Tag Archives: memoir

An Illinois winter

As I was writing the previous post, it started becoming this post, and it seemed best to separate them. But this post does build on the idea of outgrowing the belief in magic that fiction may require.

As I’ve grown up, I don’t really feel a need to believe in magic — I don’t often feel enchanted, and I don’t feel like the loss of magic is a bad thing. I read something this week that said children pass through a developmental stage of thinking magically, and I’ve been pondering this idea as I’ve been thinking about Christmas and how much the stories around Christmas (the Biblical story of Jesus’s birth, but also the stories of Santa, Frosty, the Grinch, etc.) require magic. I don’t know, I guess, why we need to believe in magic. I don’t want to disillusion the children I know — perhaps I’m a little bitter about having been disillusioned about the holiday years ago.

In my memory, there’s this connection: The Christmas Eve I was 9, as I was carrying the garbage to our farm’s burn barrel (I was trying to be good so that I deserved our family’s holiday celebration), I got the idea that I should ask for a Bible for Christmas. Somehow I was going to become A Good Person by asking for a Bible and living by it (whatever that actually meant, I’m not sure, and I probably wasn’t sure at the time. My family wasn’t particularly religious, and maybe I just had an impulse toward purity or self-control or something. I was 9 — what did I know?). I somehow made this into a test of the Divine: my last-minute request would be fulfilled, if Santa, and by extension, God, were real enough to read my mind, as they must be able to, if indeed they are Santa and God. But I didn’t get a Bible. Unwrapped under the tree the next day — the first Christmas in the apartment we had moved into after my parents’ divorce — were a baseball bat and helmet that I recognized as having come from a store’s going-out-of-business sale months earlier. I knew right away that these things couldn’t have come from Santa, but I questioned my mother about this later that day (even then, I was intense — obsessive — enough to need an answer. I have never been one to privately hold a doubt that could be shared publicly.) My poor mother, who was trying to do the best she could that first Christmas, on a reduced income and without parenting help, admitted that she was the source of the gifts from Santa.

I believe she also said that Santa may not be an actually existing person, but that I could think of Santa as the spirit of generosity. It’s a nice thought as far as it goes, but it’s hard to be satisfied with an abstraction substituted for a being of simple magic.

And I don’t even know why I have held onto this story for, well, 30 years now. Was I really that devastated — I mean, was this the single biggest moment of disillusionment in my life? I admit that I’ve led a pretty lucky life, if finding out about Santa is my biggest let-down. Am I trotting out this story as an explanation for why I still don’t feel I can trust in magic or, for that matter, God? I seldom find that such facile tales can be a complete explanation.

And yet, just now as I write this, I’m realizing what I couldn’t have understood at age 9 — that maybe finding out that Santa wasn’t real only months after finding out that my stable family life wasn’t real, either, was just a bit too much for me to take.

I have never really thought about this in this way before. My parents’ divorce was amicable, was relatively easy, and there was never any abuse or loud fighting — there was no need to be upset. Yet maybe I was upset but couldn’t quite admit it.

Of course, I was a weird kid at that age — I started reading “1984” the next year, because the next year was THE 1984, and I must’ve heard about Orwell’s book in the news or from a teacher or something, and wanted to prove that I could read such an adult book. (I didn’t read more than about a hundred pages, which is probably for the best — I didn’t need to find out about rat-torture when I was 10.) But with the divorce, and the move, and the new school, new friends, and then new world-without-Santa that year, I was probably under a lot of what I would now call stress and then didn’t know what to call it at all.

And again, I hesitate to pinpoint one moment in my past, one story, as determinative, mostly because to do so is bullshit. (One of my high school students, having recently read my blog piece about the Grinch, said she liked the Grinch’s backstory that’s in the Jim Carrey movie but not in the Seuss original. I generally find “backstory” worthless — let’s not oversimplify every character’s  action to a simple cause-and-effect from a childhood trauma.) There are many reasons — or no reasons at all — why a person is who he is and does what he does: biology, genetics, social influences, unconscious learning, etc.

But for some reason, I have been thinking a lot lately about this finding-out-about-Santa moment, and the part of who I am that I have access to is my past, and this past (faulty though I know memory to be) is something I can and do re-evaluate and continue to learn from over time. I don’t tell the story above to be maudlin, though I acknowledge that it may strike some readers that way. I guess I want to explain to myself why I’m not keen on Santa or on “Christmas magic,” and maybe this explanation above does hold insight.

Most of the year, of course, I don’t think too much about magic. I dismiss magic or Divine Will — these are not useful explanations. When others tell ghost stories, I remind myself that identifying something as a ghost is merely a subjective jump-to-conclusion after some unverifiable experience. I prefer evidence and reason and even non-answers (open questions) to bullshit answers.

Maybe my lack of faith is connected to my lack of desire to read fiction. Maybe not. Most of the time, I don’t value either faith or fiction. And even an explanation about my past is itself just a story, perhaps useful and perhaps not. But I feel a need to summarize at this point in the post — or, rather, I feel a need to reach out to some higher truth, some insight that feels right. Maybe none is forthcoming now. Perhaps later.