Snow Day Read online

  Why? That’s what I kept asking myself. Why had Kenny been given the life he had? A life of constant struggle not just to get ahead, but to keep from getting behind. A life of toil as a stock clerk at a big-box retail chain. A life of sickness and disease with a wife just as sick and diseased, and one or more children who will likely become sick and diseased themselves.

  And there I was, healthy and earning about fifty thousand dollars a year at a job where I mostly just sat around and watched a machine spin liquid polymer into yarn, with a beautiful wife, two beautiful children, a nice house, and money in the bank.

  And I was complaining. Constantly. Complaining that my job was on the chopping block, that my dreams had never come true, and that life was passing me by.

  Passing me by? Kenny’s life seemed to have already gone over the horizon.

  What did he have to look forward to? Maybe fifty more years of daily insulin injections? Of praying every night that he didn’t lose any more toes, of hoping that his wife wouldn’t get sicker, of hoping his children would be spared from his disease?

  It all didn’t seem fair to me. But it was nothing new to him. Nothing new at all.

  It started at an early age for Kenny. Maybe around Little League, when he was stuck in right field where the ball never went. That way he would never have to try to catch it and never have to throw it.

  And then there was school, where he sat in the back row with his dirty clothes and his hand-me-down shoes. That’s where his future was cemented, at least in the eyes of the public school system. Somewhere along the line between late elementary school and late junior high, Kenny became known as a number more than anything else. Success to the high school guidance counselors was a 4.0. Kenny’s, I guessed, hovered around a 2.5. Success in the eyes of his classmates was a 1200 on the SATs. Kenny never took the SATs. He was by his own admission not the brightest guy in the room, so why bother? But what of his personality, his determination, his heart? What test besides life itself can measure such things?

  I paused and looked back at Kenny, who had moved on from the cereal to the granola bars. I felt sorry for him. I wondered about his wife. How did they meet? How did they fall in love? And I thought of his three children and the love they received every day from their father.

  And I thought of Kenny returning to school, struggling through his studies to the point where he had an A average, struggling past all of the whys in his life to hold on to a dream of helping give something to make the world just a bit better of a place for everyone. I marveled at him and his faith both in God and in himself. How many people in his position, I wondered, would have both Kenny’s faith and Kenny’s life? Most, I thought, would have either one or the other. Few would have both.

  Yet there he was, pushing on toward his goal, still believing he could make a difference.

  And I believed he could. He had already.

  No matter how little we have in this life in the way of things, we still have much to give in the way of us. No matter how bad we have it, someone has it worse, and it’s up to us to help them. That was Kenny’s purpose on this earth.

  That was everyone’s purpose on this earth. That’s our reason for being here, our what. As in, “What shall I do?”

  And Kenny was living proof of this fact: as long as we have a what, the hows just don’t matter.

  7

  The Santa Suit

  Fifty dollars seemed like a lot of money to spend on something I would wear only one night a year, and it seemed like a whole lot of money for something I would only wear for a few minutes on that one night. But I didn’t have a choice. Some things a father just had to do, no matter how expensive it was or how ridiculous he looked doing it. And I had to do this. Had to.

  Even if it meant donning a red and white suit, complete with one very itchy beard and more fake hair than Dolly Parton wore.

  There was only one Santa suit left, which was a good thing. But it was a large, which was a bad thing. I figured I needed a medium. A large would maybe sag and—Lord, please help me—even fall off while I was making my getaway. That would be disastrous. It would ruin the whole thing.

  But I figured I could always just shove a pillow or two under the suit and hold it in place with the gaudy plastic belt that finished the ensemble. I mean, Santa was a pretty hefty guy, right? Yes, pillows were paramount. And my kids were pretty sharp. They would know something was fishy if they saw Santa and he was skinny.

  I put the suit in my cart, satisfied that I was just about to purchase the most important thing I had to get for that Christmas. Or any other, for that matter.

  My thoughts returned to the man in the truck and his act of charity. That was no mere act of kindness shown by someone more fortunate to someone less so. It went far beyond that. To Jacob, the act was perhaps some sort of validation. He was at a fragile age for a child. Toddlerhood was gone, but puberty was still a ways off. He was in that in-between time, when confusion reigned and things once believed in were suddenly called into question.

  I was about Jacob’s age when I discovered the truth about Santa Claus. I had heard murmurings from classmates regarding the eternal lie perpetrated upon the innocent of heart, but I never believed them. Surely, I thought, Santa was real. He had to be. He came to my house every year. Once he had even written his name on a new chalkboard that was propped up by the tree. “Santa was here for Peter and Amy,” it said. Proof positive. Though I thought it quite the coincidence that Santa’s handwriting so closely resembled my mother’s.

  Still, the rumors persisted. My faith began to waiver when friends began to tell strange tales of finding their gifts not under the tree on Christmas morning, but shoved into closets and attics weeks before Santa was supposedly to come. I rationalized by thinking they were not good kids anyway. Santa would never visit them, so their parents had probably felt sorry for them and bought the presents themselves.

