A Christmastime ‘Love Story’

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Dad was not the family gift-giver. He left that to Mom. I recall only three coming from him and him alone: my first “real” baseball glove on my 10th birthday, my first electric shaver on my 14th and a certain magazine at Christmas-Hanukkah time when I was 18. The thrill of the first two speak for themselves. This is about the magazine:

At Christmas Break (as it was called back then), dormitory residents at my university, except for the still-competing athletes, had to vacate. VW van-loads of the dorm peaceniks headed to the Bay Area, while the “straights” caravanned eastward to watch the football team play in the Peach Bowl. Everyone else headed home.

Except me. For weeks I’d looked forward to a snow-white holiday back in the Midwest with best friends and mostly Rita, my at-that-time long-distance dream come true. But a falling out with my father short-circuited all that.

Why? Sometimes the heartbreak at the end of a sophomoric long-distance romance makes a young man act like an irascible fool.

In a whiny written rant (I was forbidden to phone home except in emergencies), I scapegoated Dad for random things like tasteless dorm food, pointless classes (i.e., the two I was nearly failing), local shopping-mall Santas costumed in their bulky red Bermuda shorts and matching cowboy hats and Dad’s insistence I earn spending money, this time by mopping two Jack in the Box restaurant floors at closing time.

Above all, I needed to blame someone for an “It’s over between us” letter from Rita, one that began with an ominous “Hello” and ended with a gut punch, “Regards.” The same Rita who, on a late August night three months earlier, had purred into my ear, among other things, “What will I do without you?”

Dad responded to my rant with his standard, “Kiss the ground you’re walking on. Deal with it.” He further advised me to “adjust” my attitude before coming home for Christmas break, “or don’t bother coming.”

I called his bluff. “How about if I just don’t come?”

He called mine: “Suit yourself.”

Throughout my lifetime, Dad mandated that we live with our choices, even the bad ones. This was his way. You made your bed. Deal with it. I would not be home for Christmas.

With nowhere to go, Goose Hullman, a gangly second-string center on the basketball team who roomed on my floor, came to my rescue. “You can crash in my room,” he said. Not only that, he’d smuggle his third helpings to me from the cafeteria. All I had to do was help Goose write (read: ghostwrite) his final Economics 101 term paper — 7-10 pages about a subject neither of us knew anything about. (Later, we agreed we’d witnessed a Christmas and Hanukkah miracle when our clear-as-mud mishmash earned a passing grade.)

During my first week of that Christmas break, I slept on Goose’s dorm room floor, wandered the deserted campus, moped in front of the common-room TV, mopped the Jack in the Box floors at midnight, nursed free Coke refills at Hobo Joe’s and composed pathetic poor-me poetry about lost love.

But on Christmas Day, somehow, miraculously maybe, I wound up standing in an around-the-block ticket line to see “Love Story.”

Yes, that “Love Story.” You might remember it: star-crossed college kids Jenny and Oliver, one poor and one rich (actors Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw) meet cute, frolic in the snow in Harvard Yard, cuddle-study on a couch and fall in love. When they marry, Oliver’s old-money father disowns his rebellious son. But when Jenny dies, father and son tearfully, almost wordlessly, reconcile.

Moviegoers sobbed. A Time magazine film critic described how typical audiences exited the theater:

“ … Wet-eyed men looking neither right nor left. Girls carrying men’s handkerchiefs, eye makeup gone, gazing at sidewalks. It has actually taken them ten minutes just to compose themselves enough to face the real world again … .”

Me, too. Like everyone else, I wept when Jenny died. But I completely lost it in the end, watching father and son tearfully reconcile.

Eighteen, lonesome and alone, I called home from a pay phone.

Dad answered. “I said no telephone calls unless it’s an emergency. Is it?”

“Not exactly, but …”

“But what?”

All I could say was I just felt like talking.

“What about?” was all he could say.

We weren’t good at talking to each other back then. If not about the Vikings or Twins, our conversations were awkward and labored. Still, maybe this one time he’d say sorry, then I’d say sorry, and he’d let me off the hook and fly me home. That didn’t happen.

You made your bed he said, without saying it.

My dad was a tough-minded cookie.

Sort of.

A few days later I received a business envelope in the mail. Inside was the latest issue of Time magazine ― the one with Ali MacGraw’s portrait on the cover. Paper-clipped to it was a five-dollar bill and another of Dad’s non-negotiable directives:

“Your mother made me watch this movie. Go see it.”

Sometimes the most unexpected gift is one for the ages.

I still have the magazine.

Dick Schwartz lives in St. Louis Park.