On this day in 1939 twenty thousand American Nazis gathered at Madison Square Garden in front of a giant image of George Washington and their slogan Free America.
Richard Kimball
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Wake me up in 20 years when it is all over, the wicked are dead and I can know that somehow democracy pulled through.
List all the human advances you can, for all human time up to 1776.
It was 229 years ago that Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal…” and enterprise by the free was unleashed on a global scale. With little thought, there is not a one of us that would not marvel at what came of it.
Compare your list of what came under every imaginable despot those first 250,000 years of human existence, with what you can list the last 000.01% of it. Any comparative list would make those first 250,000 years seem devoid of advance in either human comfort, health, convenience, or nourishment. Almost regardless of your circumstance, your life today is with benefits and comforts beyond the imaginations of any ruler in history claiming to be above the law. This relationship between freedom and despotism is no coincidence.
Pride in our forebearers should ooze from every American pore while the return of a despotism boil everyone’s blood.
I’m going to doze off now, but with a hacksaw, on the chance I wake up in a prison.
Richard Kimball
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An alien, never having experienced earth as you know it, walked into our world out of a Brazilian jungle wearing only a loin cloth and carrying some wood.
He took a look at some of our magic – lighters, cell phones and such, turned around and walked right back into the jungle to be seen no more.
Enough said, some events speak for themselves.
Richard Kimball
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America represented stability in the world, because our institutions were stable, our rule of law was stable, and our separation of powers was able to mute extremists. I believe that is how America provided the safest haven for secure investment and fertile ground for prosperity.
Now with our institutions, the rule of law, the separation of powers being dismantled and a tariff wars kicker, I wonder if the coming pain will root in time for a sleepy self-governing people, charged with running this show, to wake up and save their primacy?
Richard Kimball
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Butchy saw it first, tucked neatly behind the bar’s sink, a $10 bill. It was early December, and I knew the tradition. Each Christmas my grandfather, who couldn’t travel and join us for Christmas sent $10 to buy our Christmas tree. Mom tucked it behind the bar until it was time to make the big buy. My best friends, Butchy and Stevie got so excited with the treasure, I got excited too. Treated as treasure found, it was instantly seen as free money.
YEAH! That’s right Butchy, you found BIG MONEY!” Ten dollars in the 50s, is about as rich as three kids can get.
Negotiations started immediately:
Me — “You found it Butchy, but it is my house, my sink, so it is my $10.”
Butchy — “OK! Split it”.
Stevie- “That’s not fair, what about me, I was here too.”
Me — “What are you talking about, you didn’t find it, it isn’t your house. You don’t get anything”
Stevie — “That’s not right, let’s ask your mother.”
Stevie, who would become a good lawyer, always had a knack for ending an argument with just the right words.
On the way to the Five & Dime the discussion was about toys, a new football, a bunch of trading cards with gum, or . . . “I got it,” I said, “the toy to beat all toys. We have enough money here to buy a Zippo cigarette lighter.” The idea was an immediate hit, not because we smoked, at least not yet, but because we were fascinated with that parental no-no – FIRE.
Just smart enough to know that a store might balk at selling three kids lighters, we devised a brilliant and as it turns out successful plan.
Since Stevie’s handwriting was clearly at a crude stage and I could barely read, let alone write, Butchy got the honors. As neatly as he could, which was pretty darn good as I recall, he wrote out: “I hav givn Kimmy $10 to by three liters — (signed) Mrs. Kimball.”
The clerk took a second look but didn’t seem to mind selling us the lighters or that my mom was illiterate. So, with lighters in hand, off we ran toward the arroyo and into neighborhood history.
The arroyo, a dry four-foot-rut in the neighborhood landscape that had water in it maybe six days a year. It ran right by our house, sheathed in a thick forest of thirsty mesquite trees and tall baked brown grasses.
With all the life-molding first time experiences that would come that day, it wasn’t Mr. Franklin, looking out his window, who first saw the smoke billowing over the neighborhood, not the distant approaching sirens that converged on the scene, nor even the odd smacking sound my mother’s lips made when she heard it was me, that sticks in my mind. It was the speed at which a Zippo could turn solitude into Armageddon when it touches blades of dried grass in a breeze under a forest of parched trees.
I can’t remember what happened to Stevie or Butchy that day, but I would be put to death immediately. My mother, having struggled with this odd, and now clearly dangerous child for some years, cracked.
