It is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who roam the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips.
Believe as if your life depended upon it. For indeed it does.
THELOCKET
AT SOME POINT EVERYone of my siblings received a blessing from my grandfather. They were not all healing blessings, as had been my brother’s; rather they were similar to the kind written about in the Old Testament, as when Isaac blessed his son Jacob. Every blessing given to us was unique and spoke to us individually of the journey we would walk on this earth. Most of my grandfather’s blessings were counsels on how to live righteously, though portions were prophetic of the challenges and opportunities that would come to us.
One afternoon, shortly after I had turned twelve, I went with my parents to my grandfather’s house. After talking with me for a short while, my grandfather laid his hands on my head and began to speak. Among the many words of his blessing he told me that someday I would “walk with the royalty of this earth and be known as one who loves God.”
As we left his house I asked my mother, “Does that mean I’m going to be famous?”
I sensed that my mother was not pleased with what I had taken from the blessing. “You must not talk of such things. What Grandpa told you was sacred.”
The blessing had been recorded on my grandfather’s old reel-to-reel tape recorder and was later transcribed by my grandmother and given to me. I pasted it inside the cover of one of my journals.
It was odd to me that I would be given such a promise, and though it had left me with a pervasive sense of destiny, it was, I suppose, without faith. I was too unlikely. I spent most of my childhood alone. Outside of my brothers, I had few close friends. I had chronic acne, severely cowlicked hair and nervous tics that amused or annoyed the other children at school. I struggled constantly with feelings of inadequacy. Such a destiny belonged to someone else. Someone, at least, with clear skin.
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My teenage years were uneventful and significant only to myself.
THECHRISTMASBOX
CIRCUMSTANCES GRADUALLYimproved 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 healthinsurance, 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. . . .
THELOOKINGGLASS
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 hecould 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 bookAll 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 memoriesof 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 andempathy. 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 gr
oundwater. 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
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EVEN THOUGHIOFTENwrote for fun, my first serious thoughts of becoming a writer came as a sophomore in high school, when I decided to try out for a staff position on the high school newspaper, theColt Roundup.I was turned down.
Not willing to give up, I came up with another plan. I had seen theRoundup’s editorial cartoons and even though I was not an artist, I believed I could do better. I went to the newspaper adviser and asked if they needed a cartoonist.
“Show me something,” he said. That night I went home and drew a cartoon. It was a fairly recognizable likeness of President Jimmy Carter, with pins stuck in him, each labeled with one of the myriad crises that plagued his administration. Beneath it was the tag lineGOP Voodoo Doll.
It wasn’tDoonesbury,but the journalism teacher, Pete Sorenson, liked the cartoon enough that he introduced me to the staff as the new cartoonist. It was a great in, even if it was through the back door.
Although I had no aspirations to be a cartoonist, Iplanned to just bide my time until opportunity reared its head. My break came sooner than I expected. By the third staff meeting one of the reporters failed to turn in his story. I offered to write it for him. I turned it in the next day, and to the editor’s surprise, it was good enough to print. From then on I was given writing assignments in addition to my cartoons, which were gradually improving.
This was just the beginning. As the novelty of being on the newspaper staff wore thin, so did the staff. One by one the reporters dropped off, missing assignments or refusing them, sometimes both. Once our frustrated editor in chief ran a blank page with a note that read, “This space was supposed to be filled with a story by so-and-so, who did not think it important to meet his deadline.”
By the end of the year I was the acting feature editor of theRoundup.I’ve heard it said that half the secret to success is just showing up. It may be true.
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“And what is your situation in life?”
“I’m a recent college graduate with a degree in business.
We moved to Salt Lake City to start a formal wear rental business.”
“Such as dinner jackets and tuxedos?” she asked.
“That’s right,” I said.
She took mental note of this and nodded approvingly.
THECHRISTMASBOX
IALWAYS HAD A JOB.They were usually temporary positions, something along the line of collecting shopping carts at the local Woolworth’s for a nickel apiece or cleaning movie theaters. One summer I painted house numbers on curbs. My first real job with a time clock was at a Taco Time. I wore a paper cap and shoveled soybean-laced taco meat into taco shells passed along a rail. A few years later I moved up the pay scale, first as a dishwasher at Italian Village Restaurant, then again as a busboy at an upscale French restaurant called La Caille. Then, during my senior year of high school, a friend told me there was an opening at Tuxedo Junction, the formal-wear shop where he worked. The pay was low, but working with formal wear was a lot cooler than washing dishes or busing tables. And there were perks—free tuxedos for the proms. It was too good to pass up.
