ETHAN'S PRESENCE
Once upon a time in a small, peaceful, southern village, a very busy family learned one of the most important lessons of life on Christmas Eve.
Oh, maybe fifty years ago, Madison wasn’t the serene community that it is today. It was stunned one night when Chuck Miller, a young Vietnam veteran who had returned from combat duty only a few months earlier, was pulled over at Herthum Ridge for speeding and drunk driving. As the deputy sheriff was approaching the red Chevrolet, Chuck rolled down the window, shot the officer point-blank in the chest, and then turned the gun on himself and took his own life.
Nothing like that had ever happened in Madison before. The community was in shock. The deputy sheriff, Matt Thompson, was the mayor’s son and one of Chuck’s high school classmates. Matt’s wife had just given birth to their first child, a beautiful baby boy, the week before the incident. Grief overcame the entire village as residents searched for answers that just weren’t there.
About a year before he left for the war, Chuck had married Anna Redmund, the daughter of the general manager of Madison’s only drugstore. Anna and Chuck had lived with her grandparents in a large two-story home on the corner of Highland Avenue and Lexington Street. There was no consoling Anna after the deaths of Chuck and Matt, but something disturbing happened in Madison in the following months.
Rumors surfaced that Anna may have had access to drugs from her dad’s pharmacy and that she had been giving them to Chuck to help him cope with his experiences during his tours in Vietnam. As the wild speculation grew, it was Anna who bore the burden of blame for what had happened to the two young heroes on that sweltering August night. People said it was the combination of drugs and alcohol that precipitated the incident. Consequently, Anna was ostracized from the community and often ridiculed and harassed.
When she married, Anna was a young, successful commercial artist whose work was praised from coast to coast. As the months passed after the tragic shooting and the deaths of her husband and the deputy sheriff, she kept to herself, except when she went to the grocery store or to the local Catholic mission for Mass on Sunday.
When Anna’s grandparents died some years later, she was left with their house on the corner and continued to work from home, seldom seen or heard in the community. Her neighbors often spoke ill of her at social gatherings and hoped that she’d get fed up and leave the village for good. Only then could they erase those sad and hurtful memories.
Anna, however, pursued her commercial art career in virtual seclusion and anonymity in Madison. She had no other family or friends in the village for the next half-century; that is, until she encountered a feisty little five-year-old boy named Ethan Thomas McAllister.
Ethan’s family lived on the opposite corner from Anna Redmund Miller. Lifelong residents of Madison, Tom and Vickie McAllister were both high school teachers in the county school system and very involved with drama activities and coaching sports. They had not yet been born when Madison suffered through the Chuck Miller tragedy, but Tom and Vickie shared their parents’ disgust over those horrific events and had never spoken a word to Anna for the more than ten years that they had lived across the street. In fact, they were so busy with school and coaching that they barely had enough time to talk with each other, let alone a neighbor they really didn’t like or want to know.
Tom and Vickie were seldom home and often hired a babysitter to watch their son while they attended after-school activities. Little Ethan understood that crossing the street without permission or going anywhere near Anna’s dark and dimly lit home was strictly off limits. But you know how kids are, especially ones like Ethan, with a little twinkle in their eyes and a devilish smile that tugs at your heartstrings.
Anna was seventy-five years old and retired. She’d often peek through her living room curtains and see Ethan riding his toy fire truck along the sidewalk in the summertime. Having never remarried and with no children of her own, she had often imagined throughout her life what it would be like to have a son or a daughter, but then the memories from her past would always become too painful, so she would return to her household chores for the day and to the relaxing artwork that she now embraced as a hobby.
It was a blustery day in October when Ethan boldly challenged the rules that his mom and dad had established for him. His kindergarten teacher had been giving the children a lesson on the importance of helping others and making the world a better place to live. Her words had made quite an impression upon Ethan, so much so that when his babysitter brought him home from school that day and he jumped out of her car, he saw that Anna’s garbage can had been bullied by the wind and was now crushed against the McAllisters’ mailbox near the street.
Just about the same time that Ethan got out of the automobile at his house, Anna had pulled into the driveway on her way home from the grocery store. He couldn’t resist. He dropped his backpack, grabbed the empty plastic garbage can, looked both ways before crossing the street, and dragged it to Anna’s feet in her front yard. With his sheepish grin and those sparkling blue eyes, Ethan looked up and said, “This is yours, ma’am. I think the wind almost blew it inside our mailbox.”