The fire was not what upset her, it was the “Thou shall not steal” stuff I would get it for. I got one good whack with my belt for every dollar we took.
But I got the best of it. Kids, once adults, are forever blaming their moms for imagined errors in their upbringing. The “welts” from the fire of ’56 would become my most effective weapon as I needled the screeching denials of a mother for the next half-century.
I thought I got the best of it. I got the $10, the lighters (she assumed the Fire Department had confiscated them — they had not), and my exaggerated stories about “bloody welts” from my (well-deserved) whipping, up until she wore with pride the “IT’S ALL MY FAULT” tee shirt I got her on her 70th birthday.
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The Founders, feared authoritarian government above all else, thus constructed a firewall against any possibility of an authoritarian government. Amongst those few who still know, it was the separation of powers splitting power between the three legs of a stool, that gave government balance and prohibited anyone leg from attaining absolute power over the people.
“If you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will fallow,” a forecast that hung in the Nixon White House now cemented in a Congress where their leg of the stool has mortified into water fetching lackies.
Trump now goes for the second leg that bars absolute control.
Today, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance condemned the judiciary, attacking their legitimacy, the final pillar of the separation of power’s protection against an authoritarian.
As the Vice-President said, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” While Musk added, judges who oppose him should be impeached.
When the people finally get it, don’t expect Democrats to defend you. As Hakeem Jefferies, the House Minority Leader suggests, we need to wait for the pitches we can hit or Martin, the Democratic Parties new leader, who says we need to find more billionaires to keep up with the Republicans.
This is WAR, and opposition has yet to find a leader to enter the field of battle believing that The People can govern for themselves.
Richard Kimball
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Horace Mann
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the same school Trump attended and constantly trumpets as proof of his intellect, joined US News and World Report officially proclaiming studies that show the United States has surpassed both Germany and the United Kingdom (amongst all others) as the acknowledge greatest education system in the World.
With Trump’s praise Musk now ends, the most glorious effort, copied the world over. It was the 1830’s when Horace Mann hit full stride, forever earning him the title, The Father of American Education on these principles:
Why are we unable to understand that education, our ability to know, is the only thing that separates us from the lowliest of other species on the planet?
Richard Kimball
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We never talk about our poo, do we? It is the goofiest of all human taboos. No other species on earth finds pooing the slightest concern or give it any afterthought. So absurd is the taboo that it is the first bit of humor every child picks up on. Who doesn’t remember the childhood line “Who smelt it delt it?”
Nothing like poo announces our animal nature. Yes, we poo too, but behind closed doors, stalls or bushes, as if we didn’t really do it.
The first time I had to raise my hand in third grade had nothing to do with a teacher’s question. I actually had to raise it 30 minutes earlier than I did, but didn’t, and I regret the memory to this day some 68 years later. In fact, if childhood relevance carried any weight in adulthood, I would say that I regret it more than any other single self-inflicted event in my life.
The quiet rumbles in my lower stomach started while we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance but being agonizingly shy and fearful of any attention decided the discomfort was minor, gave it little thought. Ten minutes later my view had changed somewhat, the early rumbles had become a bit gassy, but if I softly eased it out and looked busy and innocent, I could escape detection. Another ten minutes, I was out of gas, one leg here, move another there, put my weight on the right butt, then on the left, gave only seconds worth of relief. Another 15 minutes and I was in serious trouble. That is when my butt said, “Raise your hand or poop right here.”
I did not raise my hand, I launched it as high as I could stretch. The teacher looked at my sudden appearance like one would a stranger, not at all sure that she recognized me, confused and busy with more important matters she said, “not now.” Like stretching rubber, my arm went to unnatural heights. She took a second look, whatever sub-human quality she saw in my eyes gave me a reprieve. I told her, and announced to all that I, me, the invisible one, needed to go to the bathroom. She said, “Can’t you wait,” and then thought better of it, “OK go.”
I had so wanted to make it. With my first step into the hall, I knew it was now a race, but if I moved too quickly, I would not hold. Only thirty feet left, now twenty, at the ten mark it was over, out it came. Like a green horn just off the saddle, I waddled the last few feet to the boy’s room. It still would have been OK, no one was in the halls, but as I threw open the restroom door there stood Jerry Egerton, the toughest, nastiest kid on the planet.
