This must be a Gunnels Christmas tree.
My father was not a particularly expressive man. He was
stoic in every sense of the word and viewed the world with a quiet skepticism
and suspicion borne of the hardscrabble childhood he had experienced.
One of three brothers, he grew up on a small farm in
Eastland County. Times were hard and the living wasn’t easy. His father, by all
accounts, was a domineering taskmaster who demanded his family toe the line.
His line.
One incident tells the tale. When he was a youngster, my
father picked cotton one entire season in order to buy a single-shot
.22-caliber target rifle. But when he proudly brought the treasured rifle home,
his father appropriated it as his own. It was a lesson my father never forgot:
Life can be cruel and capricious and what you cherish most can be taken away.
He eventually retrieved the rifle from his father, and it
now belongs to me. Made with an eye toward durability and function, it has a simple
beauty to it. And it still shoots straight.
Pearl Harbor changed the trajectory of my father’s life. He left
the farm and went off to war, joining his generation of Americans in saving the
world from murderous butchers and madmen. Then he came home, married my mother and
started a family.
After my daughter’s birth, the nurse placed her in my arms
and I looked into her face for the first time. I was stunned to see in her
round, wrinkly face a vestige of my father, a resemblance so strong it made me
catch my breath and instantly brought tears to my eyes.
I know it was a trick of the imagination, a combination of
brain neurons created in part by my regret that my father, who had died three
years before, never got to see his granddaughter, who today looks nothing like
him. But it seemed very real at the time, and my mother and I had a good cry
together when I called her with the news.
Later, when my son came along, we named him Ethan Clyde, his
middle name a tribute to my Dad. I told E it is a Scottish name, as in the
Firth of Clyde. It is, of course, but it’s also an old-fashioned name, a
country name. It suited my father, and my son has made peace with it. He and
his male cousins will carry on the Gunnels name, for better or worse.
They’ll have to endure, as I have, a lifetime of hearing the
name mispronounced. In the seventh grade, my junior high principal, reading a
list of names over the intercom to the entire school, pronounced it Gunkells,
thus bestowing upon me a despised nickname for the remainder of my school
career.
For the record, it’s pronounced GUN-nulls. What’s so damned
hard about that?
I’ve always considered this ornament, the largest one on the
tree, as a kind of label, a sign designating this is a Gunnels, capital G,
Christmas tree. Dad would approve, I think, but he would certainly never admit it
out loud.
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