The Time of My Life (25 page)

And so it went. The self-help books were no help, and I stopped consulting them. Every time a new one would appear in the bookstores, I would sneer at it and say, “Sure, sure.”

But the other day I chanced upon a book that wanted to instruct me in a bit of self-improvement that I thought I could manage. It promised not only to make me a better person, but to help me improve a small cranny of the universe as well.

The book also was reassuringly short—only forty-eight pages, some of which had no writing on them. Its brevity led me to believe the improvement described therein could be accomplished quickly and without hassle.

The book was
How to Organize Your Closet…and Your Life!
by Crislynne Evatt, who, according to the introduction, conducts classes in this subject, but I don't know where. Reading the book would be just as helpful as attending her class, the author assured me. In addition, “You'll find it simple to implement and fun to do,” she wrote.

I happened to have a closet that needed organizing. It's in the room where I work. That's what I call the room. I've never been able to call it “my study” without feeling silly. Its closet is full of things I never unpacked after my last move. I have suitcases in there that I haven't been able to use because they're full of old bank statements, letters, and tape recordings of speeches and interviews of such characters as George Wallace, John Henry Faulk, John Dean the Water-gater, and various coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky.

There are also several torn kites equipped with tangled string; a collection of unusable fishing tackle; a number of homemade bows, arrows, and spears; a small collection of knives and swords; four or five board games with pieces missing; books for which I have no room on my shelves but can't bring myself to give away; numerous broken toys that I promised my kids I would fix someday; and everything needed to play poker except beer. I have to close the door with my shoulder.

Figuring I would organize that closet first, then move on to the one in the bedroom, then organize my life, I opened the book with a determined heart and a merry spirit. “Why Is Your Closet a Mess?” asked the title of the first chapter. Reading on, I learned why: “You ignore your closet because you'd rather be doing something else.”

Turning to the second chapter—“What Your Closet Says About You”—gave me a start. Ms. Evatt wasn't about to let me finish the closets before tackling the rest of my life. “It is sometimes said that you can tell the state of a person's mind by looking into his closet,” she wrote. “… A person who has a cluttered mind will most likely have a chaotic closet.”

I imagined Ms. Evatt signing commitment papers and testifying about my closet at my sanity trial. “Your closet, at a glance, can reveal a lot of things about you,” she continued. “It may reveal how much CONTROL you have over your life. … A messy, incomprehensible closet can tell you if a person's home base or environment is SUPPORTIVE. Does the work day start with exercise, breakfast and plenty of time to groom? (The owner of an orderly closet probably does.)”

Deeply depressed, I plunged past the photos and sketches of perfect closets in search of the essence of Ms. Evatt's message. What, exactly, would I have to do to accomplish decent closets and mental health?

I would have to learn the three principles and execute the nine steps, she said. I would have to build shelves. I would have to visit closet shops and buy bags and boxes and racks. I would have to take Polaroid pictures of all my shoes and glue them on the ends of my shoe boxes. “One ABSOLUTE rule to effectively clean your closet is: GET RID OF ALL OF YOUR WIRE HANGERS,” Ms. Evatt hollered. I would have to make round disks to put on my closet rods that would work like a filing system, telling me at a glance what section of the closet my pants, my coats, my shirts were hanging in. Only then would I know the joy that comes only to the owners of clean closets. Only then would I embark on closet adventures beyond my muddled imagination: “ROBERT REDFORD is escaping from a mob of adoring fans,” Ms. Evatt informed me. “He arrives at your door. ‘Quick! Hide me in your closet!' Would you die of embarrassment? (ALWAYS keep your closet ready for handsome strangers.)”

Right there is where I parted company with Ms. Evatt. What's the point of working my fingers to the bone cleaning the damn closet if Robert Redford's going to jump in there and mess things up?

I'd rather be doing something else. And I am.

April, 1980

Small Gifts and Special Memories

A
FEW
WEEKS
ago I asked my sons, ages 12 and 10, what they wanted for Christmas. They thought and thought, and then told me they didn't know. I was dumbstruck.

