A Simple Christmas
Page 13
To his credit, the old man did build a functioning machine, and after I got over the initial shock of its crude appearance and the fact that its engine had once mowed the lawn of some nice family on the other side of town, I did have fun riding it around the neighborhood.
Maybe my father’s sometimes rather less than superb flair for design was tempered by his desire to give his kids all he could with the resources he had. One thing is for sure—he was not one to go into debt for things he couldn’t afford. It was his Depression-era mind-set that caused him to think this way. He believed that the bottom could fall out at any moment and we should prepare for the worst because it was probably going to happen. My dad was also one of those guys who believed that if such a calamity were to strike and it only affected one family, it would probably be ours. So we always lived as if an apocalypse was about to strike our house, storing massive amounts of toilet paper and paper towels just in case. We might be turned into dust particles by a nuclear blast, but by gosh, there would be plenty of paper towels to wipe up the mess!
I know that my lack of proficiency with tools was a big disappointment to my dad. I think by the time I was lieutenant governor of Arkansas, he had finally made peace with the fact that I couldn’t change the oil in my car without making a complete mess and that my one attempt to unclog a stopped drain resulted in a plumber having to be called to my house for an emergency visit to repair my “repair” and stop the resulting water that was gushing in our kitchen. My efforts to avoid the cost of the plumber resulted in a $1,200 plumbing bill, a huge mess in the kitchen, and a wife who could have frozen the Gobi Desert with her stare. My father died just three months before I was sworn in as governor, and I really wished he could have lived long enough to see that, just so he might finally feel I had redeemed myself. He probably would have said at the swearing in, “Son, I’m proud you made governor, but I sure wish you could use a table saw.”
Power tools and me? Not a good combination. It’s like trying to get Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden together to watch football and eat pizza. Never going to happen. I’m certain that part of my clumsiness with all things mechanical comes from the fact that I should have been left-handed, but my mother thought left-handedness would make it hard for me to be “normal” in a right-handed world, so she always put the pencil or crayon in my right hand and through her stern discipline and perseverance taught me to live right-handedly. At least somewhat. I bat, shoot a rifle or shotgun, and play putt-putt golf left-handed. I write, shoot a pistol, and eat with my right hand. When people ask if I’m left- or right-handed, I usually just say that I’m ambidextrous. When I broke a finger on my right hand playing Little League baseball as a child, I was forced to eat and write left-handed while my hand was in a cast. I was able to do both rather easily, and now I’m able to use a fork in either hand and my writing is equally illegible regardless of which hand I’ve used. In fact, my handwriting is so bad that I can’t even read it myself and try to avoid writing as much as possible unless I need to sign something. My personal assistant during my tenure both as lieutenant governor and as governor, Dawn Cook, is the only human I know who can decode my penmanship. I would actually ask her to read things I had written to tell me what they said because I couldn’t make them out.
For much of my childhood and adolescence, I felt guilty over my inability to work with simple tools, so I married someone who is pretty good at it. Janet is the “handywoman” in our house and has repaired our washer (put new timers and gears in it) and dryer (changed the heating element and timer) and done minor repairs around the house. She has also helped build houses in over forty states and many foreign countries through her work with Habitat for Humanity. Because she is so active with Habitat and has served on its international board for a number of years, people assume that I volunteer with her on the construction projects. Whenever anyone asks me about this, I always say the same thing—I would never spend the night in a house that I helped build!
So now that you understand just how “dexterity challenged” I am, you can better understand why, for me, what should be a heavenly holiday—Christmas—became the holiday from hell.
By the time John Mark was born, the days of buying toys that didn’t require any assembly were as gone as the days of 78 rpm records. From my earliest “dad days,” I couldn’t actually purchase an item, but rather ended up with a box of parts and an instruction manual that had been written in Japanese or Mandarin and poorly translated into broken English so that a mechanical engineer would have had a difficult time understanding it. The notion that “Mr. Thumbs” (aka me) would be able to put even supposedly simple things together was laughable, but my pride and ego compelled me to try.
The idea of selling things to consumers that have to be completely constructed from scratch was an evolutionary thing. It started with things coming ready to take out of the box and use, then progressed to “batteries not included,” and then came the innocent enough label “some assembly required,” meaning that the package contained two or three large pieces that would easily fit together and the product required nothing more than simple observation to make it work. I wasn’t fortunate enough to do my “daddying” during those golden days of American toydom. By the time it fell upon me to prepare the Christmas toys for the big day, the assembly of almost anything other than a stuffed animal required a minimum of a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and four or five assistants who had previously helped assemble space shuttles for NASA. I’m sure it won’t be long before the stuffed animals will come packaged as a bag of stuffing, some cloth material, plastic pieces for eyes, nose, and accessories, and a little sewing kit so the consumer can build the teddy bear from the pieces and parts.
