Friday, December 11, 2015

7,584 Wakeup Calls





Over the years I’ve received some truly disappointing gifts, mostly as a kid. Of course I’ve probably given more than my fair share of half-hearted duds myself, but this is about how I been done wrong, not the other way around. Anyway, I quickly learned to feign enthusiasm and gratitude, having sussed out early on the implied obligation to do so.The first systematic lies I learned to tell were all for the sake of others, and I’ve since discovered that the turning of the world’s massive social gears is made possible solely by the lubrication of alcohol and palatable lies. 

As a kid, sometimes the gratitude was sincere, even if the gift was a bust. I felt kind of sorry for parents trying to guess what to get a kid when they themselves were so helplessly uncool.  So when I knew they got me something lame out of a sense of total mystification at what I might  have preferred, it was easier to mime excitement. But if you are the kind of person who gives a kid socks and underwear as Christmas or Birthday presents, you will be roasting weenies with Hitler and Pol Pot around the campfire in Hell. 

Perhaps the most disappointing gift of all time came at Christmas of 1980, when I was 9. We were making our semi-regular pilgrimage from our house in Long Beach, CA up to my Aunt and Uncle’s place in Springfield, OR. It’s about a 16 hour trip, and we were preparing to pile into our giant International Harvester Travelall, named Lurch, packed to the gills. We were bringing presents for my Aunt, Uncle, three cousins, and two Grandparents, as well as the full complement of our immediate-family Christmas gifts and random decorations and ornaments that would allow us to keep some of our particular Christmas traditions intact even at a home not our own. Needless to say, the old behemoth would be loaded down with luggage, presents, festive pastries, and a handful of toys and diversions to keep us occupied for what felt like an eons-long trip to a 9 year old. 

While we were loading the cargo hold of Lurch with presents I inspected each one, looking for those emblazoned with my name, trying to surreptitiously weigh and/or shake them to divine their contents. This kind of behavior was frowned upon by my Mom, as was any effort to communicate what I wanted for Christmas. My friend Shane, an only child, would take his Mom to the store to pick out his own presents in advance, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. My Mom did not agree with my assessment, and became quite irritated when I suggested we should also do that. I suppose being treated like a vending machine is somewhat off-putting for most people, so I would try to be subtle by marking pages in the Spiegel’s Catalogue with stuff that I wanted. But it either fell on deaf ears or annoyed her enough to guarantee that, whatever else I got for Christmas, it sure wasn’t going to be the items I’d circled on the heavily dog-eared pages of that tantalizing catalogue. 

Still, I had high hopes that year for a present I’d both marked in the catalogue and asked for outright at Target. I knew exactly what size and weight the box was, having picked it up in the store and turned it over so many times with the most unmitigated avarice. So as I helped to load the cargo area, imagine my excitement when one with my name on it came through my grubby little hands which seemed to be of the exact size and weight. Not wanting to be too obvious about it, I packed it up behind where I would be sitting so that I might occasionally check on it on the sly during the long trip, perhaps “accidentally” rip a corner to confirm my suspicions. I was never able to get away with this because I was nowhere near as clever as I thought myself to be at 9 years old. Imagine that. Still, I wiled away much of the journey imagining the adventures that I would have with that coveted prize: the Rebel Armored Snowspeeder from that year’s megahit movie “The Empire Strikes Back”. 



I was convinced that this present would strike a decisive blow against both my cousin, Chucky, with whom I had a silent competition to see who would get the best gift, and my best friend John, who never failed to get the rarest, most expensive Star Wars toys. When I got a huge Jeep for my Steve Austin action figure to drive, Chucky got a pool table. When I brought home an X-Wing, John brought home the Millennium Falcon. So just this once, I was gonna have the win. And if that ain’t the true meaning of Christmas, what is?

Owing to my nuanced use of foreshadowing, I’m sure you know that I did not, in fact, open any box that year that contained a Snowspeeder. Apparently there is one other thing in this world that is of the exact size and packaged weight as the Rebel Armored Snowspeeder, which would be the General Electric 4659-B Clock-Radio. If there is anything in the world more antithetical to a Rebel Armored Snowspeeder, I don’t know what it is. 


That year the Best Actor Oscar went to Henry Fonda, for “On Golden Pond”. I was totally robbed. After the performance I gave of pretending to be happy to have received a fucking clock-radio in place of a Snowspeeder, I definitely aced Fonda out and never even got nominated. Imagine that. 

I eventually got the Snowspeeder, bought with some money I got for my 10th birthday. John, in turn, landed himself an Imperial AT-AT Walker, so I was assed-out again. But that damned clock-radio turned out to be the gift that kept on giving. Despite 8 moves across 4 states and 1 foreign country, despite the fact that I routinely used it as a step ladder when I needed to be a few inches taller, the thing always kept decent time and woke me up every morning for the next 7,584 days, eventually being retired only when my wife and I got married and merged our stuff. Can’t fault GE for their craftsmanship, that thing was virtually unbreakable. 

By the end of our time together it only picked up a few AM stations, and just the most annoying, old-timey religious ones, to boot. I spent my 29th year on earth being brought to life daily by organ renditions of “How Great Thou Art” and “The Old Rugged Cross," which were interspersed with a lot of “Thees” and “Thous” as septuagenarian preachers menaced me with the Good News in their tired, ancient voices.

Even though that old brick deserved to end up in the great tech-graveyard, I sent it out into the ether via the world’s longest running rummage sale, The Salvation Army. I like to think it’s on some piece of crappy cinder block and plywood furniture with a bedside bong tattooing water rings into its faux wood finish to compliment all the ones I put there with mine. Perhaps it’s strapped together with duct tape while the flashing blue numbers proclaim it to be permanent midnight, even as it somehow still wakes a stoner up for his job cracking packs at Michael's, serenading him with “Blessed Assurance”. Who knows, maybe it’ll teach him the error of his ways. What can I say? I’m a romantic.

I guess you don’t always get what you want, and even when you get what you need it can still be a bit of a let down. Although the Snowspeeder was the thing I so desperately wanted, I gave it away when I was 16, having only really enjoyed it from 10 to 14 or so. It just seemed wrong to curate an archive of dusty toys in a steamer trunk when the kid I babysat would actually love it the way I once had. 

I hated that clock radio for every minute of the 21 years I owned it, mostly because it tirelessly delivered the Bad News that it was time to get up. Hell, it was really telling me every day that it was time to grow up, and I could never outgrow that reality the way I had my enjoyment of the Snowspeeder. One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more…


But things come round and round, don’t they? Another toy I had longed for in my youth—which that blasted Shane had sitting on his end table along with every toy he'd ever coveted—was the Magic 8-Ball. You know, ask it a question, shake it up and it will tell you that the answer is unclear? I yearned for it desperately, but was denied it for religious reasons owing to the evils of Mattel's plastic soothsayery. Then a friend gave me one last year, and it was like resolving a suspended chord that had been resounding for decades. 

So go ahead and buy that E-Z Bake Oven or Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine you’ve had your eye on since you were 6. I promise you’ll feel much better. And please, never, ever give your kids something useful for Christmas. They’ll be grownups soon enough and all the socks, underwear, and clock-radios will not be remembered fondly. Get them the stupid thing they’ll outgrow. Because life is one giant phase, and all we ever do is outgrow everything that once seemed so crucial.

And because the things you don’t outgrow are mileposts along the road to somewhere you probably don’t want to go.