I did not hear his hackling end even after the bathroom door closed behind him. I cleaned up pretty well and I covered up my underwear with a mountain of paper towels at the very bottom of the trash can, but the damage was done.
The humiliation should have been crushing, but as it turned out, only Jerry Egerton had been humored because everyone hated the bully as much as I did. If truth be told no one was that far removed from a poo in the pants at some point, and others simply thought, “Thank God that wasn’t me.” Within a couple of days, Jerry’s finger-pointing shoutouts of “poo boy” got old and ended. By week’s end no one remembered, no one but me, who still winces at the ancient memory of my final delicate waddling steps.
Richard Kimball
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She broiled children’s brains over the fiery pits of Hell. It was the mid-1950s when Holy Sister Mary Margaret got her chance to imprint on the supple believing minds of six- and seven-year-olds.
She would be dead now, and the children of the world are better off for it. Should I think her still alive, I would have a moral duty to seek her out, rip out her tongue and stitch her lips closed forever. In the 1950’s, she and her ilk could cause serious damage to any child, not yet aware that some grownups grew down instead.
Back then and sometimes even now, religious instruction was not so much faith as it was fact. It was a fact that the “everlasting fires of Hell,” as Sister Mary Margaret put it, “was where your flesh would be consumed by fire, yet be continually reborn so that you would be in agony for all eternity.” God’s desire as she saw it, was to get you to Heaven through your fear of Hell.
According to the good sister talking to children, the great joy of Heaven was not to be found in mounds of candy bars, cookies, cakes, and endless feature cartoons, but the ability to “look upon the face of God.” To a six-year-old, my age at the time, I simply wondered how someone could possibly be so pretty, as to beat out a Root Beer Float.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret had much to offer, not the least of which was her informing us that it was not necessary to actually commit a sin in order to be guilty of the sin. All you had to do was think of a sin and you were equally guilty. This was very discouraging, my being guilty on so many layers of sin that I had no hope of escaping the fiery pits.
It was the stuff that put thinking and believing believers into insane asylums as they aged. At six, I had not yet come to realize that such nuns torturing children with their unforgiving, cruel nature of God should be imprisoned, if not themselves thrown into that everlasting roaster.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret understood that our minds were too young to comprehend such horror. To remedy this unacceptable situation, she would tell us stories that were sure to reach into our imaginations with lasting effect. One juicy illustration was her telling of the “very real possibility” that our classroom might be broken into by Nazis. Nazis, who would shove us up against the wall and then ask with a gun pressed against our heads, “Are you a Catholic?” The holy Sister Mary Margaret, thinking she would tempt a correct answer said. “If you deny that you are a Catholic, they will let you live.” But then quickly followed with, “If you love God and admit that you are Catholic, then you will be shot and experience the enormous joy of looking upon the face of God.” Again, images of Root Beer Floats danced in my mind.
Years later I would recall it all, thinking of all the children she must have tortured with that kind of question, and fanaticized entering her classroom, gun in hand, and offering her that very choice.
However, at six years old, I hung on every word she said and believed every story that horrid human being told. That was until she told us how God handled the dead guy.
The previous week she had gone through some pains to explain the difference between a Venial Sin and a Mortal one. With Venial Sin (a small sin), God would place you in Purgatory, a place much the same as Hell only with a possibility that at some future time, after you experience adequate flesh burning you would be given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card. However, Mortal Sin was a sin so egregious that you roasted for all eternity in the real Hell. She just loved telling a little story or two to make certain her little charges could understand.
All her stories kept us in frozen attention, but the story about the dead guy stands alone and still rots away in my brain.
The following, minus imperfections in my memory, is a fair if not precise representation of Sister Mary Margaret’s example for Thou Shall Not Kill.
“A long, long time ago there was a man suffering from a very strange disease causing him to fall into a deep, deep sleep where his heart quieted to a soft undetectable murmur. People thought he was dead. They dug a deep six-foot hole, took his body, and placed it in the tight confines of a coffin and nailed down the lid. They lowered the coffin into the pit and filled it over with dirt.
Sometime later the poor sick man woke up in the darkness. Alone and unable to move in the black tightness of his coffin, the man realized his predicament, was terrified and began to scream. But in the blackness, six feet under the ground, he knew no one could hear his cries for help. Unable to withstand the horror of it, the man drove the forefingers of his hands into the temples of his head to kill himself. Even he, today, is burning in the everlasting fires of Hell.”
