A Simple Christmas Read online

  To my sister and me, he was “Uncle Garvin.” He was a lifelong bachelor who lived by himself in Houston, Texas. He had spent most of his career as an accountant for Armour Meat Company, and I suppose because he lived very frugally and never married or had kids, he kept most of what he earned for himself. He bought stock in the Gillette Company and kept up every day with the stock market. Although he led a generally simple life, he wore a suit, a starched white shirt, and a tie wherever he went. That meant he really stood out when he came to Hope for a visit, because no one in my entire family wore white starched shirts, let alone ties or suits.

  Uncle Garvin didn’t own a car, so he walked or took a city bus pretty much wherever he wanted to go in Houston. When he came to visit us, he almost always came on the Continental Trailways bus, which stopped only a couple of blocks from our house. When he arrived, either he’d walk from the bus stop or one of my parents would be waiting at the station to pick him up and drive him back to our house.

  Uncle Garvin came to visit every Christmas, at least once during the summer, and often at Thanksgiving. Since he was more like our grandfather than an uncle, his visits were always special and always predictable. Within an hour of his arrival, he would walk to the neighborhood Kroger grocery store less than a block from our house and buy a whole chicken. That wasn’t because he needed to buy his own food; there would be no “Starvin’ Garvin” at our house! On the contrary, this was his not-so-subtle way of telling my mother what he wanted for dinner his first night with us—her fried chicken.

  Don’t think for a minute we minded a bit. To this day, I have never had fried chicken any better than what my mother made. If Colonel Sanders had had her recipe, he would have been a four-star general! Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, navy beans (this was a must-have!), and homemade biscuits with sweet tea were as predictable for Uncle Garvin’s first meal at our house as Christmas coming on December 25 each year.

  Even when he was just hanging out at our house during the day, Uncle Garvin still wore a starched white shirt and a tie. I thought that meant he must be important and intelligent, since he was the only person we knew who dressed up for work every day. Most of the men in my extended family didn’t even own a suit, and those who did wore it only to funerals. When you saw any of my male relatives in a suit, you didn’t ask what important event they were going to attend, you simply asked who had died and hoped it wasn’t someone that you knew very well. Death in the family always meant two things—men who looked ridiculously uncomfortable and out of place in a suit would try to wear one, and people from the church and neighborhood would bring over a big bowl of potato salad. This was so predictable that when someone died, we rarely used words like dead, death, and passed away. We just said it was “potato salad time.”

  We usually knew what time the bus that brought Uncle Garvin “home” for Christmas was supposed to arrive, so sometime before that, my sister and I would park ourselves in the front yard and wait and watch for Uncle Garvin to appear. It was a big deal when one of us saw him first and started screaming, “Uncle Garvin! Uncle Garvin!” He and the well-traveled but stately brown suitcase in his hand were a welcome sight for us. These were the days long before luggage had wheels, and his suitcase was made of tan leather, which alone was reason enough to think he was pretty important. The only suitcase we had in our family was an old, beat-up one made of a stiff card boardlike material. We never used it because we never really went anywhere to stay overnight. Uncle Garvin even had a luggage tag with his name on it, which was a sure sign that he was somebody special.

  Uncle Garvin’s visits meant that there would be an adult in the house all day, even when the parents were both at work. Other than his absolute and unbreakable appointment to watch Perry Mason on the old black-and-white TV, there was lots of time for us to challenge him to countless games of checkers. I truly believe that much of my own competitive spirit was developed during those checkers sessions with Uncle Garvin, because the old man didn’t really understand how impolite it was to beat the daylights out of a sensitive little boy like me in a board game. Uncle Garvin played to win, and he usually did, until, after getting beat by him over and over, I got better and eventually even learned to beat him occasionally. At the time, I hated that he made easy play of me and actually seemed to relish beating a little kid in checkers, but in reality, he did me a great favor by making me hungry for victory and giving me the greatest thrill of all when I finally achieved it. This might be hard to believe for many of the hand-wringing whiners out there today who are so afraid of injuring a child’s self-esteem that they’ve created a society in which “everyone gets a trophy” and no one loses no matter how little they practiced or how poorly they performed. This is the recipe for creating incompetent CEOs who, when their companies fail miserably, rush to the government to rescue them because they are “too big to fail.” It’s also created total idiots in government who think they are doing these poor businesses, as well as the rest of us, a favor by bailing out the losers at the expense of the winners so everything will be “fair.” Call me crazy, but I believe there’s something to be said for competition and for rewarding hard work, talent, and intelligence instead of laziness, incompetence, and stupidity.

  Not that Uncle Garvin was mindfully trying to build in me an obsession with excellence or a hunger to succeed, but he stoked a fire in me to learn from failure and to ultimately believe that my greatest victories were the ones that followed a string of failures against the same foe. I’m lucky. I had someone who taught me this valuable lesson as a kid. Some parents today try to shield their children from the “pain and trauma” of losing. I don’t think they realize that no matter how hard they try, these kids are going to grow up one day and learn this lesson the hard way. But by that time they’ll be unprepared to face failure. God help us!

