the christmas bible

slave day, 1962

Life and poker are a lot alike, some say. You get dealt a hand with a stake to gamble, and then it’s the luck of the draw. If you’re very lucky, you have sisters and brothers, a complete set of parents, and you’re born into an era of peace and plenty, like America in the late 20th century. So, I can say with confidence that I was very lucky to have been blessed with very high cards upon entry to the casino of life, mostly.

I had an older sister, which in a two-child family is not optimal for the younger sibling, at least for the first 12 years. By the time I was old enough to hold my own in a slugfest, I was taken to the woodshed for hitting a girl, one of the inviolate taboos in my generation. However, I was finally able to establish a limited sense of parity that had previously been indisputably in her favor. She was no longer bigger, and her physical development precluded all future physical contact other than a very rare and chilly hug.

My sister was smarter and more popular, especially with my father, aloof, occasionally protective, and fascinating. Although I never felt a warm and loving bond with her, I’m sure it was there, deep in my brotherly DNA. It just never had a chance to be called on then, except perhaps once.

When I was eight, one of the most intriguing presents under the Christmas tree was from my sister: a weighty rectangular box, well-wrapped, that when shaken offered no clues to its identity. On Christmas morning we were allowed to open a single gift under the tree with our stockings. The pick was always a risky gamble because we were not allowed to “have at it” until everyone was dressed and fed, often after nine or ten o’clock. That morning, before breakfast, as we sat together before the immense heap of presents scattered under the tree spilling across the floor, the possibilities were endless but I selected her gift to me.

It was a King James Bible, very expensive and quite beautiful, so there was that, but it was hardly the present an eight-year-old Yankee fan was hoping for. I wouldn’t call this my first losing trade, but it was one of those commitments that sit on the P&L for ages, waiting to rally. It took years for me to grasp the emotional risk that she, just 11 years old at the time, took by giving it to me. I couldn’t believe it when I opened it. I couldn’t even read it. After all, we were still little kids.

However, I was also keenly aware of her uncertainty and being eight, I failed miserably trying to show any genuine enthusiasm for it. But I did try with something like, “Gee, a Bible. That’s great.” And she said firmly, “I thought you might need it some day.” It was an awkward moment but it was Christmas and it passed right away as we ripped into our stockings.

The only exposure we had as children to religion was the besotted presence of The Honorable Right Reverend, George Nichols saying a garbled grace at our grandmother’s dinner table when he came to visit as a guest for two weeks every summer. The Reverend was once the resident priest of the local Episcopal Church in the post-World War II years, and he baptized us both and many of our cousins.

He wore his clerical white collar at all times, even fishing on our boat, Le Bateau. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes in the same style of cigarette holder that FDR used, and apart from his withering breath, he was a good guy. In short, my family entertained the clergy socially to be close to God. The Bible I had just received as a gift that Christmas morning might have been the first one I had ever held. It probably was.

For most of my early years, my sister tolerated me, but in time, that changed, which brings us to the other subject of this story: Slave Day. We attended the same co-ed private school in Pasadena, California that my mother attended. Our sixth-grade teacher was our mother’s sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Saddler. Occasionally, Mrs. Saddler would say, “Your mother was this, or your sister was that,” referring to their abilities and grades, in contrast to my lack of them.

There was always a sense of timelessness in her reminiscences, a generational responsibility to measure up. There were traditions that had to be upheld, among them the high school freshman class stealing the lunch bell, depriving the entire school of lunch until it was located and duly rung, the third-grade Christmas play (I was the protagonist, Santa Claus, in my third grade), the annual lower school pet show, and Slave Day.

Slave Day was a fundraiser for various charities common throughout America long before my mother was in grade school. In my day, it was coordinated and overseen by the upper school junior class girls. It was an auction. The boys in the eighth grade, going into high school, were sold one at a time to girls in the upper school as “slaves” to carry their books from class to class, bring them lunch, and so forth. Its fruition was always on a day to be determined in the final week before summer vacation. It was my very bad luck that I was a rising eighth grader, and my sister was an upper-class sophomore.

The girls were allowed to pool their money and collectively pay rather high prices. What was worse was, they were allowed to dress their slaves in any kind of costumery, hats, and hazing nonsense imaginable. At this point, I confess I was ambivalent. I had known most of her friends since first grade, and as we got older, they rooted for me in sports, flirted with me, teased me, and often insulted me. But it was an honor to be well-sponsored, and the higher the price paid, the greater the latitude for the “owners” to torture their “property,” especially brothers.

I was sold for something like $65 to my sister and company. She did the bidding, grinning and loving it. Bear in mind, there were only 26 eighth-grade boys and 90 or more combined upper-class girls because the upper school was much larger. Upper school boys were not allowed to buy slaves for obvious reasons.

When Slave Day arrived, I was dressed in lime green tights, a pink tutu, steel roller skates, and a beanie with a chinstrap. I hauled a Radio Flyer loaded up with girl stuff and books through the patios and halls, to the cafeteria, across the athletic field to the tennis courts, and back to the classrooms with sporty panache, all the while being hooted at and mocked every step of the way. Bobby Adams had to wear a collection of hideous clothes backwards and walk backwards with a stupid mask on the back of his head. Imagine 26 of us being led about by various groups of girls. It was one of the most hilarious and memorable days ever, for all of us.

My sister and friends won a prize for the most creative costume. There were other prizes for highest price paid, best costume, and worst costume. All of these honors were formally bestowed at an upper school sock hop in the girls’ gym that evening, where I had my first kiss dancing with Ginny McCutchen. I didn’t realize how much clandestine kissing there was going on in the upper school, including my sister. It was contagious, and I think the eighth-grade girls, being left out of everything else, were eager to try it. That evening completed a bond between us that lasted the rest of our lives.

My grandfather died a few weeks later, and my mother inherited a lot of money. She did something she had always wanted to do: racing thoroughbred horses. We left Pasadena in August and moved to an enormous six-bedroom house in San Marino, and I went to the local school for my freshman year. But that didn’t work out, so we moved the next year to Arcadia, closer to the Santa Anita racetrack, and I went to Arcadia High for 10th grade.

My sister graduated and went off to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I got a driver’s license when I was sixteen, and by seventeen, my mom and I were doing our own thing. She was always at the Caliente race track in Tijuana, Mexico, or Del Mar or Santa Anita, so I left home for good to live with my sister in Tucson, and she took the wheel for a couple of years. When things got really crazy, which was all the time in those days, I quietly tried to make sense of that Bible. Sort of my version of prayer in the foxhole.

Epilogue

The only real edge I had in my family dynamic was that I was a male, a son, something all fathers prize highly. But as soon as they have one, the prize goes into a glass case with his medals and other things on a father’s “must-have” list, like money and success. The Christmas Bible was in my glass case from the day it came into my life and forgotten, mostly.

Several years later, I was speeding up the Jersey Turnpike around 5 PM with two Irish Setters in the back of a '65 Plymouth wagon at the end of a marathon three-day cross-country run from Tucson to New York City. I was exhausted. The dogs were desperate to get out. Everything I owned, which wasn’t much—a stereo, a turntable, speakers, some records, a crappy black-and-white TV, and a couple of suitcases, including The Saint James Bible packed in one of them—was tied to the roof rack.

The whole lot blew off in the fast lane, with heavy traffic swerving at 75 MPH around me. I saw an 18-wheeler run over it in the mirror, and I kept going. I had to. A perfect metaphor for life. You can’t go back. But no gift can ever be lost if you treasure the spirit in which it was given.

Merry Christmas!

PS: I won’t be publishing tomorrow, Christmas and Thursday but I’ll be back on Friday.