A Simple Christmas (6 page)

There were others on my staff at the Capitol who played instruments, and for the fun of it, we would gather in the basement of the Governor's Mansion to have jam sessions and blow off steam with music. We played a couple of songs for our staff at the 1996 Christmas party, and the fact that no one threw food at us was all the encouragement we needed. Capitol Offense, the band I still play in today, was born! The band developed, changed some personnel from time to time, but became fairly proficient, and over the years we played as an opening act for Willie Nelson, Grand Funk Railroad, the Charlie Daniels Band, Dionne Warwick, Percy Sledge, and 38 Special just to name a few. We played at two presidential inaugurations, two Republican National Conventions, and such venues as House of Blues in New Orleans and Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver. I'm often asked if we were that good, and I answer honestly that we didn't have to be—we were the only band in America that was fronted by a sitting governor, so we got some nice gigs!

In 2008, when I started my show on the Fox News Channel, I wanted to make homegrown music a part of it, using amateur, behind-the-scenes workers at the channel whose day jobs were in lighting, graphics, videography, engineering, and writing, but who, like me, had never given up the dream or the joy of playing. The music segment of our show is almost always the highest-rated segment and the audience favorite. Legendary artists like Willie Nelson, Ray Price, James Burton, Neil Sedaka, and Dion are just a few of the guests who have played with the Fox News Channel house band, the Little Rockers. Country greats like Aaron Tippin, Neal McCoy, Tracy Lawrence, Collin Raye, Clay Walker, the Bellamy Brothers, and many others have come on the show to share the stage with amateurs like us.

But if it hadn't been for my parents giving in to the demand of my stubborn eleven-year-old self and buying me that guitar for Christmas, none of this would have happened. Without that guitar, I probably never would have gained the confidence to be onstage and make speeches and run for office, and I certainly never would have gained the valuable tools of discipline, practice, and performance that music has taught me.

The real heroes of this story are Dorsey and Mae Huckabee, my hardworking and loving parents, who really did want to make my dream come true but weren't sure how they could do it.

I didn't know until years later, after I had kids of my own, just how much money ninety-nine dollars was to my parents back in 1966. It was
a lot
of money and a lot of money that they didn't have. They could have and should have told me no, but they gave up having a Christmas for themselves and bought me the guitar for which I had begged and pleaded for so long. They couldn't pay the ninety-nine dollars all at once, so they arranged to make monthly payments to J. C. Penney for a little over a year until they paid it off.

I wanted a simple Christmas that year. I didn't ask for a lot of things—just one that meant more to me than anything else I had ever asked for. But what was simple to me was anything but simple to my parents, who had to make a really major sacrifice to give it to me. The best Christmas gifts we get are the ones that represent a sacrifice on the part of the giver. That's because nothing so reflects what Christmas is all about as does sacrifice. God, who owed us nothing, gave us everything. He gave up more than His comfort and His crown—He gave His life, and it all started right there in a simple manger in Bethlehem.

It took years before the depth of my parents' sacrifice really sank in. By then, they were both gone. While they surely had some satisfaction in seeing me play onstage as a teenager and were comforted that as long as the noise of the guitar rang through our little house, they knew where I was, they probably never knew the impact that ninety-nine-dollar guitar had on me. I want to believe that if heaven is a place where all the good things are remembered and the bad things are forgotten, my parents are allowed to watch my show each week and see me playing music with not only my musical idols but theirs as well. They might actually believe that ninety-nine-dollar investment paid off!

Every Christmas, I still think about that guitar and the sacrifice that it represented. And I hope I don't forget to think about the greatest sacrifice of all, God's gift of Himself . . . a simple gift. After all, it was a simple Christmas.

P.S. I'll bet you're wondering whatever happened to the guitar from J. C. Penney. After a few years, I wanted to upgrade to a better guitar and sold it to a gentleman named Norman Gilbey in my hometown of Hope, Arkansas, for fifty dollars. In 1998, thirty years later, Capitol Offense was playing at the annual Watermelon Festival in Hope. Norman was there and came up to me and said, “You remember the guitar you sold me?”

“I sure do! Whatever happened to it? I later regretted selling it,” I remarked.

“I still have it. It's been sitting in a closet most of these years. I didn't get to play it that much, so it's still in good shape,” Norman revealed. He then asked if I'd like it back. I told him that he could name his price—I would love to have that first guitar back. He argued with me about payment and insisted that I just take it. I finally agreed, but on the condition that I would send him a collection of souvenirs from the governor's office (non-taxpayer-funded, of course!). After thirty years, the little guitar from J. C. Penney was back home. When the Old State House Museum in Little Rock wanted personal items of governors for display, I loaned them the guitar, and if you are ever in Little Rock, you can stop by and see it. And as for the Gretsch Tennessean and Jazz Bass that I sold, after my kids were grown, I scoured Internet sites and looked in every music store and pawnshop I could find whenever I was in a new town to try to find guitars like those. Though I spent a lot more than I got for the originals, I now own a 1964 Gretsch Tennessean (even more valuable than the one I had) and had Fender build a Jazz Bass exactly like the one I had when I was a teenager. They sit side by side next to my desk now, and seeing them makes me feel seventeen all over again. Then I stand up and realize I'm
not
seventeen again!

3.

