The Three Wise Men

A Christmas Meditation by Geoff Ryan

Not a festive season goes by that I don’t think about that evening twenty-six years ago. Not to mention the two other guys I spent it with. Christmas Eve 1982. The memory flares briefly every year, like the embers of a dying fire caught by a passing breeze. Three lives that converged for a few hours one night.

It was Floyd’s idea. He was the main man, after all. A well known person in this particular part of town. A smart guy who had gone to college, who read the financial section of the paper and who always spoke quietly and politely. He also dealt drugs to all and sundry. The sort of very unofficial community leader of dubious reputation and motive that this part of the city regularly produces through a process of natural selection.

I had become acquainted with Floyd through his younger sister Molly. We were dating. Molly was a great girl, even if her brother was the biggest dealer in the area and her Mom’s house a nightly “whos who” of the old Cabbagetown underworld. Molly was a tomboy who could fight like a guy, play billiards with the best, had freckles and red hair and a smile of compelling charm. It was a bit of a stretch for me to be seeing her (being who I was). It was maybe even more of a stretch for her to enter my culture (for many of the same reasons). But we had formed an odd alliance, were hopelessly in love with a teenage intensity, and wonderingly explored each other’s worlds as we sought to learn about each other. Her mom liked that she was seeing “a good, Salvation Army boy”. My parents, God bless them, smiled and accepted with some concern. My grandmother muttered darkly in the background about Irish Catholics.

Anyway, it was Floyd’s idea to do something for the poorest kids in the neighbourhood for Christmas. His plan was to get a list from a contact he had in the local welfare office, a list of the absolutely poorest of the poor. We would take them gifts on Christmas eve, just like Santa Claus and his elves. I would provide the van and wear my uniform to give it some legitmacy with the officialdom. Floyd would dress up like an elf (he was physically rather small, like a lot of big men). For Santa Claus, Floyd enlisted his friend Mickey. They were friends in that they had grown up together and I think Mickey occasionally worked for Floyd. Mickey was generally acknowledged to be the toughest guy in the neighbourhood. A big, brawler of with rock-hard muscles, shaven head and a menacing scowl on his face. Kids in the neighbourhood usually spoke his name with an accompanying glance over their shoulder, just in case. Such was our Santa.

The three of us gathered late afternoon on Christmas Eve. I drove up in our corps van, borrowed for the occasion and packed to the roof with toys, selected and purchased by the drug dealer. I hopped out of the van and smiled as I looked Floyd up and down. He was dressed in a green elf suit complete with a fur-trimmed, pom-pommed hat and pointy slipper-shoes. He was dwarfed (or “elved”, maybe) beside Mickey as Santa Claus – his red cap pushed back from his massive brow and a cigarette stuck in the side of his mouth. I wanted to laugh. But then realized they were looking me up and down in my Salvation Army uniform - my shapeless, blue accountants’ coat, cap perched on my head of hair as my ears slowly hardened and froze, my knotted tie… Floyd and Mickey had a point. We all nodded and accepted the inevitable necessity of what needed to be done to get the job done.

So off we went winding our way through the maze of buildings that comprise north and south Regent Park. Through the stairwells with walls blackened from cigarette lighters and into beaten, metal elevators smelling sickly sweet of government disinfectant and urine. Floyd smiling, Mickey swearing, myself silent. We didn’t really talk much to each other. Men usually don’t when engaged in a demanding task.

I remember one door that opened slowly to a small, thin black girl. In hindsight things are always remembered bigger than they are, but I still remember her as so small. Little more than a dirty undershirt topped by huge, inquiring eyes, about five years old. The apartment behind her was dark and devoid of any Christmas ornamentation, but we could hear loud music and the grating laughter of drunken adults. Once the door was open and she spied Santa Claus, well, her wide eyes got even wider (if that was possible). Mickey rose to the occasion and “ho-ho-hoed” with gusto. Floyd presented her with her toy – a doll, of course - which she clutched excitedly to her thin chest before slipping quickly back into the darkness without uttering a word, leaving the door to shut on its own. No adults ever appeared. Mickey lit up another cigarette, swore again and looked more threatening than usual. Floyd smiled in his cynical, satisfied way. I said nothing, just shook my head. This scene was repeated throughout the evening.

As we walked into one high-rise, a gang of local lads huddled around the warm entranceway shot a few mocking insults towards us, Santa Claus in particular. Mickey pulled his Santa beard down around his chin and filled the chill air with something other than good tidings. Recognizing that Santa did exist and that he was actually none other than who he was, the toughs paled and skittered off. Floyd laughed to himself while Mickey looked disappointed. I brought up the rear with my ears just about frozen off.

And so we got through the evening. Close to a hundred toys we gave out. We covered the whole of the Park. We felt pretty good. Even Santa had visibly softened by the end of the evening. We shook hands and the elf and his Santa wandered off to their women. I went home to my parents to catch the tail-end of our family Christmas Eve celebrations. I never saw Mickey again and Floyd only a few times. Molly and I broke up the next spring and our lives moved on in their predetermined courses. Christmases came and went, accumulating with the passing years.