Right after John Mark’s third birthday in 1979, we were in the process of moving from Texas back to Arkansas and Janet and I thought it was time for him to get his first tricycle. This is always a milestone in a child’s life—the day he extends movement beyond his own legs and employs a mechanical device to move him more efficiently and quickly. I had loved my tricycle when I was a kid and pretty much worn it out riding up and down the sidewalks of my neighborhood and around my house on rainy days. I was sure that no child could turn out normal without a bike, so I was excited to buy John Mark’s first “vehicle” and teach him how to ride.
I attempted to purchase an already-assembled tricycle from each of the local stores that sold them and was virtually laughed out of the store for daring to request such a thing. “Those are floor display models,” I was brutally told, and my attempt to buy one was met with derision. Logic was no weapon in this endeavor. I pointed out that the floor models were likely shipped to the store as a box full of parts and that whoever put them together had obviously done a good job, so why not sell me one and let that experienced tricycle engineer simply put another together? No can do, they told me. I offered to pay to have their guy do it (a practice I must have inspired, since now I see that service offered regularly by stores) but was rebuffed.
My son was going to have a tricycle no matter what! Of course, the smart thing would have been to buy the box of bolts and metal pieces and ask my dad (the grandpa) or even my wife to assemble it. But having to admit that I was a total wimp who couldn’t even assemble a tricycle would have been emasculating to me. I mean, it was a tricycle, not an ultralight airplane or a rocket ship. How hard could it be? So armed with my manly pride and all the confidence I could muster, I purchased a tricycle at Wal-Mart, took the box home, and announced to Janet that I would put it together on Christmas Eve after John Mark went to bed. Janet offered to help, but of course I waved off any assistance, as that would have directly threatened my manhood and I might as well start carrying a purse.
It’s a little tricycle, for heaven’s sake! I should have known better and simply let Janet put it together, but no—I was out to prove that being a dad had magically endowed me with new powers to do for my son at Christmas what every other American dad did for his son.
As I opened the box, I was a bit intimidated by the fact that there were what seemed like about four hundred little plastic packets, each of which had a different size screw, nut, and washer, along with dozens of larger parts that, when put together, were supposed to form a tricycle. No two pieces had been attached or assembled in any way. I’m sure that various pieces of the little three-wheeled challenge had been fabricated in various manufacturing plants around the world, and now I had before me a collection of parts and a very pathetic excuse for a parts list and instruction manual that contained indecipherable instructions and a few pencil sketches to illustrate what the end result should look like.
The first challenge was simply trying to figure out which size screw was what and how they fit into the overall picture. They all looked alike to me, and the variations in size weren’t distinguishable based on the pictures in the manual.
I would have been better able to figure out the Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded. Concern began to give way to sheer panic—my son would wake up on Christmas morning and I would present him with a floor filled with various pieces of bright red tubular metal, some little wheels, and several large piles of hardware. I would announce, “Merry Christmas, son! Santa brought you a tricycle!”
I could imagine him looking at the entire floor covered with unconnected pieces and bursting into tears thinking that Santa’s elves must have unionized and gone on strike. Then I would have to listen to his mother chide me for having ruined Christmas, not just for John Mark but for the entire planet. Somehow, I was sure she would blame me for ruining the spirit of the holiday through my laziness and pride.
I couldn’t let this get to me! I labored on, attempting to find pieces of the puzzle that either would fit or could be forced to connect with one another.
The project that should have taken about an hour was consuming the entire night. Janet checked on me to ask how it was going, and of course, I lied like a snake and told her it was going just fine. She went to bed around midnight and I again lied and said I should be headed that way soon. That part wasn’t as bad a lie—it was true that I should be headed that way, but what should be and what was were totally different things.
By four o’clock on Christmas morning, something remotely resembling a tricycle sat in the middle of the garage. And you know what? It turns out I didn’t need all those screws, nuts, and washers after all, because I had a pile of them left over that I hadn’t been able to fit.
I placed the trike under the tree just in time for John Mark to wake up and go into the family room, where the tree proudly stood with his little Christmas hat from his first Christmas topping it. There was that red, shiny tricycle in all its glory—well, most of its glory, since there were some parts missing.
For reasons that I still do not fully understand, that little tricycle always squeaked, and no amount of WD-40 could make it stop. I assured John Mark that it was just the equivalent of motor noise and that it would help us locate him if he was riding about the neighborhood.