  But it so happened that one Sunday afternoon in mid-December I was playing with my G.I. Joe action figures in my parents’ bedroom, a location that offered the perfect blend of terrain (the tall bed made the use of my new helicopter mandatory) and comfort (the carpet made it easier on my knees). I was locked in pitched battle. The enemy had ambushed a small platoon, leaving the soldiers pinned by the dresser. The number of casualties was mounting, thanks to a nasty little machine gun nest on the top of the bed. I sent in air support to take out the nest, but the fighter was shot down. The pilot managed to eject. After a perilous few minutes of parachuting, he landed at the foot of the bed, where he scrambled for cover. There he planned to hold out until a rescue mission was launched.

  When that pilot escaped, he just so happened to get a little too far under the bed. I reached for him and felt something hard. Knowing that Mom and Dad rarely kept anything under the bed, I decided to take a look.

  Four packs of baseball cards. One toy machine gun. Legos, Play-Doh, Matchbox cars. My eyes bulged. What was this, some sort of lost pirate treasure? No, that wouldn’t work—pirates didn’t have machine guns. And birthday presents didn’t work, either, since that was still months away.

  As I sat there with chin in hand, a disturbing thought formed in the back of my mind and wormed its way to the front. Those presents looked somehow familiar, but how could that be? They were new, unopened. But I knew I had seen—

  No.

  No!

  I hadn’t seen them. I had written them. In a letter. To Santa.

  These were my Christmas presents.

  And worse, much, much worse, was the fact that my presents were inside several bags from the Super Saver, cheapest store in town.

  My first thought was that I must have been bad that year, just like the other kids at school. Santa had gotten hold of my parents and told them he was skipping my house. “I don’t give toys to naughty children,” he likely said. And as I sat there, mind spinning, I realized he was right. I really didn’t deserve anything. Not that year. I’d screwed up too much. There was the time I killed the fi
sh by dumping an entire box of food in the tank. And the nasty little incident where I popped the head off my sister’s Barbie doll. And the time when the ice cream truck had come through the neighborhood and I snuck a dollar out of my father’s wallet to get some. And on. And on.

  On the other hand, I really hadn’t done that many more bad things than any other year, and Santa always came through then. Which left only one other possibility. That the kids at school were right. I’d been duped.

  There was no Santa Claus.

  When I confronted my parents about this, they didn’t know what to say. They had never taken time to think of what to tell their children once they were old enough to know the truth. They knew the jig was up. It was confession time. So no, they said, there really wasn’t a Santa Claus. There was once, a long time ago, but he was just a good man who gave presents to children. No list, no reindeer, no sliding down the chimney. Oh yeah, and Dad was the one who ate the cookies and drank the milk my sister and I left every year. And the guy whose lap I sat on down at the mall really wasn’t Santa, either. He was just some guy whose lap I sat on down at the mall.

  More, the letters I sent to Santa every year never got to their destination because no such place existed. There really was a North Pole, but the only things that lived there were polar bears and polar bears couldn’t read. Instead, my letters ended up thrown into a big bin labeled Dead Letters down at the post office, where they were soon disposed of.

  Dead. That’s what everyone thought of my letters to Santa.

  Mom gave me a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the rear. Dad stared at me and nodded. Both knew the whole thing was rough on me. Both tried to tell me that everything was okay. Just because there wasn’t a Santa didn’t mean that Christmas wasn’t worth celebrating. I would still get my presents, likely most everything I had asked for. Besides, they said, Santa Claus really wasn’t what the holiday was all about anyway. It wasn’t Clausmas, it was Christmas.

  They asked me to keep quiet about all of it and not spoil things for my sister. Fine, I said. Whatever.

  Ironically, that night was the airing of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer on television. My sister enjoyed it as much as she’d always had. Me? Not so much.

  I grew up that day.

  I had reached the point a few months earlier when I decided I didn’t want to be a kid anymore. I wanted to be a grown-up and do grown-up things. But at that moment the only thing I wanted was to be a kid again, to forget about all that mess under the bed and the conversation I had with my parents. I felt like Adam and Eve must have when they bit down into that apple. I had Knowledge now, and because of that the world suddenly became something more to figure out than to marvel at. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, but I wasn’t excited. The tree was up and the decorations were hanging on the house, but that just didn’t seem to matter anymore. What was the point?

  As I pushed my shopping cart through the crowded aisles of Super Mart, I began to ponder what I was going to do when my children made that same discovery. My parents were caught off guard when it happened to me. I didn’t want to be caught off guard when it happened to them. Though Josh was in the clear for a while, Sara was five, just two years younger than I was when I found out. And she was already hearing the rumors. At church the previous Sunday a little girl in her Sunday school class told her that Santa wasn’t real.

  Her parents, I came to find out, had decided that telling their children the truth about Santa was the right thing to do. It helped their little girl to focus on Jesus, they said. The world was too materialistic, and they didn’t want their daughter to be that way. Of course, they told me this in the parking lot after church. Next to their brand-new Mercedes. And the father couldn’t talk long because he had to get home so he could watch the Redskins on his new plasma television.

