Santa Claus On Vacation

Old Men: Robert 

As I have recently reached a significant birthday – I won’t reveal – and am on the verge of becoming one myself, I have begun to reflect on my life and the older men I have encountered throughout that life.  Actually, I have been doing this ever since I can remember, at least since another rite of passage: when I got married. The first old man I want to talk about is…

Robert

I have just come back from a mini vacation of sorts from Long Beach Island and every time I go to LBI  I always think about this old guy who I met some forty years ago. 

My wife, like myself, is a Philadelphia, born and raised. However, she spent an awful lot of her growing up down the shore: Beach Haven. Her dad was a strapping old coot, even when he was younger. I don’t know what brought this man to the island other than fate, but one day he saw a house that had been blown off its foundation into the bay. He single handedly – well, he wasn’t that strapping, but by all intents and purposes – pulled the two story building out of the bay and set it back on its pinnings on a half acre lot he bought not a hundred feet from the water’s edge.

Paul was indeed an interesting old man in his own right but I want to tell you about Robert.

That house I spoke of above was the house in which my wife, Jo, grew up in down the shore and when we were first married we would often spend a week or weekend down there at the invitation of the ‘Old Man’ as Paul would become to be called. We mostly spent those ‘vacations’ mowing the lawn and scraping barnacles off the bottoms of boats and painting and …We were still kids really and the ‘Old Man’ knew he could boss us around a bit. But like all young people we snuck out to play hooky every chance we got and enjoyed the some of the island’s amenities.

I remember one time when we were riding cruising around on our bikes, my bike broke, still ridable but hinky.  Something wrong in the front end. The thing just didn’t want to go straight. As we came down one street I noticed a shingle hanging outside a small, white house, the kind you used a lot more of down there back then, a modest, cape cod-ish kind of place with a breezeway and a garage. The sign said: ‘Sherbourne’ and under that one, another: ‘Bicycle Repair’. Quite a serendipitous turn of events. We approached the  man fiddling about in the garage, a cross between workshop and a mechanical curiosity shop.

“Can I help you?” He was a short, round man, more squat than short. His hair was white, on his head and his chin – a flowing, bleached, corn silk beard that reached almost to his belly button. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts and sandals, the kind that have old tire soles, big back then. He looked like Santa Claus on vacation in his toy shop south. Comical, if it weren’t for the scared,  blistered and charred skin that covered his feet and ran all the way up to just below his knees like bubble wrap stockings.

As I told him about my bike he noticed that we were entranced by all the stuff lining the shelves and hanging on the walls of the garage. Turned out he was an engineer overseas during the World War I. He designed, of all things, gas masks and other gothic gadgets for chemical warfare. There were a whole set of masks, prototypes, from men’s to women’s to toddler’s to … there was even one there for a new born infant – and a dog!  We recoiled but Robert was not a bit apologetic.  He was proud of his work. And who could blame him? Who knows how many people he saved or just put a little more at ease during that horrific time? I left my bike and he said I could pick it up in a day or two, as good as new.

Christmas Eve, 1917. Saint Nick, over no-man’s-land in Europe, returning from a long night of trying to carry out his mission in a war torn world when Donner takes a stray bullet to the hind quarters,  sending the sleigh and all eight of its engines and its pilot into a tailspin. The old man spends the next few days in the trenches, behind enemy lines, trying to nurse a wounded reindeer back to flying status, and surrounded by the mud and the slop and the barbed wire and the mustard gas and the fear and the despair – war – everything ugly about us.

But Santa’s a tough old bird. He got back in the air and back to work with even more commitment and dedication to his yearly mission.

After all, if he doesn’t do it, who will?

thiscrappytshirt@aol.com.