On Learning How to Learn

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."
*** C. S. Lewis 

A Short Christmas Story

I have often wondered what the holiday season would be like without a last-minute dash to the department store for a gift I forgot to purchase. Honestly, I don’t think it’s in my nature to ever know, and this past year was certainly no different from any other I can remember.

Three days before Christmas, I found myself browsing through a large selection of furry socks, the ones I always get for my wife, whether she needs, wants, or actually uses them. I wonder about that for a moment but shrug it off, because at this point, it is a tradition and I just do it.

Having chosen several pairs I think she will like, I leave the women’s apparel section and take them up front to pay. The lines are a little long but I quickly find the shortest one, or the one that seems to be moving the fastest, anyway. 

As the line shuffles forward I turn my attention to the cashier, an elderly woman wearing a Santa hat with flashing lights on it. Her face is withered and her narrow shoulders are slumped a bit, but her disposition is cheery and her eyes, I notice, are quite striking, clear, youthful, and laughing. I imagine that she must have been a very beautiful woman when she was young. 

I laid the furry socks on the counter and she picked them up and asked, “Have you been naughty or nice?”

“Somewhere in between,” I answered as she turned the socks over in her hand, looking at them with those striking eyes.

“I like these,” she smiles, “For your wife?”

“It’s a holiday tradition,” I answered, nodding my head. “I don’t know where they all wind up, but I keep on buying them.”

She scans the furry socks, but then pauses for a moment before looking back up at me. “Every year my husband has bought me a stuffed teddy bear for Christmas,” she says with a smile. She seems to wander in thought for a second but then places the socks in the bag. “I have a whole room-full,” she continued. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them.”  I smiled in response as I waited for her to finish.

“But there’ll be no bears this year,” she said, handing me the bag. Once again she paused, staring at me with those blue eyes which, I could see, were now beginning to shimmer with tears. Her smile slowly faded as I suddenly realized what she was telling me. 

“I lost him last summer,” she said, her lower lip trembling, almost imperceptibly. 

“I am very sorry,” was all I could think to say. I stood there for a second or two until she finally smiled, nodded her head, and turned her attention to the next person in line. I heard her ask if they’d been naughty or nice as I turned to leave.

I had barely left the store before my own eyes began to well up. Suddenly, those silly, furry socks didn’t seem so silly anymore. And by the time I made it to the car, the tears were flowing hard and I didn’t care who may or may not have noticed.  

I wrapped those socks with great care as if they were the most precious of things. I neatly filled out the tag and placed the package gently under the tree beside the diamond earrings and the gold necklace I had previously wrapped. 

On Christmas morning, with all the opened gifts lying upon the kitchen table, I told my wife the tale of the woman with the striking blue eyes and a room-full of teddy bears. I found myself choking on the words as I struggled to finish the story.  

“I love getting these socks,” my wife finally said as she slipped into a pair and left the room for a moment. She returned with a big cardboard box which she placed on the table, removing the lid for me to see. I leaned forward to find it completely full of furry socks. I smiled as she told me she had worn every pair, but only until they were replaced with the new ones each Christmas morning.

On Aging

"Never lose the little boy inside of you, because then you are just a crotchety old man!"

Flies

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

*   From a friend who heard it from a friend.

On Time Travel

We are all time travelers, speeding toward the future at sixty minutes per hour.
*   I don't remember where I came across this, but I dig it. 

Gathering Flowers and Such

“A flower unplucked is but left to the falling, and nothing is gained by not gathering roses”. I first read this passage in a Robert Frost poem last summer and have since spent a lot of time contemplating it. I have recently come to visualize the rose and the flower as joy, happiness, and bliss, all of which are waiting to be harvested in lieu of falling away and withering, bereft of me and mine. Thus, I have concluded that nothing is gained by not gathering them and therefore, gather them, I shall.