This Month's Story
It was a Christmas Party and our hostess had thought of several unique ways of keeping us entertained. One way she introduced was rather unusual. Although the time I’m talking about happened many years ago, I still remember my input to what she had us do.
The premise was deceptively simple: we were each tasked to remember some good deed we had done for some stranger around the season of Christmas and in turn, remember some good deed someone had done to us. These were not to be fantastic deeds; just something that on the telling would relate that the season was built about sharing the good that we all have in us and somehow manage to emerge at that time of year.
As I said, it was a long time ago and I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember the two stories each of the party members told, but for some reason, I do remember my two stories. In fact, until our hostess brought the subject up, I had not thought of either of them until she made her suggestion; which I guess, entails the true meaning of Christmas.
The first story I told related to a dark, blustery day when I was driving my pickup truck home, tired and looking forward to a warm drink and a comfortable chair. I was on a county road that ran alongside a train track that had a ditch running along beside it. Just ahead of me was another pickup truck and just before it, a station wagon. The road was not the best in the world; bumpy, with small patches of ice on the ground and new flakes of snow were falling. The lead station wagon was not going very fast, so the three of us were fairly close to one another.
Suddenly, the station wagon gave a hard twist and went sideways into the ditch.
The pickup in front of me stopped just ahead of where the station wagon went down. Its driver jumped out on the road, leaving the door open and started pulling a tow chain from a tool box in the truck’s bed. I stopped just back of where the station wagon lay on its side in the ditch and climbed down to the front of the station wagon.
As I passed the body of the car, I could see the terrified look of the woman still clutching the wheel and behind her buckled in their seats, a small boy and girl looking at me with large eyes. The back of the station wagon was filled with wrapped Christmas gifts.
I looked up at the other pickup’s driver who had found his tow chain and was looking down questionably at me. I nodded and he threw one end down to me and proceeded to attach the other end to the hitch at his truck’s rear.
I slipped in the cold mud under the station wagon and finding a good place, attached the tow chain’s hook to it. I pulled to make sure it would hold and then scrambled out from under car, climbed out of the ditch and gave a thumps up to the other driver.
He climbed inside his pickup and moving forward with a slow pull managed to skillfully ease the station wagon out of the ditch. Once it was clear, I slipped once again under the front end of the car and unhooked the tow chain. Crawling out, I waved to the other driver who quickly released his end of the chain, pulled it back up and stowed it in its box.
With a brief wave, he climbed into the pickup’s cab and drove off.
I asked the women if she was alright. She started her engine and the car started without any trouble. I said Merry Christmas and hurried back to my pickup with its welcome warm cab and waved at the two children who were still staring in wide eyed wonder through the station wagon’s side window and with two quick beeps of thanks turned at the next street corner. I went on to our house thinking of a hot shower and something warm to drink.
Thinking back on it, I doubt if the whole incident took five minutes.
I went home, took the quick shower, changed clothes and sat down to one of Stella’s wonderful suppers. I remember I was so hungry; I never did tell her about the car in the ditch.
***
The other half of my set of stories, was in its way equally bland, but still filled with the warm feeling that’s part of the season.
It was about a week later and I, part of a three-man team of scientists aboard a Cessna two-engine aircraft that were surveying for mammals in a hundred mile square of the Gulf of Mexico. The plane was small and after four hours of flying, we were glad to take a lunch break and give ourselves a few minutes to stretch our legs.
Also, despite it being winter, the sun coming through the windows overran the small plane’s air conditioner. The plane’s interior was very warm.
We flew the survey every two weeks and on each flight made a point of varying where we landed for lunch. There were a number of small plane airports along the Gulf coast and it became a game with us to decide which airport we would choose to have lunch on any given flight day. (I should say that after Christmas, we landed at an airport that we had often used in the past and found they had saved the goodies of their Christmas feast in the hopes of our return.)
One day our pilot suggested an unmanned single strip runway on Dauphine Island; one of the chain of islands off the coast of Mississippi. He had never been there before, but thought it would be a change from our usual more inland lunch stops.
We landed with no problem and after stretching our cramped bodies, locked the plane from force of habit, there seemed to be no one anywhere near the deserted strip, we walked to the small dirt road at the strip’s end.
It didn’t look promising and it wasn’t.
It was a long dusty walk from the strip to the paved two-lane road that evidently led from the mainland to Dauphine Island. When we got to that road, there wasn’t a single structure or even a sign in sight in either direction.
The road did its job of connecting the island to the mainland but that was about all. We were alone and also slowly realized that what traffic there was, was sparse and was going to remain that way.
We didn’t want to make the long walk back to the plane and go flying somewhere else to eat. It would consume too much of the day’s flying time.
Just standing there was doing us no good, so we moved to the edge of the road and stuck out our thumbs. We looked weird I’m sure, standing there, four men in the middle of nowhere, hitchhiking.
After more than a few minutes, an old pickup truck with two teenage girls stopped and asked if they could help us. We explained that we had landed on the unmanned airstrip (now well hidden from the road by trees and large bushes) and we were looking for a place to have lunch.
“Well, there’s no place nearby. There is a place up ahead about three miles. If you want, we’ll take you there.”
We said that would be fine and jumped in the back of the pickup. It was a little more than three miles and the ride was bumpy, but the restaurant the girls stopped at looked like a nice place to eat. We gratefully climbed stiffly out of the back of the truck, and giving more thanks to the girls, went inside.
The food was good and we took our time eating. None of us were in a hurry to climb back into that cramped, hot plane. Looking around we noticed that someone had placed mistletoe over the entrance door and had the pleasure of seeing it used at least twice. Finally we saw that we had wasted an hour and asked the waitress if there was a taxi service available.
“They can call one for you from the cashier’s booth up front, but I should warn you, they are awful slow. You all will have to wait a bit”
We left her a tip and proceeded out the dining area to the cashier. As we opened the door we saw the two girls sitting quietly, each nursing a coke.
“Are you ready to go back to the plane?”
We stared at them.
“You’ve been here all this time?”
“Why, yeh. How else were you all going to get back to your plane?”
We paid our bill and without any more ado, found ourselves being jostled in the back of their old pickup and the bumpy road back.
They even drove us down the single lane road to the plane.
Once there they marveled at the plane.
Since our work took us over water, safety reasons required us to use a two engine plane. Ours was a strange looking aircraft. A Cessna Skymaster was a plane with a propeller in the front and a pusher propeller in the rear. It did look strange, but, because its wings were overhead, it provided us with both the safety requirements and the unique observation of the water below that our work required.
We thanked the girls, climbed in and taxied to the runway’s end and took off. We circled them twice; wiggling our wings as they in turn whirled about and waved to us wildly.
With that we went back to work, but somehow we each felt a little better.
I still remember those two girls who waited when they didn’t have to wait. They were a special version of the spirit of Christmas that would be hard to beat.
