12 New Christmas Stories for Grownups
Written by Mel Reichler Copyright 2002
The Man who Begrudged Christmas
The Man who Begrudged Christmas
There was a man who begrudged the world—all of it, everything, not only its excellences but also its flaws, not only its beauty but it’s ugliness, its blemishes as well as its perfections, its vices and clumsiness as well as its virtues and grace.
He begrudged Van Gough the light that flooded his sunflowers and
spilled over and drenched his madness and Rembrandt the zippered shadows that
blurred and softened his schnozzle. He begrudged Beethoven his Razamovsky and
Mozart his magic flute,
He begrudged a young girl the meager, cotton dress that barely contained her body, and an old woman the folds of the shawl in which she hid herself. He begrudged a muscular man his bulges and a fat man his paunch. He begrudged the world, all of it, everything — but most of all he begrudged the world Christmas, its lights its music its charity and its joy.
Because he begrudged so much of the world he could not enjoy very much of it, almost nothing. Most of all, he could not enjoy Christmas, not its embroidered traditions or it’s bright make believe, not its sly playfulness or its bold hope, not the cards or carols or food, not a scrap of it.
Now this man had a dog who felt just the opposite about the world. This dog begrudged the world nothing. If I can put thoughts in his head and words in his mouth, he felt the world was a wonderful place. It smelled great, people were fun to look at, pretty girls talked at you in a high pitched unintelligible chatter and squealed and petted you. If you were a dog you didn’t have to worry about fouling up the neighborhood because a person walked behind you and picked up any mess you made as soon as you made it, food appeared in your bowl everyday — and there was Christmas.
The dog enjoyed Christmas as much as any animal enjoyed Christmas. People were happier than usual, more willing to pet him, snacks were easier to come by, the streets were brighter and the city smelled like a forest. Christmas was a great time.
2.
The man and the dog had been an odd couple for twelve months. The man had gotten the dog on Christmas Eve a year before—not as a gift all wrapped up of course, because he did not believe in Christmas. Someone had abandoned the dog on a street near the man’s home.
This man was not charitable by nature and it was Christmas, which he begrudged, but the dog was an abject, shivering blur of fur and bones, half covered in snow and the man stared at it like it was a puzzle for quite a while trying to figure out something he could begrudge it, and when he could not think of anything, he picked it up and carried it home put it down on some newspaper and gave it some milk and bread in a saucer.
After he had refilled the bowl three times and the puppy had stretched and belched and walked around sniffing his new place, the man immediately begrudged the dog its curiosity and himself his charity and he thought about putting it back on the street again but he realized he would have to take off his robe and slippers and put on his galoshes and coat and gloves and scarf and go out into the wet cold again and while he was considering this, the puppy curled up at his feet and fell asleep and the man decided to let the dog stay the night and crept into bed and pulled the covers over his head and went to sleep too.
The next morning when he got up, the dog was waiting by his bowl for him. The man lived in a neat but empty nest. His wife had died and his children had grown up and moved away and the man was alone in his house and had no one to listen to his begrudgings and support his complaints. He wondered if he could train the dog to be a compliant audience and although he begrudged its sniffing around the bowl and whimpering until he fed it some bread soaked in milk, he decided to let it stay another day at least, and one day grew into another and he finally took his dead wife’s pillow and made the puppy a place to sleep and decided the dog was at least temporarily his.
The man and the dog got on pretty well together.
For his part, the dog vividly remembered a snowy evening on the street when he thought he was going to turn into an icicle and was happy to be warm and fed and he genuinely liked the man who was very predictable once you got to know his idiosyncrasies and nearly pleasant when he was not grousing about one or another of the world’s shortcomings or excesses.
For the mans part, although he resented the humiliating experience of walking behind the dog picking up the mess it made, he enjoyed the challenge of teaching the dog to distinguish between the parts of the world needed to be very quickly and absolutely begrudged and the parts that could be merely grumbled about loudly, and the dog seemed to be clever and smart and recognize the world’s shortcomings as soon as the man forcefully pointed them out.
The man felt victimized by the dog’s indiscriminant willingness to be petted by anyone passing by and the dog’s curiosity — which the animal manifested by sitting and cocking his head and peering intently at anything unfamiliar on the street. He wasn’t really disturbed by these quirks until Christmas.
The man did not know how but he was certain that the dog understood that Christmas was coming. The dog appeared more impatient to go out for his walk, was more animated on the street and even friendlier to perfect strangers than he usually was. The animal appeared excessively curious about Christmas decorations and displays and the man thought he became indecently intoxicated from the smell of pines on the street.
At first the man believed that the dog was trying to wangle himself a Christmas present but after thinking about it, he dismissed the idea. Then he thought it might be the dog’s experience of being snatched from the icy jaws of death on Christmas Eve that might have left an indelible tendency to hopefulness on the animal.
But whatever it was, the dog became more animated the closer it came to Christmas, and even though the man reproached and reproved him, he could not dissuade the dog from sucking up the spirit of Christmas from the street, shaking it off in the house, and enjoying the season as much as a dog could enjoy the Christmas season.
The man felt the dog’s embrace of the Christmas spirit as a betrayal although he could not explain why he felt this way. He begrudged Christmas loudly, pointedly, continuously but to no avail. He tried to communicate to the dog that Christmas embodied all that made the world begrudgable, that it brought what was false and disagreeable about the world to a hypocritical culmination, to an apex of gushing phoniness. But his badmouthing Christmas had no effect on the dog at all, and the man felt that the animal’s indifference to his views was a rejection and mockery of the unspoken covenant between them.
The hapless man became angrier and angrier, until, a few days before Christmas he decided that, even though he had grown very fond of the dog, if the animal was so obdurate and ignorant of the shortcomings of the season, so drunk and enamored of the holiday, he needed to be shown what a fraudulent humbug Christmas really was, and that the way to teach the animal this was to throw him on the cold mercy of the Christmas spirit, on the street, much as he was when he had been abandoned on the Christmas Eve on which the man had found him.
Once the man came to this conclusion there was no dissuading him from it; He could not talk himself out of it, even though he argued with himself furiously. What made things worse was that the dog who was absolutely caught up with the season did not even notice the man’s painful, stubborn dilemma.
The man decided that he would take the dog back to the street and put it in the place that he found it, and let it wait for Christmas to take care of it. He decided to wait until late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve when there would be fewer people on the street to notice what he was doing. He took the identifying tags off of the dog’s collar and, with tears in his eyes — because he cared for the dog a lot — put on the leash and got ready to take the animal out.
Now the dog did not have a clue about what was happening. He was overjoyed to be able to go out into the snowy Christmas day much earlier than his usual evening walk and while he noticed tears in the man’s eyes as he put the collar on him, the animal’s thoughts were only on Christmas. He ascribed the sadness to his master’s dislike of the holiday, and the fact that following him around picking up the mess he made must have been particularly onerous during Christmas which its master really begrudged to begin with.
The man took the dog out and walked around a little while to kill time and wait for something to happen that might keep him from doing what he was going to do, for some voice to forbid his action and force him to reconsider he decision but no voice spoke to him and even though he fought with himself, nothing intervened to keep him from following through on his determination to teach the dog a necessary lesson about Christmas.
The street was an icy sheet, and the dog tried to diminish his enthusiasm for the bright Christmas lights and the smell of pine trees and he walked slowly so that that man could avoid especially slippery spots. The man led the dog toward the spot where he had rescued him a year before.
As they approached the spot where he had been saved a year earlier, the dog had a dark feeling. Although he had forgotten exactly why, the dog knew the place was not a good spot, that it did not have good street feng shui. He tugged on the leash a little just to remind his master that it was a place to be avoided, an awful spot, a horrible spot in fact, but his master was indifferent to the warning. Just as the man reached down to unbuckle the dogs collar (although the dog thought it was to reassure him) the dog felt the urge to put a little distance between himself and the bad place, and the leash pulled and man slipped and fell on the ground and making a sound a little like a clapper striking a cracked bell.
3.
What happened next was as confusing to the dog as to his master. When the man opened his eyes he realized something had changed. He looked down and up shook himself awkwardly, closed his eyes and opened them again very slowly. There was no mistaking that something had happened. He had become a tree, a scraggly forlorn spruce with patchy clumps of needles like the pelt of an old shedding bear.
The dog sat down in the snow, looked at his master who had become a tree and waited for the man, tree or not, to give him some direction, tell him what to do.
“I must be dreaming,” was the first thing the tree said.
“If you say so,” the dog said, “you’re the master.”
“Is this your dream?” the tree asked.
“Absolutely not,” said the dog.
“What’s happening?” the tree asked after a moments silence. “How can you talk?”
“I don’t have a clue,” the dog answered, waiting, although his leash was on the ground.
“I’m a tree,” the man finally said.
“I can see,” the dog said after a moment’s silence.
“It’s hard to see through these needles. The world looks green.”
“You’re a tree,” the dog said after a minute.
“I remember,” the tree said. “I was going…you look green,” he said, peering at the dog.
“It’s the leaves.”
“Needles,” the tree said. “I was…” The tree hesitated.
“It was a bad spot,” the dog said.
“I was going to leave you here,” the tree confessed.
“Alone? To fend for myself?” the dog said incredulously.
“Yes, to fend for yourself.”
“Why?” the dog asked.
The tree was silent. “Are you sure this is my dream?” it asked finally.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think so,” the tree said. “If I would have a dream, a last dream, I think I would have chosen to become something else, certainly not a Christmas tree.”
“Why?” the dog asked. “I like Christmas trees. A Christmas tree smells nice.”
“People let it live a few years then cut it down and pile it with silly decorations for a few days, then they throw it out,” the tree said mournfully.
