Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (9 page)

The Christmas Present

By James A. Michener

December 1967

W
hen I
was a boy of nine in the little town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, I used to mow the lawn of Mrs. Long, an elderly lady who lived across from the Presbyterian Church. She paid me very little for the chore, which was not surprising for she had not much money. But she did promise me, “When Christmas comes I shall have a present for you.” And she said this with such enthusiasm that I felt assured the present would be magnificent.

I spent much time wondering what it would be. The boys I played with had baseball gloves and bicycles and ice skates, and I was so eager to acquire any one of these things that I convinced myself that my benefactor intended choosing from among them.

“It would hardly be a baseball glove,” I reasoned with myself. “A woman like Mrs. Long wouldn't know much about baseball.” Since she was a frail little person I also ruled out the bicycle, for how could she handle such a contraption?

On my last Saturday at work Mrs. Long said, “Now remember, because you've been a good boy all summer, at Christmas I'll have a present waiting. You come to the door and collect it.” These words clinched it. Since she was going to have the present in her house, and since she herself would be handling it, unquestionably she was giving me a pair of ice skates.

So convinced of this I became that I could see the skates and imagine myself upon them. As the cold days of November arrived and ice began to form on the ponds which were then a feature of rural Doylestown, I began to try my luck on the ice that would be sustaining me and my skates through the winter.

“Get away from the ice!” a man shouted. “It's not strong enough yet.” But soon it would be.

As Christmas
approached, it was with difficulty that I restrained myself from reporting to Mrs. Long and demanding my present. Our family agreed that the first of December was too early for me to do this. “She may not have it wrapped yet,” someone argued, and this made sense. But the 15th was also too early, and the 20th, too. I argued back on the 20th, reasoning that if I was going to get a present I might as well get it now, but my mother pointed out that in our family we never opened our presents until Christmas morning.

On the 21st of December, a serious cold snap froze all the ponds so the boys who already had ice skates were able to use them, and my longing to possess mine, even though I could not open the package for a few days, became overpowering. On December 22nd I could restrain myself no longer. I marched down the street, presented myself at the door of the house whose lawn I had tended all summer and said, “I've come for my present, Mrs. Long.”

“I've been waiting for you,” she said, leading me into her parlor, its windows heavy with purple velvet. She sat me in a chair, disappeared to another room, and in a moment stood before me holding a package which under no conceivable circumstances could hold a baseball glove or a bicycle or even a pair of skates. I was painfully disappointed but so far as I can recall did not show it, because during the week my advisers at home had warned repeatedly, “Whatever she has for you, take it graciously and say thank you.”

What she had was an ordinary parcel about 22 centimeters wide, 30 centimeters long and no more than 8 millimeters thick. As Mrs. Long held it in her frail hands, curiosity replaced my initial disappointment, and when I lifted it from her the extreme lightness of the gift quite captivated me. It weighed almost nothing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You'll see on Christmas Day.”

I shook it. Nothing rattled, but I thought I did catch a sound of some sort—a quiet, muffled sound that was somehow familiar but unidentifiable. “What is it?” I asked again.

“A kind of magic,” Mrs. Long said, and that was all.

Her words were enough to set my mind dancing with new possibilities, so that by the time I reached home I had convinced myself that I held some great wonder. “She gave me a magician's set. I'll turn pitchers of milk into rabbits.”

How long the passage to Christmas was! There were other presents of normal dimension and weight. But Mrs. Long's box dominated all, for it had to do with magic.

On Christmas
morning, before the sun was up. I had this box on my knees, tearing at the reused colored string which bound it. Soon the wrapping paper was off and in my lap lay a flat box with its top hinged about halfway down.

With great excitement I opened the hinged lid to find inside a shimmering pile of ten flimsy sheets of black paper, each labeled in iridescent letters, Carbon Paper Regal Premium. Of the four words I knew only the second, and what it signified in this context I could not guess. Vaguely I remembered that the present had something to do with magic, and with this word on my lips I turned to the elders who had watched me unwrapping my gift.

“Is it magic?” I asked.

