Christmas Icons Part Five: "In Love At Christmas" Series

Christmas Icons     Part Five:    "In Love At Christmas" Series

HIGH SCHOOL

          High School affords a wealth of opportunity.  Not only are girls present, they are required by law to sit next to you, in shifts which rotate your potential love matches by the hour.  Not only that, but the extracurricular activities provide sanctioned events where you can watch girls play or perform in front of you, and you can likewise display yourself at events they are required to watch.  As if that were not enough, there are regular vacation periods, especially summer, where you are given three months of starvation from female contact, only to be rejoined with the group after they have grown noticeably more feminine and have reworked their wardrobes, in increasingly distracting choices.

          There is a downside to high school, and it consists mainly of life's frequently repeated enigma:  the best parts are also the worst parts.  For one thing, it is wonderful that State and Federal laws require hundreds of girls to spend a minimum of one hundred eighty days per year with you.  Accompanying these same laws, however, is the requirement that every single male competitor in the area be gathered at the same time and place.  Some may compare it with a Serengeti watering hole, but the Serengeti is open to all ages.  High School is restricted to the youth, made up entirely of men and women in the earliest stages of their prime, herded by a handful of aging teachers.  (This is not counting the special case of the twenty-two year old art teacher, Miss W--, who by 1972 still retained many wonderful wardrobe habits from her late sixties college experience, but that is another story.)

          Regarding Christmas, the same, good-news-bad-news problem rises to frightening proportions.  There are glorious opportunities for a young man.  With a very small bunch of green leaves and white berries, wrapped with a simple red bow, he is not only allowed, but encouraged to run around kissing girls, who are expected to indulge him, regardless of their usual social status.  A lowly band member just might be able to kiss a cheerleader, even a varsity cheerleader, if he can muster the nerve.  The down side of mistletoe is that football players, track stars, and that leather jacketed guy with dead eyes do not recognize the good-natured tradition of sharing a girlfriend's soft and glossy lips with hopeful nerds.  It is true that, after a beating, the authorities will judge in favor of the bearer of the medieval aphrodisiac, but it is also true that the eagle eyes of the Vice-Principle do not perceive the hidden little cubby between the Auditorium and the Metal Shop, and his legal reach does not extend to the empty car lot between the crosswalk and the entrance to the Junior High Building, where the angry boyfriend will be happy to invite you for a couple of rounds of that familiar old game, "Which hand am I going to hit you with next?"

          In this country, high school is a four year experience, containing exactly four chances for a magical Christmas, and exactly four chances of going down in a fiery defeat.  It is the mostly systematically arranged opportunity for you to rise to the occasion and suavely display your sensitive, romantic heart.  If you were thirty years old in high school, you would groom yourself, wear leather shoes and offer a beautifully wrapped gift, made from precious metals, jewels, and the rarest perfumed oils, to that cute girl who actually likes literature class, runs track, and thinks of her mom as a close friend.  But, such as it is, high school comes and goes long before Jane Austin makes more sense than Stephen King.  Instead of kissing your ski-club buddy on the ski lift as delicate snowflakes swirl around, you let the vampire with thick smudges of blue or green eye shadow lead you by the hand while warming up in someone's basement after the toboggan party.  Although she has not written any of her own lab reports in Chemistry, she uses an entire bottle of Eau de Brothel every week, and she is more likely to be found playing in seniors' cars than Led Zeppelin, she is a widely approved object of desire, and high school is too seldom a time when men are individuals.

          So, you start off, an ignorant Freshman, enamored of the seniors girls, so much like mature women to your fourteen year old eyes, you do not notice the second chair French Horn player in the wool skirt with knee socks.  Too bad, since you blow the first of four high school Christmas opportunities on some unrequited fantasy.  As a Sophomore, you make a feeble move on the cheerleader who lets you write all of the lab reports in Chemistry, but that is the year you find out the hard way what the difference is between an eighteen year old, weight-lifting pole vaulter's punch and your fifteen year old, sandwich-lifting trumpet player's defense.  You do not notice the thin girl in History class who likes to dance.  You become a Junior, but the girl you really think about is steady with the quarterback.  Christmas comes and goes, and you don't feel like trying this time around.  You should know that the Freshman are only two years younger than you, that this difference will mean nothing when you are in your forties, but you do not understand this, or the more general fact that for the rest of your life, a younger partner is far from a stigma.  