The dog did not say anything for a moment. “I think you look nice,” the dog finally said, “as a tree. A little patchy and sparse in the branches perhaps…” He stopped, not wanting to add insult to injury. “You do have a nice smell,” the dog said. “Fresh, like the thing you put in the bathroom only more real.”
The tree tried to shift its branches and look around. “Where are we?” it asked.
“On the street ,” the dog said. “I think it’s Christmas.”
The tree shuddered. “I remember. Christmas eve,” the tree said. “We were heading for the place….”
“Yes,” the dog said.
“Never mind,” the tree said, “never mind. What are we doing here?”
“I don’t know,” the dog said. “Waiting for something to happen I think.”
“What?” the tree asked.
“I’d rather not say,” the dog said. “I’m not sure.” He had a pretty clear image of the body of his master out of the dream lying on the sidewalk very still. The snow was beginning to cover him. He got up and licked the man’s face.
“What are you doing,” the tree asked. “My view is very fuzzy.”
“Nothing,” the dog said, “nothing.” After clearing the snow off of the man’s face he sat down again.
“What do you see?” the dog asked, after a while.
“Well the world looks greenish. There are people walking by. It’s difficult seeing through needles. And the snow. Could you shake a little of the snow off of my branches?”
The dog got up and pushed against the branches of the tree.
“Not so hard, you’ll knock me over,” the tree yelled.
“Do you like being a tree?” the dog asked. “Do you begrudge the world less as a tree?”
“Not particularly,” the tree replied. “it just looks a little different.”
“I’m sure it does,” the dog said.
“What am I like?” the tree asked.
“Well you’re a little straggly and forlorn,” the dog answered.
“I guess other Christmas trees have fatter branches and are thicker with needles,” the tree said. “I feel sorry for myself.”
“You always felt sorry for yourself,” the dog said, “without a reason, I always thought.”
“Could you get up and get some of this snow off my branches,” the tree asked. “I just get a fuzzy view of what’s around me.” The tree begrudged the snowflakes their wetness and the dog his ability to move around but he did not say anything.
“I have to piddle,” the dog said.
“Not on me,” the tree insisted, panic stricken.
The dog got up. “I’m really tempted,” he confessed. “You smell really inviting.”
“It’s a hell of a way to end my life,” the tree complained, “as a tree. What a way to go.”
“If you say so,” the dog said. “Although it’s Christmas and…”
“And what?”
“And it’s the way you lived your life.”
“How?”
“Wooden, a tree, you know. It’s…” The dog was restless. “I really have to piddle,” it said.
“Piddle,” the tree commanded, “just not on me.”
“Trees are where dogs piddle,” the dog observed making a circle around the tree.
The tree changed its tone. “Please, not on me,” the tree asked, “please.”
The dog drifted away to a hydrant then returned.
“What do I look like?” the tree asked again.
“A Christmas tree, a little forlorn.”
“Do I have any decorations at all?”
“No,” the dog said, “you’re dull. No brightness about you.” The dog could sense the tree begrudging other Christmas trees their brightness, the warmth of a living room, their decorations. “I think,” the dog said, “you had better spend what time you have as a tree enjoying…”
“Enjoying what?” the tree asked.
The dog was silent.
People came down the street barely glancing at the tree until a family with two small boys walked by. “What is that Christmas tree doing out here?” the smallest boy asked.
“I guess the man who sold Christmas trees on this corner couldn’t sell it and just abandoned it here,” his mother said.
The boy stopped. The tree looked at the boy and started to begrudge him his energy then stopped.
“It looks unhappy,” the boy said.
“Lets go,” the boy’s mother urged.
“It needs a decoration,” the boy declared. The boy reached into his pocket and took out a scrunched up silvery candy wrapper. He brushed the snow off of a branch and put the glittering piece of paper on the branch. “That’s better,” the boy said. “It looks more like a Christmas tree now.” His brother took out half of a candy bar and set it on the branch that had been cleared of snow.
“Very nice,” the mother said. “Now…”
The boy’s father reached into his pocket and found some tinsel that he had put in his pocket after the family had decorated the large fat tree that stood in their living room. He sprinkled it on the branch of the tree.
“What about the dog?” the older boy said.
“I’m sure he’s waiting for his master who is in a store, buying a present. See how quietly he’s waiting” she said. He certainly belongs to someone,” she observed as she pulled the boys away and continued down the street.
“That was nice,” the tree said, not begrudging the children their enthusiasm.” How do I look now?” it asked the dog.
“Much better,” the dog said, “much better.”
“What’s that noise I hear?” the tree asked.
“People singing, caroling,” the dog said. “It’s Christmas. There’s a group of people coming down the street singing carols.”
“It sounds nice,” the tree said, “against the silence. I can’t make a sound.”
“Trees don’t,” the dog observed. “You could try to wave your branches, imitate the sound of a breeze.”
The tree tried. “I can’t,” it complained, “not a whisper.”
The carolers came down the street each of them holding a candle. They walked by the tree and the dog until one of the singers, a young girl who wore a meager cotton dress under a furry parka said, “wait up, what’s this?”
“It’s and unsold abandoned Christmas tree,” another replied. “Probably couldn’t be sold. It’s pretty scraggly.”
“Well,” the girl said, “let’s give it a carol. It looks so forlorn.”
The small group gathered around the tree and the dog watched and listened as they gave it a chorus of Tannenbaum.
“It really is barren,” one of the sopranos said. She brushed the snow off a branch that was bending under its load. “It needs a little light,” she said, and wedged the candle she was holding between the trunk and the thickest branch she could find near the top of the tree. “Merry Christmas,” she sang out as the group of carolers gathered themselves together and moved on.
The dog became restless. “I have to piddle again,” it said to the tree.
“How do I look?” the tree asked.
“Much better,” the dog said. “Almost like a Christmas tree.”
“I can see much better,” the tree said, “not much further but around me.”
“That’s good,” the dog said. “I have to piddle.”
“Piddle,” the tree said, “but please not on me.”
The dog trotted off and returned.
“What now?” the tree asked.
“I don’t know,” the dog said. The crowd of people on the street thinned out. “It’s getting late,” the tree noted.
“Yes.”
An old woman came gingerly down the street and stopped in front of the tree. Her face was buried in a shawl and she spoke to the dog as she looked at the tree. “It looks like a tree I had when I was younger,” she said. “The last tree left on the lot was the one we got. Father used to wait until the last moment to buy it. Cheaper then. But it was so wonderful.” She took off her shawl. “You must be cold with so few decorations,” she said to the tree, draping her shawl over the branches under the joint where the candle burned. She covered her head with her hand to keep the snow off. “Merry Christmas,” she said to the tree, “and merry Christmas to you too, dog,” she added as she moved off.
Over the next half hour or so people coming by put more decorations on the tree, mostly wrappers but someone put a real Christmas tree ornament on the very top branch. The night was still bright when the crowds disappeared and the street was nearly empty except for the tree and the dog. “You look pretty good,” the dog said, “for a tree on the street.”
“Do I?” the tree asked.
“Yes,” the dog said. “A lot of people gave you a sparkle.”
“They did, didn’t they,” the tree said thoughtfully. “The caroling was nice.”
The dog went over to his master lying motionless on the ground. He licked the snow off of the mans face and turned back to the tree. “What you need is a star,” the dog said. The sky was bright with stars. “There’s one over there,” the dog said, pointing with his nose. “Up really high. If I move around,” he got up and shifted his position, “when I look up it’s just above your tippy top branch.”
“Tippy top branch,” the tree said.
“Yep. I can see it sparkling,” the dog said. “You look nice.”
“I miss the music,” the tree said. “Can you sing?” it asked the dog.
“I’m a dog. I bark. It’s hard for me to hold a melody.”
“Try,” the tree said. “I’d like to hear sound. Sounds would wrap it up for me. Mozart or Beethoven would be wonderful but I’ll settle for a sound. The night is so quiet.”
“I’ll try,” the dog said. He barked and howled trying to give the rough sounds the melody of Silent night.
“That’s very nice,” the tree said. “Howl dog, sing” — and that was the last thing the tree remembered.
4.
When the man woke up a face was hovering about him anxiously. When he opened his eyes he watched it relax. “Well,” a voice said, “fine.”
He looked around. He could see he was in a bed in a hospital. “Am I dead?” he asked, “going to die?”
“Oh no,” the nurse by his bed said. “No,” you’re fine. I was just worried a bit.”
“What happened?” the man asked, “the last thing I remember I was a tree.”
“Well, your dog saved you,” the nurse said. “You must have fallen. No one would have noticed but he was howling and barking and barking and howling and finally someone stopped and went over and there you were, freezing to death.
“The dog?” the man asked, suddenly anxious.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “A neighbor took him in for the night. Here’s the address and phone number.”
“Can I go home?” the man asked?
“I guess you can,” the nurse said, “anytime you want.”
“What day is it,” the man asked the nurse.
“It’s Christmas day, of course,” the nurse said.
“Of course,” the man said, “of course.”
When the man left the hospital he stopped at the first pay phone and called his neighbor and thanked him for keeping the dog and wished him a merry Christmas and asked if he could come and get the dog. “Why not,” the neighbor said. “He’s a very smart animal and he seems to love Christmas. The children decorated him but I think he misses you,” he added.
When the man arrived to pick up the dog he gave his neighbor the gift he had picked up on his way over and thanked him for his kindness and the dog jumped all over the man and licked him and the man did not begrudge him his exuberance. On the way home the man and the dog joined a group of carolers for a while then he and the dog walked until they found someone selling Christmas trees on the street and the man bought the scrawniest, most forlorn tree and carried it joyfully home where he and the dog decorated it with candy wrappers sharing the candy, and, although they were so stuffed with sweets they could hardly eat any more the man cooked them both a wonderful dinner of scraps he had kept in the freezer for emergencies.
