In honor of Short Story Day and the approach of Christmas, I am re-posting a short story from a couple of years ago (before I knew many of you ((wink)). Have a happy holiday season  however you spend it. In the words of one of my favorite stories, “may you have enough. . .”

The first snows of December had already fallen.  It was the winter of 1975 and like many winters that had come before, Petoskey was already blanketed in snow. Garland hung between the lamp posts of Mitchell Street suspending plastic bells above the busy street. Earnest shop keepers shoveled snow even as it fell, a lesson in futility I would carry well into adulthood. Banks were formed along the sidewalks by the snow that could be pushed no farther.  These banks created a type of frozen bowling alley for unwary walkers who often slipped upon the sidewalk.

This was it. This was winter. This was Christmas coming. I had been somewhat insulated from this Christmas at home. I had navigated the Christmas challenges at school. I had not made the paper plate Santa, I did not ring bells with the class at lunchtime. I did not take part in the Christmas play.

But now, now I was in the trenches of the season. There was Christmas in all of the places I could go any other time of the year when Christmas wasn’t.

In front of the Woolworth’s Five and Dime was a Christmas display. A cardboard doghouse decorated in lights and plastic candy canes. Jutting from the open window of the box was a dog puppet. I am usually given to details, but I cannot tell you the name of the dog or the business that was being promoted by his presence. I can tell you a young boy dressed in an elves costume stood with the house and was passing out candy canes to people walking by. He had not offered me a candy cane yet. Perhaps there was some rite that needed to be observed. Perhaps this wasn’t a casual handing out of candy but rather an exchange of some sort.

“What are you going to ask Santa for?” the dog asked in a kind of voice that was part elderly, part mentally impaired.

“What?” I responded, knowing full well what the dog had asked. I was trying to buy time, hoping that mother would pull at my mitten in a signal to move on. When she did not, I could tell: this was a test. Hadn’t I passed this test at school, bravely telling my teacher what I could do and what I could not do? Wasn’t there a phone call that occurred that left mother so angry she slammed the telephone down and asked if I had participated in music class this month? Hadn’t I endured the spanking that came of singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas?” Hadn’t I taken one swat with a wooden spoon for each day?

I had passed these tests. I had made it to December 19^th, the first day of Christmas break. I would weather Christmas at our rural home and would return in January a normal student. But now, this inanimate puppet. So seemingly friendly.  So seemingly non-combative. What would I say to the dog’s inquisition? How would I respond to the question of Christmas asked from a puppet? The dog would be one, among the legion, of inquisitors I would face during the Christmas season. His funny fur and funnier voice did not distract from his divine purpose: to seek out children and solicit from them their Christmas wishes.

“I said;” he responded, maintaining character, “what are you going to ask Santa for, little boy?”

He had added little boy to the question.  This confirmed a fear I had already begun to process in my young mind. He could see me. There was some other hole or mechanism through which he could see through the box. He could tell my age and my gender. Like the god I had only just begun to study, there could be other creatures who would be able to see me and tell what I was doing at any given time. This dog had seen me eating my grilled cheese at the store’s lunch counter and had been waiting for me to come outside. He had rehearsed this question. Though many people were on the sidewalk passing the display now, many with children, there was only the dog and me now.

If he were truly all-seeing, he would know that I had been finishing early in art class, cutting plain green trees out of construction paper and sitting quietly in the hall while the other students embellished theirs with glitter and glue. He probably saw me declining bell-shaped cookies at snack time, maintaining a milk-only regimen through to Christmas Break.

There would be no escaping his question.  I was wearing a hand-knit hat with strings hanging from the earflaps, a brown one of a kind hat that could be easily identified in a lineup of children. He had seen me and could surely describe me to the holiday authorities  if I simply walked away. I would be the non-respondent. The boy who wouldn’t answer the question.  Mother looked tentatively. Nodding her head toward the dog, she was quietly indicating that I needed to answer the dog.

“We don’t believe in Christmas, ” I responded, “We believe in Jehovah.”

There was double take from the elf-boy. He curled the candy cane in his hand and held it against his chest. He looked toward the cardboard doghouse looking for his next action. He looked back and me with a look that said he probably didn’t hear me correctly. The cane stayed firmly planted in his hand.

“What did you say, kid? Jahwhat?!” the dog asked. “What do you mean you don’t believe in Christmas?” His question sounded as though I had never heard of Christmas before and was mistaken about how it should be handled.