As a Senior, you rule!  Filled with new found confidence and swagger, you circle the brunette that liked you two years ago in Biology, but something dreadful is in the air.  She's already mentally planning her way of life at the State College in Big Rapids, while you are already committed to a college in Maryland, as in "the State of Maryland."  It's not just her; you find that your plans for the future, while lauded by the faculty, have a weird effect on the female population.  How many times do they tell you this year, "If you had only approached me a year or two ago…!"  You have the creeping feeling that your high school years are over before they're over.  Looking around, the only peers who are really dating are the ones who have been together for a while, or the ones who are dating older guys in college.  Way too late you cast your glance toward the Freshman, but they all see the invisible sign on your chest that says, "Gone by the Middle of Summer," and scurry away before you launch a conversation.  (It's also hard to be nonchalant when most of the Freshmen girls have most of their classes in a section of the school you haven't visited since before you had a driving license.)

And then it happens.  By some unanticipated trickery, you find yourself in the adult world, the real world, where the opposite sex is not required by law to sit with you.  Eventually, things happen, and you wind up happily married, but there just might, possibly, remain the slightest annoyance whenever you reminisce about your high school years.  How obvious it all seems, now.  The unnecessary anxiety, the halting and awkward attempts at simple conversation.  If only, you knew then what you know now, … wow!  You sometimes idly try to work out what happened back there, when you couldn't find your brain or your personality.  Not taking anything away from your happy marriage, and three wonderful kids, you nevertheless wonder what ever happened to the brunette from Sophomore Biology.  Well, buddy, you'd better just have eggnog, kiss your wife, and consider yourself lucky that a good woman loves you, because that brunette married Bill Gates, and she never thinks about you.

Christmas Icons Part Four: "In Love At Christmas" Series: Elementary

You wake up with a funny feeling in your stomach which can't be explained by the need for eggs and bacon.  As Christmas approaches, school will soon be out, but not before the much-anticipated Kelloggsville Elementary Christmas Party, which of course takes place on the last day before the Christmas break.  During the party, you will exchange presents with the person whose name you drew the week before.  You drew Tom Heintzlman's name, so that was a relief, but your name was drawn by Janice D--­­; with everyone watching you will have to accept, and open a gift from a girl!   

It's December, in the year 1969; men have landed on the moon, Boeing has just introduced the 747, you've seen the new movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a drive-in theater, and The Brady Bunch is a new show on television.  [Carl Levin has been a Michigan Senator for a year, by now.]  You are all of ten years old and girls belong to The Uncharted Territories.  They are annoying in that they don't like to play army, and always walk around with the teachers during recess periods. 

There are exceptions to the non-communication rule of girls.  For example, you're friends with Sherry because she likes the vampire soap-opera, Dark Shadows, and you talk to Ruth Ann, because she talks to you.  Ruth Ann is strangely comfortable, and mostly wears blue jeans, so you're o.k. with her.  (Later that year, during The School Program, she will wear a modified high school cheerleader's outfit and do a cartwheel in a pleated skirt.  This will change your life forever, but at Christmas it hasn't happened yet.)

It is also true that you and your friend, Patrick McElhenny have argued, on and off, since first grade about who will marry Elaine, but in the four years of this exchange, nothing has ever actually been said to Elaine.  That would be crazy, of course, because she is a girl.  Somewhere in the back of your mind, you may or may not have ever wondered how the Great Barrier is breached, how an elementary boy, who knows how to keep proper distance from the mysterious creatures, progresses to the state of actually being married to one as an adult.  Conveniently, enigmas are not designed to be solved by elementary boys.  You waste no time on the logical process.  The argument with Patrick is largely objective, anyway; he says he will offer her a box of gold, and you say you will offer her a box of jewels, because everyone who has ever read about Aladdin knows that jewels are more valuable than mere gold.  No related arguments include any images whatsoever of ridiculous things like weddings or talking with girls.

