THE GIFT: A Memory of the Fifties

No Snow Goose down, not the ""little gem"" which someone will inevitably call it, and, even if you can't exclude the sentiment it will certainly occasion, it's still only a short piece -- straight up -- about the time young Pete Hamill, seventeen, then a sailor during the winter of Korea, passed through New York where he grew up in a large Irish family chiefly without the benefit of his father (a ""pisser,"" usually in some saloon). He has also lost his girl Kathleen to some other guy. But on Christmas Eve he gives 40 dollars to his mother who takes it, charily, and then goes to a bar where there is for the first time a rapport with his father and the acknowledgment of his love for his son. . . The Gift -- that's what it will be come that time.