I love Christmas and I’m all about the reason for the season. My favorite Christmas story is from the bible. I’m not running to Google to make sure I’m 100 percent accurate — it comes from my heart and my crowded, jumbled memory and includes parts of my second-favorite story, which is “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Even now, when a minister reads that passage, it’s Linus I hear telling the story of a couple in Bethlehem and an infant, and how Hark! the angels sing, and kings and shepherds and the little drummer boy gather to bring gifts and adore him.
In a convoluted way I was reminded of that story last month when we settled into our temporary home at an RV park in Key West. You might assume that there are no similarities between Bethlehem and this southernmost city but this I say unto you: Palm trees!
Bethelehem had palms and we have them here. (That I Googled.) Also, there is a baby boy here in the place where one would least expect a baby boy to be: what I lovingly refer to as “Old People’s Winter Camp.”
Then, just to top it off — and I am not making it up — his first initial is J. Ba-da-boom!
This will be a sign to you
Eight-month old Baby J is like a little fish out of water in this park, which is primarily populated by roughly 200 retired military couples and a few singles, all of us hiding from winter in motorhomes, trailers and vans, or less.
One 72-year old veteran from Nebraska winters in her SUV. Granted, it’s a large, luxury Lincoln Navigator, but still, it’s a car. She said that even with minor inconveniences (no bathroom or microwave) it was easy deciding between a basement apartment in 28-degree Omaha or a car in 82-degree Key West.
You do see everything when you winter in a transient RV park, especially one located at an end-of-the line location such as Key West. However, in the dozen-plus years we’ve been snowbirds here, there’s never been a baby. Not like this.
Babies and small kids visiting sometimes, sure. Occasionally children come to spend a few days with grandparents during the holidays, and less frequently a younger family with kids appears in the RV park. But a babe in arms living in a small motorhome with his great-grandparents? Nope.
There are about a dozen of us from within the larger group who have become close friends over the years and we are, to put it poetically, in the autumn of our lives. Or, as someone who is a little less poetic described it, “circling the drain.”
We’ve seen it all, and can be kind of jaded and whiny and pessimistic.
But being around this baby has changed that. It used to be that we spent way too much time moaning about the condition of our knees or the sad state of the world. You know, that old hell in a handbasket thing. Or griping about the increased traffic caused by (other) snowbirds. And whether the AARP discounts at Denny’s are a better deal than Mickey D’s 99-cent meals.
Sweet Baby J
Now that we’ve added this baby boy to our group, not only does our average age plummet to about 67, our attitudes go in a different direction, too. It’s hard to feel grumpy when Sweet Baby J is shining all kinds of happy at you. It makes you smile right back.
Whether here at the RV park, out for a walk or at Denny’s — when anyone reaches a hand out to him, he grins and grabs it, it doesn’t matter the age of the person, or their politics, or the color of their skin, or if the arm is covered by tattoos or purple splotches from blood thinners.
There are no babies in my life so for me, having Baby J in our midst, especially now, is a blessing, a precious gift. He’s a reminder that while memories are wonderful, this season is about more than what was, or even what is. It’s also about the promise of what is yet to be, and on earth, peace and good will toward all men.
And to quote Linus, “…that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
Snowbirds and Baby J
“Snowbirds and Baby J” is the latest post in Joanne Sherman’s “Off the Cuff” column, presented Tuesdays every other week (or so) here at the Shelter Island Gazette. Follow this link to read her previous posts.
A former Associate Editor of the Shelter Island Reporter, Joanne has won multiple awards for her humor columns in both the Suffolk Times and the Reporter. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Southern Living, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle and other publications. She wrote a column, “Can We Talk”, in Toastmaster, a magazine for Toastmasters International, and was an award-winning humorist/commentator for WPBX radio in Southampton. She and her husband, Hoot Sherman, live on Shelter Island.
