All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (16 page)

T
HE
G
REAT
H
EATHEN

“J
ESUS WAS A
J
EW.
” This is my father’s voice. He’s acting as a theological matador to my mother while she charged around the arena of our living room getting ready for the Christmas competition.

“Jesus was a Jew, dear. He wasn’t a Christian, dear. And he wasn’t born on December twenty-fifth, dear. Jesus is dead, dear. And he isn’t coming back, dear. So calm down and shut up, dear.”

My mother would retreat from the room crying, and my father would go back to reading his newspaper in peace, which is all he wanted in the first place. Peace on earth—beginning in our living room this evening.

He once asked me, “Son, do you know why God didn’t have Jesus get married?”

“No, why?”

“Because having him crucified once was enough.”

My father was a born-once-and-once-is-enough heathen.

My mother was a born-again-and-again-and-again supplicant of the Southern Baptist Church. There was a brick wall between them on the subject of religion—built and buttressed with bitterness over the years.

Every December I heard my father exclaim, “Jesus was a Jew, dear,” and lay out his theological land mines. My mother would sob, “You’re going to burn in Hell,” and flee the room.

That’s how I knew Christmas was coming.

Ding-a-ling ding ding.

In the late afternoon of a windy, cold December day—in front of the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in Waco, Texas, a middle-aged man in suit, tie, overcoat, and Stetson hat stands by a red steel tripod from which hangs a black iron soup kettle.

An eight-year-old kid, bundled up against the cold, stands beside the man. The kid is working up a little rhythm with a small brass bell. This is the first year the kid has been allowed to ring the bell. Warned by the man not to do anything silly, he is trying to mix joy with the necessary reverence required of one who has been entrusted with a serious job.

Ding-a-ling ding ding.

I am that kid. The man is my father.

For a couple of hours we are the Salvation Army.

My father was not a Christian. At least not by the standards of the Salvation Army, the Southern Baptist Church, or my mother. He was a heathen in their eyes and proud of it. So it was puzzling to me that the Great Heathen would work for the Salvation Army year after year as long as he lived. I never asked why. He never explained. But every year he was there.

Now I know the explanation lay in something he often said to me: “It doesn’t matter what you say you believe—it only matters what you do.”

After my father died his sister told me that their family home had burned down when they were children, leaving them destitute. The Salvation Army came to the rescue. My aunt said their family was so humiliated about their poverty and plight that they never talked about it. If it had not been for the Salvation Army, the family could not have stayed together. The Salvos practiced what they preached.

Now I understood why my father and I were there at the kettle every year.

Simple. We owed the pot. Do unto others . . .

The Great Heathen said I didn’t have to be a Christian or a Jew to do right.

Ding-dang-ding-dang-ding-dang-dong!

H
ONG
D
UC

A S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
it was, some days before Christmas in 1979. With rain, with wind, with cold. Wintersgloom. Things-to-do list was long and growing like a persistent mold. Temper: short. Bio-index: negative. Horoscope reading suggested caution. And the Sunday paper suggested dollars, death, and destruction as the day’s litany. O tidings of comfort and joy, fa la la la la!

This holy hour of Lordsdaybliss was jarred by a pounding at the door. Now what? Deep sigh. Opening it, resigned to accept whatever bad news lies in wait, I am nonplussed. A rather small person in a cheap Santa Claus mask, carrying a large brown paper bag outthrust: “TRICK OR TREAT!” Santa Mask shouts. What? “TRICK OR TREAT!” Santa Mask hoots again. Tongue-tied, I stare at this apparition. He shakes the bag at me, and dumbly I fish out my wallet and find a dollar to drop into the bag.

The mask is lifted, revealing an Asian kid with a ten-dollar grin taking up most of his face. “Wanta hear some caroling?” he asks, in singsong English.

I know him now. He belongs to a family settled into the neighborhood by the Quakers last year. Boat people. Vietnamese, I believe. Refugees. He stopped by at Halloween with his sisters and brothers, and I filled their bags. Hong Duc is his name—he’s maybe eight. At Halloween he looked like a Wise Man, with a bathrobe on and a dishtowel around his head.

“Wanta hear some caroling?”

I nod, envisioning an octet of urchin refugees hiding in the bushes ready to join their leader in uplifted song. “Sure, where’s the choir?”

“I’m it,” says he.

And he launched forth with an up-tempo chorus of “Jingle Bells,” at full lung power, followed by an equally enthusiastic rendering of what I swear sounded like “Hark, the Hairy Angels Sing.” And finally, a soft-voiced, reverential singing of “Silent Night.” Head back, eyes closed, from the bottom of his heart he poured out the last strains of “Sleep in heavenly peace” into the gathering night.

