WHAT CHARLES DICKENS AWOKE IN ME
Tomorrow I turn 65—
the magic Medicare year.
And like a lot of men my age,
I’ve been thinking back on a few quiet moments that changed me.
Not the dramatic ones.
The ones I almost missed.
Like when you’re searching the pantry for something
that’s been sitting right there on the shelf all along—
you just couldn’t see it.
Or maybe didn’t want to.
This was one of those moments,
when the old incandescent bulb over your head finally flickers on—
and you realize the light’s been there the whole time.
You just hadn’t bothered to look up.
Some moments knock the wind out of you.
Others just raise an eyebrow
and quietly open a door
you didn’t know you’d been standing in front of.
We’d been together nearly four years.
I was young—
naive in the way you can only be
when you think loyalty is enough.
I didn’t see what I didn’t want to see.
I ignored the signs—
because they were quiet,
and because I’d convinced myself they weren’t really there.
He was smart.
I believed him to be nearly brilliant.
He could command a room with his confidence,
and I’d been drawn to that certainty from the beginning—
mistaking it for strength.
It built slowly—
quiet judgments on repeat:
a joke about food stamps,
eyerolls at volunteering,
and that line about
how “people just need to work harder.”
I’d cataloged those moments—
tucked them away in some back drawer of my mind.
Not because I didn’t notice them,
but because noticing would’ve meant doing something about it.
And I wasn’t ready.
It was December.
Tree lit.
Wine half-hearted.
We were watching A Christmas Carol,
the annual reminder that Charles Dickens
understood humanity better than most of us ever will.
Then came that scene—
the two men visiting Scrooge,
asking for help for the poor.
And Scrooge says:
“If they would rather die... they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I didn’t flinch—
not on the outside.
But in my head,
something stirred.
That inner voice—the one that pipes up
when truth arrives uninvited—
spoke before I did.
Then he turned to me,
stone-faced,
completely serious,
like we were discussing the weather,
and said,
“He is right! Scrooge is exactly right.”
No smirk.
No wink.
No sign he might be joking.
Just cold certainty—
like it was obvious.
Like decency was a debate.
And I said,
as evenly as I could,
“Scrooge isn’t right.
That’s the whole point of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
He’s very wrong—until he learns to see.”
And just like that,
I woke up.
Not in a dramatic, throw-the-blankets kind of way—
but in the quiet, unsettling way
you realize you’ve been half-asleep for years.
No argument.
No slammed doors.
Just the slow, quiet exit
that begins in the mind
and finishes in the heart.
That’s how awakenings come, sometimes—
not as thunder,
but as a sentence
that sits wrong in your soul
and refuses to leave.
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