A Simple Christmas (17 page)

9.

Limitations

As much as I love Christmas, it almost caused me to convert to Judaism. The religious part of the holiday is fine with me, so don't gasp and think I was ready to abandon my faith. The problem with Christmas had nothing to do with Jesus. In fact, that
was
the problem—Christmas wasn't about Jesus anymore. And it was this fact that had me wondering if maybe it was time to find another way altogether to observe the holiday.

One of the big differences between a Christmas in poverty and one in prosperity is that prosperity creates some real serious complications and complexities. The more material things we have, the more likely we are to be really stressed around Christmas, especially if we have kids. Granted, given the choice between prosperity and poverty, I would choose prosperity every time, but it's hard to have a simple Christmas when you have to worry not only about getting the right gift for your kid but also that you get him enough to keep him busy for a while.

Being a father is the greatest joy I've ever known, but it's also the scariest job I've ever had and by far the most challenging. Governing a state is a piece of cake compared to being a dad, and that's why, whenever a reporter asks me, “What do you regard as your most significant accomplishment?” I always answer the same way: “Being a dad.”

I'm sure this answer surprises some reporters, who expect me to extol the impact of education reform in my state, or the health initiatives that brought national attention to Arkansas, or the rebuilding of our highways, or even running for president or writing books that have made it to the
New York Times
bestseller list. None of that. Raising three kids who turned out okay—that's the big deal. It was far tougher than all the other stuff.

Part of what makes fatherhood so difficult is Christmas. This is especially true when the little tykes are small and Dad is expected to perform the “manly” function of putting their toys together. And that's what almost drove me to Judaism.

I've always been mechanically challenged, and I realized it at an early age, when my jack-of-all-trades dad tried to teach me the rudiments of being a do-it-yourselfer.

Dorsey Huckabee was one of those people who could fix toilets or faucets, wire an appliance or light fixture, fix a car, build a room onto a house, or even build a go-cart from scratch. Now, sometimes his products were hardly “factory-looking,” but they worked. Thank goodness, because had some of his attempts failed, my sister and I would have had the double embarrassment of having something that not only looked like crap but also didn't work.

My dad was a utilitarian—not an artist. His stuff worked, but he never would have won design awards and people didn't gush over the aesthetic “wow” factor of the stuff he made. For him, fixing or making things was about saving a buck, and we must have saved a bunch of them, because anything someone else offered to do professionally my father figured he could do on his own for free.

Even though he built or repaired a lot of stuff, he didn't have to deal with the ominous challenge of Christmas as much as I did. For one thing, the fact that we didn't have the money to afford a room full of gifts meant that there wasn't that much to put together in the first place, and in the fifties and sixties, most stuff came pretty much put together and required little assembly anyway. All a kid had to do was open the box and start playing with whatever was inside. Easy for the kid and a relief for the parents. Sometimes batteries had to be inserted, but even a kid could do that. Of course, it was always a real downer when the box said “batteries not included” and your parents had forgotten to get batteries and you had to sit there on Christmas morning with a dumb look on your face wondering what the toy would do or sound like until the day after Christmas when the stores were open and you could finally get batteries.

Even though my dad didn't have to put many toys together, he was still remarkably more adept and productive with his hands than his only son, who would generally just throw a part across the room if it didn't fit where it was supposed to.

One Christmas I wanted a go-cart. They were popular with kids, and I knew better than to ask for a '57 Chevy, so I figured this was the next best thing. At the age of seven, I didn't have any idea how much a go-cart might cost, nor did I care. It was my job to want things. It was my parents' responsibility to figure out how to get them. A gasoline-powered go-cart was just what I wanted.

There was no way my dad was going to spend a month's pay on a go-cart. Heck, he could make one! And that's just what he did. He took an engine from an old lawn mower, welded a frame from scrap metal he got from the junkyard, found some little tires that probably had once belonged to a lawn tractor, and somehow cobbled together a go-cart. He was proud, and rightly so, of his creation and even more proud that he had managed to save enough money to impress a Saudi prince. I'm sure when I saw it, my face didn't convey the level of gratitude that I should have expressed. I was, of course, hoping for one that looked like the ones in the Sears catalog, and this one didn't. Think Jed Clampett's truck on
The Beverly Hillbillies
compared to a Corvette, and you get the picture of how my dad's homemade go-cart compared to the one I had imaged in my mind over and over.

To his credit, the old man did build a functioning machine, and after I got over the initial shock of its crude appearance and the fact that its engine had once mowed the lawn of some nice family on the other side of town, I did have fun riding it around the neighborhood.

Maybe my father's sometimes rather less than superb flair for design was tempered by his desire to give his kids all he could with the resources he had. One thing is for sure—he was not one to go into debt for things he couldn't afford. It was his Depression-era mind-set that caused him to think this way. He believed that the bottom could fall out at any moment and we should prepare for the worst because it was probably going to happen. My dad was also one of those guys who believed that if such a calamity were to strike and it only affected one family, it would probably be ours. So we always lived as if an apocalypse was about to strike our house, storing massive amounts of toilet paper and paper towels just in case. We might be turned into dust particles by a nuclear blast, but by gosh, there would be plenty of paper towels to wipe up the mess!

I know that my lack of proficiency with tools was a big disappointment to my dad. I think by the time I was lieutenant governor of Arkansas, he had finally made peace with the fact that I couldn't change the oil in my car without making a complete mess and that my one attempt to unclog a stopped drain resulted in a plumber having to be called to my house for an emergency visit to repair my “repair” and stop the resulting water that was gushing in our kitchen. My efforts to avoid the cost of the plumber resulted in a $1,200 plumbing bill, a huge mess in the kitchen, and a wife who could have frozen the Gobi Desert with her stare. My father died just three months before I was sworn in as governor, and I really wished he could have lived long enough to see that, just so he might finally feel I had redeemed myself. He probably would have said at the swearing in, “Son, I'm proud you made governor, but I sure wish you could use a table saw.”