As the babysitter screamed, “Hey! Get back over here now!” Anna stooped down to Ethan’s eye level, smiled, shook his hand, and said, “Thank you, young man. That was so very kind of you. You made me very happy.”
Of course, Ethan’s babysitter had no choice but to inform Tom and Vickie of this egregious act, and summarily there was a punishment of no television for one week. It didn’t matter, though. In his heart, Ethan remembered Anna’s smile and how grateful she was to him for making the world a better place.
As time progressed and Anna got older, Ethan persisted in wanting to undertake his random acts of kindness to help her. Reluctantly Tom and Vickie gave in and let him perform what they joked was his “civic duty,” while still keeping their distance from Anna.
A beautiful friendship blossomed over the years between the village outcast and the maturing youngster. Ethan would always look out for Anna, and as he grew, he never forgot to visit her for a few minutes after school or run an errand for her when she became ill. In return, Anna would bake Ethan’s favorite dessert, chocolate chip cookies, and occasionally send them home with him to share with his family. On Christmas Eve, he’d always take her a special card with his yearly school picture, which she treasured and put on her refrigerator.
It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas one year when Anna died at the age of eighty-seven. Ethan was a junior in high school and was on a class trip with his hockey team when his parents called him with the news. He didn’t say much when he returned home from his tournament. As he got out of his friend’s car, he took a long look across the street at the old Miller residence, and tears came to his eyes. Then he carried his suitcase into his house and unpacked.
A couple of weeks later on Christmas Eve, the doorbell rang at the McAllisters’ home. When Vickie answered the door, an attorney from the village was standing there, handed her an envelope, and then placed on the living room floor a huge, heavy, three-foot-by-five-foot package that he said was from Anna’s estate. The envelope was simply addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. McAllister, the parents of Ethan Thomas McAllister.” When Vickie and Tom sat down and opened the handwritten letter first, this is what they read:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. McAllister:
By the time you read this letter, I will have gone home to my God and to my husband. But I wanted to thank you before I left this world for the gift of your son, Ethan Thomas McAllister.
Not only has he always been a beautiful child with his blond hair, blue eyes, and never-ending smile, but he is one of our creator’s truly precious gifts.
I never forgot the day twelve years ago when he returned to me my trash can that had drifted across our street. From that moment forward, Ethan’s presence touched my life in a way that I never thought was possible after my Chuck died.
When no one else spoke to me about anything that mattered, Ethan did. When no one else cared to reach out and help a forgotten old lady, Ethan did. And when I became ill and worried about what would happen after I died, Ethan reminded me about what he had read in the Bible not long ago, that “whoever believes in Me will never die.”
It would mean the world to me if you would give this gift to Ethan. It was over a decade in the making. I wanted Ethan to have it so that he will always remember what joy he brought to me. And please tell him how thankful I am for the gift of his presence in the latter years of my life.
God bless you,
Anna Redmund Miller
Just as they finished reading Anna’s letter, Ethan hurried downstairs to find out what was happening. He saw his dad with his arm around his mom, tears silently streaming down both of their faces, and that massive package in the center of the floor.
“Is something wrong?” Ethan wondered.
“No,” Tom said. “But I think that your mother and I made a very terrible mistake many years ago.”
As Tom and Vickie explained who the visitor was that had just left, they pointed to the tightly wrapped package with the security seal and invited their son to open it. As Ethan carefully took scissors to the wrapping on the package, he discovered an incredibly beautiful painting of a young boy driving a toy fire truck in front of an old two-story house on a leaf-laden village street. The boy had a broad smile on his face as he looked toward the old house and saw the petite, gray-haired woman smiling at him and waving from the window. What set this painting apart and made it so unique, however, was the vague silhouette of an angel with a hand placed lovingly on the boy’s shoulder from behind.
Ethan stopped for a few minutes, admired the painting, and smiled with a joy that his parents were seldom around to see. He ran his fingers across the center of the frame at the bottom where there was a gold plaque inscribed with these words: “Ethan’s Presence.” In the lower right-hand corner, the painting was signed, “A. Redmund Miller.”
As Christmas morning dawned the next day in the McAllister house and Tom and Vickie were busy preparing dinner for the relatives and friends who would visit that day, Ethan sat up in his bed, looked out the window, and saw the home where Anna had watched him ride his toy fire truck when he was a child. Then, on the wall of his bedroom, perched high above the hockey equipment on the floor, her painting became the focal point of his holiday thoughts. Ethan Thomas McAllister felt at peace, knowing that in his heart he had already received the greatest Christmas present, just because he had wanted to make the world a better place.