So, shopping for Tom poses no problem at all; you get him some cool spy gear, which includes a plastic camera which shoots a little plastic bullet instead of taking a picture.  While shopping, mom stops to look around in the jewelry department for a few minutes.  She moves the conversation into weird questions about whether or not there is "someone else" in the school you want to get a present for.  This is tricky because she sometimes teases you about getting a girlfriend, and if you aren't careful, she will manipulate the gift shopping into a disaster.  Left to herself, mom might buy something horribly embarrassing, maybe even something sensitive; and "For Whom?" you wonder with horror.  The rules are, that you only buy a present for the person on the slip of paper.  Once again, you find yourself having to carefully explain to your ignorant parent that the school rules are sacred.  Just the person on the slip of paper, that's it.  You look at the jewelry; it's for people who are in love.  You cringe at the thought, and can already hear Tom Heintzleman laughing at you.  You can hardly believe your mother half expected you to buy something for a girl, without even drawing a name. 

The party is everything it is supposed to be.  You are at school, but aren't learning anything at all.  There is food and presents, and all of your friends are there.  The teacher doesn't get mad, not even once.  The girls are keeping their distance, excited as they are about something or other with their girlfriends.  Then it comes time for the presents.  You are preoccupied with the present you bought for Tom.  When it's his turn to open a present, he likes the bullet-packing camera, but more importantly, the other boys murmur a sigh of approval; all is well.  Only one negative incident occurs, when Kevin gives a necklace with a heart shaped pendant to Kelly.  Oh no!  What is he doing?  He's giving jewelry!  He's doomed, for sure.  The entire company of boys is visibly shaken.  He'll have to pay for this later, without a doubt.

Before you completely recover, you realize that Janice is approaching you with a wrapped present.  She is actually looking at you as she approaches.  She is wearing a dress.  Your ears grow hot as blood rushes to your head.  Nearly paralyzed, you manage at least to reach out your hands to accept the present, and tear off the wrapping.  To your consternation, she remains in front of you, uncomfortably close as you open the present.  Time itself slows down as you look slowly down at the box in your hands.  You feel as if you are frozen into a photograph, here with Janice shamelessly looking at your face, while everyone watches.  After a long moment, you recognize the gift as a model car.  One of the boys says, "It's a Jaguar!"  Normal time resumes; the moment is past, Janice happily returns to the company of girls without another word, and the party resumes.  Something beyond your ability to articulate has occurred, some awful disaster only narrowly averted.

Within a few minutes, Kevin approaches to make one of the hundreds of swaps than are managed by elementary boys every year.  Incredibly, he offers his model of the "Snapdragon," a fantasy car with a skeleton driver.  You make the swap without a thought.  In truth, you haven't any idea what a Jaguar is.  As the party is nearing its close, everyone is directed to start cleaning up.  During the course of picking up papers, you see Kevin showing the Jaguar to one of the other boys.  Just past Kevin, you see Janice looking on.  She lifts her eyes and looks at you as her face falls into an expression you have never seen before.  It's not obvious to anyone else in the room, but it slices through you like an icy knife.  Janice turns away and puts her things together, as everyone gets ready to leave.  Without even thinking about it, you rush over to Kevin and bully him into swapping back.  It's a fundamental rule of The Trade in elementary:  Any customer may switch back, without giving reason, before the end of school.  The reason is supposed to stem from second thoughts about parental reaction to a foolish trade, and has nothing to do with girls at all.  It doesn't matter; you lean on Kevin without giving a reason, which you would be hard pressed to articulate anyway.  He swaps back, partly because you are friends, and partly because you are bigger than he.  Certain that you have healed some unseen wound, you proudly line up at the door to leave.  You uncharacteristically stare at the girls, waiting for Janice to look your way.  Eventually, she does, and you forget about the non-communication rule of girls.  You quietly say, "Look, I traded back."  Your anticipation of a positive reaction is unfulfilled.  She slowly turns away without a word, her sad expression unchanged.  A moment later, the bell rings, and the anxious pack of fifth-graders charges from the gate, intent on wasting no time embracing the all-important Christmas Vacation. 

Forty-two Christmases later, including twenty-five happily married years, and the memories of raising three children, now all grown up and moved out, the only thing you remember about the Christmas Vacation of 1969 is how you assembled a little plastic Jaguar model and for reasons you did not understand, spent a whole month thinking about a girl who never spoke to you again.           