That night when I went to bed I could not sleep. I was tired but every time I started to doze off, I woke with a start. If I slept, I was sure someone would think me dead. Finally, in the wee hours of the night I had an idea. I got up, stumbled over to my desk and switched on the light. Searching around in the drawers I found my drawing book and ripped off a little piece of paper and wrote out a short note. I then quietly crept down the hall to the bathroom where my mother kept the safety pins. A few hours later she came in to wake me up for Sunday church. Pinned to the middle of my pajama shirt, where no one could possibly miss it, was the note: “Pleese do not berry me, not dead.”
You must understand that I believed the Holy Sister Mary Margaret’s story, absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt that was exactly what God did. Only, the effect of the story was not what the Holy Sister hoped. That morning at church, sitting at my mother’s side as she dutifully focused on the word of God, I was staring above the alter where Christ was draped on his cross, thinking, “You Poo Poo Head!”
Today, I think a kind of God may exist but one that is wholly unlike the insanely narcissistic jackass preached by so many religions.
My best guess is if there is a God, it is far beyond any lowly human’s ability to comprehend its existence and would clearly be powerful enough to talk to me directly, without need of some self-anointed human middleman. The same middlemen so galactically arrogant as to presume to speak in God’s name that billions pay homage to and fund their nonsense.
If there is a God, and I hope there is, he already knows how to, and actually does speak to me directly through the guilt, shame, pain, and pleasures I feel with my every intention and action I take.
Don’t others think of the unimaginable, often inconceivable, grotesque agonies that consume the utterly innocence? No all-powerful God — not yours and not mine — can answer for the unfairness of life, the damnable repugnance of the hulking injustice that puts one existence in the convulsions of an agonizing death before a single step is had and another’s anointed with a passel of servants to care for their every need.
The line, “God works in mysterious ways,” exposes the poppy cock heart of much religious training for any willing to open their own eyes. What is the mystery in a child who has done nothing, can do nothing, unable to speak, raked with painful cancerous cysts, gasping a final breath in a struggle to whisper, “Please help me mommy?” Every conscious soul on this planet would struggle so to stop such a horror if they could, but the “all-powerful” God of organized religions does not.
The incomprehensible suffering of incalculable numbers of starved, enslaved, diseased, burned, bombed, drowned, murdered, maimed, tortured living things repudiates any notion of, or any need to be humbled before the nonsense of an all-powerful, “loving,” living God. I may have a good life, you may have a good life, and we feel compelled to thank our lucky stars, but we do not represent, nor can we poll the countless, faultless others who never asked to be born and now largely reside amongst the gratefully dead.
Richard Kimball
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In a normal world someone standing at the apex of political power going to prison for 11 years would saturate the news. After all, Bob Menendez was charged with leading foreign-policy, and overseeing billions in foreign aid, the sale of arms to foreign powers, holding confirmation hearings, NOT the cash discovered stuffed in his boots and pockets or the gold bars anointing him with his nick name.
I have witnessed such sliminess at every level both as a Congressional staffer, State Senator, Corporation Commissioner, a non-profit leader, and as me.
Sometimes the payouts were enormous from those willing and able to dip the largest shovels into special interest public projects.
While others just getting started get their beaks wet with offers of free trips, premium seating or just some movie tickets. I loved movies, and although I refused all others, I went to see a few free films.
It is a cycle, little known, little written about, but contagious with those elected. You grow a big head; think you are somehow worthwhile and more deserving than those that voted for you.
Richard Kimball
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He does whatever he can to do, what he said he would do, legal, illegal, everything and anything that can be done to do what he promised. Can you name a single other President willing to do so much for what he said he believed?
What a different world it would be if Obama, Bush or even Clinton had the mind set to be so craven and committed to their cause as is Trump.
If precedent, the rule of law, decency and conscience is going to be so thoroughly trashed, I wish it had been trashed by a President concerned with issues like global warming, an educated citizenry, health care, insurance companies, or just a love of people struggling to become part of this glorious achievement we call America, just as my ancestors and yours likely did.
It is as if a nincompoop stumbled into the Pitt of Endless Disenchantment where eons of candidate elected promises have gone withered and died and came out still simple and with a simpleton’s idea: I am going to bust ass, on my absurdities, right or wrong and see if we (or I) get traction.
