My teenage years were uneventful and significant only to myself.
THE CHRISTMAS BOX
CIRCUMSTANCES GRADUALLY improved for our family. My father had a run of work and we purchased a lot in a better part of Salt Lake. We worked together to build our home, from pouring the foundation to hanging wallpaper. Every room of our home was unique. My bed was in a tree, while my sister’s hung from chains. Scott and Mark wallpapered their room with a Yamaha motorcycle billboard.
The future again looked promising. “The only way I’ll leave this home is in a pine box,” my mother was fond of saying. She didn’t. As quickly as we had gotten back on our feet, my father was off his. My father fell through a staircase on a construction site and broke both of his legs, shattering one of his ankles in seven places. The doctors fastened his legs back together with pins and wrapped him in casts up to his hips. He was laid up in bed for nearly a year.
Unfortunately my father did not have insurance. Early in my parents’ marriage they had purchased health insurance, only to be denied coverage when they finally made a claim. My father decided then that the entire insurance industry was a scam.
With neither medical nor disability insurance, circumstances again turned bad and again we put our house up for sale, moving to a small three-bedroom duplex a few miles east of the home we had built for ourselves.
Rich company, like rich food, is often a cause for indigestion. . . .
THE LOOKING GLASS
In some ways it was not so bad leaving the neighborhood. We had built our home near a country club, where most of our neighbors were rich or at least severely comfortable. And we weren’t.
I’m not claiming poverty. I have walked the jungles of South America and backlands of Asia on humanitarian missions and seen true poverty. Even as a child I knew there were millions in America who had less. But in that neighborhood I learned class distinction in subtle yet unmistakably clear forms. I vividly recall sneaking into the country club while my friends walked in through the front gate because I did not have a dollar to be their guest. I remember not being allowed in one child’s home because his mother did not like my clothes. I also remember with stinging clarity a friend telling me that his parents said he could not exchange Christmas gifts with me because I would not be able to buy something good enough.
•
A few years ago Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Rick Bragg and I were speaking at an exclusive club in the South, discussing our books with a crowd of mostly wealthy women. Rick was introducing his book All Over but the Shoutin’, his story of growing up poor in Alabama. As he spoke of the pain and discrimination of his impoverished youth—he’d been raised by a single-parent mother who picked cotton and took in the laundry of the other kids at school—I realized the thickness of the scars I still carried.
As we left the event, the woman who was driving me that day, a middle-aged woman born with a silver foot in her mouth, turned to me and said, “That boy just needs to get over it.” We had a very quiet afternoon.
In that neighborhood I would sometimes seek to alleviate-my feelings of inferiority by remembering the blessing my grandfather had given me. Someday I’ll be somebody, I told myself. But it seemed so distant and so improbable.
•
Our financial travails were especially hard on my mother, amplified by the care of eight children. Most of my memories of my mother at this time were of her in bed in a darkened bedroom. My friends thought she was going to die. At least they told me so.
My mother suffered from depression, complicated by severe PMS. Neither the medical profession nor society knew much about such things at that time. It was an era when Valium was handed out like aspirin to relieve middle America’s housewives of their “anxiety,” and those who suffered from depression were mostly just considered weak and sometimes sinful. It would be years before my mother received the help she needed and rightly deserved. In the meantime there was hell to pay.
One night I came home from a friend’s house to find our foyer filled with people. One of my brothers’ girlfriends took me aside.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Your mother slit her wrists. She’s going to die.”
Mom didn’t die. But she didn’t get better either. I remember we had an electric knife sharpener in the house. I couldn’t tell you the name of my first-grade teacher, but I could draw a detailed picture of that knife sharpener. It was an avocado-colored can opener–blade sharpener in one, with a small doughnut-shaped magnet that held the can as you clamped down on it. It had a slightly sloped plastic appendage on its back with two small slits to run a knife blade through.
Several times, the first few weeks after that incident, when I was home alone, my mother would go into the kitchen and sharpen a knife. The shriek of the grinding blade could be heard anywhere in the house. I remember hiding behind the couch and covering my ears while each pass of the knife sent shivers and sobs through my body. One night, after she had gone to bed, I stole the appliance. I wrapped it in towels and hid it beneath the downstairs bathroom sink.
•
Mom is well now, active and blessing all of our lives. She happily tends to her raspberry bushes, and every July 24 she holds what she calls a “country fair” in her backyard, complete with homemade ice cream and lawn tractor rides, for her thirty-eight grandchildren. Three days a week she does volunteer work at the Christmas Box House for abused children.
I thank God for the advances in medicine that have freed her. I am also grateful to all those women and men who have had the courage to share their own stories of darkness. Especially my mother. She asked that I include this in my book as she believed it might help free someone else from their pain and give them hope that the sun will rise again.
I don’t know what effect those experiences had on me. I like to think that I’m healed and that I learned patience and empathy. I like to believe that I’m a stronger man for it. But every now and then I feel those memories seep up through the lines of my writing like groundwater. And I realize that deep within me, there is still a little boy covering his ears and hiding behind the couch.
Dear Mr. Evans,
I saw your book for the first time at Christmas shopping for a very special gift for my mom. God has been working on my mom for years to reach her heart. In short, to remind her that she is special and is deserving of love. My mom has had a very hard life.
I was in a bookstore when I prayed to God to help me find the special gift I was looking for when, out of nowhere, I heard him say, “The Christmas Box.” I had never heard of the book before. I looked at the cover but I did not pick up the book. I must have looked half the store over, but your book kept coming back to my thoughts. I believe it was God not giving up. So I went back, picked up the book and started reading. I am sure that the manager must have wondered about me. Before I knew it, I had spent a few hours in the store just reading your story. I realized this was my special gift to my mom. God was so right. It will show her what is most important of all, “Love.”
Again, thank you so much and God bless you and your family.
Love in Christ,
Shantay