Wet-eyed, dumbstruck by his performance, I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped that into the paper bag. In return he produced half a candy cane from his pocket and passed it solemnly to me. Flashing the ten-dollar grin, he turned and ran from the porch, shouted “GOD BLESS YOU” and “TRICK OR TREAT,” and was gone.

Who was that masked kid?

Hong Duc, the one-man choir, delivering Christmas door to door.

I confess that I’m usually a little confused about Christmas. It never has made a lot of sense to me. Christmas is unreal. Ever since I got the word about Santa Claus, I’ve been a closet cynic at heart. Singing about riding in a one-horse open sleigh is ludicrous. I’ve never seen one, much less ridden in one. Never roasted chest-nuts by an open fire. Wouldn’t know how to if I had one, and I hear they’re no big deal anyway. Wandering Wise Men raise my suspicions, and shepherds who spend their lives hanging about with sheep are a little strange. Never seen a flying angel, either, and my experience with virgins is really limited. The appearance of a newborn king doesn’t interest me; I’d just as soon settle for some other president. Babies and reindeer stink. I’ve been around them both, and I know. The little town of Bethlehem is a war zone.

Singing about things I’ve never seen or done or wanted. Dreaming of a white Christmas I’ve never known. Christmas isn’t very real. And yet, and yet . . . I’m too old to believe in it, and too young to give up on it. Too cynical to get into it, and too needy to stay out of it.

Trick or treat!

After I shut the door came near-hysteria—laughter and tears and that funny feeling you get when you know that once again Christmas has come to you. Right down the chimney of my midwinter hovel comes Saint Hong Duc. He is confused about the details, like me, but he is very clear about the spirit of the season. It’s an excuse to let go and celebrate—to throw yourself into Holiday with all you have, wherever you are.

Where’s the choir? “I’m it,” says he. Where’s Christmas? I ask myself. I’m it, comes the echo. I’m it. Head back, eyes closed, voice raised in whatever song I can muster the courage to sing.

God, it is said, once sent a child upon a starry night, that the world might know hope and joy. I am not sure that I quite believe that, or that I believe in all the baggage heaped upon that story during two thousand years. But I am sure that I believe in Hong Duc, the one-man Christmas choir, shouting “TRICK OR TREAT!” door to door. I don’t know who or what sent him. But I know I am tricked through the whimsical mischief of fate into joining the choir that sings of joy and hope. Through a child, I have been treated to Christmas.

B
RASS
R
ULE

A
ND SPEAKING OF GIFTS,
I should tell you a rule. It is not my rule, necessarily. It came from a very grumpy-looking man at a holiday office party. A man coming down with a full-blown case of Scrooge-itis. He had just unwrapped his dinky little present from under the office tree. In tones of amused sorrow he said to nobody in particular:

“You know, it’s not true that what counts is the thought and not the gift. It just isn’t true. My mother was pulling my leg on that one. I have collected so much gift-wrapped trash over the years from people who copped out and hurriedly bought a little plastic cheapie to give under the protective flag of good
thoughts.
I tell you, it
is
the gift that counts. Or rather, people who think good
thoughts
give good
gifts.
It ought to be a rule—the
Brass Rule of
Gift Exchange.”

And he stomped off toward a garbage can carrying his little gift as if it were a dead roach.

Well, maybe so. It’s a kind of harsh judgment, and cuts a little close for comfort. But the spirit of the season has been clear for a long time. God, who, it is said, started all this, cared enough to send the very best. On more than one occasion. And the Wise Men did not come bearing tacky knickknacks. Even old Santa, when he’s making his list, is checking it twice. And the Angels came bringing Good News, which was not about a half-price sale.

To be honest, I do know what I want someone to give me for Christmas. I’ve known since I was forty years old. Wind-up mechanical toys that make noises and go round and round and do funny things. No batteries. Toys that need me to help them out from time to time. The old-fashioned painted tin ones I had as a child. That’s what I want. Nobody believes me. It’s what I want, I tell you.

Well, okay, that’s close, but not quite exactly it. It’s delight and simplicity that I want. Foolishness and fantasy and noise. Angels and miracles and wonder and innocence and magic. That’s closer to what I want.

It’s harder to talk about, but what I
really
,
really
,
really
want for Christmas is just this:

I want to be five years old again for an hour.

I want to laugh a lot and cry a lot.

I want to be picked up and rocked to sleep in someone’s arms, and carried up to bed just one more time.

I know what I really want for Christmas: I want my child-hood back.

Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn’t make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? Christmas is about a child of long ago and far away, and Christmas is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded, and vulnerable to joy. A child who does not need or want or understand gifts of socks or pot holders.

People who think good thoughts give good gifts. Period.

The Brass Rule is true.