by his house on the way to work. I was hoping that he wouldn’t be up yet. I pictured him coming down the stairs in the morning and seeing this Christmas wrapped box in the foyer, under the mail slot and ready to do its job.
And the irony wasn’t lost on me. For many years while I was growing up, my father had paid for many, many presents for me that were under our family Christmas tree. I loved to wake up on Christmas morning to see them piled one on top of the other. They were filled with everything from games to toy guns. A whole lot of toy guns. The best of TV’s toy commercials had come into my living room!
Now, I had given my father an empty wrapped box as one of his Christmas presents.
Let’s be clear. This is not a story of any great overall reconciliation of the spirit between father and son. True, my father did thank me more than usual for this present. He really did seem to appreciate and value it. But it didn’t build the bridges in an instant that had not been constructed over the previous decades.
Yet there was a consolation in it for me, nonetheless. You see, it was in that empty box that I found the fullness of the Christmas spirit. It wasn’t accompanied by the fanciness (or sappiness) of a Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas Special’s soundtrack. It wasn’t as carefully decorated as our living room. And it certainly took a whole lot less time to prepare.
So, as acts of love go, it wasn’t four-star quality.
It may have deserved only one star.
But I guess that’s appropriate for a season commemorating a time when one big star hovering over an unceremoniously wrapped act of love was all that the world needed.
I’m not everything my father wanted me to be. But for this moment, I did my best for him…
…me and my box.
Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum!