Snow Day Page 2

  Why?

  Jimmy Buffett had just begun another song about warm breezes and sunny beaches when my thoughts settled on Mandy.

  She and Jack had come to the neighborhood alone. Transplants from the Grand Canyon State. Not too many people move to Virginia from Arizona. More often it was the other way around. A fact I had mentioned to her shortly after they had moved in.

  “I’m not moving as much as I’m running,” she replied. She clarified that it wasn’t so much what she was running from as what she was running toward.

  Home.

  Mandy had been born and raised in a small house near the railroad tracks not too far from where she’d been standing. The wrong side of the tracks, mind you. At eighteen, she decided to follow her bliss over the mountains to Arizona State, where she met the love of her life in a lawyer whose wealth was transcended only by his violence. Mandy endured under the false assumptions that an abusive husband wouldn’t necessarily become an abusive father and that the comfort in her life was worth the pain in her marriage. When he raised a hand to Jack in a drunken rage, she took their son and left. In the end, she found that the very mountains she always thought had kept her hemmed in now protected her and Jack from their past.

  It hadn’t been easy for her. Mandy confessed to Abby that there were times when the bills were paid late and the money was short and she wondered if she’d really made the right choice. But those were the times when she would look at her son and her God and see just how better off she was.

  She doesn’t have the stuff anymore—the fancy cars and big houses and high teas with the country club wives. And that’s okay, because the stuff never made her happy anyway. Mandy didn’t need a rich life of fine wine and filet mignon. Not when a simple life of bread and milk would be better. She had weathered her storm by finding the constants of her life. She had people to love, a God to lean on, and a reason to face every day. How could any dream be better than that?

  I realized then the real reason I’d taken off work. I needed to search for my constants. For my own bread and milk of my life that would sustain me if life at work unraveled.

  So as I drove I prayed for what Mandy had. I asked God to help me believe that if I lost what means much, it would be so I could find what means more.

  3

  The Superman Costume

  There were those in this world who possessed the economic wherewithal to avoid the experience of having to shop at Super Mart. I was not among them. Ambivalence was not generally a part of my personality. I loved some things, loathed some others, but rarely did the two emotions converge on one point. Super Mart was one of those points.

  The parking lot was just as busy as usual. Not even the snowstorm could keep people away from a deal on detergent and 10W-30 motor oil. I found a spot about a mile and a half away from the entrance. The snow fell so fast and the store itself was so far away that I found myself praying for God to send me a Sherpa so I wouldn’t get lost.

  After what seemed like an hour’s walk, the doors appeared through the blowing snow and slid open. On the other side I was met by an elderly man wearing so many layers of clothing that his arms were trapped in a T, as if he were preparing to dive into deep water. There was a layer of snow and ice on his beard and a What-did-I-do-to-deserve-this look on his face, but that didn’t stop him from offering me a good morning and a shopping cart. I took both.

  I glanced at Abby’s shopping list. “Stocking stuffers.”

  As I approached them, I could see Super Mart’s toy aisles were even busier than the grocery section on the other side of the store appeared to be, in spite of the fact that the day’s events required more in the way of practical shopping than indulgence. The seven aisles of baby dolls and action figures and whatnot were just a step or two below a brawl. Particularly the girls’ section.

  I rolled my shopping cart around the outside of the girls’ aisles, waiting for an opening. After five trips, I still hadn’t found one. I decided then that Sara had been pretty well taken care of as far as presents went. It was a selfish notion, and I knew it, but the thought of wading through a crowd of apprehensive, stressed-out mothers made me a little squeamish. I would concentrate on Josh’s stocking stuffers instead. The boys’ section of toys seemed a little less congested and a little more civil.

  It’s tough to find toys for a three-year-old. Josh was too old for rattles and the teething toys, but too young for action figures and Hot Wheels. There wasn’t much in the middle.

  Inspiration struck when I spotted the rack of Superman toys. Little boys love Superman, and my little boy was no exception. Everything you could have ever wanted in a Superman toy was hanging on those racks. Action figures, play sets, games. The trick was going to be picking out which to buy.

  A quick look at the “4+” on the action figures told me they would not do. Which meant the play sets would not do, either, since a play set without an action figure was basically just a clump of plastic. And the games? Josh hadn’t even mastered Candyland yet. This was tragic.

  It looked as though my son would have to endure one more year of stuffed animals and those big, fluffy baby books.

  But hanging beside the action figures were a collection of Superman costumes: tights, cape, and shirt (complete with fake abdominal muscles) for a little over ten dollars. A bargain if I had ever seen one. It was the perfect gift. And there was even one left in Josh’s size—extra runt.

  Ten dollars was a little too expensive for a stocking stuffer, especially in light of the seven-dollar maximum Abby and I had agreed upon. Still, it was a Superman costume. A real one. Much better than the red T-shirt, bath towel, and safety pin I had to use when I was his age.

  I snatched it from the rack before anyone else hovering around me could. I checked the quality (marginal, but satisfactory), the durability (knowing Josh, I gave it a life span of about two weeks before he either grew out of it or ripped holes in it to mimic bullet holes), and the kid factor (Superman was daily DVD viewing for my son).

  Then I made one last but crucial check, which was to see if my wife could throw the suit into the washing machine without its falling apart like a wet tissue. The front of the tag didn’t say, so I flipped it over to see if the washing instructions had been printed there. They hadn’t. Instead, printed was a warning.

  “Caution,” the label said in bold black letters. “Wearing this costume will not enable you to fly.”

  I read it twice and burst out laughing. The shoppers around me glanced my way and then began to quietly disperse, no doubt believing that the poor man beside them had just snapped under the pressure of the storm and the season. I offered to show the tag to a gentleman standing beside me. He gave me a quick smile, held up his hands, and backed away.

  Why in the world would such a warning need to be put on a costume? Sure, companies put warning labels on their products to cover themselves against any legal ramifications due to their buyers’ idiocy. But the warning couldn’t have been for the child; all the sizes were so small that whoever was wearing it would surely not be old enough to read. And even if they could, what kid reads the tags on his clothes?

  This left the parents. That was a sad consideration. For some reason the company thought it at least somewhat likely that some parents would buy their Superman costumes and tell their kids to put them on and go jump off the roof.

  Ridiculous.

  As if grown people thought that wearing a superhero outfit could turn you into one. Could make you fly, even. As if people thought that becoming Superman was a rather plausible reality.

  Then again, I thought, maybe it wasn’t so ridiculous after all.

  My father wanted to be Superman when he was a kid. Me, too. And from the look of things thus far, my son was well on his way to carrying on not only our family tradition, but the family tradition for millions. It seemed to me that every guy in America wanted to be Superman at some point in his life.

  And who could blame us? Being able to fly faster than a speeding bull
et, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound had its advantages. Not to mention the whole heat vision thing and the fact that Superman could reverse time.

  Superman could do anything.

  So we indulged our fantasies, flying around our homes with bath towels safety-pinned around our necks, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way—defeating evil through power and sheer will.

  Playing superhero didn’t last, though. Whether he likes it or not, at some point every boy must become a man. Life’s truths must be redefined from soft to hard. We realized that not every story ended happily ever after, not every cloud had a silver lining, and superheroes were just cartoons to pass the time. If Superman were real, he’d end up like every other man. He’d grow old and screw up and his hair would start falling out. His back would hurt from a day’s work, and he would develop an audible grunt whenever he bent over to pick something up off the floor.

  Of the entire Superman myth, only the kryptonite seemed real. It wasn’t a green rock from some far-flung planet, though. Adults’ kryptonite became the ticking of our days, the slow yet inevitable forward motion of time.

  A few, however, resisted. Some kept right on playing their own version of superhero, tweaked to correspond with just enough reality to keep them off the psychiatrist’s couch. They faced life with chests puffed and chins out, impervious to the pain that lurks both in this moment and the next. Standing tall against adversity. Fighting for happiness and peace and the American dream.

  It was a lie, this life.

  I should know. I was living it.

  The stone wall I had erected between my life and my job was a mere façade, made more of sand than stone. I worried and fretted. I was afraid. Yet I tried to keep all of these things hidden from family and friends for this one simple reason: I was a man, and men didn’t feel such things.

  As long as I kept that costume on, I knew I was safe. I could fly. It wasn’t until I pondered that warning label that I realized I wasn’t soaring through my hardship, I was falling.

  Faster than a speeding bullet? Hardly. I couldn’t even outrun my life. More powerful than a locomotive? I’d found many things that were much bigger and much badder than I. And as for leaping tall buildings in a single bound, I knew then that the mountains we all had to climb in life required more than one step.

  Standing there in the middle of Super Mart, I had an epiphany: I had to take off my costume, because I wasn’t Superman.

  And I knew this as well: one day my son would have to make that same decision. But he would also discover that the God in heaven he prayed to at night was also inside of him. And that the God who lived in his heart could allow him to do some amazing things in this life. Maybe nothing as fabulous as heat vision. But something more practical, like seeing the truth of things. He wouldn’t be able to lift cars, but he would be able to lift spirits. He wouldn’t be faster than a speeding bullet, but he would be able to take the shots life dished out and stand up again.

  I placed the outfit in my cart, satisfied that I could cross one more item off the list. But before I wheeled on I reached back down, tore the warning label off, then put it into my pocket. Josh could have the costume for Christmas. I’d give him the label when he got older.

  4

  Beautiful Scars

  Zigzagging my cart through the aisles and around people, I slowed my steps and quickened my senses to take in the surroundings. The place was alive with activity. The festivity of the season was awash in fake Christmas trees and rows of candy canes and enough wrapping paper to cover the entire eastern seaboard.

  The bread section was immediately to my right, easily spotted by the crowd of people attacking it. Shopping carts were slammed into one another. Tempers were beginning to flare. Children were screaming. The loudspeakers were trying to soothe the stressed-out shoppers with Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” but the scene in front of me was more Apocalypse Now. A bag of hot dog buns flew through the air, only to be snatched up by two hungry hands. I then knew I had been recruited for a suicide mission. I would never get out of there alive.

  But like any good soldier, I intended to carry out my orders. I left my cart, sure that it would not be there when I got back—if I got back—and flung myself into the throng. I came out with the last loaf of butter bread, raising it above my head like the spoils of war. Then I remembered that I had to get a loaf for Mandy and Jack as well. I briefly considered just cutting the one I had in half, for surely that would be enough to get everyone through the day. But I had promised a loaf. I dove back in. By some act of Christmas magic, I had two loaves in my hand when I came out. And my cart was even where I’d left it.

  Deciding to press my luck a bit, I rolled down to the milk coolers, where by some miracle the crowd was not only small but almost civil.

  That was when I saw it. Perched atop the nether regions of the closeout shelves like a gargoyle, ugly keeping worse ugliness away.

  If the fears and worries of my life could have somehow been fashioned into a physical representation, the end result would have looked much like the figurine that was in front of me. The Santa was just that awful. And the more it repulsed me, the more I couldn’t look away.

  Jolly Saint Nick wasn’t so jolly. He was tired. His rosy cheeks were a pallid gray, almost brown. And the toy sack he carried wasn’t really a sack as much as it was a small clump of mashed black dangling from his right hand. His smile was more of an I-hate-this-time-of-year frown, as if Christmas Eve was about as fun as having a stick thrust into his eye. Part of his nose had been chipped off by some previous fall or drop. I picked him up. On the bottom of his cardboard container was a sticker that said, “Pres Santa’s belly to hear him talk!” Yes—“Pres.” I did. What came out of his mouth wasn’t “Ho, Ho, Ho!” or “Merry Christmas!” It was more like “Clarrmm homba dwee!”

  No wonder it had been banished to Super Mart’s version of the Island of Misfit Toys. Where in the world did they get that thing? And who in their right mind would ever plop down—I looked at the sticker price—three dollars for such a piece of junk?

  I shook my head in wonder and put the Santa back on the shelf where it belonged. Still staring, I pushed my cart blindly out into the aisle.

  And collided with the people coming around the corner.

  Elderly couple. With a cart full of bread and milk and a couple of DVDs.

  “I am so sorry,” I said, backing my cart away from theirs.

  “No problem,” the man said, doing the same. “Sometimes we come here just to play a little bumper buggies and get our frustrations out.”

  “You two picked the right day, then.”

  “Is it still snowing outside?” the woman with him asked.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Afraid so?” she asked. “Now what’s that kind of talk? I think it’s wonderful.”

  “I’m a spring-and-summer kind of guy myself,” I said. I looked up from my cart long enough to notice that the left side of her face had been badly scarred by a long-ago burn. I averted my eyes and smiled.

  “My apologies again,” I said. “You two have a nice day.”

  “Merry Christmas,” the woman said with a smile.

  I strolled off and glanced back at the couple as I rounded the corner. Both were parked right in front of the sick Santa that had grabbed my attention. I stopped to watch, amused that they, too, were playing the role of curious pedestrians.

  The woman had taken the Santa off the shelf where I had left it. The man gawked at it and pushed Santa’s belly. The sound came out even more garbled than before. They both laughed and shook their heads with the same sort of wonder I had felt. But instead of putting the figure back onto the shelf and moving on, he placed it in their cart.

  Curiosity gripped me. Though I had spoken with them only briefly, I could tell they were two intelligent people. They were well-dressed and competent. They had opted for the more expensive milk and the fancier brand of bread. Their c
hoice of DVDs led me to believe they preferred high-brow to low-brow. These were not two dummies. At least, not until they picked up the Santa and put it in their cart.

  I pushed my buggy back over to them.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Hello again,” said the woman.

  “Back for more bumper buggies?” the man asked.

  “No, no, I’ve had enough of that.” I paused, unsure of how to broach the subject. “I was just wondering about that Santa. I was looking at it before our run-in.”

  “Oh,” he said, reaching into their cart. “You didn’t want it—”

  “No-no-no,” I said, waving my arms and trying to keep the thing as far away from me as possible. “No, I don’t want it. I just wanted to know why you want it.”

  “Pardon?” the woman asked.

  “I’m a curious kind of guy,” I explained. “Always asking questions and whatnot. Drives my wife crazy, but she’s not here. Would you indulge me?”

  She reached into their cart and retrieved the Santa. The two of them examined it a bit. She smiled. “It’s pretty,” she said.

  Pretty.

  “Oh come on,” I said. “That’s the worst excuse for a Santa I’ve ever seen in my life. That thing is ugly.”

  “Don’t think so,” the man said. “Don’t think so at all. It has… what’s the word, Helen?”

  “Character,” Helen offered.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s the word. That Santa has character. Rather beautiful, I would say.”

  So now the monstrosity wasn’t just pretty. It was beautiful, too.

  “Sorry folks, and all due respect, but you two are nuts.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been accused of being that,” Helen said, smiling.

  “Here,” the man offered, “take a good look at him. Sure, this Santa’s not as nice as the ones over there on aisle twelve. I mean after all, he’s stuck over here on the closeout aisle for a reason, right? But that doesn’t make him any less valuable.”