 

Christmas Icons Part Three: The "Wrong" Songs

            When I was growing up, I shared a bedroom with my brother, Mike.  He was two years my senior, and so, was my appointed mentor.  That's the way it was supposed to work:  The older brother knew more, and better.  After lights out, we talked until Mike fell asleep.  He always went first, and never took long to go.  As a kid, I was a little insomniac, sometimes unable to sleep for hours.  My memories of these times are many, but I almost always picture darkness, with Mike's disembodied voice speaking words of "wisdom" for the day.  This darkened chamber of mystical wisdom is where I learned most of the funny songs of my elementary years.  There was On Top of Old Smokey, All Covered in Blood, and Whistle While You Work, Hitler is a Jerk, and many others.  In some cases, it took years if not decades not only to understand what the subject was, but also to correct errors which were the result of the singers not grasping meaning.  For example, the Whistle While You Work… song had the name Oscallini in it, but years later I figured out it was supposed to be Mussolini.  What did we know about Mussolini in those elementary years?

            So, there were a couple of songs about the most important day of the year.  There were, of course the "regular" songs that we heard on the radio or Christmas records, and then there were the songs which came from Christmas shows on the television.  These were touchy because they often came with strong emotions we were too embarrassed to show.  For example, most of the songs from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer were too sensitive, and would surely bring mockery from everyone else in the neighborhood if we got choked up while singing.  Every time I even thought of the Island of Misfit Toys being visited at last by Santa, I got a tear in my eye; this was never o.k. in a neighborhood with a boy-to-girl ratio of more than seven-to-one.  So, the following are a couple of "classic" elementary school songs about Christmas.  (Actually, The Night Before Christmas is a poem.)  There may or may not be more lyrics available, but these snippets are what I remember:

            JINGLE BELLS

            Jingle Bells, Santa smells

            Rudolph ran away.

            Oh, what fun it is to ride

            In a brand new Chevrolet.

            'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

            'Twas the night before Christmas,

            and all through the house,

            not a creature was stirring,

            not even a rat.

            The children were all slaughtered,

            they were dead in their beds,

            and Grandma in the closet,

            without her head.

            And I on the toilet,

            with a knife in my back,

            had just settled down,

            for a long winter's crap.

            It goes without saying, that these songs are horrible, but the question is whether or not they are normal for elementary boys.  I'm no psychologist, but I understand that at that age, boys at least have an interest in far out and shocking images, so long as they are not too graphic.  This is the basic reason my wife and I did not show movies or television of any kind whatsoever to our children until they were about five years old, and nothing that could be considered to be horror until they were teenagers.  So much so, that they were all past sixteen before they choose to watch Dawn of the Dead while on a weekender with their friends up north in a family lake cottage.   They survived the ordeal, but not without  losing some sleep that week.

            I can't really discern the long term effects of repeating the "wrong" songs.  I have no preoccupation with guns, knives, or violence (unless playing on-line World of Warcraft counts).  I love traditional Christmas songs with Bing, Nat, Dean, and Frank.  I love the hymn-like tunes, such as Coventry Carol.  I might even be coaxed to admit I still feel some emotion when I think of the Island of Misfit Toys.  I am not ready to declare horror and shock to be healthy for an elementary boy, certainly not when it is accompanied by graphic Hollywood images.  If there is any developmental function for the "wrong" songs, I supposed it is more related to learning how to grab and hold the attention of peers on the playground.  I'll wager that doing character impressions would have been just as good.  Sometimes we did do Cornelius from Rudolph, shouting "Wahoo!" or saying, "Bumbles bounce!"  To this day, my family slips into communicating through movie quotes, to the confusion and amusement of friends.  Without warning, someone might ask, "What is the meaning of Christmas?"  to which the only answer can be, "Revenge! … and presents, I suppose…" 

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Wino, that is, I Mean Machinist…

Rudolph, the union machinist

had a set of Craftsman tools,

and if you every saw them,

you would say they shine like jewels.

When he had his job at GM                                         

he could buy his kids some toys;

his overtime was piling way up,

retirement would have its joys.                         

                                                 

Then one foggy Christmas Eve

the VP came to say,                                                     

"Rudolph, global markets are down,                             

you know we can't keep you around."                          