After Christmas was over the man decided that it was a shame that Christmas was only one day a year and the dog agreed and they both decided that there was no reason they should begrudge themselves Christmas the other 364 days of the year so the man and his dog celebrated the spirit of Christmas every day of the year and people in the neighborhood said of the two of them what people said of Ebenezer Scrooge; that they really knew how to keep Christmas.
§
Every neighborhood has its characters. In my neighborhood the local character was an odd duck with an odd name.
He kind of lived in the park more or less. He wasn’t homeless. He had a small apartment. But when he wasn’t sleeping or working he preferred to be in the park — always sitting on a ladder. He worked on the ladder too. Whatever job anyone needed done off the ground he could do. On the ground he was clumsy, walked like a wounded duck and couldn’t hammer a nail in straight, but on the ladder he could do anything, anything.
People called him, the Man with the Ladder. If he had any other name no one knew it or if they did they never used it because no one would know who they were talking about.
People trusted him because he was part of the familiar landscape, a tree or an old building and whatever he did, he did in public, in the open, in full sight, on top of that ladder. Because he spent so much of his time in the park, some of the single parents in the neighborhood used him as an informal baby sitting service. Parents never asked him to babysit, they just brought a child and parked it close to the foot of the ladder and made it clear that they were entrusting their precious to his care. If the child was old enough to listen, he would tell it a story. If it wasn’t he carried it up to the top rung of the ladder and rocked it or bounced it on his knee. He was a very responsible babysitter.
One of the single mothers who used him often was Molly Schwartz, a postal worker who, as a second job, sometimes filled in as a school crossing guard when Gertrude, the usual crossing guard called in sick, or as the doorman for one of the elegant apartment buildings in the neighborhood when Willey, the usual doorman had to leave his post for one reason or another for a while.
When the mother had a job and the Man with the Ladder was in the park, she would bring her little girl – whose name was Tatanya —as close to the ladder as was possible without making what she was doing obvious, and say as loudly as was necessary to catch anyone’s attention who needed telling “now just stay here.” And pointing vaguely in the direction of nowhere in particular, and edging the little girl slightly closer to the ladder, she would tell her again to stay put, until finally the little girl was firmly planted against the back of the ladder, and everyone had been adequately communicated to. “I will pick you up in an hour, two hours at the most. Do you understand?” she would ask, and look at the Man with the Ladder, and the little girl would say “yes” quietly, and the Man with the Ladder would look away and nod as inconspicuously as possible and wonder who baby sat for the little girl when he himself was working.
Since it was not a real babysitting job he did not receive real wages, but when the mother returned to pick up the child she always had a bag with fruit or pastries in it, and she would say, to everyone who needed telling, something like, “I brought us a treat,” and then, feigning surprise, as if the grocer had put an extra apple or pastry in the bag, offer it to the Man with the Ladder, as if it was him or throwing it away. Once, when she worked overtime, she found a five dollar bill underneath the ladder that she insisted he must have dropped and forced him to adopt it.
A few days before Christmas the Man with the Ladder was in the park, close to the statue of Artigas, when Tatanya and her mother showed up and he realized he had a babysitting job which did not surprise him because Christmas week was usually a busy time for Tatanya’s mother.
Now he and Tatanya were old friends so to speak and he knew the first thing she would expect, after the chit chat about the weather was a story. And since it was Christmas, even though the little girl was Jewish, it would have to be a Christmas story because Christmas demanded a Christmas story. He racked him brain for a suitable story but his mind went blank so that after Tatanya’s mother had gone through her instructions and left, he sat on the ladder staring into space.
Tantanya tried to help. “Do you think it will snow for Christmas?” she asked.
“I’m sure it will,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I can feel the snow in the air.” Then he fell silent.
“I know,” he said, after a while, “you’d like a Christmas story. Only I’ve drawn a blank,” he confessed.
“You’ll come up with something,” Tatanya replied, “you always do. “Wet snow or dry snow?” she asked, trying to prolong the weather prolog. “Wet,” the Man with the Ladder replied, “definitely wet,” and sank back into thoughtful silence again.
“Sometimes I get presents,” the little girl said trying to spark an idea, “for Christmas, even though I’m Jewish. It’s a special temptation,” she said, “not to be to greedy, not to want too much, on a holiday that isn’t even yours.”
“Christmas has become everyone’s holiday,” the Man with the Ladder commented, “and greed is always a problem, for everyone,” he said slowly. The little girl could see the seed of a Christmas story tumble down from somewhere into the Man with the Ladder’s head then sprout. As he turned to her she could see the first leaves beginning to grow but she could not tell exactly what kind of flower the plant was going to have.
“It makes me think of a story,” he said, “only…”
“Only what?” the little girl asked.
“I’m not sure if it’s suitable for a child.”
“I’m eight “ the little girl said.
Eight, the Man with the Ladder thought, going on twenty four. “Eight,” he said. “Well, I’ll start telling it,” he continued, “and if you think it’s not fit for an eight year old you can stop me.”
The little girl smiled at him. “I’ve seen the destruction of whole
star systems in the movies, I have my own lightsword. I have email pen pals in
The Man with the Ladder looked down. I’m sure you will, he thought to himself.
“Well,” he began, “a little girl about your age or a little older got sick and went into the hospital. Although the hospital gave her the best care in all the world the little girl died.”
“It doesn’t sound much like a Christmas story,” Tatanya said.
“If it bothers you I’ll stop,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“No, I mean it’s sad but death is part of life, even seven years olds know that.”
The Man with the Ladder thought for a minute. “You know,” he said. “I’ think this may not be much of a Christmas …”
“Why don’t you continue,” Tatanya Schwartz said. “I’ve had all of the Disney cartoon world I can hold,” she said. “If it gets too bad, I’ll just think about enchanted princesses and …”
“Will that make you forget the sadness? “ the Man with the Ladder asked.
“No,” the little girl said smiling, “but it will remind me that a just so story is just a just so story.”
The Man with the Ladder coughed and continued. “Well the parents of the little girl who died were very unhappy and angry and they went to see the doctor who took care of her in the hospital. This doctor was very sad and he was sympathetic because he could not save everyone whose life he took into his hands, especially this little girl. When they came to his office they demanded to know whose fault it was, who was to blame.
Now the doctor knew that if they had brought the little girl in when she first got sick instead of putting off the visit for a few weeks the girl would not have gotten so sick, and he knew that if they had had insurance they would have brought her in sooner, and if the man had not lost his job because the economy collapsed, they would have had insurance. And he knew that if the drug companies had acted a little quicker the medicine that would have prevented the illness would have been available much earlier and she would not have gotten so sick at all, and if he knew that if he had been more skilled he might have seen what was wrong with her sooner and saved her life, so that it was no one’s fault really and everyone’s fault.
But the doctor, who was not only clever but wise, knew that the little girl’s parents would not be satisfied with that explanation so instead, he asked the couple if they believed in God, and when they said yes, the doctor said what he always said when he had to deal with unmitigated tragedy. “Some things are in Gods hands,” he said sincerely. “It was God’s decision to take your little girl and no one knows why God does what he does.”
“But instead of being mollified…,”
“Mollified?” the little girl repeated, interrupting the telling of the story.
“Calmed and quieted,” the Man with the Ladder explained. He looked at Tatanya and the little girl seemed to understand so he continued. “Instead of being calmed and comforted by the statement that it was an act of God, the father leaped up. ‘Well if God’s to blame then God must pay for it.’ That was the beginning of it,” the Man with the Ladder said.
The Man with the Ladder rested a moment looking over the park before he continued. “The mother and the father were poor and couldn’t afford a private lawyer so they went to a storefront legal clinic that was staffed with lawyers from big law firms who donated some of their time to the poor who could not afford a lawyer with a fancy office who charged by the minute.
“We want you to sue God for us,” they said to the young man with the fancy suit and fancy shirt and tie who greeted them at the makeshift table in the storefront.
Tatanya Schwarz’s face grew serious and she interrupted the Man with the Ladder. “Why did they want to sue God? Were they looking for money?”
“I don’t think they wanted money,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I think they wanted God to come clean about why he had done what he had done, and they had two other children and I think they might have wanted him to assure them that it would not happen again. I’m really not sure what they wanted,” he said.
“The lawyer said that he would look into the law on the subject of suing God, but to himself he said that it was the stupidest thing that he had ever heard, sue God indeed. But when he went back to his big leather chaired office and jollily told his colleagues the story, it set their minds working and one of the cleverest of them said, ‘Wait a minute. We could make a class action suit out of this case. “
“A class action suit,” Tatanya Schwartz said, “I don’t understand.”
“Some lawsuits are brought against someone on behalf of everyone who is more or less in the same pickle they are in even though they may not have started the lawsuit themselves.”
“Why did he think of a class action thing?” the little girl inquired.
“Well, the law firm they all worked for was representing a tobacco company that was being sued and he thought that if they were clever they could blame God for tobacco, ‘I mean,’ he explained to the lawyer who had told the story of the parents who wanted him to sue God, ‘if God hadn’t put tobacco here on earth then the cigarette company couldn’t have made cigarettes and people would not have smoked and gotten lung cancer and died.’ And then these lawyers sent out a memo to all of the other lawyers in the firm who were handling really sticky cases telling them that they should think of getting on this case that was being put together to sue God. After that it grew like Topsy.”
“What grew like Topsy?” Tatanya Schwarz asked.
“The list of people who signed on to sue God,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Pretty soon everyone who had a complaint about the way the world was, joined in as a class member of this suit — which means they signed on to sue God. Are you getting bored?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“No I’m really interested, but I was wondering why God didn’t just slam them down, I mean lightening bolts, plagues, Job and the Pharaoh, if not on everyone who was suing him, the lawyers at least?”
