The other day my mother told me a Christmas story I’d never heard before.
My father was born in Asheville, N.C., during the Depression, and his childhood was difficult. The story I heard was that my grandmother was from a well-to-do family who lost its modest fortune in the stock market crash. But this didn’t really matter since she was already estranged from them—she’d married a poor boy who did not meet with their approval.
In 1937, not long after my father was born (or maybe in 1936, just before he was born), my grandfather took off, ostensibly to look for work.
Whether he ever found it, no one knows.
But anyway, my father (and his older brother and younger sister) grew up poor. My grandmother worked as a seamstress and took in boarders. Like a lot of poor Americans in those days, she did whatever she had to do. Christmases were not bountiful. There were oranges. There were practical presents like socks.
And then, when my father was 7 or 8 years old, there was a football.
This was, my mother told me, something like a miracle. Because my father had been conditioned not to expect things. Because no one around him made much of Santa Claus. But there was a football. It looked like a new one. And my father and his brother went out in the yard to throw and kick it—and stained their hands brown with shoe polish.
It turns out the football wasn’t new; it was an old ball that came from Catholic Charities. Someone—my mother says it was my grandmother (“bless her heart”)—had tried to make it look new. It worked for a little while; the shoe polish made it gleam.
Soon enough, I guess, the polish wore off and hands and jerseys were washed. For a little boy, an old football ought to be sufficient. It still worked, it might even have felt better with the pebble grains sueded a bit. It was well-broken in.
(Today you might even pay a premium for a distressed ball. Pre-ripped jeans are in style. So-called “reliced guitars”—new instruments artfully beaten up to look like hard-played vintage models—can sell for two or three times what they might otherwise command. Somehow I cannot imagine my father embracing either trend.)
I don’t know why I never heard this story before. There were a lot of things people couldn’t tell me when I was younger; a lot of things I wouldn’t hear. It seems like the sort of thing older people like to tell children, to instill a sense of gratitude that they don’t have to walk six miles through a blizzard to sit in an unheated schoolroom where they have to write out answers to Latin word problems in cursive script.
But I think it’s possible my father never told me the story because part of him was ashamed of having received a second-hand football for a Christmas present. When I think about how I know what I know, I understand I found out more about my father’s childhood from my uncle.
Yesterday was his birthday. I’ve been thinking about that little kid with the brown-stained hands.
I like to think I knew my dad pretty well, that he wasn’t mysterious or unfathomable, but the truth is you don’t know what you don’t know. Mostly I know how he was—calm, slow to anger, quiet and gentle with me, except when he could get competitive. He would let me win, but not without letting me know he was letting me win. I often got the sense he was proud of me.
I don’t really know what he did during the war, I don’t really know what his plans might have been. He got out of the Air Force, he had a couple of business ventures, he got sick.
We didn’t have big Christmases when I was a kid, but I don’t have any sad stories. My footballs were always new. They came in boxes with lightweight plastic tees that didn’t work well; somebody always had to hold it down with an index finger. I got a bike once. Then there was the year I got some golf clubs, brand-new irons from a pro shop, as good as any you could buy. He managed to surprise me.
It’s funny to think about how little your parents must have known back when you thought they knew everything. I was an idiot when I was in my 20s, not that I’m that much less of one now. Maybe past generations had to grow up faster, maybe the necessity of having to perform in an adult world when you’re 17 or 19 or 20 years old quickened some instinct in them, but that’s probably just wishfulness. I don’t imagine any of us are ever ready for the responsibilities thrust upon us; we all figure it out as we go along.
Or maybe we don’t.
Everybody suffers trauma. It is our nature to hurt each other, especially those we profess to love. If you’re lucky, you manage the oyster’s trick: you coat over the irritant, you make it smooth and shiny, what the world calls beautiful. Given enough time, even grievous suffering can look romantic. It was just a football.
Now I give my mom advice. She asks my opinion about real estate, about finances, about whether she should go on that Alaskan cruise again. (She should.) It feels strange to pose as competent. She hasn’t trusted the market since she took a good hit back in 2002, so I suggest that, rather than stuff an unexpected windfall into a money market account, she might want to look around for a relatively short-term CD. We have found some good rates, I tell her.
That’s when she told me about my father’s football.
When I told her I hadn’t heard it, she said he used to tell it all the time. That he’d made it into a funny story.
But I hadn’t heard it.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.