Presence 2 comments

By Kelly Foster

Does anyone else remember the Snickers commercials that showed the guy closing his hand over a healthy fistful of peanuts and opening it to reveal a neatly packaged Snickers bar? They played in the early 1980s. I remember watching them at my grandparents’ house, the odor of my grandfather’s perpetual bowl of peanuts heavy in the air. When he’d get up to go the bathroom, I’d reach my tiny hands into the bowl, close my eyes, and squeeze.

Of course, we all know how that story ends. Eventually, I prayed hard enough and God sent me a magical Snickers bar. Ha! Just checking to see if you were still paying attention. All I ever got was salty peanut hands that my grandmother then lathered up with Irish Spring and smoothed with Jergens Cherry Almond lotion.

It probably speaks to the weakness of my burgeoning character that the most I could hope for from magic was a Snickers bar. I mean, I don’t even really like Snickers bars. I never have. If I was a truly good kid, a truly Tiny Tim sort of altruistic kid, I’d have reached my hands into the bowl of peanuts and wished that every malnourished child would have food at Christmas or that every prisoner would be reformed or that every soldier would come home safe. Nope. I just wanted a Snickers bar, a candy I don’t even particularly like.

I guess that speaks mountains about me.

I was never told that Santa Claus was a real person. My mother, a woman whom as I have previously mentioned filled our living room with posters of Middle Earth and Narnia and who is probably at this very moment curled up on her couch by the fireplace reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the eighty-third time, always told us that Christmas was Jesus’ birthday and that Santa Claus was the spirit of Christmas. Jesus was real. Santa Claus, not so much real as wished for.

But I kind of half hoped that he was real. Jesus asked for things from you. Santa just wanted to give you stuff. I remember watching Miracle on 34th Street and thinking to myself, “Maybe? Maybe?”

Recently, my friends’ little girl asked her what Thanksgiving was. When she was told that Thanksgiving was when we thanked God for all our gifts she replied, “And if we don’t have any presents, God is going to have to go back and get us more presents.” When my friend tried to explain that gifts and presents aren’t always the same thing by listing all the non-stuff gifts for which she was thankful, her little girl said, “I am thankful for Aunt Jessi and Uncle Lain and going sailing. And I’m gone sit in the middle and I’m gone be the pirate.”

Well said, kiddo.

Later in my life than I would even like to admit, I wanted to believe not so much in miracles but in magic. For an entire year of elementary school, I deeply wanted (and prayed for) a time machine to bring me back to 1960 so I could meet and marry Davy Jones of The Monkees.

In seventh grade, I began to close the door to my bedroom and practice facial expressions when lip-synching or even sometimes singing “Memory” or “I Dreamed a Dream” or any other showtune that took my fancy. I thought one day I would wake up with this big Patti Lupone Broadway voice. I spent hours dreaming about what it would be like to finger pick a guitar like Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, and how impressed people would be with me. Or how it would feel to sing “I Will Always Love You” like Whitney Houston and how no one in my school would believe how amazing I was.

After the release of Last of the Mohicans (and four separate trips to the movie theater to see it), I actually hoped (and prayed for) the opportunity to meet and marry Daniel Day Lewis. Not his character (which would have made some kind of fantasy sense), but the literal person, the actor who played the sexy, rugged character on screen. And I’ll be honest. I was well into high school by that point, well past the age in which fantasy and reality have quite the same thin veneer between them.

I still wish Hogwarts was a real place.

Or Narnia. Or Middle Earth.

I still wish Santa Claus was real.

I’ve tried over the years to categorize and analyze or even whitewash this desire for magic—for gaudy, instant magic—it’s a masked hunger for transcendence; it’s a need to escape the less desirable elements of my reality; it’s an idle, myopic mind that needs to invest itself in some earnest, earthly cause—and so on and so forth.

But there is, as Lewis would say, a deeper magic than all my fantasies.

There is the present.

There is the moment when thinking my feelings and feeling them miraculously collide—making Christmas popcorn and cranberry chains in contented, intimate silence with my boyfriend while the snow lingers magically in Mississippi. Or smaller even than that. The moment when I wake up, happy in my bed, and it is enough to know that coffee is waiting for me.

And I do not wish to be other. I feel what it is, in that moment, to be me. And the present is gift enough.