The Future Tells a Christmas Story
He rolled it in on a cart each year and would set it up next to the dining room table. He would invite each of us, starting with the youngest, to step up to the glass of wine he would set in front of the strangely mottled image. We would close one eye and get as close to the wine glass as possible following our father's incantations about how his time machine had been passed from generation to generation and how it opened a window into the future for a very short time each Christmas eve.
I watched each year as my brothers and sisters stepped up for their peek through the glass into the screen our father chose for them, the younger ones screaming with delight as they received hints about the gifts of the future that would be waiting for them under the tree on Christmas morning and the older ones giggling in spite of knowing something about the illusion of it all.
The rule was that you had to do something to help the future. It couldn't happen by itself. and it needed your help. Our Father was careful to explain this each year. Each year I would understand a little bit more of the explanation, but for the longest time, all I ever understood was the part where he said that we had to help the future by dreaming about it. Sometime after I got older, I heard him say that we had to be patient too. The following year, I heard him say that we might have to do something to help our future all year long. That was a conceptual stretch for a six year old, but I heard it repeated year after year after that.
On the last Christmas Eve that I spent with my father, I was a little disappointed that the future's message had nothing to do with the sweater and book that were under the tree for me that year. I always got a kick out of the connection. I was disappointed in the book too. Which is to say that I didn't read past the first few pages. That is, until one Christmas years later I found the book again.
There, in my father's cockeyed style, was a circled paragraph.
Holding the glass to the light, he said, "I've had a rich and full life. My family and friends have fulfilled me more than I believed possible. And now, after all is done, I can tell you that, as much as I enjoyed my job, my position, my house and all the rest; they were simply a means to keep us all warm, dry, fed and comfortable. They were never the reason for my being".
On that last Christmas Eve with my father, all those years ago, this is what the time machine told me.
No matter how elaborate the glass might be, it's the contents that matter most.
Related Tags: christmas, christmas story, stories, christmas stories
Best wishes for a rich life from Personal Fit Weight Loss Guide.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2121/Weight-Loss-Guide-120506
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