Books, table tennis and a teddy bear… Sometimes the least expensive gifts are the ones we cherish most

Dec 25, 2019 News

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By Michael Jordan

I once lived in a world of dragons, giants, elves, boy-wizards, brave knights, war heroes and super-heroes, beautiful damsels and evil witches. Sometimes I still do.
I was fortunate to have grown up in a house that was always filled with books, and there wasn’t always an adult around to read for you. So I found myself, at an early age, living in a fantasy world with King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood and his Merry Men, The Snow Queen (on which the movie “Frozen’ is based); of fighting witches in Tales by the Brothers Grimm (from which a television series was created). There were the comic books, with Batman, the X-Men.
I memorised the Green lantern’s mantra:
“In brightest day or darkest night no evil will escape my sight let those who worship evil’s might beware my power, Green Lantern’s light…”
Like me, all my siblings were bitten by the reading bug. I still remember the evening that my eldest brother came home from Literature classes, excited over some new poems he had learned.
For about two hours he kept me enthralled with a ghostly Scottish ballad about a girl who drowned while going out in the mist to get her family’s cattle (pretty morbid, I guess), and the haunting ‘Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner’.
We ‘borrowed’ books like Miguel Street from our father’s bookshelf, and laughed at the antics of ‘Man-man’ who said he wanted to be crucified; ‘Laura’, who had eight children with seven men (or was it the other way around?) and ‘Baku’, the ‘mechanical genius.’
Books began to appear with toys under our Christmas tree, but sadly, giving books as Christmas presents seems to be a thing of the past.
Austin’s Book Store was one of the few places without the seasonal throng of shoppers when I went there a few days before Christmas, despite the virtual treasure trove of children’s books, including the entire Harry Potter series, to fiction and non-fiction books for adults on virtually every subject.
TWO TENNIS RACQUETS
When he was about 12, my eldest brother awoke on December 25th to look for his present under the Christmas tree. His present turned out to be a table tennis set; something he had been yearning for, and a gift that would shape the entire family.
Our father fashioned a tennis table and we were soon playing daily. Afternoons, his school friends began to drop in, and that trend continued when we moved to Tucville. The tables became regulation size and height. The old racquets changed to more effective types, and our father kept ‘upgrading’ the tables.
I was about eight or nine when I first held a table tennis racquet. I still remember the first time I played and my class mates found out about my table tennis prowess. I was good enough to be junior inter-centre champion twice when I did a stint in National Service. My eldest brother went on to host a few tennis tournaments at the National Sports Hall. He took his love for the game to the US when he migrated, and his eldest son, in the US, now plays a high standard of table tennis.
But the greatest impact that dad’s tennis racquets had on us was to give us boys a chance to bond with our peers; to make a drove of good, long-lasting friends. We played tennis. We sometimes fought.
Last October, when we all gathered in Florida for our mother’s ninetieth birthday; the love of the game returned when my brother, his eldest son and I, along with two cousins, played for hours at a gym.

TEDDY
He came into my youngest sister’s life when she was about three. He had light-brown fur, glass eyes and tiny ears. Like her dolls, he never had a name. He was just plain teddy.
It wasn’t love at first sight, though. My sister was used to dolls, and she was at first taken aback by this furry, short-eared, glass-eyed creature. But the two eventually became almost inseparable, and her favourite toy.
But Teddy also had a hard life. He occasionally lost his glass eyes, his rubber nose, his ears, hands, sawdust stuffing, and sometimes, even his head.
As a ‘big brother’, I found myself thrust into the role of Teddy’s surgeon; a role I took seriously to pacify my tearful sister. It became my role to stitch back on an ear, his black rubber nose, to push the stuffing that was leaking out from under an arm.
I forgot all about Teddy until my sister reminded me of him on my last birthday. She said she told her sons how I used to administer to her stricken toy. I was surprised that she remembered.
“I wonder what ever happened to that teddy bear?” she said.
I don’t know. But what matters is that books, a table tennis set and a teddy bear are gifts that can give us memories that we can cherish for a lifetime.

 

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