{"id":62253,"date":"2022-12-21T17:37:58","date_gmt":"2022-12-21T22:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=62253"},"modified":"2022-12-21T17:40:38","modified_gmt":"2022-12-21T22:40:38","slug":"the-secret-of-the-old-mill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/12\/21\/the-secret-of-the-old-mill\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret of the Old Mill"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

There\u2019s a scene in The Rookie<\/em> that devastates me every time I watch it.<\/p>\n

Disney\u2019s 2002 sports biopic is mostly a competent little movie, elevated by a fine cast. (Dennis Quaid is terrific \u2014 and he learned to pitch left-handed<\/em> for the role, which is a whole other level of acting.) It tells the implausible true story of Jimmy Morris, a one-time pitching prospect who blew out his shoulder and wound up as the baseball coach of a small-town high school. Then, as a 39-year-old husband and father of three, he realizes his arm has healed and he is once again capable of throwing 98 miles per hour. The story involves two<\/em> unlikely underdog success stories and both of those are exalting tales that the movie capably presents, but those aren\u2019t the scenes that get to me.<\/p>\n

What gets me is the look on Brian Cox\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

Cox plays Morris\u2019s father, a distant, gruff figure who never really understood or cared about his son\u2019s passion for baseball. But now he\u2019s trying, and as a gesture of that he\u2019s bought a special gift for his grandson\u2019s birthday \u2014 a baseball glove. It\u2019s his way of showing that he\u2019s learned to pay attention, his attempt to please his grandson and, thereby, to make amends with his own son too. He hopes they\u2019ll see that and understand what it means \u2014 understand how much<\/em> it means.<\/p>\n

But the old man screwed up. He bought his grandson the wrong baseball glove, a first baseman\u2019s mitt, something he didn\u2019t understand was different because in all those years he\u2019d never really learned anything about his own son\u2019s life and dreams. And then, as an angry and disappointed Quaid rallies to reassure the young boy that it\u2019s OK \u2014 they can exchange Grandpa\u2019s gift for something he actually wants and needs, that\u2019s when we see Brian Cox\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a wordless reaction shot that lasts two, maybe three seconds. And it\u2019s devastating. His horrified expression shows us a lifetime of pain, confusion, failure, sadness, and disappointment.<\/p>\n

The scene works because the details are just right \u2014 with just exactly the right gift that\u2019s wrong in just exactly the right way. And it works because Cox and Quaid are terrific actors at the top of their game.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also gutting because I\u2019ve seen that look before. I\u2019ve seen that same heartbroken and heart-breaking expression on my own father\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

When I was little \u2014 seven or maybe eight years old \u2014 I went on a Hardy Boys kick. I was plowing through the collected works of \u201cFranklin W. Dixon,\u201d making weekly trips to the library as I obsessively tried to read the entire series.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My sister, a year older than me, had done the same thing with Nancy Drew, and she\u2019d even begun collecting those books. She had a dozen or so of them already, neatly arranged on a shelf in her bedroom, and I desperately wanted to do the same with those Hardy Boys books. So far, saving up my allowance, I\u2019d only managed to acquire one volume, No. 3 in the series, The Secret of the Old Mill.<\/em><\/p>\n

But Christmas was coming and I knew or hoped that this meant my library was about to grow. This was the one thing I\u2019d asked for that year for Christmas: Hardy Boys books.<\/p>\n

Our family\u2019s custom was for each of us to open one present on Christmas Eve. As we kids got dressed for the candlelight Christmas Eve church service we went to every year, Mom and Dad would bring down the neatly wrapped presents they\u2019d kept hidden in their bedroom and stack them in little piles under the tree, one pile for each of us. When we got back from church, we\u2019d each examine our piles carefully, weighing and shaking and sniffing at each to determine which one we\u2019d get to open first before reluctantly going off to bed.<\/p>\n

And there, in my pile, was a present that was precisely the glorious size, shape, and texture of a Hardy Boys book.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis one!\u201d I said, giddy with excitement.<\/p>\n

\u201cGo ahead,\u201d my dad said, beaming with anticipation, \u201copen it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I shredded the paper furiously and held up the book: The Secret of the Old Mill.<\/em><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re a little kid, you haven\u2019t yet learned to mask your emotions, so my disappointment was bluntly evident. \u201cBut this is the only one I already have!\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a beat before my father said anything, before he rushed to reassure me that it was OK, that we could take it back to the store and exchange it for any of the other books, for whichever one I wanted. And in that half-second it took for him to gather himself to say that I turned and saw his face.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where I saw the same look that Brian Cox had in The Rookie.<\/em> Dad was crushed, defeated, sadder than I\u2019d ever seen him before. It was only for a second \u2014 a twitch and a grimace hastily replaced by a forced smile that didn\u2019t quite reach his eyes. It was a pained and painful look that said more about his love for me than any stack of presents ever could.<\/p>\n