Loneliness

I never knew my grandfather on my mother's side of the family. From what sparse descriptions I had of him from my mother, it sounded like it was just as well. She didn't talk about him much, and when she did, it was not with affection, but rather with a level of contempt that probably hid a lot of stuff I didn't need to know. She did tell me that he was an alcoholic and that he could often be harsh, even abusive. But in general, my mother buried her memories of her father deep within her soul and never, to my knowledge, talked about them to anyone. Her generation didn't have Oprah or Dr. Phil leading people to bare their souls and openly express all their inner feelings and emotions to the world. From what I gather, my grandfather's story would have been more fitting for
Jerry Springer
than
Oprah
anyway.

My grandfather was born in 1868 and died in 1945—ten years before I was born. He served in the military during the Spanish-American War but was too old to fight in World War I. He had been married once before he married my grandmother and was almost sixty when my mother was born. He was considerably older than my grandmother but managed to father seven children with her. My mother was the oldest and therefore had the most memories of him—memories, it seems, she would later try to forget. In my grandfather's first marriage, he had fathered two sons, both of whom were easily old enough to be my mother's father. One of these two half brothers of hers, Garvin Elder, was the closest thing to an actual father figure she had.

To my sister and me, he was “Uncle Garvin.” He was a lifelong bachelor who lived by himself in Houston, Texas. He had spent most of his career as an accountant for Armour Meat Company, and I suppose because he lived very frugally and never married or had kids, he kept most of what he earned for himself. He bought stock in the Gillette Company and kept up every day with the stock market. Although he led a generally simple life, he wore a suit, a starched white shirt, and a tie wherever he went. That meant he really stood out when he came to Hope for a visit, because no one in my entire family wore white starched shirts, let alone ties or suits.

Uncle Garvin didn't own a car, so he walked or took a city bus pretty much wherever he wanted to go in Houston. When he came to visit us, he almost always came on the Continental Trailways bus, which stopped only a couple of blocks from our house. When he arrived, either he'd walk from the bus stop or one of my parents would be waiting at the station to pick him up and drive him back to our house.

Uncle Garvin came to visit every Christmas, at least once during the summer, and often at Thanksgiving. Since he was more like our grandfather than an uncle, his visits were always special and always predictable. Within an hour of his arrival, he would walk to the neighborhood Kroger grocery store less than a block from our house and buy a whole chicken. That wasn't because he needed to buy his own food; there would be no “Starvin' Garvin” at our house! On the contrary, this was his not-so-subtle way of telling my mother what he wanted for dinner his first night with us—her fried chicken.

Don't think for a minute we minded a bit. To this day, I have never had fried chicken any better than what my mother made. If Colonel Sanders had had her recipe, he would have been a four-star general! Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, navy beans (this was a must-have!), and homemade biscuits with sweet tea were as predictable for Uncle Garvin's first meal at our house as Christmas coming on December 25 each year.

Even when he was just hanging out at our house during the day, Uncle Garvin still wore a starched white shirt and a tie. I thought that meant he must be important and intelligent, since he was the only person we knew who dressed up for work every day. Most of the men in my extended family didn't even own a suit, and those who did wore it only to funerals. When you saw any of my male relatives in a suit, you didn't ask what important event they were going to attend, you simply asked who had died and hoped it wasn't someone that you knew very well. Death in the family always meant two things—men who looked ridiculously uncomfortable and out of place in a suit would try to wear one, and people from the church and neighborhood would bring over a big bowl of potato salad. This was so predictable that when someone died, we rarely used words like dead, death, and passed away. We just said it was “potato salad time.”

We usually knew what time the bus that brought Uncle Garvin “home” for Christmas was supposed to arrive, so sometime before that, my sister and I would park ourselves in the front yard and wait and watch for Uncle Garvin to appear. It was a big deal when one of us saw him first and started screaming, “Uncle Garvin! Uncle Garvin!” He and the well-traveled but stately brown suitcase in his hand were a welcome sight for us. These were the days long before luggage had wheels, and his suitcase was made of tan leather, which alone was reason enough to think he was pretty important. The only suitcase we had in our family was an old, beat-up one made of a stiff card boardlike material. We never used it because we never really went anywhere to stay overnight. Uncle Garvin even had a luggage tag with his name on it, which was a sure sign that he was somebody special.

Uncle Garvin's visits meant that there would be an adult in the house all day, even when the parents were both at work. Other than his absolute and unbreakable appointment to watch Perry Mason on the old black-and-white TV, there was lots of time for us to challenge him to countless games of checkers. I truly believe that much of my own competitive spirit was developed during those checkers sessions with Uncle Garvin, because the old man didn't really understand how impolite it was to beat the daylights out of a sensitive little boy like me in a board game. Uncle Garvin played to win, and he usually did, until, after getting beat by him over and over, I got better and eventually even learned to beat him occasionally. At the time, I hated that he made easy play of me and actually seemed to relish beating a little kid in checkers, but in reality, he did me a great favor by making me hungry for victory and giving me the greatest thrill of all when I finally achieved it. This might be hard to believe for many of the hand-wringing whiners out there today who are so afraid of injuring a child's self-esteem that they've created a society in which “everyone gets a trophy” and no one loses no matter how little they practiced or how poorly they performed. This is the recipe for creating incompetent CEOs who, when their companies fail miserably, rush to the government to rescue them because they are “too big to fail.” It's also created total idiots in government who think they are doing these poor businesses, as well as the rest of us, a favor by bailing out the losers at the expense of the winners so everything will be “fair.” Call me crazy, but I believe there's something to be said for competition and for rewarding hard work, talent, and intelligence instead of laziness, incompetence, and stupidity.