"We're not having much this Christmas, but at least we have our health." I don't know for sure if my mom was the first ever to utter those words, but she certainly repeated them enough to claim ownership…every Christmas as I recall. Whether by clever parental design or not, it had a chilling effect on our Christmas lists. My brothers and I knew enough to keep our expectations low. That is until the Christmas of 1958 when I succumbed to the allure of wretched excess. I was idling time with my father while he was picking up our TV from repair when my eyes lit upon a red Channel Master transistor radio. It was love at first sight, and I can tell you quite honestly at the further end of the life cycle that no object of desire…no house, no car, no computer, nothing…ever obsessed me the way that radio did. More so because I knew its $15 price tag would put it well out of range of my parents' gift budget (for those doing the math at home, if you buy one of four boys a $15 gift, then you have to buy all four boys a $15 gift, and before you know it you're up to $45…more than half a working man's take-home pay in those days).
Still, I became just like that kid in Christmas Story lusting after a Red Ryder BB gun. I did everything in my limited powers to campaign for the radio. I left cute notes around the house: Don't let this Christmas be a disaster/Buy Danny a Channel Master. I drew up plans for earning money that mostly consisted of returning bottles to the grocery story for 2¢ each ($15.00 ÷ 2¢ = 750 bottles!). I openly pleaded and secretly prayed (I may no longer have believed in Santa, but I still believed in God, the Super Santa). The folks never provided a hint that I was getting through…Dad was not working overtime, Mom was not taking in laundry. My importuning seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
Indeed, on Christmas Eve, surrounded by open gifts and discarded wrappings, there didn't seem to be any "seeming" about it. It was clear that all I'd get for that Christmas would be disappointment. And then my father asked me to go fetch his cigarettes off the piano (note here: our piano was green…and not a seasonal evergreen or rich jade green, but a very puky lima bean green…Dad was inspired to do things like that on occasion). I couldn't help notice there was an unopened gift sitting next to his ashtray and cigarettes and dumbly announced it, still in shock from my recent letdown. My parents did their best Lunt and Fontaine and feigned surprise: "Oh, really? Where'd that come from? Who's it for?"
As I opened it, I opened up the tear ducts and out came a gusher I've been hard pressed to duplicate since. What's more, soon everyone in the family was joining me in a massive sob fest, even my younger brothers who at that point didn't know a transistor radio from a pop-up toaster. We cried and cried and then laughed at ourselves crying.
Soon thereafter, I was the freest boy in Thompsonville, Connecticut. That little radio put me in touch with a world so big and wide and utterly engaging. The music that came through on AM radio was the single most liberating experience of my life. The universality of that experience was captured by a boy about my age half a world away who would grow up to write a song about it. In the Days Before Rock 'n Roll Van Morrison rhapsodizes how the wireless brought Fats and Elvis, "The Killer" and Ray Charles to his ears and expanded his universe. Every night I would fall asleep with that transistor resting on my chest and the earplug channeling melodies about countless teenage romances and news of the latest dance crazes.
When the snow cleared, I strapped the Channel Master in its leather case onto the front of my bike and peddled all over town, every bit the sport as those guys in that Corvette on Route 66. Up Brainard Rd toward Shaker Pines Lake ("Let's Go to the Hop"), around the bend onto N. Maple ("Lonely Teardrops"), past the tobacco barns ("Secret Love"…Parrish!), by the tennis court in Hazardville ("It's all in the Game"), down South Road ("Teen Beat"), to Raffia Road ("Patricia"), to Post Office Road ("Runaway"), onto Enfield Street and past the Paul Robeson house ("Summertime and the livin' is easy…), back onto Brainard Rd and home ("Travelin' Man").
So much of what I was to become I owe to that radio…and count myself lucky that at such a young age I was seduced by music rather than a BB gun. My parents tried capturing the emotional lightning in a bottle a second time when three years after giving me the Channel Master they gave me a bigger version of it for my birthday. I must say the look on my face when I opened it probably struck them with the same level of disappointment I had experienced on that Christmas Eve when I didn't think I was going to get what I so dearly wanted. The new one was too big to sit on my chest at night and too big to strap to the front of my bike. And truth be known, I was getting too big for the bike as well, and would soon be making up poems and devising money-making schemes to get a car.
There will never be a Christmas like that one where the gap between desire and possibility seemed so immense. Certainly not this Christmas. This Christmas I have as many material possessions as any sane man should ever want, but my mom does not have her health…and no amount of pleading or prayer is going to change that.