An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting With Destiny by Laura Schroff

Author:Laura Schroff [Schroff, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Business, Personal Memoirs, Family & Relationships, Friendship, Self-Help, Motivational & Inspirational, Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781451648973
Google: 0DD9lUGqfD8C
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

Not long after our Thanksgiving together, I asked Maurice what he usually did for Christmas.

“Nothing,” he said with a shrug.

“What do you mean? Don’t you celebrate Christmas?”

“Nope.”

I pressed him on this, and Maurice told me his family didn’t usually do anything. He could remember a couple of times when his mother cooked something special around the holidays, but Maurice spent his last Christmas all by himself at the Salvation Army. He had the free meal they offered, and a staffer took him over to a bin filled with toys for poor children. Maurice had picked out a stuffed white teddy bear for himself.

That was the closest he’d ever come to getting a Christmas gift.

I asked him if he wanted to spend this Christmas with me and my family. He quickly said yes and smiled his biggest smile.

The Saturday before Christmas, Maurice and I went together to buy a Christmas tree. We picked out a nice one from a sidewalk vendor and lugged it home. I pulled out my decorations, which included little red apple ornaments, tinsel, and colored lights. Then I played an album of Christmas carols, and we drank hot chocolate while we trimmed the tree.

After we finished decorating the tree we had dinner and, of course, baked cookies. Then I handed Maurice a piece of paper and told him to write down what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him this year.

“There ain’t no Santa Claus,” he stated, laughing.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but you still have to make a list for him.”

Maurice scribbled something down. At the top of his list he wrote remote-control racecar.

Maurice asked if he could just sit and look at the tree for a while. I dimmed the lights in the apartment, and, with the Christmas carols still playing, we sat on the sofa and stared at the tree, saying nothing. We sat like that, with the glow of the tree lighting up our faces, for quite a long time. Then Maurice finally spoke.

“Thank you for making my Christmas so nice,” he said. “Kids like me—we know everything that’s going on out there. We see it on TV. But we’re always on the outside looking in. We know about stuff like Christmas, but kids like me, we know we can never have it for ourselves, so we don’t think about it.”

I marveled again at how wise Maurice was, given his circumstances. He was still so young, but he had a definite outlook on life, a perspective shaped by his experience. He understood precisely where he fit in society. He may not have known how to blow his nose, but he understood the way of the world better than a lot of people twice his age.

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, Maurice came over to my apartment. My sister Nancy, who lived by herself about thirty blocks south of me, was there, too. She had gotten to know Maurice and really liked spending time with him. When Maurice came into my apartment, he saw ten or twelve wrapped presents under the tree, and his eyes grew wide.

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