He will find great success, his number of supporters will continue to grow as “America First” takes root and finds purchase, up and until Americans discover they aren’t part of his America.
Richard Kimball
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So says the Bible !
Majestic elephants at a Colorado zoo do not have the legal right to pursue their release, Colorado’s highest court said.
The ruling from their Supreme Court follows a similar court defeat when Happy, Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jubo, pursued a long-held legal process for prisoners challenging their detention in an effort to reduce sentence and live in an elephant sanctuary instead.
So, it goes for the 680 vertebrate creations that have gone extinct and the 4,300 others – mammals, fish, birds and amphibians that have declined from human greed these past 50 years.
“His work is perfect,” says the bible even as we dismantle it, setting ourselves on the throne of judgement.
Richard Kimball
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Comments closedNO LONGER A CHILD’S GAME
We were all put on notice by those that knew him best:
His Vice President, Mike Pence: “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
His Attorney General, Bill Barr: He “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.
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His Secretary of Defense, James Mattis: “He tries to divide us.”
His Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office.”
His Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
His Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: “His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited.”.
His Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley: “A terrible thing happened on January 6 and he called it a beautiful day.”
His National Security Adviser, HR McMaster: “We saw the absence of leadership, really anti-leadership, and what that can do to our country.”
His National Security Adviser, John Bolton: “I believe (foreign leaders) think he is a laughing fool.”
His Chief of Staff, John Kelly: “A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law… God help us.”
His Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, “I quit because I think he failed at being the president when we needed him to be that.”
His Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci: “He is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century.”
His Communications Director, Stephanie Grisham: “I am terrified of him running in 2024.”
His Homeland Security Adviser, Tom Bossert: .He “is an utter disgrace.”
His White House lawyer, Ty Cobb: “Trump relentlessly puts forth claims that are not true.”
His top aide in charge of his outreach to African Americans, Omarosa Manigault Newman: ” I could no longer be a part of this madness.”
Every thinking American: “THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE!”
Richard Kimball
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If you are old, or as in the eyes of a teenager, about dead old, pitied, if cared about at all, you might remember stories from long ago parents: the miles walked to school, the starving children of China, the unfortunate pagan babies of Africa or just the garbage you could buy labeled, “Made in Japan.”
If you really get into those long-gone times, you might remember the joy found with an old board and a few nails making your palace in the trees, or one made from boards, sticks and rock dug into the dirt. You might recall playing chaises with marbles and capturing someone’s prized steely, maybe demonstrating your turn around skills at Hopscotch, jump rope, or being cast off a merry-go-round, or that time jumping off a titer toter that seemed a good idea, maybe that swing where your mind sailed you to a new Olympic distance record.
Perhaps you can close your eyes and think back when it was too cold or wet outside, so you made do with that cozy little in-door house your parents let you create out of cushions, pillows, sheets and towels.
Playing house, dressing up in parents’ clothes come to mind. Girls played hopscotch, jacks and jump rope while boys, if not playing football or basketball, found delight in who just farted or just some good long-distance spitting.
For me, I add a kitchen knife and a game of splits, or seeing what I could do to a stone with my dad’s eight iron.
There was kite flying, bicycling with playing cards clipped in the spokes or just being Robin Hood with a tree branch and OH GOD his bow and arrow. Stevie Bogard, my best friend and I couldn’t hit a living thing that wasn’t a plant that Christmas morning with our new bows. When frustration set in, I challenged him to who could send an arrow the highest without a thought of its return trip when we panicked slamming into each as the arrows plunked into the dirt.
Our childhoods were stuffed with our imagination, glories won and lessons learned in a cacophony of gregarious social interactions.
ALL NOW GONE AND REPLACED:
Richard Kimball
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I always wanted to be her hero, her knight errant off on the road to right all wrongs, vanquishing any detractor, asserting my love month after month, year after year, to win her. I felt my efforts knew no end, no plan too distant, no event to extreme, just a perfect knight exemplar fighting her every foe to win her love. In all, a life well lived only to find at its end, I was no knight. To her I had been, always been, damaged goods. I was to her not a hero, but a grief.
Such a blow one cannot bear.
Richard Kimball
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I was young in 1974 when President Ford granted a “full and unconditional pardon” to Richard Nixon.
I thought that first punch in the face that we are NOT ALL CREATED EQUAL a freak occurrence!