Now the parts are made in China,                                

low wages were the golden key.                                               

Rudolph's now a red nosed wino;                                             

he went down in poverty!

Christmas Icons Part Two: "First Christmas"

Christmas Icons      Part Two:    "First Christmas"

It was December 24, Christmas Eve in the year 1986.  Dorothy and I had been married for sixty-one days.  It was the year the movie Top Gun came out, and American warplanes bombed Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi's headquarters at Tripoli.  There was a space shuttle disaster, which killed seven astronauts.  There was a disaster at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl Nuclear facility which was serious enough to affect other countries.  The Bangles had the number one hit that December with "Walk Like an Egyptian."

We lived in the apartment she was already leasing, behind the mall they now call Centerpointe.  I was the only one working at the time, and Dorothy was pregnant.  My job was the one where I would mature professionally.  Recaro Seating was investing BMC with enough business to quadruple yearly sales, and I was able to take on a career's worth of hands-on education from my many visits to the Battle Creek American headquarters.  I was inexperienced, however, and so was the owners of my company, at least as far as the field of quality control was concerned.  They had never hired anyone before who didn't run machines; I was "the college kid," even though I was still only in my sophomore year at age twenty-seven.  I definitely had something to prove.  So, although I was to eventually make enough money in quality assurance that I raised three kids without Dorothy going to work, in the beginning back there in December, I was at my starting wage of $ 5.50 per hour.  After the rent and car payment, we had about a hundred dollars a week for utilities, food, and whatever else life was made up of.  Money was tight, to say the least.

I had only been at work for six months, so I was not eligible for either vacation time or year-end bonus.  When Christmas time actually rolled around, we did not have money to spend on presents.  We were at least happy that I was working.  On Christmas Eve, however, my boss walked up to me at the end of the day and handed me an envelope.  Opening it, I discovered a check for $ 250.00 marked "bonus."  The owners were good people, but they didn't hand out money carelessly.  Although my boss explained in brief that "everyone deserved some reward for a job well done that year," I knew that the owner's wife Jean had a soft spot in her heart for Dorothy and me, the newlyweds.  Earlier in the year, Jean had bought our place settings from the wedding registry, even though I had only been with the company four months.  She was a gem.

As it was the last part of the day, I rushed to my office phone to warn Dorothy we were going shopping, after all.  It was a little before four O'clock and the malls would close within a couple of hours.  I hurried home, and we got ourselves into the mall without delay.  We each took about thirty dollars and zipped off to "surf the crowd."  We split up in hopes of creating some level of surprise for Christmas morning.  I bought some perfumed powder for Dorothy.  It was vital I avoid anything made by Lanvin, as my mother had always worn My Sin.  Crossing mental images of my hot little wife with my mother could be disastrous, or at least confusing, so I chose something by Chanel.  Before I left the mall, I popped into a record store and bought an album by the Gaithers, the "Welcome Back Home" album, which was just out.  We had been able to attend a concert earlier that year.  Out of all the music I have ever heard live, the Gaithers had the most precise vocals of all.  They had absolutely astounded me at the time.      

On Christmas morning, we opened our presents.  Dorothy gave me wool cap, which was made in Scotland that I still have to this day.  Sometime later at work, my English boss told me that it was called a "rattin' cap," because that's what is worn in England for rat hunting.  (Yeah, I'm trying to picture it, too).  Evidently, it is a time honored activity to go out (somewhere where there are rats) and blast away at them with a shotgun, while wearing a Scottish cap.  Just last year I was walking around the college campus and someone good-naturedly accused me of trying to be "hip" with my rattin' cap; (the other one we bought later).  I hadn't realized that the wool cap is an "in" item. 

When I opened my other present from Dorothy, I saw there was a mistake; I had opened the present for her, or so I thought.  After a moment of confusion, and we opened the remaining present, I we saw what had happened.  In an hour and a half of individual shopping, Dorothy and I had both gone into the same record store and bought the exact same album for each other unknowingly!  We laughed and considered it a good sign for the future.  Now that I sit back and think about it, I miss the days when such Christian music was fresh, and I long for our old tunes.  It doesn't really work to play very many of them now, though.  There is something vital about listening to music when it's set in its own time, accompanied by the activities we were doing while listening to it.  I don't long for months of pregnancy or the toddler stages, or the old factory floor, but ever so often, when some key trigger stirs old memories, and brings me back for a few moments, I savor it until it dissipates, like some very fine spirits, and I am glad for the reminder of who we are and where we have come from.

