Carlyle Fielding Stewart III

He was from Chicago. He loved baseball but he did not appreciate receiving from his wife at Christmas, “What it Means to Be a Chicago Cub.” He understood the meaning of personal suffering. He knew what it was like to have his hopes dashed year after year. He even identified with the infamous young man who interfered with the fly ball that cost the Cubs the playoffs and perhaps the championship. The pain of that young man and his scapegoating by Cubs fans was humiliating, if not Buckneresque; meta  Boston Red Sox Bill Buckner who allowed a ground ball to go through his legs which cost the Red Sox a critical game enroute to the championship. It has taken years for the great first baseman to live down that fielder’s error and now after decades 0f painful ridicule by irate, unforgiving fans, he and his family are finally starting to heal.

Roger did not want to be reminded of the Cubs ordeal; their suffering, near misses and their “almost” seasons; their heroic determination to keep pressing on to a championship against all odds. Nor was he amused at the ceremonial and pompous manner that his wife unwrapped his gift for him, humming a drum roll and John Philip Souza marching music while surgically picking away tape from the paper to save it for next year. Receiving the book was one thing. Adding insult to injury was the twelve minutes it took for her to unswath the present, embroidering the moment with a suffocating speech about how we all, like the Chicago Cubs, must learn to recover from missed field goals in life.

What he wanted this Christmas was something that he had always wanted; something that he had always drooled for; a gift that he just knew his wife would give him after he had dropped hundreds of hints throughout the year and after explicitly calling her attention to his need for it. She knew what he wanted and knew what he loved. She knew deep in her heart that the gift would lift his spirits and would be a fitting capper for a tough and difficult year. How could she not give him the only thing that he wanted this Christmas?

If she knew deep in her heart that he was a Looney Tunes aficionado and that as  a child he was a frantic but faithful member of the Bugs Bunny Club why would she give him a book on a team that had not won a championship in over century?

All he wanted for Christmas was the DVD set of “”That’s All Folks.” After all, he was not a man that asked for much but could not even get the prize of all prizes, the gift of all gifts; the only thing that he had hoped and longed for.

“If you really love me,  you would have given me what I wanted for Christmas; you would have honored my wishes, like I always do yours, and although I could not give you a gift this year for obvious reasons, you could have at least put more thought into what you would give to me.”

“You know how I feel about cartoons. You know how I get an adrenalin rush watching Bugs and Daffy. You know the many times that I have sat down on the couch in near depression and the countless times that I have gotten up from that couch, renewed, victorious, hands high, spirits lifted, determined to start looking for work again after months of beating the pavement trying to find a job.

Those DVD’s would have been all that I needed to get by this Christmas! Why would you do this to me? What you have given to me this Christmas will make my New Year even harder.

Pray that I get through this year and pray that we are still together by next Christmas!

I wish that for once in my life you could give me what I want, what I need and what I ask for, but instead you leave me Scrooged. Your gift sucks and so does this holiday season!”