When
I
was a kid I began work on the first draft of my Christmas wantlist sometime in August. Revision and expansion commenced upon the arrival of the first Christmas catalogue from Sears or Montgomery Ward. The cover letter, in which I listed my virtues and good deeds clearly but modestly, was composed during November and mailed to the North Pole right after Thanksgiving. Then the countdown began, building to almost unbearable suspense as I marked the days of December off the calendar and culminated in the delicious mystery of Christmas Eve Night.

It didn't matter that Santa Claus never fulfilled more than a fraction of my wishes. I was so thrilled with the dreams that
were
realized that I could forgive even the absence of the shiny red bicycle that headed my list year after year. It was the dreaming and the waiting and the mystery, I realize now, that made Christmas wonderful. And it is these wonders that are being stolen from my children—all our children— by the materialism and instant gratification that govern us now. Santa Claus is no longer a mysterious North Pole elf but a TV huckster and shopping mall shill, and he can bring the children nothing that they don't already have. He can't even make them dream or wish or imagine, and I worry that when they are older they won't remember Christmases past as being much different from other days.

I hope they will. Maybe they will. Memory is tricky. We're always forgetting things we thought we should remember forever and remembering things that reason says aren't memorable.

Despite the time and care I spent on my want lists, I remember few of the larger gifts of my childhood except the one that never arrived, the red bicycle. Yet many of the smaller gifts remain in my mind—a certain cap pistol, a wooden truck I got during World War II when there were no metal toys, a card game called Authors. I still own a few of the books I got. But some of the gifts I remember weren't even mine.

One was a hair barrette that my brother Mike bought for my sister Sherry when she was about 6 and he about 8. He had chosen gift himself and paid for it with his own money. He proudly presented it to her on Christmas Eve Night.

Normally, Sherry's hair was one of our family's golden and fine and naturally curly. But Sherry had ringworm that Christmas, and her head had been shaved. Except for a fringe of long curls, she was as hairless as an egg and wore a green-and-gold felt beanie to hide her baldness. When she opened Mike's gift, confusion crossed her face. Mike, suddenly realizing his gaffe, turned red. Then both burst out laughing, then we all laughed. We laughed until we cried. I don't recall any other gift that anyone got that year, but it was one of the happiest I remember.

Mike was the most excitable and enthusiastic of us five children, and easily obsessed. Every Christmas he would spend hours on his belly under the Christmas tree, poking, weighing, and shaking the gifts with his name on them, trying to figure out what they were.

In those days when Mike and Sherry were still young enough to believe in Santa Claus, it was our custom to open one gift on Christmas Eve and the rest on Christmas Day, so those of us to whom Santa no longer came would still have something to celebrate.

One year Mike asked Santa for a cork bulletin board to hang on the wall of his room. While he awaited the arrival of the elf, he did his usual probing under the tree. One of the gifts almost drove him crazy. It was Mike's smallest gift, a little flat rectangle wrapped in red paper. It was from our mother. One surface of the rectangle was smooth. The other was bumpy, as if covered with…with what? Buttons? Stones? Knobs?

The rest of us knew what was in the package, and we exchanged knowing smiles whenever we saw Mike poking and weighing it. It so baffled him that he eventually ignored his other gifts and concentrated his detective efforts on that one. He even tried to bribe some of us to reveal the secret, but we would not.

At last Christmas Eve arrived, and each of us got to choose the gift we would open early. We usually chose a gift from our mother or grandmother, a package certain to contain something we had longed for and asked for. We drew straws to see who would open first, and then wait our turns. I think we rigged the straws that year so that Mike would have to go last. And, of course, he chose to open the mysterious red rectangle. It was a card of thumbtacks to go with his not-yet-arrived bulletin board. Again we laughed until we cried.

Maybe it's only coincidence that Mike is the butt of my funniest Christmas memories, or maybe his excitable enthusiasm for the season made him an easy victim to these small misfortunes. But the gifts I associate with him in my memory—the hair barrette he gave to bald Sherry and the thumbtacks that monopolized his curiosity—didn't cost more than a dime apiece, yet brought more joy to the whole family than a sleighload of expensive goodies would have. The laughter they inspired gathered the seven of us into the close family warmth that is always the atmosphere of the best Christmases.