“I wondered that myself,” the Man with the Ladder said. “But God held his peace. I think he was waiting to see if people would come to their senses. But they didn’t and it got worse. The list of people who signed on to sue God grew and grew. Women complained he had made them smaller in size and a little bit physically weaker than men, and everyone had some complaint about the way God made the world. All the people who had to wear glasses sued because they had to wear glasses and the people who had diseases that had no cure, sued God because he had made diseases without cures, which they felt was unfair, and the children sued because they had to take orders from their parents … you get the idea.”
“I think I do,” the little girl said,” and the Man with the Ladder could see here thinking about her grievances.
“You know how lawyers are,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Well, maybe you don’t so I’ll tell you. They try to think things out to every logical detail. Anyway, when this got rolling they started to think about collecting money from God to compensate people who had been hurt by the things God did wrong. The lawyers tried to think the issue through and they saw trouble collecting from God himself since he hadn’t really been seen anywhere for a while, and miracles were scarce, so they named the Churches and Synagogues as co-defendants with God.”
“I don’t understand,” Tatanya Schwarz said.
“Well I’m not sure I understand either, but they looked at all of the organized religions and found that every one of them claimed to represent God on earth, so they named them in the suit also, meaning they sued them too.”
“They sued them too.”
“Yes,” the Man with the Ladder said, “down to the village priest and your rabbi.”
“My rabbi too.”
“Absolutely.”
“I thought you said this was a Christmas story,” the little girl said.
“I’m getting to the Christmas story part of it,” the Man with the
Ladder said, “it’s coming.” “Well it got to be a
pretty big mess,” the Man with the Ladder continued. “At first people worried
that it might turn into a struggle between religious people and non religious
people but it turned out that a lot of the people who had complaints about God
were really religious people, who had been slighted and people who believed
whatever cost their church might suffer would be outweighed by the cost to
other religions. So if you were Jewish you thought that the burden would bear
on the Catholic Church more because they had more churches and monasteries
along the
“It sounds like a mess,” Tatanya Schwartz said.
“It was,” the Man with the Ladder continued, “but most thinking people thought the courts would throw it out.”
“They didn’t, though,” the little girl said leaping ahead of the narrative.
“They didn’t. The judge who was the judge on the case got a jury together. Now he was young and wasn’t worrying about dieing soon and thought he would have a whole lifetime and career to make it up to God if he had to, and meanwhile he would be seen as a fearful crusader for justice and everyone else was blinded by the historic nature of the lawsuit and the case grew legs of its own.”
“Didn’t they ever see the Miracle on
“Well there wasn’t any opponent to speak of,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Almost everyone was part of the suit.”
The little girl sat thinking. “No one asked me if I wanted to take God on in court.”
“They didn’t ask me either but, sure enough, I was included in the class of petitioners.”
“You sued God?” the little girl said in amazement.
“I was enrolled on the list of complainants,” the Man with the Ladder admitted.
“What complaint did you have about God?” Tatanya asked.
“Well,” the Man with the Ladder said, “none of the books I appeared in were ever published and unpublished authors were a sub-class of complainants.”
“Were published authors on Gods side?” the eight year old asked.
“Not quite,” the Man with the Ladder said. “They complained about royalties and the fact that God made people’s brains too small and gave them only two eyes so that they could only read one book at a time.”
“It sounds like a frivolous…”
“Where did you learn that word?” the Man with the Ladder interrupted.
“On a box of cereal,” the little girl said “where I enlarge my vocabulary in the morning.”
The Man with the Ladder shook his head. “Well, the suit went to court and the jury to a person found God guilty.”
“Of what?” Tatanya wanted to know.
“Of being arbitrary, of capriciousness, of a lack of due diligence — he wasn’t careful enough about what he created,” the Man with the Ladder explained.
“So the suit was over and God lost,” the little girl concluded.
“God lost the first court case, but when people think there is something wrong with the way a lawsuit was handled they complain and take the case up to a higher court. That’s what they did here. They appealed. The churches and synagogues and mosques took the case up to a higher court.”
“And …?”
“God lost at the higher court,” the Man with the Ladder explained.” And then they took the case up to the highest court and God lost there so that was the end of it. God owed everyone a lot of money.”
“How much?” Tatanya asked.
“I forget exactly,” the Man with the Ladder said, “but it was a lot of money.”
“But how could they collect?”
“Well, they were thinking of forcing the churches and synagogues and mosques to pay when….
“When what?”
“When astronomers reported they had discovered a meteor high in the sky.”
“A meteor. What did a meteor have to do with the settlement against God?”
“Well it was a very strange meteor. “
“Why strange?” the little girl wanted to know.
“Well it was made out of gold and silver and platinum and jewels and such.”
“How did the astronomers know,” Tatanya inquired, “what it was made out of?”
“I don’t know how astronomers know what they do. Probably it has to do with light and such. Anyway they reported this meteor had appeared suddenly in the sky and was made out of precious metals and stones. They calculated its weight and the value it had was exactly how much the court case had fined God for his lack of due diligence.”
“Exactly that amount,” the little girl said in amazement.
“Exactly. Only the trouble was that it was heading straight for earth. So, I guess you could say that, in a manner of speaking, it was delivering God’s judgment because the astronomers calculated that if the meteor hit the earth nothing would be left of the planet.”
“Nothing would be left?”
“Nothing larger than a dust mote. If God paid his fine to the dollar with the meteor that was worth exactly that amount of money, the judgment against him would have been satisfied and the fine paid, but, of course, there would be no one left to enjoy it because the earth would be destroyed.”
“You have to watch what you go to court for,” the little girl said, thoughtfully.
“Exactly.”
The Man with the Ladder suggested lunch and they ate the sandwiches the little girl’s mother had prepared. The little girl did not speak at all and the Man with the Ladder could see she was thinking.
“I still haven’t heard anything about Christmas,” Tatanya Schwartz said as she finished the last of her dessert.
“I was coming to it,” the Man with the Ladder said as he resumed telling the story. “Now the astronomers couldn’t say exactly when the meteor would hit or even if it would for sure. They said it wobbled and the wobbling made their calculations unsure but they did a rough calculation and said about December 25th more or less.”
“Christmas, more or less,” the girl said.
“They couldn’t be certain exactly. They said it was possible that it might miss the planet entirely and spin off into the deep blue of space and they couldn’t be sure. But according to their best calculations it would hit the Earth on Dec 25.”
“Christmas.”
“Christmas.”
“What happened?” the little girl asked after a reasonable silence.
“Well all the people who had participated in the class action suit got together called the lawyers and said, “We’ve changed our minds. We’ve decided we don’t think suing God was a great idea. Withdraw the suit.”
“The lawyers explained it was too late for that, that they had won and winning was winning.”
“Then the people pointed out that a meteor in the Equator was more than a warning shot to the shoulder, but the lawyers said they were very sorry, really sorry, but the law was the law.”
“Well, people were really discouraged. Everyone who had been hot on suing God got together on the internet and the talked the matter over in emails and chat rooms and they decided, almost to a person, that they didn’t want Gods money.
“We don’t want God’s money,” people said. “Give it to the poor” And almost everyone wanted to give what they had won from God to the poor who offered to give up their share to people who were even poorer than they were, and pretty soon there was agreement that there shouldn’t be any poor any more and that the banks could move around the money they had and the cars and the toys and the computers that people owned until everyone had pretty much what everyone else had, but it didn’t help the situation. The astronomers checked their calculations and although the meteor had gotten a little wobblier and they were even less sure about their calculations than they were before, they were still predicting the world would go up in a puff of smoke on the 25th of December, Christmas.
“And the people who sued God, which was pretty much everyone, realized they had made a big, big mistake. Everyone prayed and prayed but nothing happened. It was getting closer to Christmas and the astronomers reported that the meteor was hurtling even faster towards our blue, peaceful earth spinning in the air.
“After that announcement, people decided that if they were going to go they might as well go with dignity and in peace. People made presents for one another and instead of cutting down trees for Christmas they decorated any tree they could find in their neighborhood.
“Most people tried to put the meteor out of their minds and prepared to celebrate. But there were cranky people, who had invested their happiness in a sharp, post holiday rise of the market who were surly and said, ‘humbug,’ and other people who invested all of their happiness in the beginning of the baseball season asked sourly ‘what is to celebrate?’
“But people who thought deeply about things, (among them a few lawyers) said, our old earth is so beautiful, and being alive is wonderful, and things weren’t all that bad and even with the mistakes that God made in not giving girls the same muscles as men and moustaches, and making women bear the children, there was a lot about life that was really good.
“It snowed on the 24th of December almost everywhere and people went out and walked in the snow and said, ‘we are going to miss this. How could we have not seen how good things were overall and we could have made it better without complaining so much.’ The looked up and saw the meteor which was very bright in the sky because it was made of gold and silver and jewels and things and they thought it was beautiful even though they knew it was God’s judgment.
On the evening of the 24th people went around with their families and friends and sang to one another, not only Christmas carols but all sorts of songs, and, because they figured they weren’t going to get up again, they gave one another presents and opened them and were happy with ties, and Hawaiian shirts, and toys without batteries that didn’t walk or talk only sat there. And they ate meals together and reminisced about the good old days which as far as most people were concerned was last week.”
“Afterwards a lot of people dropped into any church or synagogue or mosque that they were close to, not paying a lot of attention to what denomination of what religion it was, and they thanked God for having been alive and said they were sorry they hadn’t recognized how wonderful being alive was.”