“No, sir, we don’t” I said respectfully, “We believe in Jehovah. We don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Okay, just wait a minute, Kevin,” the dog said and the elf-boy responded with a nod. Good, the elf-boy’s name was Kevin. I could remember this for later when I told the story of my bravery and my standing up for Jehovah in the midst of the great furry dog sent by Babylon the Great to test my new faith in the truth. Kevin was left dumbfounded looking at my mother and then back at me. Then he turned his gaze down the sidewalk. I could tell he didn’t want to be in this scene any more than I did.

The puppet dog looked down, perhaps at the man working his mouth and voice. This was some kind of puppet/handler interaction that otherwise would have been delightful to other children. The illusion that the dog was real, not handled by a grown person with his or her hand extended working the large lipped mouth.  Now, it seemed a conference within the cardboard box was happening. “Did you hear this shit, Bob?” The kid doesn’t believe in Christmas!! Alright, look kid, everybody believes in Christmas! Now, I’m gonna ask ya’ one more time. Now you be a good boy and answer up. You better get it right this time! What are you going to ask for this year from Santa?!” The dog’s face was completely out of the box now; I thought I saw the box tremble.

Mother was not leading me away. I was face to face with the dog and I could smell schnapps on his felt. I knew schnapps as my uncle often drank it before his motorcycle accident. Whenever he offered me a taste of his schnapps, I had to say no as Jehovah frowned upon peppermint. It was the same stuff that made candy canes, the forbidden winter fruit.  Now this dog was breathing peppermint into my face, my eyes; my nostrils burned from it.

Mother was not leading me away. She was going to force me to face this felt distracter. In the name of Jehovah, she had thrown me to this dog and his handler. I had to say something to get out of this interaction. People had started to gather awaiting their chance to interact with the puppet. Children began grabbing for candy canes, candy canes that Kevin was now passing out freely in an effort to move these children on.

Quietly, I offered. “Someday, Jehovah is going to come and make this whole world new. We are going to get a new house up on the hill after Armageddon. All the bad people will be gone and only Witnesses will be left. That is why I don’t believe in Christmas. Santa will not get me and my mommy and daddy a new house. Only Jehovah can do that.”

I was having my first theological conversation on a snow-covered sidewalk in front of Woolworth’s Five and Dime. I was preaching Jehovah to a dog puppet and his handler. I would earn points for this on Sunday morning. The anecdote of Paulie vs. the dog would be the stuff of legend. The story would live on as an example of the struggle of Witnesses everywhere. We had heard about them in Russia meeting under busses to avoid being punished. I had taken on the demon dog of Christmas in an effort  to minister to him on the sidewalk. I had responded appropriately to his questions and stood tall in the face of his torment. This would be the stuff of Watchtower heroics.

“Yeah, yeah, kid,” the dog replied. “Look, move along will ya’? There’s lots of kids waiting.”

There were no kids waiting. It was just us, locked in a battle for souls I had only begun to hear about from mother. The dog was resisting the word of Jehovah and therefore must have been under the power of demons. Kevin thrust out his hand with the candy cane and said, “Merry Christmas, kid.”

I did not take the candy cane from him. I walked away with mother, my mittened hand in her larger hand. Moving down the sidewalk, I licked the inside of my cheeks. I could taste peppermint in my mouth.

Three boxes of soppy seasonal items are now waiting for the trash collector on Friday morning who will come and haul away a cherished collection of Santas and other Fa-La-La Filigree and Holiday Hubris. Our basement has never had issues with water until I discovered that—yes it has—it has for some time seemingly. In a corner where we keep some of our Christmas items, I discovered a leak coming from a pipe. The water was dripping directly onto my Santa Collection. Above the now damaged collection was a kind of gurgling sound that was nothing like the angelic choir I was expecting to hear as we unpacked the decorations on a Sunday morning.

In the end, wooden Santas green-gray with mold, now-flexible Christmas books, and other items were damaged beyond salvage. A plumber was called as I might share with you that I am not the handyman of the house. This leaves the Hankins home without a handyman. I fancy myself the reader-writer type who avoids Henry David Thoreau for the shame he casts upon me. If HDT asked for a Phillips screwdriver, I would bring him both kinds so as not to embarrass us both (please don’t respond with the differences. I am trying to come to terms with this). I was disappointed that we had to throw so much out. I spent much of the day in a kind of self-pity vs. the productive seeking of a solution. Water continued to drip throughout the day, but now it was dripping into a beautiful Longaberger basket insert (these are plastic and can be washed. I heard a gasp out there).

Finally, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, a plumber came to our house and we were able to walk in areas of the basement my Dr. Sholl’s slippers have not trod. By the way, if you come to the Hankins house to fix something, can you bring your own tool kit? I am always a little embarrassed to show handymen that my screwdrivers are in the same drawer as my hot glue gun and ribbons (though when Noah was in Boy Scouts, we bought some simple wood-carving tools which now casts me as a gentle Gepetto type).

