Christmas breaks my heart.
For one thing, the hype and hypocrisy (which now start in October, how surreal to see cobwebs and tinsel sharing the same store windows) are pathetic. Peace On Earth would be more than just a soggy seasonal sentiment if even half as much money and effort went into ending poverty as goes into buying presents and putting up twinkly lights.
For another thing, Christmas is a holiday that discriminates against dysfunctional families. The propaganda, cozy images of loving relatives clustering around present-laden trees and turkey-laden tables, does not match the increasingly common reality of fractured families shuffling between parents and grandparents, reliving the tensions of failed relationships and bitter custody battles. It’s especially hard on people who have no relatives, or perhaps just none that will talk to them. For these folks, Christmas is a time of yearning for connection and belonging in a world that has none to offer.
Two of these unfortunates came into the library one morning last week.
The first was a seedy, little man with a hygiene handicap. He’d obviously slept in his clothes, and equally obviously, had taken a hair-of-the-dog hangover cure. He wanted to use the Internet but didn’t have a library card, so I offered to sign him in as a guest and asked to see some identification. He produced three pieces of an expired health insurance card. I put them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. About a third of the card was missing, but there was enough for me to see his name and most of his picture, taken at a time when he had fewer wrinkles, less hair and more access to things like toothbrushes and shampoo.
Breathing as shallowly as possibe, I signed him on to an internet session and gave him the spiel about time limits.
He squinted at the screen and said, “Where does the name go?”
“What name?”
“My father’s name. I put in his name and it shows my family tree.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. The man at the next station leaned over and said, “He probably means Ancestry.com.”
I showed my odiferous client how to navigate to the search page for Ancestry.com. With remarkable coordination for a man who'd had beer for breakfast, he typed the equivalent of John Smith into the name field and clicked on the search button, producing a predictably long list of John Smiths. “What’s this?”
I held my breath as I leaned down beside him to see the screen. “It’s a list of all the people named John Smith recorded in Ancestry.com. We can enter more information to narrow it down. Do you know when he was born?”
“Probably around 1930.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about where he was born.”
“Maybe in Welland.”
Unfortunately, Ancestry.com did not have probably and maybe fields. I figured his best chance was to search birth records for the province of Ontario. I tried to explain this to him, but he wasn’t in the mood.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to work,” he whined. “I’m supposed to type in the name and it’s supposed to show my family tree.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because that’s how my kid said he found me.” I had a vision of this sad, sorry little man, abandoned and abandoning, whose Christmas wish was to find his roots and give meaning to a chaotic life. It died instantly with his next complaint. “Why are all these guys,” he waved at the list of John Smiths, “in the States? He’s Canadian.”
“Because we’re looking at non-specific list. We don’t have enough information to be more specific.”
“But we’re in Canada.”
He was an Internet volunteer’s worst nightmare, one of those deluded people who thinks computers are omniscient, capable of instantly gratifying their slightest whim. I looked around for rescue. A young man waved at me hopefully from behind a terminal at the back. “Just give me a minute to help someone else and I’ll be right back.”
Judging by the frayed shirt cuffs peeping out from the sleeves of his scruffy grey sweatshirt, the young man also came from the lower end of the economic spectrum, but at least he’d made recent contact with soap and water. He had a sweet smile and an aura of peaceful patience normally associated with people like the Dalai Lama.
“Can you please help me find someone?” he asked.
“I can try, who are you looking for?”
He said a name that was the equivalent of Mary Smith. My inner good Samaritan cringed as I asked him what else he knew about Mary.
“She went to Camp Wanameemee twelve years ago.”
“Birth date?”
He shook his head in response and continued to shake it as I asked about where she lived, what she did and if he knew any of her friends or relatives. All he knew was that they went to camp together when they were kids and she lived in a town he’d forgotten the name of. Googling for pictures of Mary Smith was all I could think of to help him, but his inability to remember if she spelled her name with a “y” or an “ie” complicated the process.
We tried it with a “y” first. He clicked on some pictures to get a better view, allowing me to deduce that Mary, or at least the Mary of his memory, had blonde hair, a very tiny nose, and a deep dimple in her chin. He searched through the pictures with methodical, focused intensity, as though searching for a long-lost love. I wanted to stay and help him, but an increase in the noise level from the front Internet stations told me I’d left Mr. Cranky alone for too long.
One of the benefits of volunteering is the sense of satisfaction that comes from helping people. But there are some people who refuse to be helped, people who are more interested in avoiding their problems than they are in fixing them. My ripe client with the missing father was just such a person.
“I haven’t got time to look through all this crap,” he informed me after I’d tried, and failed, to shorten the list of John Smiths. “Where are the computer games?”
I refrained from pointing out how stupid this request sounded following so closely on the heels of his previous statement, and pulled up a games website, then retreated to my desk, where I watched him attempt to play Bejeweled for a few minutes before giving up and leaving the library, presumably to refill his Labatt’s prescription.
A while later, the young man came up to my desk to thank me for my help.
“Did you find her?” I asked.
“Not today. But I can come back for another hour tomorrow, right?”
I don’t know which of these two people made me feel more hopeless: the whiney old alcoholic who has adapted to an unjust and uncaring universe, or the naive young man who hopes for miracles and may still believe in Santa Claus. Either way, I’ll be relieved when Christmas is over and I can get back to problems I know how to fix, like how to upload blurry holiday pictures from i-phones to Facebook.
