Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve
12/24/1997

When I was living in New Haven, there was an old man who used to hang out and panhandle for money by  the graduate dorm where I lived. He was a weathered old man with the gnarly hands and picket fence teeth you picture when you imagine an old bum begging for cash. Most days, I would pass him by without giving him any money but sometimes he was hard to ignore so I'd drop some loose change into his open palm or throw some coins at his beat up hat. I always wondered why homeless people insisted on living up East where the weather can make daily life seem hard. Some days the wind is so bitter and the clouds so heavy and gray that all the wonders of snow and icicles mean very little and all you want to do is head south on the wings of a prayer. Why not choose to live somewhere warmer?

Then one day I realized what kept the old man in Connecticut. I was caught keyless outside the Hall of Graduate Studies hoping that one of my fellow students would happen by and open the daunting iron gate which secured the dorm building. While waiting, I watched the old man gather some money up and walk over to the public pay phone to make a call. I can't say for certain who he was calling, despite the level of his raised voice, because it was hard to understand him when he talked, but it seemed to me that he was speaking with someone who might have been family, maybe an ex-wife, someone like that. A friend of mine who lived in the building confirmed that every few days or so the old man would get on the phone and talk to someone in a real loud voice, sometimes apologizing, sometimes arguing, sometimes rambling but always apparently talking to someone who might have been important to him at some time in his life. Or maybe someone to whom he once held some importance.

I remember thinking that I had probably found my answer concerning bums who lived in the cold, dank North. This man was a bum all right, but he was a bum with roots. He was in a bad state, no question about it, but somehow, in some way, unfortunate things had happened in his life which took him from point A to point Z and the only anchor he had to a better, nearly forgotten time was that public phone. Loose coins from strangers his only passport to those happier times. And like most people who have a fleeting glimpse of the absurd turns a life can sometimes take, I thought one simple, traditional thing, "there but for the grace of God, go I." And I wondered just how many poor decisions, terrible luck and pissed off people it would take before I too could end up wondering what had happened to my life, my friends, my loves? Not much, I bet.

What strings our lives together, I think, is our friends and our family. The antsy six-year-old kid starting grade school, the peer-pressured teen fighting off acne, the cog-in-the-wheel employee, the mother, the father, the grandmother, the grandfather we all were, are, and become…these stages of life can be seen as almost completely disconnected taken separately, but are strung together by the constants of life -- care and love and feeling. Our friends. Our family.

As the gentle, falling leaves of Autumn whispered down to the stoic ground and the Christmas season bared down on us all that year, I remember discussing the old man with my girlfriend. She had seen him herself on occasion and being the thoughtful person she was, she decided to get the old man a holiday present, a scarf and some gloves, to help him bear the winter. It was a well-intended gesture on her part. But school duties took precedent. The tests to take, the papers to write, the planning for trips home….and we didn't get a chance to deliver the gift to him.

We never did. That January a burly winter storm blew through Connecticut, one of the worst in years.  When we returned to New Haven we noticed that the old man was missing from his usual post. I found out that he had passed away one day on a park bench which resided in what is known in New England cities as the Town Green. Ragged blankets and newspapers could not, apparently, protect him from the cold.  

Every Christmas Eve I think of that old man guarding what was left of his past by collecting money so he could huddle by that phone and rekindle a spark of a flame of a fire long since burned.

It doesn't make me a good or a bad man. I don't know if he was a good or bad man either…but it reminds me of the strings connecting my life….friends, family….how lucky I am….it reminds of the meaning of that gentle, parting wish……Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men. Merry Christmas to one and all.

L.V.