  Since Uncle Garvin didn’t own a car, he walked a lot. It’s not like he couldn’t afford a car, but I think in his mind, it was an expense he could do without. When he was at our house, it meant that we walked a lot too, because if we were going to hang out with him, we would spend a good part of the day walking around town to do whatever errands there were to do.

  A part of Uncle Garvin’s daily routine was walking to Jack’s News Stand on the corner of First Street and Main just across the street from the Missouri Pacific train depot in Hope. Jack’s was a grimy little store that always smelled like cigars and fresh popcorn. Cigars and popcorn don’t make the most desirable aroma, but they sure create a memorable one! Jack’s was Hope’s main place to buy newspapers other than the local daily paper, The Hope Star, which was so small that instead of being rolled, it was often folded wallet size so it could be thrown easily by the kids on bikes who delivered the paper each afternoon. To get “real” papers, like the ones from Little Rock, Shreveport, or Texarkana, one had to go to Jack’s. This was also true for magazines like Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News & World Report, although in those days, more people read Life, Look, and Reader’s Digest (two of which don’t even exist now). Jack’s also had racy magazines like Playboy, which were kept behind the counter. Young guys knew they were there, but they also knew that if they attempted to buy one in the name of their “dad” or “older brother,” Jack, the proprietor, would simply ask “Dad’s” name (though he probably already knew it, since Hope was so small) and pick up the phone to call to see if he really wanted his son to pick up a Playboy. The only future in that exchange would be an old-fashioned “whipping” with a belt or, even worse, one of the hideous green tree branches affectionately known as switches. I’m sure I’m offending the sensibilities of those who think corporal punishment a form of barbarism, but it never occurred to me at the time to think of myself as being abused. I was simply experiencing my early indoctrination into my father’s form of patriotism—true patriotism—he laid on the stripes and I saw stars.

  After we walked to Jack’s so my uncle could pick up a copy of the New York Times, Houston Post, or Shreveport Times to check
the stock market and get the news, we’d walk back home and sometimes stop at Joe’s City Bakery for a chocolate-covered doughnut. On the way back, since the fire station where my dad worked was only two blocks from our house, we’d usually stop there to see him if he was working that day. On afternoon walks, we sometimes walked the eight or ten blocks to the local Dairy Queen, which meant a soft-serve ice cream cone.

  It was fun walking with Uncle Garvin because he didn’t poke around. His walks were brisk, and walking around Hope with a man all dressed up in a suit and, usually, a light tan fedora made us feel like real big shots. He even wore what we called old man socks, which were actually midcalf silk stockings, but since all we knew were white cotton socks (even with jackets and ties), even those seemed pretty upscale.

  The visits with Uncle Garvin were some of our favorite times of the year, but they weren’t without some moments of frustration. He was more predictable than the Cubs losing to the Cardinals, and because he was an eccentric and lifelong bachelor, he was used to having things his way and on his own terms. He wanted his meals prepared so specifically that one would have thought he was ordering from the menu at the Four Seasons, and we always watched what he wanted to watch on TV, which meant that during his visits, Popeye cartoons and The Three Stooges had to give way to The Edge of Night, the evening news, and the aforementioned Perry Mason. Years later, as an adult, my wife and I would come to love watching Perry Mason reruns late at night, but I confess that it took me a while to get over my loathing of the show that I had been force-fed by Uncle Garvin when I would have rather been watching The Little Rascals.

  It seemed that the regular visits from Uncle Garvin would always be a part of our lives, especially at Christmas. We always looked forward to Uncle Garvin’s Christmas visits most because they were the longest and my sister and I were out of school and had more time to be home. Plus, Uncle Garvin would always give us a five-dollar bill as a gift, which for us was a lot of cold cash to have, since back then a movie ticket only cost twenty-five cents and a hamburger at Dad’s Hamburger Stand only cost a dime.

  Uncle Garvin was as much a part of Christmas for us as the tree and the ornaments. That is, until the Christmas of 1967.

  In the fall of 1967, I noticed that my mother and dad had several phone calls with Uncle Garvin. That was unusual because in those days most of the communication between Uncle Garvin and my mother was through typed letters, his typed on old-fashioned tissue-thin typing paper on an old Underwood Five machine, and my mother’s also banged out on an Underwood with a hand-operated carriage return and a little bell that rang at the end of a line of type. Long-distance phone calls were rare at my house and were done by dialing zero on the phone and telling the operator, “I’d like to make a long-distance call,” which sounded about as important as launching a satellite into orbit. Receiving a long-distance call was just as big a deal, and whoever answered the phone would run about the house shouting, “Long distance! Long distance!” All of this seems so long ago in the age of cell phones, instant messaging, and text messaging, but back then, the fact that a simple voice call from another city was occurring seemed like a really big deal that stopped everything in its tracks.

  A few of those calls, more letters than usual, and worried looks on my mother’s face finally culminated in my parents’ sitting down with my sister and me and giving us news that would forever change our lives and our Christmases.

