JOHN FREEMAN
He didn’t tell us where we were going.
This was not unusual. My father loved pointless drives. He’d hustle us into the car and then we’d tool across town. No destination. Sometimes these drives went on for fifteen minutes.
Sometimes several hours.
We’d meander home from church the long way, stopping at open houses.Are we going to live here? No, let’s just look, he’d reply.
Do I need to say all the homes we ogled were much bigger than ours?
And so I grew up in the multiverse. Have you heard of this term? The theory that reality is simply a series of stacked versions of itself.
This idea—that something else was always simultaneously happening elsewhere—called to my father, and so that Christmas night in 1985 my mother, my brothers, and I—there are three of us—knew we could have been going anywhere.
We passed the malls, then the turnoff to the adjacent suburbs. Then it seemed clear we were going to downtown Sacramento.
Our hearts sank.
My father ran a family service agency in the city that provided health and human services. They did things the government gave up on. Meals on Wheels programs, counseled people getting on or off welfare.
The office was a big old home with sticky floors and it smelled of Tab cola. Most of the time he stashed us in a room with no toys and we were told to wait.
The whole place had the low, quiet ache of disappointment.
And looking back I suppose it should have … that’s what the agency dealt in, how to cope with disappointment.
It was dark now and we had sailed right past his work; none of the streets were looking familiar. My mother was talking quietly to my father as they drove.
Where are we?
We’re here. Come on, help me with this.
My father opened the back of our banana-colored station wagon and yanked out several wrapped presents.
Come on guys.
We followed him and my mother to the door. All of us had paper routes, and though we lacked any kind of social IQ, we were experts in front doors.
This was the kind of metal that would bang if you tried to one-hop the paper to the porch and hit the door by accident.
My dad rapped it loudly. RAP RAP RAP. A light turned on. The metal door opened and a woman appeared. She was dressed for work in the kind of outfit Lucy wore inI Love Lucy. She looked confused but friendly.
Hi we’re your neighbors from United Way, and we just wanted to say Merry Christmas.
By this point, my brothers and I were holding the presents.
We still didn’t know what we were doing there, but the woman behind the door, she had figured out why. Her eyes softened, and then she put on the face you make when you have another face you need to cover up.
Oh you are so kind. Thank you …!
A child our age appeared behind the woman.
This is my daughter …
There we stood on the other side of the door. Two families. Ours, the five of us, and theirs, the two of them.
That’s when the girl our age burst into tears and ran back into the house.
We have been talking a lot in recent years about privilege. White privilege, male privilege, straight privilege. I know I have benefited from all these things, but when I have to identify a period where I understood—before I could articulate—what any of these things meant, I think of that night.
We use a horrible phrase to describe such incidents: teachable moments. But who are they teaching? And what? At age eleven the lesson, for me, was too complex. What was supposed to be an objective demonstration in generosity—giving is good—turned into a tutorial in the invisibility of power. That it takes power to give, and power to create moments for learning, rather than have them thrust upon you. The woman’s daughter had decoded all of it in under a second and it made her feel ashamed.
It took me years to understand that, because as a middle-class striver, I had other teachable lessons I was paying attention to—mostly in books. You read the books, you followed the plan, you took the classes, you did the right activities, you got into the schools that enlarged your life progressively, sequentially, logically, coherently.
But of course, we often learn the most from what we see. It sits inside us like a spinning top, moving of its own accord, until we grab it.
That Christmas
