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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron The wondrous, spellbinding time for Christmas has come again, and the cold winter's freezing breath crusts the December nights - and my mind, subdued and just a little sad, goes back across the years to Uncle John, who was not my uncle at all.
He was just a neighbor and a beloved friend, and I had known him since I was a little boy, going often to work for wages on his prosperous farm at Rocky's Corner, just down the rutted road from us on the windswept plains of Eastern New Mexico.
He was a tiny man, Uncle John was, with enormous callused hands far too large for this body, and he farmed with a team of fat, sleek mules in a day when the mule was all but extinct, and his crops each year were the prettiest for miles around.
He wore, winter and summer, a cap with the ear flaps down, and the only concession he made to the sweltering summer days was in pushing the flaps up above his ears, so that the cap rode high on his head and gave him a distinctly misshapen look
And he had false teeth too small for him, so that they clattered while he talked, and my brothers and I - eternally on the hysterical verge of laughter anyway - would just about bust from wanting to laugh.
I was always afraid that Uncle John knew it, too.
He came from Tennessee and talked - you know - funny, with the unique vernacular of the mountainmen and when he said "his'n" and 'our'n" for his "his" and "our", and allowed that "hit" was mighty fetching day, it just about killed us , so that we would goose one another in the ribs to keep from laughing.
But when I went off to college, carrying all my worldly goods in a $3.98 cardboard suitcase and a heartful of impossible expectations for the future, it was Uncle John who called me aside one day, offering to lend me money for the academic venture.
He said he wouldn't dream of charging interest.
"I never had any education, except three months one winter," he said , as if that explained his offered generosity.
I went off to school, and then set out to ignite the world with a match that wouldn't light, and I didn't see Uncle John for a long, long time.
In letters from home I learned that Aunt Blanche, his wife, had died, raving in madness at the state asylum.
Uncle John, a wizened, broken man in his 70s lived alone in the big house at Rocky Corner, farming with mules as always had and speaking in that twangy, high-pitched way he had.
And then I heard that he had moved into a nursing home - that he had given up his farm and his mules and his vineyard and all the things in life he held dear, and had moved into a nursing home.
And as I drove that way one year on a vacation trip to the West Coast, I stopped to visit him, because it had been so long.
It broke my heart to see with what cruelty the years had attacked him. He had caved in upon himself, his shoulder slumped; his eyes often studied the tile floor. And I noticed for the first time how white his hair had become.
His enormous hands, the scars of old calluses still remaining, lay quietly in his lap that day, except that sometimes they trembled, the way on old man's hands will do.
An afghan lay across his bony knees, though it was July.
His false teeth still clattered that day, and he still spoke witht the quaint echo of the Tennessee mountains in his voice, but the hysteria of youth had left me and it didn't seem funny anymore.
I only knew that he was my dear and valued friend, and that when I walked away from him I probably would never see him again.
And I never did.
When he sensed I was about to leave, he reached out and, for an instant overcoming his basic shyness, patted me on the knee and said wait a minute; he had something he wanted to give me.
He totterd to a heavy, antique dresser in the corner of his tiny room and rummaged in the bottom drawer, and when he returned he carried a set of walnut bookends.
"I made them myself," he said simply, "It's not Christmas, but you can pretend they are a Christmas present from me."
I took them and held them in my lap while we talked some more, speaking of things we both knew - of the farm life both had led, of the times I had worked for him, sometimes lying hidden under the protective vines of his huge grape arbor, glutting myself on the huge, sweet Concords that hung like churchbells toward the ground.
He bragged on me shamelessly that day, in the same loving manner way that my Dad had always done, telling me I was the best hand he ever hired - and recalled with one of his infrequent chuckles my amazing appetite for Aunt Blanche's oatmeal cookies when we'd come in from the fields at dinnertime.
Pretty soon I told him I better go, because it was a long way to California, and as I walked toward the door he sat quietly in his chair, his gnarled old hands trembling on the afghan, and tears tumbling slowly down his cheeks.
I held his Christmas-in-July bookends in my arms, gently, and climbed into my car and headed west.
And I have known since that day a fact I hadn't realized before - Christmas is not a time year, it is a blessed condition of the human soul.