Ruling out active running water (discussion of sewer lines should not be in proximity to the season of lights), we looked to the dryer line. And this is where we found our water problem. It seems that the vent from the dryer goes straight downward, runs the length of the back storage hallway, and back up again to exit the house. This, according to the plumber creates a U-shape he called a “belly” (the Campbellian within me got this reference right away, though an attempt to enter into the discourse of the three day encampment was met with a snort from the plumber). He also shared with me that any number of small creatures seeking warmth could be inside of the pipe though they would certainly be dead at this point (I saw N.I.M.H-like rodents making their home in our basement, stealing my tubesocks with every other load). We could hear the water sloshing back and forth in the pipe. The pipe was cold and clammy. The plumber took a drill and drilled a hole in the pipe releasing water and lint like something out of a Charleton Heston film. He asked me to go get a wire hanger (which prompted an allusion to film that was met with not only a snort, but a look of disdain) so that we could work our way through the small hole in order to break up whatever was stuck in that pipe.

One hundred and eighty-five dollars later, we have a pipe that now runs warm air through the back of the house vs. water and lint. Our clothes are drying quicker and I am free to write inspired entries such as this. But I have been stuck with a thought for the past twenty-four hours. I am stuck with this because this is all my brain can do—to seek out connections between what I don’t get to the things I think I do. Could part of the problem with young students and reading be because of what is stuck in the pipeline?

Here is my thinking and it is raw at best. The problem with our dryer line was the fact that both the source pipes, leading into the run and back out of the house, are pointing straight up. Follow me. With each year a student moves through a grade, how many times do we hear, “We need to prepare you for the ________ grade?” “We need to prepare you for high school?” or “We need to prepare you for college?” It seems like just about every instructor a student might have (including those who wandered in, either out of curiosity or just because it was warm) are pointed in the vertical direction. All reading invitations (and let’s be frank while we are being friendly, “tasks”) are a pipeline leading, or intending to lead, straight upward.

Is it any wonder that so many of our students find themselves sloshing about in the pipe? And don’t think that it has escaped me in the last 24 hours, and haunted me, that the dripping I experienced yesterday in the corner of my basement are just like the tears of frustration, if not expressed, internalized, by our readers who find themselves continually frustrated by the most earnest of reading tasks? And how many curiosities have been left to die while stuck in the Habitrail of the traditional one classroom, one book modality that persists in classrooms?

Could the right book at the right time with the right student be enough to punch through this sloshing to bring that reader back the place they were when they first entered the world of reading? I am just thinking out loud here. I couldn’t get my peers excited about this thinking at the lunch table today (it’s just Mr. Hankins thinking outside of some pre-approved box again) and my wife just nodded appreciatively happy that I have found a way to connect tragedy to teaching (but since she was on-call last night this nodding happened on her way down the hallway and was accompanied by a wave I am sure she learned in charm school).

But when I had a group of thirty students who have traditionally struggled in ELA courses for the past five years, they got it. They were able to follow this illustration in a way that forced me to clarify my own thinking. They had stories to tell about being in rooms where nobody got it and where everyone just waited until the warm winds might blow again (yes, this was an attempt to make Summer School funny). These students I talked with this afternoon are veterans of summer instruction. They would letter in this if we could make SS patches politically correct). Many of these students have read more this year than they have in years past. They inspire me to keep them in good titles and in good conversations about the reading we are doing this year.

The plumber shared with me that if the line ran consistently from the dryer unit all the way to the vent outside we would never have had this problem. What he was describing was a discernible, direct line from unit to vent (how about from invitation to reflection?). And he said it need not be an uphill climb. In fact, he shared that this type of run is often a subtle kind of downward slope. I am not suggesting that students read at a steady incline, nor am I advocating for a downward progression, but can our students identify what kind of path they are taking with their own reading or is every invitation another submission to the indiscernible slosh that keeps them floating back and forth in a perpetual schmutz bath?

In the end, what I have come to discover, is that I paid $185 dollars for some of the best professional development I have had in the past seven years. The kind where I got some hands-on experience and saw with my own two eyes the very challenge I am asked to meet each year. Get them reading. Help me to drill the hole and to punch through the slosh (and be open to what comes out), and we may be able to do just that.

Twenty-four hours later, the pipe I found cold and clammy yesterday is now running warm air. In the room where we had our conversation about reading today, I could feel the same warm air flowing (and no, it was not the sound of my own voice), the flow of conversation between learners in the classroom talking through the mess of reading to find the message of why we read and what we read and how we find ourselves expressing ourselves as readers. Isn’t this what a vent/venting’s designed to do?