Christmas Icons: Part One

Christmas Icons      Part One:  "Santa Claus Never Came"

(Warning:  Spoiler Alert!)

There is no Santa Claus.  There is a North Pole, but it's just a barren icy landscape that in a few years will be the location of the most militarily strategic body of water on Earth.  There are Reindeer, but the people who keep them must slaughter them for meat and fur in order to survive.  (They also drink their blood.)  The Mongolian and Siberian herders are gradually losing their way of life, and soon there will no more reindeer than there are elves.  There is no magical toy factory; toys are made at Mattel.  It's the world's largest manufacturer, with sales over six billion dollars and 32,000 employees.  Mattel's website indicates where the "magic" happens:  "Mattel's manufacturing operations are located in China, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, and Thailand."  Ho.  Ho.  Ho.

Let me explain; I am not sitting up late with any strong holiday libations, nor am I depressed.  I have simply rejected the cult based on the cheerful little home invader.  Modern belief does not do legends justice.  Not that there is actually a very long legendary tradition of Santa Claus; in most world locations, the legend quickly becomes religious as one traces the history, and the current American model is, as almost everyone knows, a creation of 1920's Coca-Cola marketing.  Snopes disagrees, but only in the details; my point is that Santa emerged very recently.  (http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp)  For old tales, you can't beat Charles Perrault, author of Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots) and La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard).  Even he wrote as recently as the late seventeenth century.  To find seriously old tales, one must search the more nationalistic or religious themes, but that's another story and I digress.

In my own mental version, the fur clad, diminutive king of the elves is supposed to make his visits by getting around tyrants installed in local governments, to deliver toys and other necessary items of encouragement, such as cured meats, coats, boots, and maybe a short barrel of beer (considered to be food by most of the world through most of history).  He is someone who comes in when circumstances look bleak and delivers hope in the form of hard goods to the lowly and downtrodden.  We are not short of the downtrodden in these tough times.  When is he going to show?  And when he does, what will he bring?  Toys?  What do we need with more toys?  (The short barrel of beer is just plain, wishful thinking)  

Well, and maybe sometimes some of us could use a choo-choo, or a scale model of the starship Enterprise that comes with a light that installs inside so it can light up at night when you go to bed.  Yeah.  But where was he when I needed him, huh?  Don't lecture me on why I got into trouble; I know why I got into trouble.  (Remember, I was up to $160 per hour before I descended to 0$ per hour in the Dot-Com-Y2K-911 crash in 2000-2003)  But, as I said, Santa Claus never came to town.  I struggled, Dorothy and the kids supported me completely, and just about a full year after we should have understood the writing on the wall, we bailed out, needing help even to return from Europe with nothing but ten boxes of possessions.  I remember one doleful evening near Christmas, when a kindly man came to "mark" our possessions.  In Germany, when you don’t pay your bills, ("can't" = "won't" = "don't"  in Deutschland) an official comes to your home and tags valuable items with a prominent red sticker, which is illegal to remove.  After a month or so, if you don't pay, they send someone else to collect your stuff.  The idea is that the almighty German peer pressure will get your ass moving.  When your friend in Germany sees that you are either clumsy, stupid, or lazy, he will invariably offer either a helping hand, a kick in the pants, or a lengthy lecture on standard behavior.  The red sticker is the government's way of encouraging your best friends to encourage good behavior in you.  Well, this guy came with a tag gun, but he couldn't find a single valuable item in the apartment!  He was a little perturbed, but when we told him our story of how we came to Europe in order to witness to the Gospel, (albeit with a naïve attitude), his face sank.  The more we were cheerful, in spite of everything, the sadder he looked.

