1-5-03, Voice in the Crowd
Wealth Beyond Fort
Knox
By Pete Chaney
IPS Features
Christmas has become a mile marker for me.
Each year I take stock of things and compare it with the Christmas I saw
a year ago, ten years ago, fifty years ago.
There have been many Christmases.
An early one was filled with the tears of the grownups,
all crying and sad. My father’s
older brother, troubled with asthma so bad he couldn’t sleep at night, crawled
up under his house with a pistol and killed himself. There was that Christmas morning on the farm went Aunt Fanny
was knocking on the door before anyone was up.
She and her brother lived in a cottage the family built for them across
from our home. Uncle Josh was dead.
I stayed alone and played with my Gilbert microscope set while my mother
and father went to let everyone know and make the necessary arrangements.
But it was not all about death. Each Christmas the whole family came to my grandmother’s
home where she lived with a widowed and an unmarried daughter.
There were three tables set. The
main one was in the living room where the men ate first and then the wives and
women. The children ate in the kitchen.
They came slowly and filled with prized gifts.
Then, as time passed, they came quicker and quicker as the years became
shorter. There was the first one
with a newborn daughter, arriving six days before Christmas in the two-story
wooden hospital building in Camden, S.C. There
were the seasons spent on foreign shores where observances were different.
In Germany, my wife, daughter and I lived on the economy
renting a shared apartment with a German landlady. We carried her to the PX to buy some things for the holidays.
Some said she and her husband had been big in the Nazi party, but—of
course—after the war, no one was a Nazi.
The neighbors had a huge Christmas tree decorated with candles with a
bucket of water nearby.
An Air Force friend and I, after getting into the spirit
of the season, went over to see it. Pogo
was a popular comic strip then and we launched into the pirated lyrics from
Pogo: “Deck the halls with Boston Charlie; tra-la-la-la and Kalamazoo.
Nora’s freezing on the trolley; tra-la-la-la and Kalamazoo.”
The Germans recognized the tune and not the words.
They were very impressed with our getting into the theme.
There were happy Yuletides with family together and
exchanging gifts. There were lonely
ones with family breakup and loneliness so deep it was personal and could not be
shared. When my wife and I broke up
and she took our daughter across the country to California, I sent out Christmas
cards with my daughter’s picture on it, saying her name “and friends.”
It made sense later when friends realized our marriage was over.
Another marriage with a son and a daughter gave
Christmas new meaning. The season
is always best when seen through the eyes of a child.
There were times when the bank account was sufficient to
afford nice presents for everyone. There
were times when every penny counted. Once when I was in the real estate business, was worth a
million dollars—on paper—and was building and selling a house a month, I had
to buy kerosene in five gallon buckets to heat our home.
There was the Christmas when “One Day at a Time” was
on the bestseller list. St.
Martin’s Press had the paperback edition on every supermarket rack. It was satisfying to see my name on the cover.
There have been 20 Christmases since then and no new book on the shelf.
Of course, I haven’t given up, just discouraged.
When I look back over a year that has passed, I try to
decide if I have accomplished anything since the previous Christmas.
This year my bank account had seen better days.
Having quit smoking and gotten cataracts removed so I could see again, my
health was improved.
But there was an asset I could count which was more valuable than all the gold at Fort Knox. Friendships. Veteran friend. Those I came to know and appreciate through political work. Those who share writing interests. There are many friends I love and appreciate. It is impossible to name them all. But one friend stands apart because he is a unique individual. Dalton Roberts. The Lord broke the proverbial mold when He created him. Being able to call him friend makes me richer than any billionaire who has only gold.
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