It was that warmth and laughter that I missed during the most depressing Christmas I ever endured. I was eighteen, and had left home only a few months earlier to seek my fortune as a newspaper reporter in El Paso, two hundred miles away. As the youngest and newest member of the staff—and unmarried, as well—I was told to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

That assignment was my initiation into the coldness of adult life, made more awful by my aloneness. The college dormitory in which I lived was empty, except for me. Close to tears, I had watched my friends pack their cars and head home for the holidays full of joy. Even the dorm mother had left, leaving me with the key to the dorm's front door and strict orders to lock it every time I came or went. The central heating had been turned down to near-freezing. All the windows in the huge building rattled in the gloom. I imagined myself the sole survivor of some worldwide disaster, and couldn't sleep.

The newsroom was almost as soul-darkening as the dorm. Only a few of us had to work during the holidays, and the familiar clatter and clangor of teletypes and phones and typewriters had dwindled almost to nil, as if someone had twisted a knob and turned down the volume. The streets outside the window and the downtown buildings were empty. The little news to be covered—drunks killing each other with cars and guns, Christmas trees catching fire and burning children—was as dark as my mood. The guy manning the city desk brought a bottle of bourbon to work with him and drank every drop himself. I ate my Christmas dinner in a Juarez bar. You can't get much less Christmasy than that.

But sometime during the afternoon of that interminable Christmas Day, a glad-handing public relations man came up and wished us all a merry one and gave me a cigar, which I stuck in my pocket. Then about 10
P
.
M
. the city desk guy got mellow and said, “Hell, Woolley, nothing's going on, so why don't you go on home?”

I took him literally. I poured a Thermos of coffee, jumped into my old Plymouth, and barreled off through a howling norther for the Davis Mountains and my family fireside. It was a grueling drive over narrow mountain roads through a cold, windy, black night, but somewhere along the way I lit up that cigar and belted out “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I felt as light as an angel, and it was the best cigar I ever had.

So maybe I'll give my sons something small this year, something they'll remember.

December, 1981

Isabel, Pussycat, and Me

G
ROWING
UP
in rural Texas, I learned early not to get sentimental about animals. Hogs and calves got butchered, horses were to ride or pull wagons or plows, banty roosters wound up at last on the dinner table, all domestic fauna served some practical purpose. Dogs were supposed to hunt, or at least bark when strangers approached. Cats were supposed to catch mice. They didn't live in the house. I wept when my dog Shadow was struck down by a car before my eyes when I was ten, but I didn't grieve over any other childhood pet. In our Trans-Pecos ranch country, dogs that strayed too far from home were likely to get shot or poisoned, and dogs that lived outdoors, as most did, tended to form packs and wander at night and never return. Several of mine met that fate. But to my child's mind they had simply disappeared, not died. By the time I realized they weren't coming back, it was too late for sorrow. I already had ceased to miss them, maybe had even replaced them. We had no barn, and therefore few mice, and therefore no need of a cat. We never had one.

In later years, city-bred acquaintances who talked baby-talk to dogs and cats and parakeets would accuse me of hard-heartedness toward animals. This wasn't true. I simply didn't indulge in anthropomorphism. Humans were humans and animals were animals, and although humans may sometimes be animals, animals are never human, and that was that.

Then I met Pussycat. She arrived via Braniff from New York City with the lady I was to marry. They were a package deal. I took Isabel, I took the cat, too. What stepped out of the travel cage was one of the most outstandingly nondescript beasts I had ever seen. Pussycat was your basic alleycat, black with white chest and paws and chin. She was small for her age, estimated at twelve, long past cat prime. Her only distinguishing features were her nose, which was half black and half pink, and her right eye, which was watering. She glared at me with that eye, apparently identifying me as the cause of her imprisonment in the cage and her present disheveled condition.