“And even those people who did not believe in God and who did not go to some church or synagogue said a little prayer as prepared to go to sleep for the last time acknowledging how wonderful life was and they said they were sorry about suing him because it was a stupid thing to do.”
“And …?” the little girl asked after spending a minute thinking about what the Man with the Ladder said.
“Well everyone got up on the 25th alive and well.”
“But the meteor.., “ Tatanya Schwartz exclaimed.
“The meteor had disappeared. No one could explain it. The astronomers had trained the telescopes on it and had refined their calculations, but on the 25th when everyone got up the meteor was gone. Disappeared completely.”
“So the world wasn’t destroyed?” the little girl said with relief in her voice.
“On the contrary, the Man with the Ladder said. “It seemed to be refreshed. People said that God had given everyone Christmas as a present because he had spared them and everyone went back to grousing about the faults they found with the world but also with a sense of the wonder of it and the beauty of it.”
“And the lawyers?”
“Well the lawyers learned their lesson also and they tried to hold the law out as a measure of last resort and…” Just then they heard the familiar cry of the little girl’s mother who yelled, “Look what I brought everyone…”
§
Christmas 2002, was a season of sparkling ambiguity. People awaited the holiday with a mixture of great joy and dread; joy because it was Christmas, dread because people anticipated that even a small increase of good will in the world would attract terrorists, kooks and monsters the way a drop of honey at a picnic attracts ants and wasps.
New York City, — and the country and the world— wobbled a bit, surrendering itself to the joy of the season and then pulling back, husbanding its energy for invisible dangers, impromptu disasters, ad-libbed tragedies. People anticipated joy and but imagined calamities; they would look at a Christmas tree and see in its snow laden branches the facades of destroyed buildings: In snowflakes they imagined they saw tiny hexagonal spores that looked like anthrax; they would stare at a gift and notice in the ribbon wrapping something that might be the fuse of a bomb.
It was in this ambiguous and uncertain situation that the crying statue appeared.
1.
“I passed a crying statue,” Mrs. Grunderson told her husband when he came home after work.
“I am not buying another…”
“A crying statue on the street, on
“It’s Christmas. You can guarantee that if a statue is crying, someone is selling something. We do not have room in this apartment for a statue,” Mr. Grunderson said as he turned on the TV.
“I want you come down with me and look at it.”
“Leave it alone,” Mr. Grunderson said. “Christmas is hard enough without statues that are crying.”
“I want you to look at it and tell me why it is crying,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“It has to have reasons?” Mr. Grunderson asked.
“It’s crying,” his wife said.
“Pigeons,” Mr. Gunderson said, “december cold, a hole in the ground,” he added. “Look around. Wherever you look there are enough reasons to cry.” He folded himself onto the couch. “Was it talking as well as crying?” he asked.
“Only crying when I was looking,” his wife said flatly.
“If it’s not talking, how would I know why it’s crying?” He glanced at his wife.
“When you see it you’ll know. You know everything,” she said tuning her voice to a tempered, reedy sarcasm.
“Where is it this silent, crying statue?” Mr. Grunderson asked.
“I told you,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“Tell me again,” Mr. Grunderson said, as he got up and put on his parka and waited by the door while Mrs. Grunderson pulled on her red woolen coat.
“In the park, on 6th, near Spring.”
“Damned artists, damned
2.
Once outside, he walked quickly, not paying attention to his wife struggling to keep up.
“Don’t rush,” she complained. “You are always rushing.”
“To see a phenomenon,” he answered smartly, “you don’t walk slowly. Too slow and its mood might change,” he said. Then, after a minute he said. “I can’t wait to see this talking piece of art.”
“It’s not a piece of art, it’s a statue” Mrs. Grunderson called out from behind him.
“Whatever,” Mr. Gunderson said.
“Crying,” his wife whispered softly. “There,” she pointed as they
came up on the park that hugged
“Artigas,” Mr. Grunderson said “Artigas is crying?”
“Not Artigas,” Mrs. Grunderson said. “Next to
him. There” She pointed past the familiar statue of the savior of
Mr. Grunderson peered at a dark collapsed mass that huddled on a pedestal close to the familiar statue of Jose Artigas.
“That one.”
There was a statue, not nearly as tall as the statue honoring Artigas. An ill defined figure was crouching or squatting uncomfortably. Its body was scrunched up but it looked like a man, blurry solid features burrowed in the dusk. It seemed to be looking at lower Manhatten.
Mr. Grunderson watched as two glistening points of light moved down the cheeks of what he took to be a man’s face. He moved closer and peered at the nondescript statue.
“You’re right. It’s crying,” he said. “Tears are rolling down its face.” He stood staring at the statue for a minute. “OK,” he said, “I’ve seen it. It’s crying. Yes.” He looked around. “Where is the person who owns it?”
“It’s a city park,” Mrs. Grunderson said. “There’s no one around,” she added. “No one at all. There wasn’t before and there isn’t now.” There was a sense of satisfaction in her voice. “It’s not selling.”
“Rest assured, someone is selling something. It’s Christmas. Someone is always selling something. Maybe it is advertising something,” he said after a while. He walked around the statue looking for a slogan or a logo. There was nothing.
“It could be Candid Camera,” Mrs. Grunderson said, looking around
for a camera. “Sometimes they hide in vans.” She scanned the area for a van.
When she could not spot one she yelled out. “OK, “she said loudly, “Come out,
come out,” she yelled. The few passersby crossing
“I want to go back home,” Mr. Grunderson said suddenly . He looked at the tears tumbling down the statues cheeks. “It’s stone, it shouldn’t be crying.”
“Or iron,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“It shouldn’t be crying anyway,” Mr. Grunderson replied. “It was not in the park yesterday,” he added.
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“I’m sure,” Mr. Grunderson said.
“What do you think he is crying about?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“I haven’t any idea,” Mr. Grunderson said.
“How can you be so sure the statue wasn’t in the park yesterday if you don’t have a clue why it is crying.
Mr. Grunderson turned his back on the non-sequitor. “It’s Christmas,” Mr. Gunderson said.
“How do you think it got to the park,” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“By truck probably,” her husband said. “Maybe a….”
His wife growled at him. “I meant…”
“A drunken Santa Claus, a confused parks commissioner, a pigeon lover, the CIA. Who knows?” He was very quiet on the way back home. He fell behind his wife. “Now you’re not walking so fast,” she said.
“I’m thinking,” Mr. Grunderson said, “It’s Christmas. What is a crying statue doing in the park?”
3.
“They did an exorcism,” Mrs. Grunderson informed her husband as he walked in the door shaking accumulated snow off in the hall as he struggled out of his coat.
“Who did an exorcism?”
“A priest from St. Micheals. Mrs. Bibcock saw the statue was crying so she went and told the brothers at St. Micheals . They sent father Machilis.”
“Mrs. Bibcock noticed the statue was crying,” Mr. Grunderson said incredulously, “she’s nearly blind…”
“I told her and a couple of other women from the church group.”
“St. Micheals leaves its crèche up all year,” Mr. Gunderson said, “ that’s what St. Micheals knows about statues. Why did they do an exorcism?”
“Mrs. Bibcock talked to the brothers. They thought it might be an evil spirit so they sent father Machilis to do an exoricism. It didn’t work.”
“Of course it didn’t work,” her husband said, curtly dismissing the ritual. “Superstition,” he said, exhaling quickly, “superstition dressed up in a cassock. It never worked, ever. Why should it work now? “ When his wife did not respond to the provocation he continued. “The poor statue is more like a lost soul. They should have blessed it.”
“Martin said to tell you he put up an webcam,” his wife said, in a matter of fact way, emphasizing the word webcam. “He wrote something down.” She handed her husband a piece of paper with something printed on it. “He said you should look at it.”
“A webcam,” Mr. Gunderson said as he let himself sink into the couch. He looked at the piece of paper his wife had handed him. It was a url: WWW. CRYINGSTATUE.COM.
“What’s a webcam?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“A computer thing,” Mr. Gunderson answered. “It takes pictures and puts them on the internet lets you see them on your computer. Your nephew put up a webcam?”
“To take pictures of the statue he said,” his wife reported.
“I never liked that boy,” Mr. Gunderson said, after a moment’s silence. “He’s unnaturally smart. The boy’s father thinks the Louvre is a French whorehouse and your sister can’t read street signs and they have this kid who knows everything, more than everything. It’s unnatural. You should have asked him why the statue is crying.”
“He said he didn’t have an idea. But he thought it would make an interesting web site. He set up a web site then he put up a webcam. What’s a website?”
Mr. Grunderson ignored the question. “Naked women make an interesting web site, a crying statue in a park I don’t know,” Mr. Grunderson said. “I didn’t notice a webcam.”
“You went to see the statue?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“Not to see. Lunch. I was walking that way. I looked. It was still crying. No one seemed to notice or care as far as I could see.”
“Father Michael called the Village Voice,” Mrs. Gunderson said, “after the exorcism didn’t work.” The sentence hung weightless in the air. “When the exorcism didn’t work he called the Village Voice,” she repeated.
“How did he know the exorcism didn’t work?” Mr. Grunderson asked.
“Because the statue didn’t stop crying.”
“And the …”
“He called the Village Voice because he thought if they did a piece on the statue, they might mention the Christmas pageant at the church. A reporter came down from the paper. He looked at the statue and took notes. “I’ll write up the story,” he said,” but it won’t be published. The voice doesn’t ‘do Christmas.’”
Mr. Grunderson grunted. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. The completely wrong tack,” he said, not wanting to sound like he was defending St. Michaels or the priest. “If they had said the statue was crying because its surgeon had botched a sex change operation or it was an abused, homeless psychopath, maybe the Voice would have printed the story.”
“It’s a Christmas statue that’s crying,” Mrs. Grunderson said, “it doesn’t have anything to do with, with… problems.”
