<< Back 12/25/02 A bookman’s generosity brings the spirit of Christmas to July SMN That year Christmas came in July. There was no tree or wrapping paper, nor were there chestnuts roasting on an open fire. The weather was hot and sticky, and Santa Claus was a skinny old man wearing big thick glasses. I was at home when he called me. “Mr. Minick?” “Yes?” “This is Mr. Porter. I want you to come and look at some books.” He gave me directions to his home, set a time for our meeting, and left the telephone conversation as quickly as if he had vanished up a chimney. Mr. Porter’s telephone call caught me off guard that day. I knew him from the bookstore that I then owned on Main Street. Once or twice a year he came into my store, a little man wearing a trench coat and looking like Mr. Peepers. He rarely acknowledged my greeting, rarely spoke, and never said good-bye. From the few second-hand books he purchased, I knew that we shared a liking for the classics, but I will confess that I did not like him. He was too abrupt, too cold, too distant. Somehow I knew that he was originally from New England, and he had all the warmth of a Maine January when the snow has drifted to the windows and the trees crack and groan with the cold. When I pulled into his driveway the next afternoon, Mr. Porter was waiting for me. He didn’t say hello of course, but instead waved me toward his open garage. “Here are the books,” he said. “Look them over.” I had expected a few boxes of rough-looking books. Instead, I found myself standing beside a double row of fine books piled high as my knees and extending half the length of the garage. In these stacks were a hundred of the old blue Oxford classics, scores of Modern Library books, and several hundred other gems whose titles I knew and whose texts I loved. Though the books would not appeal to an antiquarian bookseller — they were not rare, and most were marked with Mr. Porter’s notes — I felt as if I had stumbled into a bookman’s treasure trove. Unfortunately, I was a bookman without capital. I lusted after those books the way a man may lust after a certain woman, beyond reason or possibility of satisfaction, yet no matter what scheme I contrived, I knew that I did not have the money to pay for those books. When Mr. Porter came outside again, I told him that he had a fine collection but that we should call a dealer I knew in Asheville. “He’ll give you a much better price than I can,” I said with a blackness growing in my chest as if I was announcing a death. “I’m not selling you these books,” Mr. Porter said. “They’re not for sale. You may have them.” “Mr. Porter, I’m sure the man in Asheville will pay you well for these.” “If you mention payment again,” he said, “you won’t get the books.” After the books were packed into the car — I worked in a sort of haze, as if walking through a dream — we went inside together and sat at his kitchen table. Mr. Porter began to talk about himself. His wife, Helen, had died earlier that year, and he told me that they had read aloud to each other from those books every day for 50 years. He cried a little telling me about his wife and the reading, and I thought of the books sitting in my car and of how for so many years I had disliked him, and I felt like crying with him. I thought to myself how often I had judged people by the way they appeared on the outside, the way they dressed or the way they spoke, and a shame rose in me so thick and powerful that even now, all these many years since my Christmas in July, I wince at the memory of that moment. Over the next two years Mr. Porter and I became friends of a sort. He kept giving me things — books, a stereo, records — always with the admonition that if I tried to pay him he would give them to someone else. The books I had acquired from him I marked at bargain prices because of the way they came to me. His books and the bargain-basement prices were so popular that for a brief time some people who shopped at the store would ask if we had any more “Porters.” One customer even contacted Mr. Porter through me and took him to supper. From other people and from Mr. Porter himself I learned a little about his past. He was an orphan, I think, who was raised by Catholic nuns in New England. Someone told me that he had entered seminary for a time. Later he became a librarian at a private school. He loved jazz, the Shakers, and the Transcendentalists. He had a quiet and deadly sense of the absurd. He liked to communicate with his friends by means of handwritten notes bearing the quotations of his favorite authors. He loved his wife so deeply that he carried the pain of her loss in his eyes like a wound. Robert Porter lived his life by books, and he died by a book. One of the murderous knaves who were then writing books about the best way to kill yourself taught Mr. Porter well, and he died by his own hand in an assisted living community in Brevard. His death still hurts, for, like most people who knew him, I have often wondered what I might have done differently, if anything, to help ease the burdens of his failing body and the breaking of his heart. But that is not the reason I am writing here. I am writing here simply to tell you about the year that Christmas came in July. I am writing to remember a man who taught me an enormous lesson about generosity, about giving freely and gladly. I am writing to tell you how I misjudged a skinny old Santa Claus with big glasses just the way many of us may misjudge and misunderstand so many people, including the baby born two millennia ago in Bethlehem. So thank you, Mr. Porter, for what you taught me. I pray that your suffering has ended, that you and your beloved Helen are together again at last, and that a Merciful Providence has granted you peace, that peace which passeth all understanding. (Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)