(I'm coming to the point now):  Under my leadership, and Dorothy's indefatigable buoyancy, we celebrated the Christmas season each year for the entire wonderful four weeks of Bavarian Advent.  Personally, I think it was easy in such a place that seriously knows how to put on a festive occasion.  Now that's another story that I promise to tell another time.  Every tiny thing we did, from putting candy and nuts in the shoes for St. Nicholaus Day, to the many visits to the Christkindlmarkt, (Christ Child Market) also called Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market), stuffing down currywurst (simple sausage and curry sauce) while shivering in the cold, or standing in the crowd in front of the Karstadt store window display, was a celebration of its own.  We celebrated the coming of Christ, we celebrated our family, and we even celebrated our pirate style of life in Germany.  The most important part was, that when I became depressed over what I could not buy for those I loved the most, my family reacted as one:  They got pissed.  (That's "extreme anger" in American Colloquial; "pissed" means "drunk" in most of Great Britain)  We all believed in what we were doing, and we all believed that our togetherness, that the miza za pet ("table for five") we talked so much about was of supreme importance.  If I was going to be depressed in the face of our vast wealth, lacking only money, it would ruin everything.  Dorothy and I had been married for sixteen years, and Amanda was fifteen, Candace fourteen, and Ted thirteen years old.  They all looked to me to continue sending the message:  Our decisions had been good ones for us as a family, and if anything negative happened, it was either a challenge to be overcome or a message from God.  We were pirates.  Not the toothless, immoral barbarian kind; we were adventurers who lived by our own compass, and as often as not, saw the unknown as opportunity for adventure.  We accepted difficulties as the occasional natural outcome of our life on the high seas.  What was not accepted was a wishy-washy captain who had no stomach for extremity.  They would follow me and do their part only so long as I stood up on the poop deck with a set jaw and determined glare.  We would sail on, and weather the storm; it was the only way to go forward! 
 

To this very day, my kids who are now all past twenty-one talk about our adventures as a vital part of who we are.  That is not to say they liked everything about our journeys, quite to the contrary.  But they all retain a solid sense of strength in adversity, and can each raise any of life's simplest joys to festive status at any time.  While listening to my kids talking this week about getting some sort of "real" Christmas tree, because they know I love it, I realized with sudden clarity that they were visited by Santa Claus when they were kids.  They did have someone to encourage them, regardless of difficulties.  They did have special occasions and festive celebrations.  I was in the bathroom, shaving the next day.  I looked at the face in the mirror, covered with a white shaving cream beard, and in a voice worthy of Darth Vader, I said out loud, "I am Santa Claus."

Fear of Flying

I hadn't been on a flight in almost twenty years; I was not a happy man to be standing at the gate for the first leg of a trip to Europe.  My wife and I had decided that we would move to Europe and participate in evangelistic outreach to people in and around Germany.  In order to set-up our home and gain employment on the continent, it was necessary that I go first and make arrangements.  If successful, then upon my return I would prepare the family to move across the ocean.

Dorothy and I had been married for ten years, and in that time had not been apart overnight at all, except when she was birthing babies or attending a women's group overnighter.  All in all, we had been apart no more than about six days total.  I was now going away for an entire month.  I would not be in town at a meeting, or even in the region at a conference.  I would be more than six thousand miles away in countries with languages I did not speak, and a questionable sense of direction.  It was a tense and tearful goodbye scene.

As I boarded the relatively small aircraft bound for Chicago, my anxiety matured into cold fear.  I tried to take an aisle seat, but the gentleman in my row insisted I have the window.  I could not explain my anxiety because he had only a couple hundred words of in his English vocabulary, and my Italian was non-existent. 

As the plane taxied to the runway and took off in a burst of acceleration I did not remember well, I tried to find some calm.  I looked out of the window and found that it was less scary than leaning back in my seat with my eyes closed in desperate prayer with one hand on my pulse.  Feeling a very slight encouragement, I looked around the airplane cabin a little.  The Italian gentleman was alert and had a friendly expression.  He greeted me in English, heavily accented, honestly just like in the movies.  The conversation was utterly basic, and we probably should not have tried to have a conversation, but I we weren't going anywhere and I felt a little better when I was talking to him.