  Besides, said the father, believing in Santa was bad for other reasons. He couldn’t in good conscience allow his daughter to believe in something that wasn’t real. That would be wrong. And the whole business seemed to be a bit too occultish for him. Santa was a slippery slope in the spiritual development of his daughter. Why, if they allowed the whole thing to go on unabated, his little girl might even want to start dressing up for Halloween.

  God forbid.

  Me, I felt differently. I always thought the most important element in a child was a sense of magic, and that quality had to be protected and nurtured. When children are young they see and experience things on a level that adults are simply incapable of. Anything is possible. Everything is cloaked with wonder.

  And why not? The world really is a magical place, isn’t it? Look at a flower or a mountain or the ocean or the stars. Look at a sunset or a butterfly or a platypus. Look at yourself. Magic!

  Sara believed in Santa Claus. She had dressed up for Halloween two months earlier. She was a happy child. She laughed often. She lived not in stark reality, but in a world of possibility. Did I think the one had something to do with the other?

  Absolutely. And that was something I wanted to always be a part of her.

  Which is why I had come up with the idea of buying a Santa costume. Oh yes, I would. And I would be outside of my children’s bedroom windows on Christmas Eve, and they would see me and believe all the more. And when I was done I just might drive over to Sara’s little Sunday school friend’s house, and I just might do the same thing.

  A lot of the so-called smart people in this world believe it is their job to explain away everything that happens. Disease and want are not our enemies, mystery is. They believe the three worst words in any language are not “I hate you” or “I am hungry,” but “I don’t know.” That’s why every year around Christmas and Easter many of the newspapers and news programs divulge “new research” on the life of Jesus. He was really just a man, they say. A great moral teacher whose message was distorted into a religion. He didn’t perform any miracles, He just had a keen medicinal mind. He was more Dr. House than King of kings. He died but did not rise. The Nativity? Unlikely. There is no record of a star above the town of Bethlehem. And a virgin birth? Please. Mary was more likely the victim of rape by a Roman guard.

  We would rather have wrong answers than questions. We want facts, not possibilities. We would rather not believe in supernatural things. Not just because those things aren’t scientific, but because those things would inevitably lead to God, and we cannot believe in God because then we would be held accountable for the things we do in life.

  My children believed in Santa. He saw them when they were sleeping and knew when they were awake. They knew he wanted them to be good, but they also knew he would still love them if they weren’t. They loved him because he laughed much. He was their favorite person because his delight was to spread joy abundant.

  My children also believed in God. They knew He saw them when they were sleeping and knew when they were awake. They knew He, too, wanted them to be good, but they also knew He would forgive them when they weren’t. They saw Him as a loving father rather than a distant relative, as someone who laughed much, who was patient and joyful and jolly.

  Dare I thought such, but Santa was God 101 for a small child.

  It was hard for their tiny minds to wrap themselves around the mystery of the Almighty. It was hard for my bigger brain to do the same. Hard for everyone, sometimes. But Santa we all understood.

  Still, I knew that eventually the time would come when my children would realize there really wasn’t a Santa Claus. I could buy a costume and stand outside their windows, I could climb onto the roof and ring bells, I could utilize every ounce of my creativity, but sooner or later the game would be over. What would happen to my children then? How would they deal with that loss of innocence? Would they lose that sense of magic and possibility?

  Not if I could help it.

  The picture of Jacob finding that toy tractor in his parents’ car flashed through my mind again. But this time, so did something else. It was the picture of that old man in the truck, sipping his coffee an
d watching it all. And I had my answer. I knew what I would say.

  No, I would reply, there is no Santa Claus. At least not in the way they have been led to believe. Usually the truth hurts, but in this case it is much more wonderful. We’re all Santas, you see. We all have magic. The pretend Santa gets to work only one day a year. But we, the real ones, we get to work every day.

  We get to spread joy. We get to give gifts. We get to help those who need help and plant smiles where there are frowns.

  There is magic in this world, I will say. God is the magician. And we are His hands.

  8

  Is Anybody There?

  I made a few more stops and crossed the last item off my list, which was laundry detergent. That’s all it said. I didn’t know what kind of detergent my wife used to wash the family’s clothes. Felt a little guilty about that, too. It seemed like something I should have taken the time to find out. But rather than call home and ask, I decided to pick a detergent on my own. I chose Cheer. Not so much because it had something the other detergents did not, but just because I thought it sounded good. My family could use some cheer, I thought.

  “Help! Is anybody over there?”

  Shouts, from one aisle over and about two rows back. Elderly and male, by the sound.

  “Would someone please help me?”

  Shouting has definite and strange effects on people. Take the dozen or so who happened to be in my vicinity just then. Just a moment before we were all a mass of busy shoppers in what could be described as one step below a frenzy. One small step. There was commotion all around—some people gabbed away on cell phones, others were in conversation with whoever was brave enough to come to Super Mart with them, and some, barely managing to hang on to what little sanity they had left, simply muttered to themselves. We were all consumed by the business of our own little lives, close in proximity but nicely separated in thought from everyone else.