Childhood Memories of Buying a Christmas Tree

This is a revised version of a story that appeared in the Virginia Beach Sun on December 1, 1988.     

      Men measures their progression through time in many ways. As young boys, we cut our neighbors grass and as adolescents, we deliver their newspapers. As adults, we bring them their mail and sell them their cars and as old men we exaggerate how well we accomplished all of these tasks.

      For me, the one sure measure of time and my own journey through it has been the Christmas tree—or more precisely, how I have gone about getting one each year.

      I remember as a child, in Rochester, how my father and I would walk up the street to the City Service gas station where the man would have all his trees leaning on one side of the building. They would be stacked up in a giant heap making it impossible to compare them but nevertheless my father would hold up one after another, and ask my opinion.

     “What do you think of this one?”

  “How do you like this one?”

  “How about this one?”

  “Do you like this one?”

  Until finally he found one that he liked.

  “This one looks pretty good. I think we’ll get it.” My father would then pay the man what I suppose was a couple of bucks and then we would carry it back home. Not even the freezing cold could dampen my excitement.

Pearl Harbor Day 1982, Hope for the Holidays

I left Vietnam in July 1971 and the Army in January 1973. For the next few years I lived in San Pedro and Long Beach, California; Rochester, New York; and Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina before settling in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Somewhere in the middle of all that moving around I got married and by 1982 I was the father of two girls. I had done a little writing while living in California but not that much and I had reflected back on Vietnam even less. But by 1982 I was ready to take look back  , not just on Vietnam but also on just about everything else.

 

Hope For the Holidays

                     --a GI remembers

                           Virginian Pilot, Tuesday, December 7, 1982

In December 1970, I was nearing the end of my first year in the army. It was a strange year. I held none of the then-popular objections to serving in the army. Both my parents had served their country during World War II and I was proud to be following in their footsteps.

But there was one problem. I didn’t really feel that I was walking the same path that they had. So many changes had taken place and the army had come under so much attack in recent years that it was hard to believe that my army was my father’s army. His had had the support of the entire nation. Mine didn’t even have the support of its own members. After one year I was still looking for the missing link.

But as the year was drawing to a close it was the upcoming Bob Hope Christmas Show that occupied my thoughts more than anything else as the 12 days of Christmas passed so tediously slow.

I was an information specialist assigned to the 1^st Aviation Brigade. We’d be in charge of taking the official pictures of the show—Hope, the girls, the celebrities, the girls—did I mention the girls.