Another Christmas is in the books, and we are now dealing with the fact we have already burned through the first quarter of the 21st century. We get a respite from the interminable holiday film, music, and television juggernaut, and do not have to be concerned with the 178 different iterations of “A Christmas Carol” for another 10 months. So, for now, we can go back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Yet, I remain slightly haunted by this past Christmas. Now, my personal prayer life is not what it should be, but at the same time, it is a lot better than it has ever been. Almost every night — I said it was better, not perfect — before I drift off to sleep I do a little spiritual inventory and run through a litany of special intentions. It may be for someone close to me who is struggling with a health issue, someone going through a long night of the soul, or just a general request upon the Virgin Mary to put a good word in for me and my loved ones as we, hopefully, strive to be better followers of her Son.
But the haunted part, which, in my best Edgar Allan Poe simulation, “binds me still,” is an image I saw at an unlikely place for a haunting: a McDonald’s outside the little Tennessee hamlet of Shiloh. My wife and I were visiting our sons, and our boys and I had convinced my wife that her travel bucket list could not be complete without a visit to a major Civil War battlefield.
After we had our fill of history at the Shiloh National Military Park battlefield, it was time for the three-hour drive back to Nashville. An army travels on its stomach but apparently tourists do also, so we stopped for a snack.
The downtown of Shiloh can be missed if you blink, but someone saw a McDonald’s and we stopped. We settled into a booth, my sons and I still on our natural high from walking the grounds of an American historical site. But as someone spoke about U.S. Grant’s heroic stand and how the battle might have been different if Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston had not been killed, I saw something in the corner booth that brought me crashing back to the here and now.
There was a nest of blankets in the corner of the booth. On it rested a little boy of about 5. By the looks of one of the blankets, his favorite “security blanky” was part of the bedding. He had some kind of cheap tablet device from which he was watching a cartoon. And every now and then, one of the McDonald’s workers, a young woman who looked still in her teens, checked on him.
The boy seemed to know the drill. His mom was working and there was no one to watch him, so he was going to spend God knows how many hours hunkered down in that booth. Like most children who live in want, he seemed to have become accustomed to his circumstances.
I observed this modern Dickensian tableau long before the Christmas season even began, and my educated guess is that it will be played out long after the last pine needle from a long-forgotten Christmas tree is vacuumed up from a living room floor — sometime in mid-April, I would surmise.
It is easy to judge this scene by questioning this young mother’s choices that put her in this economic bind. But we need to remember that she also chose life for this little boy tucked away in that booth.
Charles Dickens was a great writer and his “A Christmas Carol,” among many other great works, has rightfully stood the test of time. But his wheelhouse of observing and commenting on the British economic and class system has almost sanitized poverty. They made a musical out of “Oliver Twist,” after all.
Now maybe this little boy had a first-world problem of not having the state-of-the-art tablet that children with more affluent parents have, but at least to me, seeing this little guy so resigned, and resilient for that matter, in the face of his poverty continues to disquiet me.
So, if one of your New Year’s resolutions is improving your prayer life and you are doing inventory as you lie in bed, say a prayer for that little boy in the booth at McDonald’s in Shiloh, Tennessee — the Blessed Mother knows where it is. And say one for his mom as well.
