‘Christmas' memories

T.J. Simers Register Columnist

Before the emails arrive wanting to know what this column has to do with sports, I would like to make it perfectly clear I once met William Devane at a golf course.

So he's a golfer, and that pretty much answers that.

Now as to why I'm such a sap, well, the wife was asking that very question Tuesday night.

She was looking at me as if she hasn't known me since 1969, as I watched Devane play a father remembering his fallen military son as intensely as I would get into John Wayne shooting the bad guys.

And I don't even have a son.

But every year about this time I look forward to the G-rated movie, “A Christmas Visitor,” as schmaltzy and sappy as any grown man would tell you while trying to bite the inside of his mouth and dare not show a hint of emotion.

When a visitor tells Devane he did well in raising his son, who was killed in Iraq, Devane says, “I didn't raise him to die.”

Now I make a living watching and evaluating performances; Devane right there with Kobe & LeBron in a movie made more than a decade ago.

Who knows sometimes what accounts for our own peculiarities?

When I did a morning radio show with the daughter and Fred Roggin, and now there are two peculiar people, I liked to read the obituaries of young soldiers on the air.

Roggin and the daughter seemed to think there were more entertaining things to do on morning drive-time radio, and people really don't wonder why we were canceled.

But for all the effort put into describing the heroics of a shortstop or how a basketball player overcame obstacles to stand out, it seemed the right thing to mention a young person who had lost their life in the duty of their country.

I know someone will email to say these young people volunteer, Devane telling his son in a flashback, “We're your parents and we don't want you to go.” But kids will be kids and they will have no idea how their parents will fret.

I just know whatever one's position; it was someone's child when I hear of a soldier's death.

“A Christmas Visitor” is about the back story that's almost never told, 11 years after losing a son and the loss as raw as the Christmas Eve when two soldiers arrived to say something about a grateful nation.

It's about a father who talks nightly to his son at a memorial and who finds comfort in holding his son's dog tags.

And it's about a visitor, a vet like Devane's son, who looks into a mirror deep into the movie to ask, “How many wars? How many young men never making it home? Nothing's changed. Nothing.”

And here I am Wednesday morning reading about six more U.S. soldiers killed in a helicopter in Kabul, Afghanistan — on News 9 of the Register.

As the movie goes, the family stopped celebrating Christmas after the death of their son. A visitor arrives to change all that, and did I mention he swings a bat in the movie so this really is a sports column. He hits a grand slam, too.

There's also a daughter awaiting tests to learn if she has cancer. When she buries her head into her father's shoulder for assurance that everything will be all right, I know Dez Bryant had to leave the field to not be seen crying, but where do you go in your own living room?

When Devane quizzes his daughter about who she's dating these days, he's reminded she was seeing Peter.

“What's with Peter?” he asks.

“Actually dad, it was Peter who found the lump in my breast,” she says.

And with the look on Devane's face, we've all been there.

We hear about these military losses all the time, but when the visitor tells Meredith Baxter, playing the mother in the movie, that he understands her loss, she says, “It's an unbearable loss.”

Often a columnist is assigned the task of finding some perspective after an unbearable sports loss for those who have invested so much into the outcome. When a sentiment comes along that's much more important, it really does speak to the fact that there but for the grace of God go so many others.

And so when Devane flashes back to the day he put his Army Special Forces son on a bus, not knowing but fearing it might be the last time he ever saw his son, how can anyone not relate?

“I love you dad, and look, I'll be fine,” the kid says.

When Devane gets the chance, magical and unrealistic as it is, to get one more opportunity to hug his son long after he's been killed, who wouldn't give anything for one last chance to hug someone they have lost?

Now I don't know if being a sap goes back to being a lottery pick in the draft, four months spent at Fort Polk learning how to yell, “kill, kill” after putting a bayonet on the end of my M-16. Or, whether it's somehow avoiding Vietnam while so many of those training with me did not.

I think it has more to do with being a parent, the movie coming to an end with the visitor leaving and confirming what Devane has already guessed.

“Merry Christmas, Dad,” says the spirit of his son. And they hug.

It's a movie moment right up there with Wayne and Katharine Hepburn saying their goodbyes in “Rooster Cogburn.”

The first lesson in not being exposed as a sap, of course, is to immediately tell a joke. Or, try.

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