At The Bottom of the Elephant Barrel

Mr. Baseball and I had been talking about a Christmas Party and the jist of a Christmas Past.

I hadn't attended a Christmas Party for 30 years. At the last one I attended everybody got smashed which presented a vibrational, intuitional overload resulting in way too much information and a couple decade long grudges

I was working in the building where Mr. Baseball was teaching Spanish. 

A few weeks earlier, my wife Lynn and I had gone to the movies with Mr. Baseball and his wife Rosie. We went to movies as a fearsome fousome quite often. We had dinner at Bugaboo Creek after the movie and somehow the conversation turned to an oncoming Christmas party. Although I was now retired, I had been filling in for a woman who was on maternity leave. I wasn't crazy about the assigment. I had been a twelfth grade teacher and all of a sudden I was teaching ninth grade.

God bless anybody who teaches ninth grade.

I had started my career there. It was kinda cool that I was finishing it in the same building, the same room in fact that I had begun thirty five years prior. I liked the people, teachers and staff, who worked in the building. They treated me with respect and kindness. They liked to say that I was their idol because I was retired.

 When I shared my hang up about Christmas parties, Rosie ,Lynn and Baseball gave me a colective 'get over it" response. To my surprise, Lynn seemed interested in attending the party. She told Mr. Baseball to pick up two tickets for us and we'd pay him at the party.

Since I hadn't been  to a faculty party in decades, I wondered how the attendees passed the time before and after the buffet. Baseball told me that a "white elephant" activity was on the agenda. I didn't know what a white elephant activity entailed so I asked Baseball to sum it up for me.

"You bring in some piece of junk you've got hanging around the house that you don't want, you don't know what to do with and yet you don't want to throw out. You wrap the junk up as nice as you can or in your case have Lynn wrap the junk up. You give your precision wrapped junk to somebody else. They give the piece of junk that they don't want to you and everybody's happy, sort of"

The whole exercise sounded like a microcosm of most of the relationships that I'd observed in my lifetime and thus possessed a certain minimal degree of valididty along with existential possibility....

A week later, on a snowy December night, Lynn and I arrived at the scene of the party. I had forgotten about the "white elephant". I asked Lynn if she remembered and of course she had it "covered". She had covered it in more ways than one. She had selected the elephant. she had wrapped it beautifully, she had placed it in the back seat and she grabbed it when we headed into the party.

We entered a little early so we had our choice of seats. We saved two places for Rosie and Mr. Baseball. As it turned out Chris, the principal and his wife along with the vice principal Ken and his wife chose to sit with us. We were at the power table.

Once the crowd had gathered, Chris went around with a manilla envelope which contained a bunch of numbers. I found out that I had to draw a number from the envelope. The number that I drew would have something to do with the order in which I would select from the well wrapped white elephants on the "elephant" table. 

Mr. Baseball picked first and pulled out the number 4 which he immediately described as "Lou Gehrig" the famous first baseman of the Yankees....the Iron Horse....the luckiest man....wore number 4. Lou Gehrig was Mr. Baseball's father's favorite player. Lou had died with the disease that now carries his name.

I picked next and pulled out the number 32.

Chris remarked with a laugh "the retired guy ptcked the last number."

I shrugged as once again, I was at the bottom of the barrel.I glanced at Mr. Baseball and tried to make the best out of yet another calamitous draw.

I expected to see a big shit eating grin; instead I saw a shadow of worry cross Mr. Baseball's face. The cause of the umbrage was not yet discernible to me.

That would take a minute.

Stay tuned,