Snow Day Read online

  “Look, Daddy!” he said. “I can’t fill it all the way, ’cause I’m small.”

  It was a good point, and I said so. I tousled his hair and gave him a pat on the rump for a job well done.

  Sara was not in her room, which was not a good sign. Hide-and-seek was a favorite tactic of my daughter’s whenever she knew she had done something wrong. Her trash bag sat in the middle of the bedroom. Full, from the look of it. I walked over and peered inside.

  Tiny dresses and blankets were neatly folded and piled, along with a hanger or two she had missed. But no stuffed animals. I was ready to pronounce judgment and sentencing for disobeying me until I thought that perhaps the animals were in the bottom rather than on top; Sara had chosen to get the worst over with first. I shoved my arm down into the bag and rooted around. Sure enough, about midway through the bag cotton and polyester gave way to fur and felt.

  I took out the clothes to see what she had chosen to give away. There was a Winnie the Pooh that had long ceased to capture her imagination, a stuffed pig she hadn’t seen since it had been in her crib, and an assortment of giraffes and zebras. Not bad, I thought. Then the familiar sight of a brown arm caught my eye. I reached in again and dug to the bottom. What I pulled out shocked me.

  Brown fur and eyes. Colored patches on the upper arms, legs, stomach, and backside. The tiny white T-shirt said “Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation” across the front. A medical alert bracelet hung from its left wrist.

  I held the toy in my hands. No, I decided, not toy—that was the wrong word.

  This was Beary.

  Sara had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes just a few months prior, and my thoughts of her stay in the hospital still caused many sleepless nights. It was a horrible and confusing time, but at least Abby and I had the benefit of comprehension. We knew what had happened to our daughter. Sara had a disease. Her autoimmune system had attacked the beta cells in her pancreas, rendering it incapable of producing insulin. At five, though, Sara could not possibly know what was happening. She was unable to understand why she couldn’t go home and why she had tubes going into her body and why she felt so sick. For five days she languished in her hospital bed, thirty miles from the safety and familiarity of home, in a constant state of fear.

  Abby and I did our best to comfort her, but after two days there was little we could do other than dry her tears and assure her everything would be okay, even if we still feared it wouldn’t.

  Then Beary showed up.

  The nurse came into Sara’s room on the third day of our stay. The hospital had a problem, she said. A bear had been found abandoned. Poor thing. No one had any idea where his mommy and daddy were. And to make things worse, the bear had diabetes. The doctors could tell because of the bracelet on his wrist and the patches on his body that showed where he could get his insulin shots.

  It was a shame, the nurse said. A hospital was no place to raise a bear. But who could take him home? No one they knew. It certainly couldn’t be an adult. What grown-up knows how to take care of a teddy bear? And besides, it was hard to find someone who could understand about having your sugar checked and getting shots every day.

  “I can take him,” Sara offered.

  “What a wonderful idea!” said the nurse.

  She brought the bear in and settled it into Sara’s arms. Sara was like a mother receiving her firstborn. Beary, she named it. It was the first smile she’d shown in three days.

  When she was finally discharged, Sara made sure Beary never left her side. When she ate, he ate. And when her sugar was checked she made sure his was checked, too. When she got her shots it was his arm she squeezed, and when it was his turn he squeezed hers. Beary needed her, Sara said. And that was true. But what she didn’t say was also true—she needed him.

  Which made the fact that Beary had been put into the trash bag so odd. It had to be a mistake, I thought. Had to.

  It was a good thing I checked her bag before I left. I could see myself in the middle of the night rummaging through the small building at the firehouse where the clothes and stuffed animals were stored, trying in vain to find Beary and then having to tell Sara I couldn’t.

  “Sara?” I called.

  She came bounding down the hallway and into her room. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  “Hey there. I was going through your bag and found this.” I held the bear up in my hand. “Beary must’ve crawled in here by accident.”

  “No, he didn’t,” she said. “I put him in there.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honey, when I said you had to get rid of some of your stuffed animals, I just meant the ones you didn’t play with anymore. You can’t get rid of Beary.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because he’s Beary. He’s important to you.”

  “That’s why I want to give him away.”

  “I don’t understand, Sara. If he’s important to you, then you should want to keep him. He helps you.”

  Sara stood in front of me, thinking. “Jesus loves poor people, right, Daddy?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Does He love scared people, too?”

  “Sure He does,” I told her. “He loves them special.”

  “Did God make Beary for me so I wouldn’t be scared in the hospital?”

  The question caught me off guard. “Yes,” I finally said.

  “He helped me not be sad when I got diabetes, so he can help someone else not be sad when their house burns down.”

  We stared at one another, and I finally understood. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll put him back in there, then. If you’re sure.”

  Sara said, “I’m sure. But I guess just take his shirt off. Maybe whoever gets him next won’t have diabetes.”

  She ran off to the living room and her cartoons, leaving me alone with Beary.