Aunt Laura, who taught school, had the presence of mind to say, “It really is!” And she took two pieces of white paper, placed between them one of the black sheets from the box and, with a hard pencil, wrote my name on the upper sheet. Then, removing it and the Carbon Paper Regal Premium, she handed me the second sheet, which her pencil had in no way touched.

There was my name! It was clean, and very dark, and well formed and as beautiful as Christmas Day itself.

I was enthralled! This was indeed magic . . . of the greatest dimension. That a pencil could write on one piece of paper and mysteriously record on another was a miracle which was so gratifying to my childish mind that I can honestly say that in that one moment, in the dark of Christmas morning, I understood as much about printing, and the duplication of words, and the fundamental mystery of disseminating ideas as I have learned in the remaining half-century of my life.

I wrote
and wrote, using up whole tablets until I had ground off the last shred of blackness from the ten sheets of carbon paper. It was the most enchanting Christmas present a boy like me could have had, infinitely more significant than a baseball glove or a pair of skates. It was exactly the present I needed and it reached me at precisely that Christmas when I was best able to comprehend it. Because it enabled me to learn something about the reproduction of words, it opened vast portals of imagination.

I have received some pretty thundering Christmas presents since then, but none ever came close to the magnificence of this one. The average present merely gratifies a temporary yearning, as the ice skates would have done; the great present illuminates all the years of life that remain.

It was not until some years later that I realized that the ten sheets of Carbon Paper Regal Premium which Mrs. Long gave me had cost her nothing. She had used them for her purposes and would normally have thrown them away, except that she had the ingenuity to guess that a boy might profit from a present totally outside the realm of his ordinary experience. Although she had spent no money on me, she had spent something infinitely more valuable: imagination.

I hope that each year some boys and girls, will receive, from thoughtful adults who really love them, gifts which will jolt them out of all they have known up to now. It is such gifts and such experiences—usually costing little or nothing—that transform a life and lend it an impetus that may continue for decades.

Laughter, the Best Medicine

The devout
cowboy lost his favorite Bible while he was mending fences out on the range.

Three weeks later a cow walked up to him carrying the Bible in its mouth. The cowboy couldn't believe his eyes. He took the book out of the cow's mouth, raised his eyes heavenward and exclaimed, “It's a miracle!”

“Not really,” said the cow. “Your name is written inside the cover.”
Roman Wilbert

• • •

A farmer
pulls a prank on Easter Sunday. After the egg hunt, he sneaks into the chicken coop and replaces every white egg with a brightly colored one. Minutes later, the rooster walks in. He spots the colored eggs, then storms out and beats up the peacock.
Adam Joshua Smargon

The Man on the Train

By Alex Haley

February 1991

W
henever my
brothers, sister and I get together we inevitably talk about Dad. We all owe our success in life to him—and to a mysterious man he met one night on a train.

Our father, Simon Alexander Haley, was born in 1892 and reared in the small farming town of Savannah, Tennessee. He was the eighth child of Alec Haley—a tough-willed former slave and part-time sharecropper—and of a woman named Queen.

Although sensitive and emotional, my grandmother could be tough-willed herself, especially when it came to her children. One of her ambitions was that my father be educated.

Back then in Savannah a boy was considered “wasted” if he remained in school after he was big enough to do farm work. So when my father reached the sixth grade, Queen began massaging grandfather's ego.

“Since we have eight children,” she would argue, “wouldn't it be prestigious if we deliberately
wasted
one and got him educated?” After many arguments, Grandfather let Dad finish the eighth grade. Still, he had to work in the fields after school.

But Queen was not satisfied. As eighth grade ended, she began planting seeds, saying Grandfather's image would reach new heights if their son went to high school.

Her barrage worked. Stern old Alec Haley handed my father five hard-earned ten-dollar bills, told him never to ask for more and sent him off to high school. Traveling first by mule cart and then by train—the first train he had ever seen—Dad finally alighted in Jackson, Tennessee, where he enrolled in the preparatory department of Lane College. The black Methodist school offered courses up through junior college.

Dad's $50 was soon used up, and to continue in school, he worked as a waiter, a handyman and a helper at a school for wayward boys. And when winter came, he'd arise at 4 a.m., go into prosperous white families' homes and make fires so the residents would awaken in comfort.

