12/26/98
Knife

Good Christmas, y'all. A real good Christmas.

Thursday morning Sonya and I drove down to Julie's to ride to West Memphis with her, due to her having an SUV and the icy roads and all. There was another reason, too: Lynne wanted me to play on the ice with her.

Julie lives at a fairly swanky, place-to-be apartment building Downtown. It is the envy of all Downtown dwellers here in Memphis, I assure you. Lynne is my niece, and my sister Julie's daughter. We got there and Lynne took me down to the tennis court. It was, indeed, covered with ice. It was pretty impressive. Lynne had two banana sleds. You know, those long skinny plastic sleds? Well, she had two of those. I got one, she got the other.

The problem is, tennis courts tend to be pretty flat. Lynne could have pulled off a running jump onto a sled, maybe, but I knew I'd hurt myself seriously. What to do?

I carried my sled over to the fence and laid down in it on my back. I put my feet against the fence, pulled myself in close, and gave it a good kick.

Whooosh! Halfway across the tennis court, just like that. Simple, but very, very fun. We stayed down there and did that for an hour or so, I guess. After a while I started sitting against the wall and giving Lynne a good push-off, launching her nearly to the net.

Lynne had just flown in from Miami, too, where she'd seen some family. Can you imagine being ten years old and flying from the beach to Memphis on Christmas eve? That sounds so jet-set to me. That would have been so cool to do when I was a kid. Hell, I'd like to do it now. She was the smallest person with jet lag I've ever seen.

My family does Christmas on Christmas eve. It's an old custom that lets the married kids go to their in-laws on Christmas morning. It works pretty well, too.

I was worried about a possible domestic incident, what with my brother being home for Christmas for the first time in god knows how long. It went okay, though, besides some grumbling when Jack was a touch too loud or bossy. He was okay, though, and sweet, in his own way.

Sonya and I got Jack a flannel shirt from Old Navy. No big thing, but a good plaid and nice and soft. He seemed to like it a lot, trying it on and all that.

When we were getting ready to leave, Jack caught me in the living room, getting some stuff together.

"You got a pocket knife?" he asked gruffly.

"Nah," I told him, "I don't usually carry one."

"Well here," he pulled his pocket knife, a serrated-edge lockblade, out of his pocket. I'd seen him use it for those ubiquitous pocket knife occasions that pop up and hadn't thought anything of it. He handed it to me.

"You sure you don't need it?" I asked him.

"I got lots of knives," he said.

He can get on your nerves, he can seriously misbehave. But my brother touched my heart on Christmas eve. Weird, huh?





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