Another thing that was a bit odd about the tricycle was that with each revolution of the back left wheel, the entire bike leaned slightly to the left. It was as if it were limping on a sore tire. Despite all of my creative communication skills, I couldn’t find a way to euphemistically explain to John Mark why his tricycle had this very distinct disability. He seemed to accept that limitation, although I don’t think his mother ever forgave me for having refused her assistance in building it in the first place. And I have wished for the past thirty years that I had asked for her help. In fact, what I probably should have done is said, “This tricycle assembly looks really easy and shouldn’t take but a few minutes. I think I’ll just let you go ahead and put it together and I’ll get our Christmas music lined up on the cassette player for Christmas morning.”
I learned a lot from my dismal failure at seeking to be the “big-shot dad” by attempting to put that little tricycle together by myself. As Clint Eastwood said in Magnum Force, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
I learned some of mine on that long Christmas Eve night. Knowing our limitations and not trying to do things outside our capacity often means we have to break down our pride and admit we need help. I don’t buy things that require assembly unless there is someone (wife, son, etc.) who has agreed in advance to put them together. I don’t need to waste money on an item I can’t figure out, and I don’t have the time to go through the endless frustration of my utter ineptness at all things requiring manual dexterity.
I have come to learn that Christmas is about accepting more than just my limitations in the assembly of toys and appliances. It’s about accepting that I’m incapable of putting my own life together and making all the pieces fit. It’s about recognizing that God isn’t asking me to impress Him with my skills at “building a perfect human being.” He didn’t send His son to criticize my failures or laugh at my very miserable attempts at putting all the screws, nuts, and washers in my life in the right place. In fact, His son became a carpenter so he’d really have the hang of patiently building something from the rawest of materials.
There’s nothing disgraceful about admitting the need for help. The real disgrace is being so filled with pride and ego that we don’t reach out for the help that we so obviously need, and in the end we fail anyway.
My limitations in toy building may have almost made me convert to Judaism, but they also showed me that this is what Christmas is all about. We are not alone. God has already reached out to us before we even ask for Him. He can handle my limitations, and so should I.
Once I fully realized this, I understood that Christmas wasn’t the problem. It was the answer. I was the problem. But I could fix this by finally accepting my limitations and remembering Christmas for what it really is. Simple. Powerful and profound, but simple.
10.
Transitions
Christmas is, in many ways, a milestone that marks various parts of our year. We will put things off “until after Christmas” or commit to get something done “before Christmas.” We speak of Christmas as a reference point in time, as in “We haven’t seen them since last Christmas.” For many of us Christmas is the biggest and most anticipated holiday of the year, and it’s thought of not just as a day but as an entire season. Christmas is also the time when you catch up with many people in your life—family, friends, neighbors—whom you might not have spoken to in a while. It’s a time to reflect on life—what you’re doing, what you’ve done, and what you hope to do.
It’s also a time of transition—from one year to the next—so it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that some of the most significant transitions and turning points in my life have occurred around Christmas. Janet and I left Arkansas to move to Texas after her bout with spinal cancer right at Christmas, and we moved into our first house just a few weeks before Christmas. But since then we’ve experienced several more Christmas transitions that have greatly affected the course of our lives as a whole.
From the time I was in elementary school, I read the daily newspaper, watched TV news, and listened to news on the radio. I kept up with current events and the news of the day more than most adults I knew and certainly more than most of the kids my age. Politics and current events captivated me, and even though I couldn’t for the life of me see how I would do it, I couldn’t help but think that one day I would run for office. At one time, I thought about becoming a lawyer, but after landing a job at the local radio station when I was a teenager, I realized that the best way I could serve God was to work in broadcasting. I liked the work and was good at it, and I figured it might also be a good way to eventually launch a career in politics. At various times in my life, I would think about running for office
, and then circumstances, such as my becoming a pastor, would kill that vision and render it seemingly impossible. Contrary to popular belief, my decision to move back to Arkansas was not so I could become a minister; I wanted to run for office.
For all the talk about how dumb politicians are and how they tend to follow instead of lead, the greatest examples of sheep following sheep are those in the media who will hear or read something from one of their colleagues and, without any attempt to find out if it’s true, report it as fact.
If you followed the coverage of the 2008 Republican presidential primary, you would probably assume I was preaching in a little Baptist church in Arkansas until one glorious Sunday I up and decided to run for president. A pretty dramatic story, but a bogus one nonetheless. The true story wouldn’t have been that hard to have discovered, and even when a few reporters asked me about it directly, they ignored the facts in order to maintain the image of me as a one-dimensional “religious” candidate who had no experience leading outside the church and no motive for going into politics except to advance my agenda. They ignored the fact that I had more executive experience actually running a government than any of the candidates in the race from either party except for Tommy Thompson, the former governor of Wisconsin, who left the race in August of 2007. Journalists barely mentioned my time as governor or the initiatives I had achieved in such areas as education, health care, the prison system, environment, taxes, and the economy, which had attracted national accolades.