Saturday, December 12, 2020

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part Seven

 

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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