“Who says the statue has anything to do with Christmas?” Mr. Grunderson asked.
“Why else would it have appeared now?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“Who knows?” Mr. Grunderson muttered. “I called the parks department,” he confessed.
“You work for sanitation,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“I know who I work for,” Mr. Grunderson barked. “I wanted to know what they knew about the statue. When I got into the garage. Instead of putting the orders in for all that salt right away I called parks. They don’t know crap,” he said.
“Salt, a lot of salt? Snow?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
Mr. Grunderson was in charge of the salt inventory for the city
sanitation department. “Enough, they expect enough. It’s been snowing heavy in
“I’ll bet it was supposed to be put uptown, in
“I described the statue,” Mr. Grunderson said. “They don’t know anything about it.”
“It is a mystery,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
4.
“Lunch time, I used to be able to sit next to Artigas and smoke a
cigar in peace,” Mr. Grunderson complained when Mrs. Grunderson asked how his
day went. “Now thanks to the damned crying statue and your nephew, the park is
crazy with people. They are thick around the statue. They complained about me
smoking. Damned
“Don’t blaspheme,” Mrs. Grunderson yelled. She shifted the blame. “It’s the computers and internet.”
“They are selling things,” her husband said, “I told you.”
“What things?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“Food, T shirts with pictures of the statue, hats, even little statues of the statue, handkerchiefs. Didn’t you go down to the park today?”
“It’s Thursday. I cleaned,” his wife said. “How did they make them so fast,” Mrs. Grunderson asked her husband.
“What?”
“The things they were selling. How did they make them so fast?”
“It’s
“Tears of the crying statue,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“I bought you one,” Mr. Grunderson said taking out a nicely wrapped packet from his pocket.
“What?” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“A handkerchief. A souvenir.”
“What else did you buy?” his wife asked.
“Nothing. I listened.”
“To what?”
“People talking. They set up a little talking platform where people could make speeches. Next to the chimney the Salvation Army put up.”
“A chimney?”
“For collecting. I told you so,” Mr. Grunderson said. “Selling, collecting. “
“For giving,” Mrs. Grunderson said. “It’s Christmas.”
“Not yet — nearly,” her husband said, “but not yet. All of the speeches – theories, what the statue has to do with Christmas and why it’s crying.”
“And,” his wife said.
“No one has a clue,” Mr. Grunderson said. “Everyone’s completely innocent of ideas.”
5.
“Mary called,” Mrs. Grunderson said as Mr. Grunderson took off his coat and shook off the snow.
“How are the girls?” Mr. Grunderson asked
“They are fine.”
“How long has it been?” he stuffed the words into the silence.
“She wants to make peace,” his wife said.
Mr. Grunderson walked out of the room. Mrs. Grunderson followed his footsteps and heard the door open. When the footsteps stopped she knew he was looking at the pictures from the doorway.
The footsteps started again and she knew he was moving toward one of the pictures on the wall. “She wants to make peace,” Mrs. Grunderson said to him again, her voice scraping as it carried around the corners of the apartment.
Mr. Grunderson began measuring time using pieces of the room. The statue was crying. He had resisted crying. It seemed like an adult thing to do. The pictures on the wall traced a life, a whole life. He looked at the latest series. Tom and his wife. Tom, his wife and Elizabeth, then Tom and his wife, Elizabeth, Tanya, and Alice.
“She doesn’t have family. Her parents are dead,” his son had reported when he called to tell them he had met someone special.
“How can a person not have relatives?”
“An uncle, a couple of aunts.”
“She has no family,” his son reminded his father when he called to tell his parents he was getting married.
“Fine,” Mr. Gunderson said. “We will make a wedding.”
“There’s a problem,” Tom said. “Her religion…. she…”
“She’s not …”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter,” they said. “We’ll have a wedding.”
They were married in St. Michaels. Mr. Grunderson worked something out.
“It was a wonderful wedding,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“She fidgeted in church,” Mr. Grunderson observed.
“It wasn’t her church, she was nervous.” Mrs. Grunderson answered.
Mr. Grunderson took it as a sign of something bad. “She doesn’t have a church. Why did she fidget?”
“Everyone had a good time. Relatives, neighbors, friends, they all had a good time,” Mrs. Grunderson commented. Two days later her son and his bride were gone.
Mr. Grunderson hoped they would stay and live in the city
but after a month his son called to say they were moving to
“There’s air everywhere, even in NY,” Mr. Gunderson said.
“I know. She’s a private person. She’s not used to family.”
“If you think its best,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
Mr. Grunderson said, “OK, that’s the way it is.”
The children came bim bang boom. Two
girls then they rested. Then another. They visited
“We’ll come visit you,” Mrs. Grunderson said, but visits were not encouraged.
“Is there anything wrong?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.
“No.”
“Did we do something?”
“No, not exactly. She prefers…”
And while Mary seemed to grow more comfortable on each visit and more of her showed up in Tom’s room where they stayed when they visited, she maintained her distance.
From the family picture they sent instead of visiting one year, it was clear the girls were growing. Mary looked softer and Tom began to look like the banker he was. He began to show an interest in the idea of banking which he had never done before. Mr. Grunderson had framed the first page of an article he wrote on adaptations of banks to electronic commerce which was published in a trade journal. He had not understood most of it.
Tom’s voice was enthusiastic when he called in September. “I’m coming into the city,” he said during the last phone call, “an interview.” The investment firm he worked for was bought by one of the city’s largest investment banks.
“Wonderful, with everyone?” Mrs. Grunderson asked.
“No, just me. Business but…”
“But what?”
“Well, we may be moving back if the job comes through.”
“Wonderful,” Mrs. Grunderson said, gushing.
Mr. Grunderson was more cautious. “Is Mary willing to come back?” he asked.
“We’re talking about it, it’s a possiblity.”
“I’ll get your room ready,” Mrs. Grunderson said.
“No, They are putting me up in a hotel near the WTC. The interview is early in the morning. I’ll come over for dinner after I’m done.”
There was no dinner, there was no after the interview.
“Let the dead bury the dead,” his wife said when they called. It did not make sense. The calls that tried to mobilize her, get her to come to the city, to come closer, angered her and she pulled into a shell. They argued. “The girls…”
“The girls are at home here.”
“And you.”
“I miss Tom, terribly” she said.
“We can… we are family.”
“Let the dead bury the dead,” she repeated.
“She wants to make peace,” Mrs. Grunderson said. She says she will get a hotel room, she won’t put us out, only she… “
“Tell her there’s room at the inn,” Mr. Grunderson said. He looked at the pictures of his granddaughters. “Tell her we want to make peace too.”
The girls had grown. They had only seen the youngest one a few times but their son had sent pictures and videos.
“Pilgrims, they look like pilgrims,” Mr. Grunderson said. “Gaunt, worn.”
“Simple living.”
“He was a banker,” Mr. Grunderson said.
Things were awkward at first when Mary arrived with the girls who were excited by the airplane ride and the city. The unspeakable was all there was to talk about.
The girls took to their grandparents, especially the small one. She was seven and reminded Mr. Grunderson of her father, the same curiousity, the same enthusiasm for things around her.
They settled in and spent a day looking at Christmas things in the city. They shopped for toys. After a while Mary gave up trying to keep their enthusiasm for Christmas in check. They visited the Statue, bought handkerchiefs. It was the little youngest of his grandchildren who found the crying statue mysterious.
Everyone had settled in after doing the windows on
Mr.Grunderson looked at her mother.
“If she wants to,” Mary said. “I’ll….”
“No,” Mr. Grunderson said. “I’ll take her. If it’s alright.”
They bundled up and the seven year old clutched his hand as they maneuvered the slushy streets.
“Why is it crying?” the little girl asked.
“I don’t know,” her grandfather said.
“It doesn’t seem sad,” the girl said.
“Your right,” Mr. Grunderson said. “I’ve noticed that too. Not really sad.”
“But it’s crying.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I miss my father,” the little girl said.
“I miss my father,” Mr. Grunderson said, “and I miss your father too,” and held her hand tightly.
When they got to the statue the park was packed with people. The fading winter daylight lingered on the statue.
“Can we get closer?” the girl said as they stood in front of the statue.
“I don’t see why not,” Mr. Grunderson said.
The girl moved closer until she was just below the statue. Then she reached up and in one unstoppable stretching childlike motion took its hand. Frightened that she might slip as she stood up on her toes and stretched for the statue’s hand, Mr. Grunderson grabbed at the girl. It was an awkward gesture and left the two of them unbalanced. The old man held his granddaughter at an angle tightly around the waist as she curled her hand as much around the statues hand as possible. The man standing next to him, worrying that the old man was falling, grabbed him and a chain of people seemed to form each touching the person next to them.
“The statue has stopped crying,” the old man on the ladder, handkerchiefed hand held above the statue’s face, yelled.
A moment before tears formed in his own eyes Mr. Grunderson noticed tears welling up in his granddaughters eyes and then in the eyes of the people around him.
There was no sense to it. Mr. Grunderson looked at his
granddaughter clinging to the statue’s hand and knew where the statue’s tears
were coming from and why it was crying and everyone who made up the chain
connected to him, and the people watching on the internet,
suddenly knew too. He looked at his granddaughter and followed the
statue’s eyes towards lower
§
There were four men who used to meet in the neighborhood park every couple of weeks and talk about literature. Literature may be to high falllutin a word. They bickered and squabbled and debated about writing, mostly their own, but occasionally other people’s.
Every other Sunday, rain or shine, they would drift out to the bench in the park where they met and every time they would act as if their coming together were a surprise, an unexpected (but not unwelcome) event. They would nose around like hounds finding their spot, and, once settled, they would yammer and grouse about writing — discuss technical things like verbs or adjectives, complain about publishers, and bitch about readers and the price of words.