I immediately changed gears, doing my best to feign excitement and enthusiasm over this present, but 7-year-old me was no Brian Cox and I don\u2019t think my acting fooled anybody. But I was only just beginning to learn something about Christmas and gift-giving and gift-receiving that I hadn\u2019t previously understood.<\/p>\n

We give our loved ones presents at Christmas and on birthdays and we want those presents to convey the love we have for them. But this is something those presents can never do. Not even the best of them \u2014 those rare, perfect gifts we find that we hope will show how much care and attention we\u2019ve put into them. Even when we don\u2019t mess things up by buying the wrong baseball glove or the wrong Hardy Boys book, no gift or pile of gifts ever seems adequate to represent the love they\u2019re meant to symbolize.<\/p>\n

This is what strains our budget every year around this time. My wife likes to get her Christmas shopping done early and by the first week of December she\u2019ll have stacks of ready-to-be-wrapped presents assembled for our daughters. Because she loves them. Because she loves them so much.<\/p>\n

And so, because she loves them, she will begin to imagine those gifts on one side of an invisible scale opposite the enormous love they\u2019re meant to communicate. Weighed on that scale, those presents \u2014 no matter how wonderfully apt or lovingly chosen they may be \u2014 begin to look tawdry and insubstantial. They\u2019re never enough. They could never possibly be enough.<\/p>\n

And so the Christmas shopping continues even though it was more than done already.<\/p>\n

And so we\u2019ve learned \u2014 or are learning, or are still trying to learn \u2014 to remember the sheer impossibility of buying or making or baking or handcrafting stuff to give to one another that could ever hope to adequately demonstrate the whole of the love we\u2019re awkwardly wanting to show. Which means embracing that inadequacy and insufficiency. It means accepting that the awkward semaphore of gift-giving can never, in itself, articulate all that we\u2019re trying and needing to say.<\/p>\n

I suppose that all I\u2019ve said here amounts to little more than platitudes about how \u201cIt\u2019s the thought that counts,\u201d or don\u2019t have \u201cPresent Face<\/a>,\u201d or just some trite condemnation of the \u201ccommercialization of Christmas.\u201d But this is what makes whatever that means so dangerous. We\u2019re suckers for the \u201ccommercialization of Christmas\u201d because of our best impulses, not our worst. We\u2019re buying more than we can afford because we\u2019re trying to give love, not to get it for ourselves.<\/p>\n

And every one of us, even at our best, is going to make mistakes when trying to show our love to our loved ones. Even if you\u2019re not the kind of gruff, distant, distracted and disinterested figure like Brian Cox plays in The Rookie,<\/em> you\u2019re bound to screw things up sometimes.* Every one of us is, at some point, going to make that same face, disappointed in our own miserable inability to show what we desperately needed and wanted to show.<\/p>\n

But the good news is that Christmas affords us all the opportunity to show this same love effortlessly. It\u2019s not about giving the right presents, but about receiving them. People who care about us are going to give us things because they care about us and because they want us to know that they do. Let them. Accept those gifts as what they are \u2014 expressions of love and of care which are, therefore, always appropriate and perfect and wonderful to receive. Even if they\u2019re the wrong kind of mitt, or a book you already have, or a hideous scarf.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not about getting, but it\u2019s also not about giving. It\u2019s about allowing others to give.<\/p>\n

My collection of Hardy Boys books eventually grew to more than 20 volumes. Those books are mostly now in the basement of my sister\u2019s house, on a shelf alongside her old Nancy Drews and a dozen or so vintage Bobbsey Twins books she found in a used bookstore. Her kids plowed through all of those books when they were that age, and I suppose one day their kids will do the same.<\/p>\n

But that collection of Hardy Boys books is missing volume No. 3. I kept that one. Both of them. I\u2019ve still got two copies of The Secret of the Old Mill<\/em> and they mean too much to me to ever give them away.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n

* There\u2019s a whole different essay to be written here about Christmas and the awkward gift-giving of a distant father figure \u2014 we wanted a Magnificat and you got us a Pieta?<\/em> \u2014 but that\u2019s something I\u2019ll have to think about some more before attempting.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a wordless reaction shot that lasts two, maybe three seconds. And it’s devastating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Secret of the Old Mill<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's a wordless reaction shot that lasts two, maybe three seconds. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Secret of the Old Mill","description":"It's a wordless reaction shot that lasts two, maybe three seconds. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}