okieinexile
Well-Known Member
By Bobby Neal Winters
My five-year-old has more poise and self-possession at her tender age than I do at forty-one. The other day we were at the mall and—at her request—I took her to see Santa Claus. When you are five years old, Santa Claus is like what the boss, the President of the United States, and God all rolled up into one would be to you and me. Indeed, Santa Claus might be scarier. The worse thing that your boss can do to you is fire you, but Santa can put coal in your stocking this year, and you’d have to be good a whole year before you got another chance. Santa comes right inside your house in the middle of the night, and the President doesn’t do that, yet, Patriot Act or not. And while God is a pretty abstract concept to some, Santa is a big, red, solid in-your-face sort of guy.
In short, while he appears to be all “Ho, ho, ho,” the appropriate response to Santa is not laughter, rather it is terror. If he were a corporation, we would have to break him up, because he is just too powerful.
My response to such powerful figures is to seek anonymity. (I was employed at the University for seven years before the dean of my college knew my name and considered that a great success until I learned that college deans are just like that.) My father’s advice was to not ask a lot of questions, keep your ear to the ground, and whack your truck tires with an iron first thing every morning to make sure they haven’t gone flat. I’ve not found a lot of chance to apply that last one, but I’ve applied the first two religiously.
Dad spent the first few years of his life in a house with a dirt floor in the deep woods of southern Oklahoma where his families were sharecroppers who worked someone else’s land and gave a share of the cotton as rent. When he got older, he worked as a day laborer in the oilfield, then he went to WWII, and when he got back he got a regular job, having learned there was another way to do things. This is the world that Daddy was speaking from, and his advice will get you a long way.
However, sometimes you have to be noticed, and coming to terms with this has been hard for me. As I was working on my degree in mathematics, it was my desire to learn something that no one else in the world knew anything about and to work in a dark corner where no one else knew just exactly what I was doing. It’s not exactly turned out that way, however. I’ve learned there are times when you must ask questions, and that you shouldn’t wait too long before you ask them.
This has been difficult to take up because somewhere in the back of my mind I am waiting for the landlord of my holding to come around and throw me off it. Like the Bible says, it takes generations for these things to work themselves out.
Our five-year-old daughter seems to be unaffected by the sharecropper mentality, however. She is a bold one and has never given any evidence of not wanting to be noticed. They said of Teddy Roosevelt when he was at a wedding he wanted to be the bride, and when he was at a funeral, he wanted to be the corpse. This fits the five-year-old to perfection.
When she went to talk to Santa Claus, she did not sit in his lap. Instead, she stood before him and looked him directly in the eyes. She then calmly and quietly presented her Christmas list, and having done so, she turned and walked away with no more concern than if Santa were a cashier. This is made more remarkable by the fact that she hasn’t always been nice this year. In fact, there are a few episodes which, if they had been captured on videotape, would insure her having coal in her stocking until her children are able to drive. This didn’t bother her, though, because she is of a new generation and has grown up in a different world than my father or I did.
I don’t mean to say that she is a better person than either of us. Not everybody can start out life picking cotton and put two sons through college. But she can look the Big Guy right in the face and ask him for what she wants without crying or wetting her pants. It seems to me that ability can take someone a long way provided some other talents accompany it as well.
Merry Christmas.
My five-year-old has more poise and self-possession at her tender age than I do at forty-one. The other day we were at the mall and—at her request—I took her to see Santa Claus. When you are five years old, Santa Claus is like what the boss, the President of the United States, and God all rolled up into one would be to you and me. Indeed, Santa Claus might be scarier. The worse thing that your boss can do to you is fire you, but Santa can put coal in your stocking this year, and you’d have to be good a whole year before you got another chance. Santa comes right inside your house in the middle of the night, and the President doesn’t do that, yet, Patriot Act or not. And while God is a pretty abstract concept to some, Santa is a big, red, solid in-your-face sort of guy.
In short, while he appears to be all “Ho, ho, ho,” the appropriate response to Santa is not laughter, rather it is terror. If he were a corporation, we would have to break him up, because he is just too powerful.
My response to such powerful figures is to seek anonymity. (I was employed at the University for seven years before the dean of my college knew my name and considered that a great success until I learned that college deans are just like that.) My father’s advice was to not ask a lot of questions, keep your ear to the ground, and whack your truck tires with an iron first thing every morning to make sure they haven’t gone flat. I’ve not found a lot of chance to apply that last one, but I’ve applied the first two religiously.
Dad spent the first few years of his life in a house with a dirt floor in the deep woods of southern Oklahoma where his families were sharecroppers who worked someone else’s land and gave a share of the cotton as rent. When he got older, he worked as a day laborer in the oilfield, then he went to WWII, and when he got back he got a regular job, having learned there was another way to do things. This is the world that Daddy was speaking from, and his advice will get you a long way.
However, sometimes you have to be noticed, and coming to terms with this has been hard for me. As I was working on my degree in mathematics, it was my desire to learn something that no one else in the world knew anything about and to work in a dark corner where no one else knew just exactly what I was doing. It’s not exactly turned out that way, however. I’ve learned there are times when you must ask questions, and that you shouldn’t wait too long before you ask them.
This has been difficult to take up because somewhere in the back of my mind I am waiting for the landlord of my holding to come around and throw me off it. Like the Bible says, it takes generations for these things to work themselves out.
Our five-year-old daughter seems to be unaffected by the sharecropper mentality, however. She is a bold one and has never given any evidence of not wanting to be noticed. They said of Teddy Roosevelt when he was at a wedding he wanted to be the bride, and when he was at a funeral, he wanted to be the corpse. This fits the five-year-old to perfection.
When she went to talk to Santa Claus, she did not sit in his lap. Instead, she stood before him and looked him directly in the eyes. She then calmly and quietly presented her Christmas list, and having done so, she turned and walked away with no more concern than if Santa were a cashier. This is made more remarkable by the fact that she hasn’t always been nice this year. In fact, there are a few episodes which, if they had been captured on videotape, would insure her having coal in her stocking until her children are able to drive. This didn’t bother her, though, because she is of a new generation and has grown up in a different world than my father or I did.
I don’t mean to say that she is a better person than either of us. Not everybody can start out life picking cotton and put two sons through college. But she can look the Big Guy right in the face and ask him for what she wants without crying or wetting her pants. It seems to me that ability can take someone a long way provided some other talents accompany it as well.
Merry Christmas.
