I remember that old screen door slamming, and looking out into the night beneath a street light, hoping to see a flake of snow.

As a boy, I spent most every Christmas Eve in the pool hall back home in the hills, just a ways from the Big Piney River, not far from heaven. Dad and Grandpa McNew and I owned the pool hall on Main Street in the small town of Houston.

It was like a second home for me. All my friends were there, the old-timers like Bill Stalder and Jim Splechter and Jess Wolf. They were rivermen and outdoorsmen a lot like Grandpa Dablemont. In all, there were about a dozen of them who came in and watched the snooker games and talked about big catfish and hat-rack bucks and politics and religion.

There was Ed Davis, Saldy Reardon, Churchill Hoyt and General Romines and Norman Salyer, just to name a few. And then there were a few boys my age, like Bobby Goodman and Billy Bob Woods, both of them top-flight snooker players like me by the time they were 13 years old.

Dad set up rules to make it a place where anyone could come, and there was no alcohol or bad language tolerated when he and Grandpa McNew were there. Educated men who were a great influence on me came in quite often, like Virgil Davis and Coach Weaver, Doc Dykes and Shorty Evans, even a preacher or two on occasion.

Some folks back in Texas County will remember those names ... and remember me when I was a boy. Many of them occasionally see this column and shake their heads and say, “How did that kid ever amount to anything?”

I fooled a lot of my teachers too, who wondered for years how I ever got into college and actually graduated with the kind of grades I made as a kid. They never understood what a fine place that pool hall was for a boy who wanted to become a writer.

God does indeed work in strange and mysterious ways. I would, in time, write a book about that pool hall and the old men who came in there, and dozens and dozens of columns and short stories about the place. When it came to story telling, I was taught by the best of ’em, right there on the front bench.

On Christmas Eve, there were just a handful of the old-timers who didn’t have families, and didn’t want to be home all alone, and it was a joyous time. They weren’t so much the kind to sit around and be melancholy. Dad let me open up the back of the soda chest when Christmas Eve began to wear down, and give Nehi Christmas presents to all of them.

On occasion, I’d get a present or two myself, always something simple, like an old used pocket knife or a prized marble from someone’s boyhood days. A few times, someone would slip me a 50-cent piece and tell me to buy something special with it.

Once I got a second-hand Christmas card with someone else’s name blacked out with a pencil. It was a special card because it had a flock of mallards on the front. There was that time that Saldy Reardon gave me the $2 bill, and I have written about that memorable Christmas Eve before. (You can find that story on the website…www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.)

The old timers told about great boyhood memories at Christmas time, back when a wondrous gift amounted to an axe or a couple of muskrat traps or a box of .22 shells. Much of the time there were no gifts at all, just home-made decorations on an evergreen tree.

“I ’member how we’d always cut a cedar tree about three foot high,” Old Jess said, one Christmas Eve. “It took up too much room in that little cabin to have it sittin’ ’round very long. But we’d make strings of decorations out’a popcorn threaded with a needle, and string ’em on that tree. Course with eight kids in that old cabin, sometime durin’ the night the popcorn would get et, so it never lasted long neither. We was just too danged hungry to leave popcorn hanging around for looks.”

Everybody laughed at that. These were all men that had known a little about hunger when they were kids. They were young at a time when there were deer and turkey and ducks still left in the Ozarks, and at Christmas time you ate wild meat or you didn’t eat much. Something like cheap hard candy or popcorn was a real treat.

When those old timers in the pool hall recalled Christmas gifts that moistened their eyes a little, and brought back memories of family members long passed, they were remembering little things, and gifts that were often hand-made.