  In the end, Sara and I both succeeded in helping the poor and pained. In a lot of minds, that would be good enough. But as proud as I was by my actions, my intentions had fallen a little short. My bag had been filled with pants that were worn and faded and shirts that had long since gone out of style. They weren’t good enough. Not for me. But they were good enough for the desperate.

  But Sara knew the pain of need. Maybe not the needs of clothing or shelter, but certainly needs more basic—those of comfort and understanding. She had felt those needs during her five horrible days in the hospital, and she would likely feel them every day for the rest of her life. And it was that pain that had allowed her to give not out of duty, but love.

  That was why Sara had chosen not to part with mere castoffs and rejects, but with the one thing that represented the link between the innocence she longed to hold on to and the maturity her disease forced her to have.

  I gently placed Beary back into the trash bag. He rested on a stuffed lion that pushed his paw up in a final wave.

  Good-bye, he said. My work here is done. Don’t worry, Sara knows what she’s doing. She’s a smart girl, you know. You could learn a thing or two from her. Like how to give, for instance. And how to love. And how to make good out of the ugliness of your life.

  And maybe most of all, how to realize that you are not a keeper of your blessings, but a borrower.

  19

  The Plan

  While Sara and Josh picked up the last of the toys straggling behind in the living room, Abby and I sat at the dining room table over coffee to decide what was next and what we could do about it.

  I’d worried. I’d prayed. I’d thought. The answer eluded me. Abby seemed to think that putting in an application at the college wouldn’t do any harm. If my job at the factory was saved by the Exciting Announcement!!! and I still wanted to stay, fine. If my job was lost, having a head start on other possibilities would be a prudent thing.

  I agreed with her in principle. But prudence had never really been one of my strong points, and I couldn’t ignore what was simmering beneath all of my feelings on the matter.


  I’m always up for a good pity party. Since no one else ever worked up enough pity for me, it’s one of those jobs I took upon myself. And I could always throw a great party. Poor me. Poor, poor me. It actually felt good. For a while.

  The truth was that I felt like a nothing. A nothing who might lose his nothing job and so would go apply for another nothing job. I should have been more by now. More of what I didn’t exactly know. Like most people, I knew more of what I was missing than what I wanted to find.

  I was thankful for the blessings God had given me, blessings I was sure I didn’t deserve. I knew I had a rich life, one more fulfilling than most could ask for. But was it a good life? A good life for me? Despite all I had, I couldn’t answer yes to that question. And despite all I was, I knew what I lacked most in life. I wanted to stand out in some way. I wanted to be accomplished at something.

  Men tend to define themselves by what they do for a living. Their jobs mark their places in the world. And while I didn’t place that much emphasis on what I did for a living, I realized that every job I’d ever had never counted for much in the big picture. I needed meaning in what I did, and I’d had none of that. As I boy I had dreamed of being an astronaut, then a ballplayer. Those dreams were long dead now, victims of the reality of who I truly was—just a man. Not too bright and not too stupid, not too rich and not too poor, not too happy and not too sad. A middle-of-the-road, ordinary man. That was me. Nice to meet you.

  And that should have all been good enough, I supposed. But it wasn’t. There are two things every decent person possessed in his or her life, at least in my opinion. One is a set of lofty goals that rise just a bit higher than their reach. The other is a desire to do something good for this world. And it didn’t look as though I was going to do that. I was too common.

  My wife said in her kind and roundabout way that maybe I was thinking too much. That people leave their mark on the world through their family and friends. That all of what I’d said didn’t change the fact that I should go and put in an application anyway. She said it would make me feel better about going back to work the next day. And if I hurried, I’d still have a lit-tle daylight left to take the kids outside again when I got back.

  All good points.

  So I put my boots back on. Abby suggested with a wink that I wear a different coat. Like any good husband ready to be done talking, I did so without asking why and headed for the door. I paused to tell her she was right but didn’t tell her that maybe she was wrong. I didn’t want to waste the life that God had given me, and I thought I was doing just that. The idea of getting a job in the lower echelons of a college only meant that I would be wasting it a little longer.

  Twenty minutes plus the detour later, and the city loomed from my windshield. Stanley, Virginia, had a population of about twenty-four thousand people. As I made my way through the commercial areas toward downtown, every one of those twenty-four thousand was either driving the streets or walking the sidewalks.

  The exaggeration was a product of the fact that I did not particularly like crowded areas and looked with suspicion upon those who did. And if by chance I ended up being offered the job, and if by chance I accepted said offer, I would by default have to spend much of the week smack in the middle of what I considered to be a pretty big city—something I intended to keep in mind as I navigated the crowd.

  It had been a while since I had been downtown—a maze of one-way streets, steep hills, and hidden stop signs all designed to make fools out of everyone who wasn’t familiar with the surroundings. After many wrong turns and a few right ones, I finally arrived at the front door.

  Martha Barton College covered over fifty acres in the heart of the city and had done so since its founding in 1842. So said the historical preservation sign outside of the administrative building. Which, I soon found out, was not where I should go to fill out an application. For that, the nice receptionist said, I had to go to the physical plant building, which was about one mile and three hills away.