Some have wealth, some do not.
Some wealthy earned it, some did not.
Some have little but worked like dogs.
Some have nothing and did nothing.
What time has taught me is that what makes us equal is that none of us are equal under the rules of law.
Trump is not, you are not. There is not a single other one of us that would not be headed to jail this very day!
Richard Kimball
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As the word penis came out of her mouth, I would have willingly stretched out underneath an elephant turd and hoped its owner would take a step on it.
When a widowed mother asks a 13-year-old Catholic boy to take a seat “for the BIG TALK,” low organs will crinkle up into raisins frantically looking for somewhere they won’t exist.
It was some years earlier that my older brother Bobby, flatly stated, “Dad put his penis in Mom’s pussy and because of that I came out.”
“NO, NO! Say it isn’t so!”
Richard Kimball
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LIKE TITANIC WE CALMLY SET SAIL WITHOUT BINOCULARS
Good people with thoughtful hearts seldom recognize how horrible an event can be and when they do, most sit frozen, drop jawed, as their heart is slowly eaten.
Titanic, The Gulf war, Deep Water Horizon, Pearl Harbor, Challenger, Chernobyl are amongst the many sufferings that could have been avoided if our better angels were heeded.
Now the most odious flight of all is about to take wing. As it has slimmed its way above to lord over us all, those saddened, thoughtful hearts hide in the cracks dreaming that lucidity and sanity will magically reappear.
No massive demonstrations planned, no public outrage evident, “Brownshirts” have won the day and there will be Hell to pay.
Richard Kimball
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When former Texas governor John Connally took a private jet in 1980 to convince Iran not to release the hostages, the Carter Presidency was done. Such was the underhanded ugly, in old time politics.
Carter, the antithesis of what is to come, thought we should not only be the top military power but also “the champion of peace, champion of human rights, champion of the environment and the most generous nation on earth.”
Carter knew that knowledge was the only real source of human success and thus created the Department of Education.
Carter knew that bringing adversaries to the table and convincing them peace was a mutual advantage, might bare fruit and thus the Camp David Accords, which won for Begin and Sadat the Noble Prize.
Even out of the Presidency Carter spoke truth to power as when he was amongst the first to say, “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq,” or when he suggested we cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced.”
But mostly I loved Jimmy Carter for his devotion to us after his Presidency, his tireless journeys all over the globe to promote peace, health and justice and his passion for the less fortunate here at home.
All former Presidents retire, comfortably cocooning in their former glories. Not Jimmy Carter, my hero!
Twice my boss, first as my boss’s boss when I worked for Walter Mondale and second as a founder of an organization called Vote Smart where I was dogged on his example for 35 years as its President.
Richard Kimball
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Like you, if you were lucky enough to have the perfect childhood, my young years looped around that one magical day. The days leading up to it were loaded with wonder and on the very morning of Christas Day an explosion of dreams come true.
But child time is short time and the day after came with thoughts of the eternity that existed before that day would roll around again.
Yet on the Christmas morning of 1960 my view was forever altered when I saw real magic.
Everything was as my years had come to expect: the glittering tinseled tree stretched to the ceiling, the felt, sequined Mr. and Mrs. Clause our grandfather had made hanging on the wall, the fireplace already aglow, and Mom and Dad in their robes holding cups of coffee. What was different was what was under the tree. The number and size of the packages did not fit under the boughs, and instead flushed out all about.
My eyes went big and wide at the wonder of it, unknowing that the biggest, best, most valuable lifelong gift I was about to receive wasn’t under the tree at all.
As always, I tore into the packages marked for me, and those marked from Santa or Mom and Dad were their normal great.
What blew me away and affected me more than any wrapped package was this: the most perfectly wrapped gifts, often the most expensive gifts, were all marked “From Billy,” my 16-year-old, oldest brother.
Turns out he hadn’t spent all that money from his double newspaper route on himself. He spent it on us.
I would spend the next 65 years lighting up others just the way he lit me up that one Christmas morning when I was 11 years old.
I would never again receive a gift that beat my heart as hard as my giving one.
My brother did that for me when I was very young, and his giving had no end. Later he would do it for his own kids, and much later he did it again for me, when he dragged himself out of bed in the middle of the night just to hand me a seat in my first political job as an Arizona State Senator.
Richard Kimball
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