I remember back to that day in the second grade, shortly before Christmas, when a group of my classmates were telling each other what we wanted for Christmas. When it was my turn, I proudly proclaimed "Santa's bringing me a Lincoln Logs fort!" Hubert, an overweight bully, snorted, "Huh! You still believe in Santa Clause? What a baby!" Glancing around at the others, I quickly surmised that they were on Hubert's side. I might have been a slow student, but I wasn't stupid, so I immediately went into damage control and said, "Not me! My brother still believes, but I know Santa's not real....Everybody knows that." In a moment, my dream of Lincoln Logs, BB guns, and a bicycle evaporated, only to be replaced by the knowledge that my parents had lied to me about something so big! I mean, we're not talking about the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny here, we were talking about the Big Man himself! What? No Santa? Might as well be no Jesus either!
Eighteen months earlier, on the last day of my first year in the first grade, we were having a class party to celebrate the end of the school year. There were four of us boys - Mike, Red, Walter, and myself, who were not being promoted to the second grade the following year. In my case, the teacher wrote on my final report card that my mind was not on my studies and that I didn't even know my ABCs yet. I was bummed out, and dreaded having to show my mother that report card. While I was in the corner having a pity party with my other three failing friends, the rest of the class was whooping it up. They got so loud that the teacher said something that gave me hope, if only for a few minutes. She said, "If you children don't hold the noise down, I'm going to take your passing grade and give it to one of the boys who failed." Well, as you can imagine, the four of us perked up! We hoped that the class would continue to raise a ruckus so that we could get a get-out-of-the-first-grade-free card. I didn't care who she took it from, but I wanted one for myself. Regretfully, the class continue to raise hell, but no pass was coming our way.
Trudging home that day, I realized that those report cards had been prepared before the last day of school. What was already written down might as well have been in stone, because the teacher never had the intention, nor the authority, to take a passing grade from one student and give to another. That day I learned that teachers lie.
The summer after I finally did pass the first grade, my brother and I were outside working in our family garden. It was our job to follow our father, who was tilling a plot to plant potatoes and peanuts, and pick up any rocks or clumps of weeds that would prevent the seeds from growing. Bending down to pick up something white that didn't belong in the garden, I discovered a sea shell - some sort of mullusk shell - but I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that here was a sea shell and we were a couple hundred miles from the nearest ocean. Taking the shell to my father, I asked him what it was. My dad replied that it was left in our garden during the Great Flood of Noah's time. I thought it was cool to have a shell several thousand years old, but as there appeared to be a lot of them, I tossed it away and got back to work.
It was many years later that the subject of sea shells came up again. My brothers and our wives were sitting around the table talking to my mother about the house we grew up in, and the shameful condition the new owners had allowed it to become now. In place of our garden was a mass of weeds and half-grown trees, a snake-infested mess. I recalled finding those sea shells and mentioned the day when my our father told us where they came from. My mother, like Hubert, snorted and said, "Them shells came from oyster shuckings, and we threw them out there to help fertilize the garden." Now I had grown up by now, and I knew that anything that was thousands of years old should have been buried deeper than what a tiller could uncover, but it never dawned on me that my father would lie to me. Sure, he and Mama lied about Santa Claus, but about something from the Bible? What the hell!
Then, there was that afternoon we were sitting on our back porch shelling butter beans, and up in the sky there appeared the face of a lion - not a resemblance in the clouds, but a real live, technicolor face, of a lion roaring - just like that mascot for MGM. My grandfather was the first to see it and pointed it out. I looked up and there it was - big as day! My mother saw it too - or at least she said she did. I'm wondering now if I wasn't somehow hypnotized by some sort of auto-suggestion, into believing that a cloud was really a lion? A few years before she passed, Mama confirmed that it really happened, but how am I to really know? I mean, she lied about something important as Santa Claus!
I realized then that I'm a pretty gullible person. As a child, it was easy to believe in fairies and ghosts, animals that could talk, and aliens that possessed super powers. Eventually, over time, all those supernatural things were nothing more than stories to make children behave. There was no Santa, no Super Man, no "Do-Over-Life" card. And the people that I trusted the most? They are the ones who led me to believe in magic, even though they didn't believe themselves.
Maybe it was their way of paying back their parents when they found out for themselves that magic is nothing more than lies and misdirection. Perhaps they believed in the Almost Golden Rule - Do unto others what you've had done to you. In a real way, it's made me a cynical person. If my parents and teachers lie, what about those preachers? What if they're selling snake-oil to gullible people like myself just to pad their pockets ?
Faced with reality, I vowed not to lie to my kids. I taught them that Jesus was real and Santa was make-believe; Easter eggs come from Wal-Mart, not from a rabbit; comic book heros are a waste of time; and not to put too much faith in what their teachers say - especially if they are Liberals.
The thing is - I miss that time when you could lie in bed on Christmas Eve and swear you could hear reindeer on the roof. I miss having a teacher ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and telling me I could do anything I want if I worked hard enough for it. I miss pretending I'm John Wayne or Roy Rogers or James Bond. But some things I'm still not convinced aren't real: those monsters that hide in your closet, ET, and Elvis is alive.
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