Poor Simon became something of a campus joke with his one pair of pants and shoes, and his droopy eyes. Often he was found asleep with a textbook fallen into his lap.

The constant struggle to earn money took its toll. Dad's grades began to flounder. But he pushed onward and completed senior high. Next he enrolled in A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a land-grant school where he struggled through freshman and sophomore years.

One bleak afternoon at the close of his second year, Dad was called into a teacher's office and told that he'd failed a course—one that required a textbook he'd been too poor to buy.

A ponderous sense of defeat descended upon him. For years he'd given his utmost, and now he felt he had accomplished nothing. Maybe he should return home to his original destiny of sharecropping.

But days later, a letter came from the Pullman Company saying he was one of 24 black college men selected from hundreds of applicants to be summertime sleeping-car porters. Dad was ecstatic. Here was a chance! He eagerly reported for duty and was assigned a Buffalo-to-Pittsburgh train.

The train was racketing along one morning about 2 a.m. when the porter's buzz sounded. Dad sprang up, jerked on his white jacket and made his way to the passenger berths. There a distinguished-looking man said he and his wife were having trouble sleeping and they both wanted glasses of warm milk. Dad brought milk and napkins on a silver tray. The man handed one glass through the lower-berth curtains to his wife and, sipping from his own glass, began to engage Dad in conversation.

Pullman Company rules strictly prohibited any conversation beyond “Yes, sir” or “No, ma'am,” but this passenger kept asking questions. He even followed Dad back into the porter's cubicle.

“Where are you from?”

“Savannah, Tennessee, sir.”

“You speak quite well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What work did you do before this?”

“I'm a student at A & T College in Greensboro, sir.” Dad felt no need to add that he was considering returning home to sharecrop.

The man looked at him keenly, finally wished him well and returned to his bunk.

The next morning, the train reached Pittsburgh. At a time when 50 cents was a good tip, the man gave five dollars to Simon Haley, who was profusely grateful. All summer, he had been saving every tip he received, and when the job finally ended, he had accumulated enough to buy his own mule and plow. But he realized his savings could also pay for one full semester at A & T without his having to work a single odd job.

Dad decided he deserved at least one semester free of outside work. Only that way would he know what grades he could truly achieve.

He returned to Greensboro. But no sooner did he arrive on campus than he was summoned by the college president. Dad was full of apprehension as he seated himself before the great man.

“I have a letter here, Simon,” the president said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You were a porter for Pullman this summer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you meet a certain man one night and bring him warm milk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, his name is Mr. R. S. M. Boyce, and he's a retired executive of the Curtis Publishing Company, which publishes
The Saturday Evening Post
. He has donated $500 for your board, tuition and books for the entire school year.”

My father was astonished.

The surprise grant not only enabled Dad to finish A & T, but to graduate first in his class. And that achievement earned him a full scholarship to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In 1920, Dad, then a newlywed, moved to Ithaca with his bride, Bertha. He entered Cornell to pursue his Master's degree, and my mother enrolled at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music to study piano. I was born the following year.

One day decades later, editors of
The Saturday Evening Post
invited me to their editorial offices in New York to discuss the condensation of my first book,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. I was so proud, so happy, to be sitting in those wood-paneled offices on Lexington Avenue. Suddenly I remembered Mr. Boyce, and how it was his generosity that enabled me to be there amid those editors, as a writer. And then I began to cry. I just couldn't help it.

We children of Simon Haley often reflect on Mr. Boyce and his investment in a less fortunate human being. By the ripple effect of his generosity, we also benefited. Instead of being raised on a sharecrop farm, we grew up in a home with educated parents, shelves full of books, and with pride in ourselves. My brother George is chairman of the U.S. Postal Rate Commission, Julius is an architect, Lois a music teacher and I'm a writer.

Mr. R. S. M. Boyce dropped like a blessing into my father's life. What some may see as a chance encounter, I see as the working of a mysterious power for good.

And I believe that each person blessed with success has an obligation to return part of that blessing. We must all live and act like the man on the train.