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The Gifts We Give
Benjamin slid his sneakers through the mud in the gutter letting his loose laces drag through the puddles. All the way home from school he walked head down, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed into the pockets of his blue jeans. Sparrows chirped above him and tiny droplets of water dripped from the branches where they had been iced earlier that morning. Benjamin noticed nothing, not even the sounds of the basketball thumping on the asphalt or the high pitched voices of younger children on the monkey bars in the park. For a small boy of nine he should have been enthusiastic especially now that school was finished for two weeks over Christmas.
The few friends he had at school had returned to their own homes in other parts of the city with wild excitement in their eyes and stories of expected adventures over the holidays. But Benjamin had quietly slipped out of the school yard and trudged home unnoticed. He knew that this Christmas would not be the happiest he and his father had ever spent. His father was unemployed and Benjamin knew that they only had enough for the gas and a bit of food.
He turned down the alley leading to the rear of an apartment block and walked among the garbage bins and the dancing debris caught in the wind. He thought about his father and the holidays and the vague memory of his mother who they sometimes visited at the cemetery. He liked the cemetery with its green grass and trees and sometimes its colourful flowers. But most of all he liked to fly his kite in its open spaces without tall concrete buildings blocking the light or long black wires eating his kite. There were no oil spills, or dog droppings and foul-smelling garbage.
Since his mother had died, his father and he had grown close. They didn't speak of hardship but they both understood what it meant to each of them. As he trudged he knew he should accept the condition; he knew he should be optimistic and not depressed, but he couldn't rise out of that sadness that hung in his heart like a cold round stone. Bitter visions slid silently into his soul. Happy ironic visions of cheery Christmas scenes with all the trimmings - a tree with decorations, music, laughter and presents, the smell of turkey and pudding with caramel sauce - all flashed across his mind like impossible ephemeral memories that would never return.
" Why should others have all those things when we don't?" he thought, squeezing back bitter tears of anger.
To a small boy anything that didn't seem to end well, didn't seem very fair at all.
Benjamin was an introverted and sensitive boy who was well liked but would often go unnoticed in a group. The past week quite naturally had been a time to talk of Christmas, to do Christmas activities, and to attend the Christmas concert although with all the different kinds of kids from all over the world attending school, the concert was referred to as a seasonal celebration. Benjamin's ancestors had been traditional Christians even though he and his father hadn't set foot inside a church since his mother had died. Benjamin wasn't sure about what to believe about religion, and still feared that some terrible wrath would descend on him if he thought too much about what to believe in from the Bible. However excitement had existed because of the Christian celebration of Christmas, and the anticipation of the holidays had generally risen to a crescendo by the week's end. Everyone had become involved in the spirit; that is everyone except Benjamin who chose to immerse himself in passive silence amid the celebrations. With so much activity, his sadness went unnoticed.
Jason, Benjamin's father peered out through the curtains on the back window of his van and caught a glimpse of Benjamin as he appeared in the alley. He had been thinking also. This Christmas they had only each other, the bare metallic walls of the van, a few strips of bacon he had salvaged from the top of the garbage outside the Burger King, a few rubbery stalks of celery and a bunch of carrots the green grocer was discarding. All the monthly money had long gone to pay the remainder of the unpaid bills. Jason prided himself in never owing anyone anything. The monthly payments from the unemployment were personally hard to accept and he only rationalised receiving them by looking at the new running shoes and the winter coat Benjamin was wearing.
On looking down the alley at Benjamin hunched over plodding through the grease and grime of the shadow land behind the facade of the street, he felt the creeping return of the old feelings of failure.
"What does Benjamin expect?" he thought. "God knows he must realise we can't have a normal Christmas this year, not this year!" he muttered under his breath as he saw his son disappear behind an indentation in the alley. Benjamin was checking the garbage, scavenging out of habit. He'd be up to the van soon and Jason knew he'd need to cheer himself up for Benjamin's sake.
A knock sounded on the van door and the handle turned allowing the door to scrape along its runners. A blast of cool air whipped along the alley and curled into the van as Benjamin entered stepping over boxes and a jumble of old clothes piled on the mattress that lay on the floor. As Benjamin entered Jason turned from the rear window and looked at him.
"Well buddy, how's it going? You're on holidays. We've got to do something special."
Benjamin looked up from the mattress he was crouching on, careful not to let the filth of his shoes mark up the already shabby fabric. He met his father's eyes, held them in his gaze for a moment, politely said hello and then returned his face to the floor of the van.