  “Thank you,” I told her.

  “You’re very welcome,” she said. “Have a great day.”

  “You, too, ma’am.”

  “And happy holidays!”

  I winced. Again with the happy holidays. I decided to let it slide this time. This was a college, I reasoned, and colleges are the bastions of political correctness. One must make concessions at times. Besides, I was still weary from my bout with the Christmas police at Super Mart earlier. And I didn’t want to start throwing one of my fits in front of someone I might end up having to see every day.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said, smiling against saying anything more.

  I decided to walk instead of drive, mostly because that way I didn’t have to worry about the traffic flow. I popped a quarter into the parking meter and aimed myself at the nearest hill.

  Either the receptionist’s directions were a little fuzzy or my brain was, because I got lost soon thereafter. It didn’t matter if my mind wandering led to my feet wandering or the other way around, but time had come to stop meandering and sharpen my sights on where both my feet and my life were headed.

  That’s what my whole snow day had come down to, after all—taking stock of my life.

  As I walked among the quiet side streets of Stanley, vainly searching for something called a physical plant, I realized that was precisely what had happened to me. I had let my life get away from me. It seemed as though just a few months ago I was a senior in high school, sitting in class with Kenny McCallom, trying to write out what would become of my life. Had I made a life for myself? I didn’t know.

  For that essay in Mrs. Houser’s class I had written out what I dubbed The Plan. It was the result of seventeen years of observation concerning what society thought was a successful life. It covered everything from finances (five hundred thousand dollars a year, minimum) to housing (a five-thousand-square-foot log home at the top of the mountain) to occupation (whatever made me rich) to vehicle (a Ferrari to drive into town, and an Aston Martin to drive back home).

  I exhaled a sarcastic chuckle as I walked. Things hadn’t really turned out the way I thought they would. Not that I ever really had a chance at any of those things anyway. But there was still the nagging thought that I had let someone down. Me? God? My family? I didn’t know.

  When I was a boy my father would drive us all out to Stanley and spend some time at the park, feeding the ducks and riding the train and such. We would always drive past the college on the way. I remembered thinking how wonderful the campus looked, how stately the buildings were. That was where the smart people were, I thought. The good people. And many times I dreamed of going there, either to study as a student or teach as a professor. And here I was, all these years later, about to fill out an application to become part of that ivory tower. Not as a student, though, or as a professor. But just to get a job to keep my family’s heads above the water.

  It was a sad thought, one that arrived the same time as a street sign. I suddenly knew where I was and where I was heading, both in body and in life.

  South.

  When the bumper stickers on the cars parked along the streets went from “God, Guns, and Guts Made America—Let’s Keep All Three” and “Harley Rider for Life” to “Meat Is Murder” and “So Many Christians—So Few Lions,” I knew I was close to the campus again.

  The physical plant was located in an ancient building that overlooked an even more ancient soccer field. While most of the college seemed quiet, this little corner of campus was alive with activity. Pickups fitted with snowplows came and went. Workers armed with shovels and bags of salt paraded in and out the doors. I guessed these people didn’t get snow days, either. Something else to keep in mind.

  I walked through the door and up the stairs to the second floor, where I found a hallway lined with offices. I stood at the first one and was greeted by another nice receptionist whose nameplate said Administrative Assistant.

  “I’d like an application, please,” I said.


  “Sure,” she answered, pulling open a desk drawer and fishing one out. “You can have a seat out in the hallway. I’ll take it when you’re done. Do you need a pen?”

  “No thanks, I have one.”

  “Okay, here you go,” she said, handing me a ballpoint anyway.

  “Thank you,” I said, politely accepting it. I walked out into the bustling hallway and found a small table and chairs against the wall. I sat down and got as comfortable as I could.

  Though I had started my working career at sixteen and had worked at five jobs over the next eighteen years, this was only the second time I had to fill out a job application. My first came when I applied to the factory. That application covered some five pages and was followed by a battery of tests that made me feel as though I was applying for fieldwork with the CIA rather than to perform the sort of mindless tasks that your average primate could master.

  This application looked better. Two pages, front and back. A picture of the scales of justice was stamped at the top of the first page. “Attorney Developed” was written around it. The questions were pretty standard fare but by no means irrelevant. And I had to be honest in answering them, too. On the last page and above the blank for my signature was the “Applicant Statement.” The last paragraph, written in red ink to signify its seriousness, said this: “I understand that any information provided by me that is found to be false, incomplete, or misrepresented in any respect will be sufficient cause to (i) eliminate me from further consideration for employment, or (ii) may result in my immediate discharge from the employer’s service, whenever it is discovered.”

  So not only could I not lie, I couldn’t half-lie or embellish, either.

  I had just spent about twenty minutes wandering around the streets of Stanley trying to figure out where I stood in life. What better way to measure my progress than to fill out a job application? An application, after all, deals in truth. And verifiable truth at that. There the hubris could be stripped away, leaving only the unmitigated facts of my life to be evaluated and judged on their own merits. Then I could see how my life matched up with The Plan.