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The Snow Fort of St. Timothy
Chuck Miller

Port’s alarm clock rang at 8:00 a.m., as it rang every day at 8:00 a.m. throughout his life. An alarm clock has no concept of holidays or weekends - its main purpose and existence is to wake people up with its electronic second-by-second staccato buzz. Even though it was Christmas Eve, the alarm clock beeped with jarring precision.

Normally, the beeps would have triggered Port into his usual routine - a tired hand slapping the snooze button, buying his body an extra nine minutes until the alarm clock rang again, then get out of bed and deal with college life. He would then wrap a terrycloth robe around his waist, reach for his bathroom condiments - a plastic sandpail containing liquid soap, a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a bottle of shampoo, disposable razor blades - and trudge from his one-room dormitory cubicle to the communal bathroom and shower facilities on his dorm floor. After a good long shower - even longer if he didn’t have a morning class - Port would return to his dorm room, toss on whatever jeans and shirt were clean, and go on with the rest of his college day.

The dorm itself was deathly quiet - no conversations in the shower about classes or girls or the score from the minor league hockey game downtown. In fact, Port was halfway through his morning shower when he realized it was Christmas Eve, and that he was the only student still on campus at Iverhill State. Everybody else had gone home to their families and loved ones.

Port lathered up the soap. Maybe I can get my thesis done, he thought to himself as he scrubbed his shoulders with the mint-scented bubbles. It’s not like I have any family to visit.

As the shower continued, Port closed his eyes, imagining waking up on Christmas morning and running downstairs to a living room decorated with lights and ribbons, tinsel and ornaments glistening from a freshly cut pine tree. Boxes of presents and gifts, each one wrapped in glittering silver paper, each one with a name tag for himself or his brother or sister. His father and mother sitting on the couch, obviously tired from their nighttime decorating spree. Port would open every present with his name on it - it was as if Santa Claus himself knew every gift Port wanted, and made sure every request was fulfilled. It was the perfect storybook Christmas fantasy.

Port opened his eyes, and turned his head to let the shower spigot rinse the shampoo from his hair. The Christmas tree, the presents, the tinsel - they never happened. There were no brothers or sisters or parents, it was just a morning daydream, drifting away as the shampoo swirled down the shower drain. I wish I knew a family like that, Port sighed as he turned off the shower water.

He returned to his dorm room and got dressed for the bitter December weather. Even though it was the day before Christmas, all Port wanted to do was finish the research on his senior thesis, spend the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day composing a dissertation on the works of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty - and presenting it to his professor for review. Unlike other students at Iverhill State, whose parents took out college loans and paid tuition, Port’s existence at the college was funded by various academic scholarships - and if he lost even one of his partial scholarships, he could not pay for the rest of his tuition by himself.

Iverhill State was a long way from the New York City orphanage where Port was raised. He even remembered the green metal sign over the front door - St. Timothy Orphanage and Home for Abandoned Children, a name as old as the green tint on the sign’s copper patina. The sign itself should have been removed when the Diocese relocated the orphanage to another parish 30 years ago, but for one reason or another the sign remained, a misleading beacon of hope of an organization no longer in existence.

Any parents that Port might have known left him less than a month after his birth, left him in the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal, left him next to a rack of garbage cans. A sanitation worker who found the baby took him to St. Timothy’s Church, where the worker hoped God would provide the baby a proper baptism and some hope. A priest took the infant inside, and blessed the worker for his kind actions. Phone calls were made to the police, to social workers, to Child Protective Services. But somehow, the infant slipped through the bureaucratic red tape - nobody could find his parents, and nobody wanted to place him in a foster home or a county facility. His only option was to stay with the priests and nuns in the rectory of a former orphanage.

Father Clement, a strong man who taught Catechism on Saturday mornings and coached Pop Warner football for the parish children on Saturday evenings, baptized the baby and gave him a good simple Christian name - David Charles Smith, so it says in the orphanage records - but because the clergy and the lay workers at the church always called him "the cute little baby from the Port Authority," David Charles Smith was relegated to official papers, to be replaced by the nickname "Port" Smith.

As he grew from toddler to teen, Port wondered about his biological parents, fantasizing that they were still in the bus terminal, looking for the baby they had misplaced. Sometimes at night, when the main vestibule at St. Timothy’s was quiet, Port would look up at his bedroom ceiling and ask God, in his prayers, if He would contact Port’s family and let them know their son was safe.

He whispered the prayer one more time from his chilly dorm room at Iverhill State, on a cold Christmas Eve morning. As he threw on some warm clothes, Port changed his thoughts to focus on his midyear thesis. The Iverhill Public Library downtown would be open for a few hours. With no other competition from fellow students looking for the same library information, all Port had to do was drive down, grab some books, read a few reference materials, sign out the texts, and head back and finish writing the chapter before nightfall. Unwrapping an old candy bar that he kept on his desk as an emergency breakfast, Port plotted out his schedule for the day, making sure to allow some time for a nap and a trip back downtown for Midnight Mass. After tightening the work belt around his jeans and tying his bootlaces, Port threw a warm woolly coat over his shoulders, thinking about celebrating Christmas by sleeping late tomorrow.

Outside, the cold winter weekend had dumped a foot of snow on the ground and roads, and Port knew his car was now plowed in from a combination of snowfall and snowplow. Grabbing an ice scraper out of the rear trunk of his car, he dug at the icy powder that clung to his car’s rear wheels like glue.

It was hard work removing all the snow, but Port kept at it without a break. That’s how Father Clement told him to tackle any job or obstacle. Work at a problem until it is solved. No homework is unsolvable; no obstacle is unconquerable. No matter how many barriers are in your way, God will see you though.

Port remembered playing for Father Clement’s Pop Warner football teams as a child. He also remembered the days when Father Clement would go over homework and essays with the same excitement as a completed forward pass. During Port’s years in high school, he studied as hard as possible, knowing report cards with "A+" marks could earn trips to Yankee Stadium, to Madison Square Garden, or to Liberty Island.

While scraping the ice from his car windshield, Port smiled a little as he remembered Father Clement. Port recalled the pride of graduating at the top of his high school class - giving the valedictorian’s speech that Father Clement helped him edit - and giving that speech with Father Clement sitting attentively in the front row, smiling and beaming from his wheelchair.

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