They met in the park for years, through marriages and divorces, new girl friends and breakups, hirings and firings, children and grandchildren, elation and despair. They met in the park to talk about writing the way some younger men have a pick up football game every other week, rain or shine, snow, wind or hail, every couple of weekends for years, and never acknowledge what they are doing, never put a name on their connection, never call it something, just let it hang there around them, like a coat, not worn, but casually thrown over the shoulders.
Three of them were writers. The ringleader was not a writer. He was their audience. People in the neighborhood called him the Man with the Ladder. He was a specialist in doing things high up; whatever required a man on a ladder, he could do. Any plumbing that had to be done at a height he could take care of; the most delicate aerial electrical work — that he could do too. On the ground, at eye level or below, he was useless, couldn’t drive a nail into a board. But on the ladder, high up, he could do anything, take care of any task. When he wasn’t on top of the ladder working he would sit in the park, on the top rung, relaxing.
Besides him, the group consisted of three other never-really-been writers. You couldn’t call them has beens because they hadn’t been. Between them, they maybe had a minute and a half of fame. They were almost as odd as the Man with the Ladder was. There was Anatole Sweet, who was episodically employed as a reader for the Encyclopedia of Encyclopedias, Harry Byrne-North, who was an occasional assistant editor of the Journal of Astrological Computing, and Sidney Ardrup, who was the very part time bibliographer and indexer for Bawdy, Grab and Reach, publishers of Recreational and Institutional Pornography.
These part time jobs barely let them scrape by. If they ate anything more than hamburger and sour kraut it was from what they made extra as writers. Their paychecks, such as they were, went to ex-wives, or girlfriends or children, or nephews. Unfortunately it had been a very bad year for literature. Not a one of them had sold anything. Individually and collectively, they were poor as church mice.
As people and as writers they could not have been more different. Byrne-North was plant like: tall, thin like a stalk of some wild plant. The bush of black hair on his head spread like a patch of dark, wild, sour grass growing on a gray rocky landscape. He wrote in longhand. Everything appeared in an organic, vegetative motion, planted, cultivated, harvested then agriculturally processed and put down onto a piece of paper carefully, completely.
Analtole Sweet wrote like a sailor riding the whipped up ocean, searching the wind for some sign of what direction he was being blown in. His writings were always the impression of a storm, of water and air in motion. His stories came in gusts which he scrambled to put down on paper before they flew away carrying his words with them. Always caught in a squall, his feet wrapped around a leg of his desk, he typed into his computer with one hand and snatched the sheets that spilled from his printer with the other, keeping them from blowing away until the boat docked.
Sidney Adrup wrote reams and reams. He wrote as if he were the court reporter on a battlefield, watching and listening to some Armageddon taking place in front of him, taking notes, detailed notes, encompassing every aspect of the struggle. Details, he believed, were the key to identifying the encounter he was watching. Ignoring words, he would write until the sounds of the crashing of forces diminished to silence then he would stop writing and he would go back and read what he had written, selecting a single detail or two from the stack of paper he had accumulated. Then he would begin the process again.
Now, although each of these men had close relatives, brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, deep down, each of them felt that the three other men who made up the literary society were their family. But they had trouble acknowledging this, even to themselves. As much as they loved one another, they hid their affection behind raucous debates about adverbs and plot development, and the Man with a Ladder, although he saw how much the three writers cared for one another, felt that he could not risk damaging the group’s morale by pointing this out to them.
As long as they had known one another, they had always spent Christmas with relatives, so everyone was a little confused when, two weeks before the holiday, Anatole Sweet announced that the son with whom he usually spent Christmas week, was taking his family to ‘somewhere in Arizona, – sand and desert,’ for the holiday and that although he had been invited, he was probably going to refuse and would most likely spend Christmas at home, alone, although nothing was decided yet definitely.
The Man with a Ladder watched and listened and saw that the two other writers were using the announcement as an excuse to re-examine their own Christmas commitments. He realized that there was a good chance that each of the members of the group would use the occasion to evade the obligations that tied them up during the holiday and that, finally, there was an opportunity to bring the literary society together as the family that it really was.
He spent the next week thinking about it and had a plan in mind
when, at the next meeting of the group, Anatole Sweet repeated the announcement
in case no one remembered it. When he finished, Byrne-North announced that he
was not going to
Although the Man with a Ladder had decided on a plan already, he waited to see if any of the other members of the literary society would make a suggestion that would bring them together for the holiday and, when they did not, he struck his head as if an idea had just materialized there out of thin air.
“I just got a great idea,” he said. “Just an idea. I’m not sure about it. We could spend Christmas together.” The three men listening to him stared in different directions. “A Christmas party even. We could exchange gifts.” The three writers grunted together.
“A party? Gifts, how can we?” Anatole Sweet said, his voice full of childish longing and a throttled enthusiasm.
Byrne-North was more attracted to the idea so his response was more ferocious. “None of us have sold anything this year, not a novel, not a story, not a review, not even a poem. We don’t have any money for gifts, not even small ones.”
“You misunderstand,” the Man with a Ladder said quickly. “We are writers we don’t want to give those who read us the wrong impressions. I mean what would our writing be if we just went out and bought a present for… for a colleague and a friend. No, bought gifts are not for our circle. We should give other kinds of gifts. Not bought ones,” he said, “made ones. Or, in our case, made up ones.”
“It’s not the gift but the thought that matters,” Sidney Ardrup said, in a voice that barely contained his sarcasm.
“It’s an interesting idea,” Anatole Sweet chipped in, “but as Horatio said, ‘more honored in the breach than the observance.’”
“Hamlet said,” Sidney Ardrup commented, ”Hamlet.” Anatole Sweet shrugged as The Man with a Ladder charged ahead enthusiastically. “I’ve been collecting some odds and ends of food in my freezer,” he said, “mostly leftovers from a wedding that a friend of mine catered. There’s some frozen portion’s of a real feast, and desserts and I have most of a bottle of scotch, and at the end, we can exchange the Christmas gifts.”
“How,” Byrne-North wanted to know, “just how can we afford gifts?”
The Man with a Ladder picked up the idea he had been hatching about all week and shook it out in public.
“We can’t. That’s exactly the point. The gifts we give should have no monetary value at all. Zilch, nada. We’ll give gifts that are completely valueless in themselves, things of no extrinsic value, worthless things, stuff that you wouldn’t bend down to pick up if you passed it lying on the sidewalk.
Byrne-North snorted. “A holiday party without gifts isn’t a celebration at all, but a holiday party with worthless gifts is, is…,” he searched for some witty literary phrase, “a travesty, a transgression, an assault …. I mean, it’s not how much the gift costs that makes a difference but a gift that’s worthless is an insult. It breaks some rule that I can’t think of just now.”
“He’s right,” Sidney Ardrup added. “It doesn’t sound like fun. Exchanging worthless things as gifts lacks…, lacks a certain generosity of spirit,” he added,
Anatole Sweet spoke up. “You have to put a lot of spirit behind a worthless gift. I mean if you are not a kid giving a drawing you made at school, you really have to pump out a lot of Christmas spirit to offer someone something of no value at all and wish them a merry Christmas. I’m not sure I have it in me to work up that kind of head of steam. I’m out of practice.”
The Man with a Ladder did not let the lack of enthusiasm derail him; he charged ahead. “Well have a grab-bag. Each of us will bring a present and put it in a bag then we’ll pick. You can’t take your own of course,” he said.
Sidney Adrup stuck his face close to the Man with a Ladder face and shouted as loud as he could. “I thought it was clear that none of us have any money for gifts. We haven’t sold anything, not a novel, not a story, not a poem. Bought gifts are out of the question. And as Harry has put it so succinctly, valueless gifts violate the spirit of Christmas.”
“I have an idea about that,” the Man with a Ladder said.
“What idea can nullify poverty?” Sidney Ardrup barked. “We don’t have any money, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“Well,” said the Man with the Ladder, “I think I have a solution, not a solution to poverty but a solution to the worthless presents issue.”
The three writers stared at him defiantly. The same look on each of their faces challenged him to come up with any Christmas idea that transformed poverty into plenty.
“Any present worth wrapping and giving comes with something else that makes it valuable,” the Man with a Ladder said. “A present never stands alone. The monetary cost of a gift only counts a little towards its worth.”
The look on the writer’s faces changed minutely, the way a deep river bed changes in geological time, a century’s slight twist here, a millennium’s curl there. The Man with a Ladder looked at each of them in turn. “In themselves, the gifts we will give are worthless, things of no value, but…. each of them comes with a story, a story that makes it precious, a gift of infinite value.
“Lets see if I understand,” Sidney Ardrup said. “The gift itself is junk, but there is a story attached to this worthless piece of crap that makes it priceless, inestimable, beyond valuing.”
“In other words,” Anatole Sweet said, getting the idea, “it’s not the gift, it’s the thought behind it, the story behind it, that makes it priceless.”
“Hm,” Byrne -North said. “It sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.”
“No,” the Man with a Ladder insisted. “It’s a challenge worthy of the writers who make up this group.” He said it as if he believed it although he wondered if had not been carried away by Christmas sprit.
“Lets see if I have this straight,” Sideny Ardrup said. “We give each other worthless gifts then we write a story about the gift that makes it precious, beyond value.”
“Yes,” the Man with a Ladder said. “With the stories, the gifts will be worthy of Christmas. It’s a test of your ability as writers and of the spirit of Christmas,” he said.
As the idea sank in, the Man with a Ladder could see it spark a fire in each of them.
“Just when should we have this party?” Byrne -North asked.
