Good Intentions

Christmas Day, 2000. Despite a thirteen hour drive north from Atlanta a few days before, I found myself chauffeuring my family to and from church.

I scanned the road for potholes as my ears adjusted to the cacophony in the back seat. Whenever my family filled any space, that space burst with sound, activity, life. That particular Christmas Day, like all holidays, they turned my car into a rolling, overflowing cornucopia of conversation. Words spilled out and bumped into each other, landing wherever they might find the tiniest silence.

“I’m not sure we have enough corn,” Mom fretted.

“Can I play my skateboard game at Grandma’s?”

My mother ignored her grandson Geoff's interruption. “And ‘Silent Night’ is not ‘The Minute Waltz’. The choir went way too fast.”

“Geoffrey Martin,” my sister Rosie admonished, “you played skateboard all night last night. Besides, Grandma doesn’t have a Nintendo player. Mom, do we need to swing over to my house and get another can of corn?”

"Can we pick up the Nintendo?" Geoff piped up hopefully.

"Not a chance."

I stole a quick glance at the passenger’s seat. Pop sat in stone-faced mirth next to me. Neither of us rolled our eyes, but I knew we both wanted to. Eye-rolling would just add yet another course to the vocal feast behind us. So I smirked and returned my attention to the road ahead.

Christmas Day had dawned brilliant and cold. A single wispy cloud adorned a vibrant blue above. The streets, sidewalks and driveways had all been shoveled and salted and seemingly licked clean. Strips of gray pavement fused each neighborhood we drove through into the next. The cityscape appeared neater and somehow cleaner. Maybe, I mused, fresh snowfall was God’s way of decorating the more rundown, shabbier areas of Cleveland’s West Side.

I don’t look down on these century-old neighborhoods. This part of town was only slightly poorer than the suburb I had been raised in.

Embellishments and indulgences had always been rarities growing up. I still lived that way Christmas of 2000, keeping things as uncluttered and uncomplicated as I could in an increasingly cluttered and complicated world. Despite my family’s struggles, or perhaps because of them, neither I nor my sisters had ever wanted for anything.

“Didn’t Erna look beautiful today? Who did her hair?”

“You shouldn’t have gotten us a real tree this year. The needles get in the carpet.”

“Mom, Jason Gratski got his own DVD player for Christmas.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me he was gonna get one…”

DVD players and Nintendos for Christmas… Innocence isn’t what it once was, I decided, as I made a gentle right turn. My parents had fought in vain thirty-nine Christmases earlier to get a new, battery powered toy train to stop jumping its track. Much of Christmas Eve had been spent ignoring the thing’s poor design. The track’s circumference was too small, and the train’s one speed was too fast for the engine, two cars and caboose to navigate the tight circle without derailing.

The adults had debated a full two hours whether or not to return the Little Train That Couldn’t. Proof of the debacle still existed in a fading picture in the family album, a shot of my Pop on all fours trying to coax the poor toy into defying the laws of physics. It was a simple, innocent lapse of judgment in a much simpler, much more innocent time….

I reconsidered. My childhood had taken place during the Civil Rights movement and the Viet Nam War. “Complex” was too mild a word to describe the era. And yet, I'd been allowed a childhood, an entire stage of life I believed was denied to the youth of 2000. Children seemingly grew up more quickly at the dawning new millennium. They had to in order to keep pace with runaway technology.

Technology. The word made me wince.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My aversion to airports in general put me on the highway out of Atlanta a few days before Christmas. Thirteen hours in the car struck me as a good trade-off. However, it made my first day back in Cleveland a groggy affair. Still, I conferred with older sister Rosie and “baby” sister Chrissy on what to get my nephew for Christmas. I hadn't gotten him anything yet. Sleep would wait.

“Chrissy already got Geoff a skateboard, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Chrissy said. “I got him a helmet and knee pads, too.”

“How about some kind of game for the Nintendo 64 you got him?” I offered. “Some game of skill?”

“Okay,” Rosie agreed. “But nothing violent. Seriously. We get more than enough on cable.”

"How about this," I offered. "I'm not really up on Nintendo. What if I take Geoff to get the game he wants? He knows the deal on Santa, right?"

"Yeah. Remember what I said about the--"

"Violence, yeah. I'm with you on that."

That evening after dinner, Geoff and I headed for Parmatown Mall, and a shop specializing in video game equipment and software. Geoff's eyes lit up as we searched the shelves for an appropriate gift, something a boy of eleven might enjoy. The vast selection of war games, urban crime shoot-’em-ups and fantasy bloodlettings – all touted as Perfect Stocking Stuffers – disturbed me more than a little. Geoff pulled game after game off the shelves.

My responses?

"No... no... nope... Uh-uh... Oh, definitely not. Your mom would kill me..."

Finally, we found one, an innocuous looking skateboard game.

"Perfect," I said, scanning the packaging with bleary eyes. "You like skateboarding, so there you go." I dropped Geoff off at home, then went to Pop and Mom's house and wrapped his gift.

As was the Roppelt custom, each family member opened gifts on Christmas Eve. We started that night at Rosie's house.

“I wanna open Uncle Marty’s gift first,” Geoff insisted.

Rosie had pushed one of her own gifts toward her son, to no avail. She refrained, however, from letting Mom and Pop know I had taken him to buy his own gift. "You can open it first," she said. "But nothing happens before you open all your gifts."

Geoff pouted a bit, but nodded agreement. He even showed both restraint, excitement and proper gratitude on opening his other presents.

Then he hooked up his Nintendo 64.

And so, I succeeded my father in family lore when Geoff's skateboarding cyber alter ego wiped out for the first time. After rejecting dozens of games which required inflicting as much invasive trauma as possible, I was horrified to see a good deal of gore spatter from the skateboarder’s body when he fell. Geoff squealed with glee and spent the rest of the evening purposely running the hapless cartoon into walls, railings, fences – anything to create a new and unique injury.

Rosie glared in mute anger at me. I could only shrug helplessly in reply. Current technology meant taking a mere snapshot of my futility would not do. Digital Video captured and preserved the proceedings for eternity.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

We approached Mom and Pop's house with the talking still at full throttle. I grew up with multiple, concurrent conversations. To me the continuous stream of non-sequiturs resonated like a symphony. Each person was an instrument, speaking rather than playing his or her part. Melodies, harmonies, staccatos and legatos, forte and pianissimo (though usually very little pianissimo), like an aggressively interpreted Nutcracker Suite, intricate and unashamed, and beautiful. And, yes, it was a little loud and, as the title might imply, a bit nutty.

I smiled, yet squirmed a little in the driver's seat. Nothing quite equaled the silence in Rosie's living room, punctuated by the game noise and Geoff's audible delight.

And a Merry Christmas to all, and to all uncles, good luck.