  Uncle Garvin had cancer.

  Cancer is a horrible word now, but in 1967, it was pretty much the same as death. When we heard of people getting cancer, we never asked, “Did they catch it early enough?” but rather, “How long does he have?”

  My mother told us that all those calls and letters were not only about the fact that Uncle Garvin had been diagnosed with cancer but also about what to do about it. The good news was that he lived in Houston, home to some of the world’s best healthcare specialists as well as the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. The bad news was that his doctors had told him that his lymphoma was incurable and none of their treatments would help him.

  My mother told us that Uncle Garvin would be coming to live with us full time because he had no place to go and would need increasing care during whatever time he had left.

  Our house wasn’t very large to begin with, so having him come to live meant we had to make some major adjustments to accommodate more than the usual Christmas visit. My parents moved from their room into my sister’s room, and she and I shared space in the attic, which had been somewhat walled off to create a makeshift room. There was a partition that gave us somewhat separate spaces, but we had very little privacy.

  Having a dying man come to live with us meant much more to my sister and me than just a move to the attic. We could no longer have friends over because it might disturb Uncle Garvin, and we had to cease playing music at high volume. By this time, I was very much into my guitar, playing with a band, and loving not having parents home in the afternoons so I could play loudly, so this was a very hard transition for me. It also meant that we’d have to help out more around the house, and we’d also have to assist in caregiving once we got home from school and before our parents could be home.

  Instead of taking the bus to our house like he usually did, Uncle Garvin flew from Houston to Texarkana that November, and my dad drove the thirty miles to the airport to pick him up and bring him to what would be his home for the last few months of his life. When the car pulled into our driveway, we rushed out to meet him, and from that very first moment, I knew things weren’t the same. While he was clearly trying to act chipper, there was a pained expression in his face that I had never seen, and he seemed frail. The confidence he had always exuded in his upright posture and meticulous grooming weren’t as evident, and that would be the best he looked until the day he died.

  My mother, of course, prepared the normal welcome-home dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and all the accompaniments, and this time Uncle Garvin didn’t even have to stop at the store to ensure the menu. My sister and I had been told over and over again not to overload him with questions, especially about his cancer, but to try to just act like everything was normal.

  From the very first meal, however, there was nothing normal about it. He had come with two suitcases this time instead of one, and many of his other things were on their way in a Bekins moving truck that would arrive a few days later. After he put his things in his room, we all gathered at the kitchen table for our first meal together as a now-extended family.

  We had barely gotten under way with loading our plates and starting to eat when I heard Uncle Garvin call my mother’s name. I saw a strange look on his face and sat stunned as he tried unsuccessfully to hold back vomit. After a scramble to get a pan, a bucket, a trash can—anything—I saw something I’d never seen before in this man of strength and steely resolve. He cried.

  And inside, so did I.

  Other relatives had died, but most of them were more distant—great-uncles or great-aunts who were old and passed away, and a few younger ones who died suddenly of a heart attack or even in a car wreck. Yet in all those instances, we didn’t really see the process of death—just the aftermath. Even on the death of my dad’s aunt Clara, who committed suicide, we learned what happened from our parents, but in a sanitized version, and while we went to the funeral home for the obligatory visitation and then to the funeral, the whole process was rather calm even though surreal and unsettling. This was different. Death didn’t get announced to us at breakfast one morning or after a phone call, and we weren’t shielded from any of the grim details. We would watch as death slowly took each bit of strength and dignity from a man who had always represented to us nothing but strength and dignity.

  I will never forget the look of humiliation on my uncle’s face after that moment at the dinner table. If he had ever had a moment of weakness or fear or vulnerability, we’d never seen it, and he was clearly embarrassed that he had ruined a meal for us and had been unable to maintain his rigid
and erudite Methodist deportment.

  He lost more than his dinner that night. He lost what he valued more than his Gillette stock—he lost his independence. And I lost more than the privacy of a room; I lost my childhood innocence.

  I had always envied my Uncle Garvin because of his stubborn independence. Since he had no wife or kids, he answered to no one except himself. If he wanted to go somewhere, do something, or buy something, he only had to take his own counsel. I always thought he had it great, but that night I realized that he also had something I’d never known before—he had loneliness.

  It had never occurred to me before that being independent and unencumbered by other people’s schedules, likes and dislikes, and needs also meant not having the stability of knowing that there would be someone around to share your burdens or help shoulder your load.

  My parents hired a young woman named Margaret Wilson to come and help take care of my uncle during the day when they were working and we were at school. She would come in the mornings and leave not too long after my sister and I came home. After she left, it was my sister’s and my responsibility to take care of things until one of our parents got home. We loved Margaret. She was afraid of nothing, full of spunk and inexhaustible joy, and as a bonus, she was a wonderful cook. That was helpful to my uncle but also took a big burden off my mother. If Margaret had to leave early, my sister and I would prepare meals, clean, and provide care.