Power tools and me? Not a good combination. It's like trying to get Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden together to watch football and eat pizza. Never going to happen. I'm certain that part of my clumsiness with all things mechanical comes from the fact that I should have been left-handed, but my mother thought left-handedness would make it hard for me to be “normal” in a right-handed world, so she always put the pencil or crayon in my right hand and through her stern discipline and perseverance taught me to live right-handedly. At least somewhat. I bat, shoot a rifle or shotgun, and play putt-putt golf left-handed. I write, shoot a pistol, and eat with my right hand. When people ask if I'm left- or right-handed, I usually just say that I'm ambidextrous. When I broke a finger on my right hand playing Little League baseball as a child, I was forced to eat and write left-handed while my hand was in a cast. I was able to do both rather easily, and now I'm able to use a fork in either hand and my writing is equally illegible regardless of which hand I've used. In fact, my handwriting is so bad that I can't even read it myself and try to avoid writing as much as possible unless I need to sign something. My personal assistant during my tenure both as lieutenant governor and as governor, Dawn Cook, is the only human I know who can decode my penmanship. I would actually ask her to read things I had written to tell me what they said because I couldn't make them out.

For much of my childhood and adolescence, I felt guilty over my inability to work with simple tools, so I married someone who is pretty good at it. Janet is the “handywoman” in our house and has repaired our washer (put new timers and gears in it) and dryer (changed the heating element and timer) and done minor repairs around the house. She has also helped build houses in over forty states and many foreign countries through her work with Habitat for Humanity. Because she is so active with Habitat and has served on its international board for a number of years, people assume that I volunteer with her on the construction projects. Whenever anyone asks me about this, I always say the same thing—I would never spend the night in a house that I helped build!

So now that you understand just how “dexterity challenged” I am, you can better understand why, for me, what should be a heavenly holiday—Christmas—became the holiday from hell.

By the time John Mark was born, the days of buying toys that didn't require any assembly were as gone as the days of 78 rpm records. From my earliest “dad days,” I couldn't actually purchase an item, but rather ended up with a box of parts and an instruction manual that had been written in Japanese or Mandarin and poorly translated into broken English so that a mechanical engineer would have had a difficult time understanding it. The notion that “Mr. Thumbs” (aka me) would be able to put even supposedly simple things together was laughable, but my pride and ego compelled me to try.

The idea of selling things to consumers that have to be completely constructed from scratch was an evolutionary thing. It started with things coming ready to take out of the box and use, then progressed to “batteries not included,” and then came the innocent enough label “some assembly required,” meaning that the package contained two or three large pieces that would easily fit together and the product required nothing more than simple observation to make it work. I wasn't fortunate enough to do my “daddying” during those golden days of American toydom. By the time it fell upon me to prepare the Christmas toys for the big day, the assembly of almost anything other than a stuffed animal required a minimum of a master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and four or five assistants who had previously helped assemble space shuttles for NASA. I'm sure it won't be long before the stuffed animals will come packaged as a bag of stuffing, some cloth material, plastic pieces for eyes, nose, and accessories, and a little sewing kit so the consumer can build the teddy bear from the pieces and parts.

Right after John Mark's third birthday in 1979, we were in the process of moving from Texas back to Arkansas and Janet and I thought it was time for him to get his first tricycle. This is always a milestone in a child's life—the day he extends movement beyond his own legs and employs a mechanical device to move him more efficiently and quickly. I had loved my tricycle when I was a kid and pretty much worn it out riding up and down the sidewalks of my neighborhood and around my house on rainy days. I was sure that no child could turn out normal without a bike, so I was excited to buy John Mark's first “vehicle” and teach him how to ride.

I attempted to purchase an already-assembled tricycle from each of the local stores that sold them and was virtually laughed out of the store for daring to request such a thing. “Those are floor display models,” I was brutally told, and my attempt to buy one was met with derision. Logic was no weapon in this endeavor. I pointed out that the floor models were likely shipped to the store as a box full of parts and that whoever put them together had obviously done a good job, so why not sell me one and let that experienced tricycle engineer simply put another together? No can do, they told me. I offered to pay to have their guy do it (a practice I must have inspired, since now I see that service offered regularly by stores) but was rebuffed.

My son was going to have a tricycle no matter what! Of course, the smart thing would have been to buy the box of bolts and metal pieces and ask my dad (the grandpa) or even my wife to assemble it. But having to admit that I was a total wimp who couldn't even assemble a tricycle would have been emasculating to me. I mean, it was a tricycle, not an ultralight airplane or a rocket ship. How hard could it be? So armed with my manly pride and all the confidence I could muster, I purchased a tricycle at Wal-Mart, took the box home, and announced to Janet that I would put it together on Christmas Eve after John Mark went to bed. Janet offered to help, but of course I waved off any assistance, as that would have directly threatened my manhood and I might as well start carrying a purse.

It's a little tricycle, for heaven's sake! I should have known better and simply let Janet put it together, but no—I was out to prove that being a dad had magically endowed me with new powers to do for my son at Christmas what every other American dad did for his son.

Once we put John Mark to bed around eight thirty on Christmas Eve, I immediately went to the garage, which would be the staging area for this momentous event. The tricycle was no longer a toy for my boy—it was the symbol of my manhood and ability to celebrate Christmas the way God intended.