"Get your coat off then and those sneakers. Sneakers! What have you done to your new sneakers? They're soaking wet and covered with mud!" Jason exclaimed in a voice that rose in pitch until the build-up of frustration stopped him short and breathless.
"It's wet outside, Pa."
"Wet outside! I suppose trailing the laces is supposed to be cool. I didn't spend good money for you to ruin them two weeks after you got them. What am I going to do with you?"
"Send me away then," Benjamin replied casually.
Silent now with his anger spent, Jason ignored the taunt, the gut-wrenching jab to his conscience. Benjamin removed his shoes and dried his bare feet on an oily rag from beneath the front seat. Jason produced the bacon wrapped in the waxed yellow paper displaying the Burger King logo. He'd also cut up the vegetables and displayed them on a small Styrofoam tray.
They started eating. The silence was deadly amid the occasional scrape and squeak of Styrofoam. The tension gripped the van like a band of steel around a shipping crate. Each of them sought answers in the silence of their minds. Each realised the growing need to communicate and the increasing inability to do so. As they sat constructing their walls of silence across from each other, the last low rays of the sun that had managed to circumvent the grey mass of the neighbouring apartment block faded into oblivion. The light from a solitary bulb in the alley filtered through the front side windows and illuminated their battlefield.
A gust of wind funnelling though the alley rattled the window and rocked the van slightly. Jason blurted out his words like shells hurled across a no-man's-land. "I have nothing to give you for Christmas. We have nothing. Do you understand that, Benjamin, nothing! Nothing!"
He regretted his impulsiveness the instant he spoke, but he could not stop the staccato volleys from the machine-gun.
Benjamin didn't look up from the empty yellow wrapper. He couldn't meet his father's eyes. Jason similarly drove his eyes down onto the bare mattress in front of him.
"We have nothing! We have nothing! " ricocheted and reverberated in the corners of Benjamin's mind. I live in a van. I hide my route home from my friends so they will not know our disgrace. These thoughts echoed and re-echoed, grew and grew until he could no longer bear to hear them. He sprang up from the mattress, grabbed his coat in one hand, slipped on his running shoes without doing up the laces and reached for the handle of the sliding door. In the flurry of movement all Jason heard was the loud slam of the door sliding closed like a shot ringing out into the night. That singular piercing sound did its own re-echoing in the seconds before Jason sprang up and out into the windy darkness of the alley to find his son.
He was too late. Benjamin, veteran of illusion had disappeared. The wind scraped brown claw-shaped leaves across the asphalt and lifted fragments of old newspapers into the air. They floated like grotesque birds of prey among the detritus of the alley.
" Benj! Benj! " Jason's cries disintegrated as they left his lips. He searched without success among the other derelict cars, the piles of scrap iron and the garbage containers. He ran out to the street and found it too, deserted. He then returned to the alley and sat down in defeat on the back fender of the van. Benjamin also sat defeated, not far away in the sheltered corner of the neighbouring apartment block. He hadn't heard his father's cries. Each waited within his own private battlefield. Each tried to unravel his thoughts.
" Why did I run away? "
" Why can't I talk to him?'
After a timeless period of waiting and struggling with themselves, simultaneously they both moved from their positions and as if directed by some unknown force approached one another. They met. In the light of the bare solitary derelict bulb in the alley their eyes caught each other's shape. They waited frozen in the moment reserved for them. Both heard the heartbeat, and sensed the aura of emotion that dominated the wind, the darkness and the inner silence . And in that frozen moment they knew what they wanted to give to each other. They crossed the distance equally to hold each other and squeeze the tears from their eyes. Slowly they walked side by side back to the van, sharing their gifts with each other and the wind.
David Fraser likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not
formally working as an educator, he is either writing and researching or involved in one of the
following sports: alpine skiing, ski teaching as a full time professional ski instructor at Mt. Washington,
BC http://www.mtwashington.bc.ca/winter/default.cfm , windsurfing, tennis, golf, cycling, hiking.
In addition he likes to garden, listen to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has
built his second water garden which has become his new daily sanctuary. His is learning and refining
his Spanish fluency and will travel back to Central and South America in the near future. He
lives among the flora and fauna of the British Columbia West Coast.
David is the editor of Ascent Magazine - Aspirations for Artists (established 1997)
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