After some struggling, I got him to understand that I was going to Slovenia to work in a church.  I could not find the words to correct his belief that I was a priest.  He related some form of understanding and approval of Slovenia, but I did not discern any details.  After some time, he saw that I was moving to Europe, and did not plan to live in the United States anymore.  When he said, "It is good you leaving America because is better in Europe, eh?"  When I saw that the sum total of his understanding was that I did not like the United States, I realized I would not be able to make him understand anything, though I did see the humor in it.  When I settled to face the rest of the flight I was startled to find that I hadn't been aware of any fear for the duration of the difficult conversation.  I had been too focused on the task of making my neighbor understand me to think about the flight.  Now it was more than halfway to Chicago and I wasn't scared anymore.  I mused that when flying I should look around for an alert foreigner, to relieve my fear of flying.

Lunch

Go to Work, and Don't Forget Your Lunch

Dad was a working man; he had a metal lunch box.  There are other kinds of jobs, of course, but as a kid, I had the idea from somewhere that men who carried metal lunchboxes were the core layer of American society.  I often looked forward to the day when I too could carry a metal lunch box to work.  Sometimes, mom helped us play "work."  She lined up the kitchen chairs in the living room with sheets over them to form a tunnel we could crawl through to the corner where a blanket formed a tent of sorts.  She packed some food for us in paper lunch bags.  We took out lunches and crawled through the tunnel to "work," which actually amounted to us eating our lunch.

My first "real" job was with Arrow Door.  I had worked for a time in a pharmacy, but there was no opportunity for carrying a lunch to work, as it was part time.  At Arrow Door, I was on an eight hour shift, six in the morning to three in the afternoon.  I needed a lunch.  Unfortunately, I was still living at home, so mom pitched in and make me lunch every day.  She packed in a paper lunch bag.  A little later, I was promoted to junior management, and going out to eat for an hour took the place of the brown bag.  I was going in the wrong direction.  After about six years, I left Arrow Door; my plan was to get back into college.  My plan was not well thought out, and after a year, I needed to work again.  (The Reagan Era was a different time, and school loans were not what they are today)  I applied around and got a call from Haven-Busch, a steel erector facility in Grandville.  By then I was living on my own, but I immediately went back to mom and dad's house to borrow a lunch box.  A metal lunch box.  Dad didn't mind, he had a couple of extras in the back cupboard.  He let me have a black metal lunch box with a big green Philadelphia Eagles sticker on it.  I was very excited.

After my interview and job acceptance, I found that, not only did I need to bring lunch, I needed steel toe work shoes, and even better than that, I was issued a hard  hat.  I bought a couple of flannel shirts to complete the outfit.  At work, we wore safety glasses and thick denim aprons, wore thick gloves in addition to our steel toe shoes with special metatarsal guard and the awesome hard hat.  Every time I walked in the front entrance, I saw dad walk off in another time, when we dropped him off at the old Reynolds Metals facility when I was small enough to wear pajamas with feet in them.  He always had his lunch box with him; now I had mine.

It probably doesn't matter that the job was not a good arrangement for me.  I was trying to go to school, and I was on the most evil Second Shift, from three in the afternoon to eleven at night.  Most of the jobs in the facility were welding related, a skill for which I had zero training; there was absolutely no patience for a rank novice, so there would be no job openings for me, past the one I hired in for.  Of all things, I was the assistant to the guy who ran a punch, which was irrelevant.  This important thing about the guy was that he was the union steward.  Now this was still the early eighties, and working with the union steward meant one thing:  he was never in a hurry, ever.  I was the assistant to an employee who really didn't need one.  I followed him when he looked at his schedule.  And when he looked for a stack.  And when he brought the stack over with an overhead crane.  And when he lifted one beam and put it in the machine, (though I did get to help him line it up).  I followed him when he punched one hole, and retraced his steps in reverse, putting the beam with a hole in it back where it was before.  It was boring as hell.

That summer, I met Dorothy, my wife-to-be.  I quit the steel erectors in favor of a quality manager job at a machining shop in Grandville, where I stayed for seven years and grew up professionally.  There would be no more steel toe shoes or hard hats.  After only three months in the "real man's job" I had fulfilled my childhood dream, however, and I didn't need to overdo it.  I had gone to work, flannel shirt and all.  I smelled the acetylene and had seen the flashes of arc welding.  I had sweated my ass off underneath the most extensive protective layer imaginable, but I was fulfilled.  I had taken my lunch to work in a metal box.