Christmas

I pretty much worked my way through college, something that is nigh on to impossible to do these days. It was hard then, particularly on the grade-point average, but I “gradjated” debt free and headed out of the state as fast as I could, eventually ending up in the Haight-Ashbury. That’s a story for another day, though.

My next to the last year of college, I think it was, I worked as janitor at the Chi Omega house on the Fayetteville campus of the University of Arkansas. My princely emolument was ten dollars a week plus meals. That sufficed to live on and in addition to the pay, I was privileged, each day, to greet some of the most beautiful girls on campus. A few of them even returned my greeting. All in all, I was a fairly lucky guy.

Lucky yes, wealthy no, those were years in which discretionary income was a distant dream. I got by. That was all.

Then, that year, the mid-term break came and we all prepared to leave for the holidays. I gave the sorority house a final dusting, emptied the trash, swept up, and reported to the house mother. I seem to remember her name was “Mother Mann,” a nice lady but strict. I suppose she had to be. Anyway, she handed me my wages in a white envelope and we prepared to say our goodbyes. “You might check what’s in the envelope,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to think we had made a mistake.

I did, and my mouth must have dropped, for she smiled. “Yes,” she said, “thirty dollars. We pay you each week whether school is in session or not.”

And there they were: three crisp new ten-dollar bills, a fortune those days. It was the first time in my life, at nearly 21-years of age, that I was able to buy Christmas presents for my family with my own money, a privilege I’ve never forgotten and a Christmas I’ll always remember. It was just one of the miracles that the holiday season can generate.

The next year, I held a more respectable job, albeit sans the bonus of attendant female pulchritude. I did drafting for the campus Editorial Service and wound up, at $1.50 an hour, the highest paid student help on campus. I did it in the afternoons and tended a local bar at night, living “pretty high on the hog,” as they say. I’ve always had Christmas money for the years since.

During those years, I dined atop one of the World Trade Center towers when they still stood, and during a long-ago scuba dive, I floated out over the Grand Cayman wall and stared at where it dropped for three miles before hitting the ocean floor. I remember the awe of walking to the crest of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and looking across the field to where, as William Faulkner said, “For every Southern boy … there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.”

Yep, I’ve been blessed to see many wonderful things over the years, but nothing ever filled me with more amazement and pride as a long-ago Christmas when Mother Mann handed me that little white envelope.

Doesn't take much sometimes.