Two brothers, Gordon and Eldon Fletcher, owned thebusiness. They were good men, as were my coworkers, and Tuxedo Junction became my home away from home.
I graduated from high school, was voted by my class “the most likely to die saving hostages” (don’t ask; I don’t know) and enrolled at the University of Utah. I kept my job at Tuxedo Junction, though I changed my hours to reflect my new schedule, working weekends and evenings.
One Saturday I noticed Gordon Fletcher lowering a large box through a trapdoor in the floor. I asked him what he was doing.
“Getting rid of another line of suits,” he said.
I learned that the basement was filled with worn and outdated tuxedos and their accessories—ruffled shirts, dickies and cummerbunds—which they planned to store until they got around to throwing them out. I asked if I could sell them instead. The Fletchers didn’t know why anyone would buy them, but deciding that they needed to clear them out of the basement eventually, they told me that if we cleaned out the basement on our own time, we workers could keep half of what we brought in from selling the tuxedos.
I spent the rest of the day devising strategies for selling the used suits. I created my first advertising campaign. I called itTuxmania.For a week I ran tiny teaser ads in the localPennysaversand in the classifieds section of the University of Utah newspaper.
Q. What’s bigger, Tuxmania or a James Watt protest rally?
A. The rally.
To the woman I met at the Union cafeteria last Thursday. I’ll meet you at Tuxmania.
—The Mannequin
A week later I spelled out the details of the sale.
Tuxmania, Utah’s only used tuxedo sale.
Coats, pants, ruffled shirts and ties.
Tuxedo Junction. 3300 South 1200 East.
The store went nuts. We sold the old suits to high school drama departments, costume companies, college students, even the homeless.
The entire advertising campaign cost me less than forty dollars, and in the end we brought in more than sixteen thousand dollars in sales. It also made me a hero with my coworkers, for we pocketed close to two thousand dollars apiece, and I got a steak dinner from the owners. I paid off my car, a ’69 Ford Fairlane, and saved the rest.
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The noble causes of life have always seemed foolish to the uninspired. But this is of small concern. I worry less about the crucified than those who pounded the nails.
THELETTER
WHENITURNED NINETEEN,I sold my car, and using all the dollars I had managed to squirrel away, I volunteered to serve a mission for my church.
I was sent to the city of Kao-hsiung, in southern Taiwan. My only previous contact with Taiwan was theMade in Taiwanlabel that seemed to be attached to everything that wasn’t made in Japan.
Taiwan is a tobacco-leaf–shaped island, a lush, tropical country about a hundred miles off the southeast coast of China. Culturally it’s a microcosm of mainland China and is largely populated by the Chinese nationalists who fled Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.
Educationally my time in Taiwan was a remarkable experience. I learned to speak Mandarin well enough that I once got in an argument with a Chinese woman on the telephone who thought I was lying when I told her I was an American. The food was good and theclimate, with the exception of a couple of typhoons, was tolerable.
The work was another matter. Teaching Jesus to Buddhists and Taoists was not a highly successful proposition. I should have gotten used to rejection, but I never did. It hurt just as much to have a door slammed in my face my last day in Taiwan as it did the first.
In many ways I grew up in those years. I learned that standing for what you believe in often meant st
anding alone. And in spite of my frequent bouts of homesickness, I learned that I was fortunate to have so much to miss so badly.
I did see a few lives changed, and maybe that’s the best you can take with you. That, and the lessons. It was in Taiwan that I learned the very real power of prayer.
Once, my companion and I were riding our bicycles in the country outside Chang-hua, a city in central Taiwan, when a motorcycle gang took an interest in us. Actually they were a motor scooter gang; the hoodlums in Taiwan rode Vespas, not Harleys. They got off their scooters and began gathering rocks, then they revved their scooters and headed toward us, no doubt intent on stoning us. We were alone on the road and had no place to go. We both said silent prayers and rode our bikes ahead as if we were unconcerned. As one of the motor scooters neared me, less than three feet away, the man on back threw his rocks atmy face point-blank. I heard the rocks hit my bike and all around me, but not one of them struck me. I looked back at the rider, who had a look of astonishment on his face. I saw him shake his head as they drove off.
On another occasion we were driving a new Ford van to a remote town on the east side of the island when the van broke down. We were probably fifty miles from the nearest mechanic and we hadn’t even passed a car for more than a half hour. After opening the hood and looking around for something that didn’t look right (which is something all men do even if they don’t know a carburetor from a cantaloupe), we knelt and prayed.