Annie's Gift

Welcome to DavidTarver.com

Annie’s Special Christmas

I spent the first two years of my college career, 1971-73, at General Motors Institute (GMI) in Flint, Michigan. Mark Landis (not his real name) was a fellow engineering student at GMI. Mark was a senior when I was a freshman, and he was at the very top of the class. In addition to being a great engineering student, Mark seemed very well versed in history and philosophy. He was a very unusual engineering student.

Mark considered himself very progressive. He was fond of quoting Vonnegut and Maslow to his fellow students. He railed against capitalism, racism and the Vietnam war. He railed against the use of fossil fuels for anything other than medicine, and he felt that gas-guzzling automobiles would destroy the planet. I always wondered how Mark ever came to be a student at General Motors Institute!

On the subject of God, Mark said he was agnostic. This meant, he explained, that he couldn’t prove that God existed, and he couldn’t prove that God didn’t exist. Therefore the subject of God was a "don’t care" for him.

Every year at Christmas time, some of the GMI students would collect toys and other gifts for underprivileged children. Predictably, Mark was against this practice, and he didn’t participate. He said that we were only trying to make ourselves feel better, to assuage our guilt, by collecting these gifts. He said that poor people were poor all year, not just at Christmas, and that if we were really concerned about them, we would be working to fundamentally change the unfairness that existed in our society.

I felt that Mark made some good points. However, as I considered his arguments, my thoughts drifted back several years to a girl named Annie (not her real name). Annie was a girl on my street, and her family didn’t have much. It seemed that Annie had been severely injured at one time, because she had bad burn marks on her arm, and one of her hands was permanently deformed and unusable. Annie usually wore tattered old clothes to school. Her hair was a mess, and she was often in need of a bath. Other kids sometimes made fun of her. She usually walked to and from school alone.

One year, after Christmas vacation, Annie came to school with a whole new set of clothes, and she was beaming from ear to ear. She was clean and her hair was done. She was carrying the biggest and nicest doll any of us had ever seen. It was obvious that some generous person had given these things to Annie, because her family simply couldn’t afford them. Annie seemed to be a new person after that Christmas, even though she eventually went back to her original disheveled appearance. I became convinced that Annie’s new spirit came about because she realized that someone cared about her and wanted nice things for her.

After remembering what someone’s kindness did for Annie, I had an answer for Mark. It is better to be kind at Christmas time than not at all.

I don’t know what became of Annie, but I bet she remembers that very special Christmas to this day. I do know what happened to Mark. He got his Ph.D. and became a professor at a top engineering school. I hope that he is doing good things for people all year ‘round.

David Tarver

En route to Atlanta, GA

December 16, 2003