A few years years later I bumped into some guys I knew from the Park and asking after old acquaintances, learned something about my Christmas companions. Floyd was eventually arrested and did a stretch in prison. It changed everything - like a butterfly with its wings manhandled by an excited child. His inviolability had been breached. He came out a wreck and lost everything - his house in the Beaches, his wife. The careful, yet fragile facade of respectability he had constructed around his essential lawlessness had broken apart at the seams. The last anyone heard he was a reclusive presence, seeing no one, possibly addicted himself. But who really cared? There were new players in the neighbourhood, new drugs too.

As for Mickey, he went drinking one night with his best friend. One drink led to another, one comment to another, an argument flared and Mickey’s infamous temper exploded. There is really no delicate way to put this … he poured a can of gasoline over his friend, set him on fire and killed him. His time in prison is to be considerably longer than Floyd’s.

And so every year as Christmas approaches I find my thoughts returning to that evening, almost in spite of myself. Trying to make sense, I suppose, of what happened then and subsequently to all three of us. As each successive year passes, I take out the memory, dust it off, turn it around in my head, shake it like a bottle that won’t open and attempt to extract something redeemable. Then put it away again for another year and get on with the busy reality that is Christmas in The Salvation Army. The memories fade a bit, but this ghost of Christmas past visits me annually.

Then I came back to the Park, appointed to live and work in the neighbourhood after twenty years. The place has changed a lot. I’ve changed a lot. But sometimes, the more things change the more they stay the same. The Park is worse in some ways than it was then. The drugs of the 80’s have given way to crack. The fists and knives and baseball bats of past decades have given way to guns. The pasty faces of generational white poverty have morphed into wave after successive wave of new Canadians of every hue in God’s earth. The Irish street names finding themselves host to African mosques and Indian cafes and Chinese laundries. The alleyways and lanes covered daily in a babble of languages from every hot spot of the globe. But the same Christmas Eve scenes remain; the causes and faces different, but the same old.

Oh yes, I met Molly again too. I bumped into her on the street and I dearly wish I hadn’t. I recognized her right way, she had hardly changed at all. Except her face. The impish smile was gone, long gone. I never saw her eyes, she wears sunglasses all the time now because of the light. The rest of her face is frozen into a mask as if she had taken an overdose of the botox that movie stars inject into themselves. She couldn’t smile now if she wanted to. But I don’t think she wants to anyway. Her breezy manner and hot temper flattened out by drugs. Her memory full of holes, her speech slurred, her mind wandering. She was buying drugs at the time. I gave her twenty bucks. She wandered off without a backward glance.

And that is the story of the three wise men from almost three decades ago. Each having followed our respective stars, I guess you can say.  Floyd? Gone, nobody knows where, nobody cares, it seems. He is hardly a memory in a part of town where he was once a prince of the streets. Mickey? Still in prison for all I know. Either that or dead or broken somewhere. Me? A Salvation Army officer in Regent Park.

That Christmas Eve… did it mean anything?  Was it a window of grace that God cracked open to give Floyd and Mickey a chance to follow a different star, take a different path in life? A long shot at the straight and narrow for them? A Christmas gift orchestrated by God for a couple of his blacker, black sheep?

Or was it not really about Floyd and Mickey at all, but just about getting those one hundred toys to those one hundred children that night? God often uses strange midwives to birth his goodness in our fallen world… Pharoah, Rahab, to name a couple. But if so, why those kids in that place in that particular year? What was special about them?

Or maybe it was primarily about me and my responsibility? Maybe it was chance opened for me. A chance to talk to Floyd and Mickey, to influence them, to save them. A chance I obviously blew.

As each Christmas passes and the memory comes alive for me again, it seems that the need to invest it with some sort of meaning grows more important, urgent even. Christmas should be about hope, not regret, it seems to me.

Maybe it was just a lesson about choices and common grace. Something to mull over as I stand on kettles and whistle a Christmas carol.

“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

Indeed.

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder and publisher of theRubicon, co-ordinator of the 614 Network and organizes the bi-annual Urban Forum. His interests include writing, politics, coffee and his children. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.

2 Comments to The Three Wise Men

1. Geoff, I bless you for this post, which will probably also become an annual advent reflection for me as well. Its poignancy is striking and hard.

   I am reminded of a strange and wonderful BBC reality show aired this summer entitled ‘Make Me A Christian.’ Essentially a ragged group of non-believers – Wiccan, yuppie family, show girl and frat boy etc – were teamed for a month with an ecumenical and eclectic group of evangelicals. The star of the show was an aggressive and intelligent Hells Angel, who refused all entreaties of grace, until he agreed to serve lunch to low income seniors at a Salvation Army Corps in England. He softened instantly. In the actions of generosity and service he became momentarily human, even likeable.

   For a moment it would seem, Floyd and Mickey experienced the same. I wonder if that is how Christ still views them?

   RJM
Richard Munn on December 24th, 2008

2. Merry Christmas Geoff
   You present a vibrant and tangible memory, which is haunting and convicting. I may never forget your Christmas story, one calling from Christmas past to stare at you plainly each celebrated year. Although it is wise to consider that we are a product of our lifetime of choices, it is aggressively Christian to consider that God is always at work. His eternal measures encompass so many things, redeem so many actions, sanctify so much distress.
   Do not give in to the temptation to believe that night was a failure.
Jessie Irwin on December 27th, 2008

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