“Christmas day, of course,” the Man with a Ladder replied, “when else.”
2.
On Christmas day the group of writers met in the park. Each of members was carrying a small wrapped package. Swinging around, but tied firmly to the ladder the Man with a Ladder was dragging, was a large sack. He emptied its contents on the table next to the bench where they usually sat. Out came cake, wine, a bottle of scotch, sandwiches, a roast duck and all sorts of cookies and cakes.
“Ok, are you ready?” he asked when the sack was empty.
“Ready for what?” Byrne-North asked as if he had forgotten the program.
“For the Christmas story telling,” the Man with a Ladder said. “You haven’t forgotten.”
“Of course not,” Byrne-North said. “Worthless gifts and a story making each of them valuable.”
“Priceless.”
“Priceless,” Anatole Sweet echoed.
“I’m not sure I’m up to it,” Sidney Ardrup said. “I mean the story.” The other two writers nodded their agreement.
“Of course you are,” the Man with a Ladder said. “Collectively you are the greatest story tellers I know.” The Man with a Ladder held out the sack which had ‘Thomson Street Bakery’ Grade xxx white flour’ stenciled on it.
The Man with a Ladder noticed that the writers were more nervous than he had ever seen them. He tried to do his job. “Nothing to be nervous about,” he said. “It’s Christmas and you three are the greatest teller of tales I know,” he repeated.
Each of the writers dropped a gaily wrapped package into the sack. The Man with a Ladder noted that they had gone to a great deal of trouble to make the packages look good; each of the wrappings reflected the personality of the giver. Sidney Adrup had cut out a reproduction of a Hieronymous Bosch painting and wrapped his gift in that. Anatole Sweet had pasted an advertisement from a movie about a perfect storm on a sheet of paper and used it to wrap his gift. Byrne-North had selected a repetitive design composed of a variety of astrological signs for his wrapping.
After they deposited their gifts the Man with a Ladder spoke. “I took a liberty, it’s a special occasion. Not that I .. I’m not a writer the way you are writers,” he explained “but anyway, I took a liberty.” He took a small package out of his pocket that was wrapped in newspaper. It had crudely drawn picture of a Christmas tree on it. He spoke into the silence. “I mean…”
“Don’t apologize,” Byrne-North said. “It’s Christmas.”
“Who wants to go first?” the Man with a Ladder asked.
Byrne-North volunteered. “I will go first. What does go first mean?”
“The person who goes first will pick a present and then the giver of that gift will have to tell its story.”
“Ok,” Byrne-North said. “I will go first.”
He arced his long arm very deliberately into the bag when the Man with a Ladder spoke up. “Not your present,” he said.
“How can I tell, its dark as a demon in there, I can’t see.”
“Just pick one,” Anatole Sweet said. “If you catch your own fish you can throw it back.”
Byrne-North wiggled his hand inside the bag. “I’ve got one. He withdrew his hand slowly clutching a present. He looked at the box he held in his hand. “What is it?”
“Unwrap it,” the Man with the Ladder instructed.
Byrne-North grasped the string holding the wrapping in place and gently pulled it. He unwound the paper carefully refolding it as he went along.
“What is it?”
Out of the layer of paper emerged a plastic bag. He held it up. “Dirt,” he said.
“Sand,” Anatol Sweet corrected. “Sand.”
“Well it’s certainly not worth much,” Byrne-North commented. “A fist full of beach sand.”
“No,” Anatol Sweet corrected. “Not from a beach, maybe originally but it did not come from a beach. Let me explain.” The rest of the group relaxed as he began the first story.
“It’s sand,” he said, “but not from a beach.” He waited a moment
letting the silence pump up the writer’s curiosity. “It’s from an hourglass.
See, its very fine. Not just your usual beach sand, at least not run of the
mill
“Sand is sand,” Byrne-North said.
“Well, maybe not.” Anatole Sweet looked at the rest of the writer group. “Can I tell the story of that handful of sand?”
“That’s what we are here for,” the Man with a Ladder said, happy to see that the writers had slid into the game effortlessly.
“It’s sand from an hourglass. You know the..”
“We all know what an hourglass is,” Sydney Ardrup said.
“Yes but which hourglass?”
Everyone was quiet.
“A Christmas hourglass,” Byrne-North ventured.
“Not quite.”
“Ok, tell us the story already,” Sidney Ardrup said, impatiently.
“You know Christmas has a saint, Saint Nicholas. This…”
“…is sand from Saint Nicholas’s hourglass that he used to measure the hours on Christmas day.”
“No, not quite. It’s actually…” he hesitated for dramatic effect. “Diocletian’s hour glass or an hour glass from one of his palaces. From the dungeon of one of the palaces to be exact.”
“What would …”
“That’s the story. That what makes it valuable,” Analtol Sweet said, settling himself to tell the story.
“There was no love lost between them, I mean Diocletian and St. Nicholas.”
“St. Nick was bishop of
“No way,” Diocletian said. “You don’t have a few days, not a day,” he said gloating. “What you have to celebrate anything,” he said, “is the time left in that hourglass. He grabbed the hour glass that was sitting on the table and spoke to his soldiers. “When the sand runs out, kill him.”
“But,” the chief jailer said.... “a few minutes.” It was the time the jailers used to give prisoners bathroom time. “It’s a bathroom timer for hard core….”
“No buts,” Diocletian said. He turned the hour glass over and set it down. “When the sand runs down, kill him. I’ll come back for his head tomorrow.” Then he left.
Byrne-North shifted the plastic bag in his hand and the sand rushed to the bottom on the bag.
“Good bye, Saint Nick,” the Man with a Ladder said.
“That’s what Diocletian thought but…”
“The hour glass broke,” Sidney Adrup declared, thinking he could jump ahead of the story.
“No,” Analtole Sweet said.
After Diocletian left, the soldiers took off their heavy armor and sat waiting for the sand to fall from the top to the bottom.
“And?”
“It didn’t. It did but very slowly, at first, a grain every couple of minutes. Then a grain every half hour or so. Then a grain an hour. The sand was holding itself back, keeping itself from counting time.”
The other members of the writers group looked at Anatole Sweet as he continued the story.
“Well Diocletian came back the next morning and barged into the prison cell and the squad of soldiers were sitting around. “Where’s the head?” he asked.
“It’s still on Saint Nicholas,” the sergeant said.
Diocletian was furious. “I told you when the sand ran down you were to cut off his head.”
“But the sand didn’t run down.” The sergeant of the squad of soldiers pointed to the hourglass; only a little of the sand had fallen down.
Diocletian was furious. “There’s a clog.”
“That’s what we thought,” the sergeant said, “so we turned it upside down and started it again.”
Diocletian was really miffed. He grabbed the hour glass, banged on it and then spun it so that the sand that had fallen to the bottom eagerly sought the top of the hour glass again.
“Ok,” he said. “I’ll start it again. When I come back tomorrow his head,” he insisted, “on that pole.” He pointed to a sharp pole in the corner of the room.
To make a long story short, when he came back only a little of the sand had moved to the bottom of the hourglass. He was furious, he picked up the hourglass and flung it against the wall where it shattered and the sand began to cascade slowly very slowly to the floor of the prison cell. Now Diocletian knew that there was something or someone protecting St. Nick and he just shrugged and said, “let him go to celebrate his Christmas. Well get him soon enough.”
“That,” Anatole Sweet said as he pointed to the plastic bag which held the sand, “is the sand that saved Saint Nicholas. Later on he went on to be generous and really make Christmas into Christmas.” The four men stared at the sand.
“Wonderful,” the Man with a Ladder said finally. “That was a wonderful story, Anatole.” He watched as Byrne-North put the little bag of sand carefully into his pocket. “So it is very valuable, I mean at preserving time for Saint Nicholas.”
“Absolutely,” Anatole Sweet said, pleased with himself.
3.
“Inspiring story,” the Man with a Ladder said, “inspiring. It sets a mark for the rest of us to shoot for. Who wants to go next?” When no one volunteered he said, “Anatole, since you came up with that wonderful tale why don’t you pick next.” Anatole relaxed when he realized he would only have to listen and jabbed his arm into the sack that the Man with a Ladder held open in front of him. When he withdrew it, it was holding a handful of astrological signs.
Byrne-North coughed. “My contribution,” he said and leaned back a little stiffly. “I’m not sure this has the panache of Anatole’s tale he said modestly, “but I’ll try to do the story justice.”
Anatole Sweet unwrapped the package.
“Careful,” Byrne-North said, “It’s small.”
When the paper came off, Anatole Sweet was holding a piece of wood. If it hadn’t made its appearance at a writer’s Christmas party the Man with a Ladder would have said it was a cut down version of a popsicle stick, shiny from melt and fingerprints. It was stained a dark brown, and it had a hole bored in one end that looked like it had been crudely made by a fingernail cutter.
“Try not to grasp it too tightly,” Byrne-North said to Anatole Sweet. “It’s fragile.”
Anatole Sweet shifted his grasp so that the wood fragment rested in his palm.
“Much better,” Byrne-North said. “They say that it’s from this piece of wood that the spirit of Christmas goes out into the world each year, not Christmas but its spirit.”
“Who says?” Sidney Ardrup challenged.
“Some people who have spent a lot of time thinking about Christmas, not writers. It’s very old.”
“It’s a piece of something,” Sidney Adrup said, “but its hard to tell what it is a piece of.”
“That’s exactly right,” Byrne-North said. “The story makes a little sense of it but leaves a mystery still on the table so to speak.” He continued before anyone looking at the piece of wood had a chance to say anything.
“There was this monastery, in
“Who said?”the Man with the Ladder wanted to know.
“Religious people who know about those things,” Byrne-North said, dismissing the query. “A crusader returning from the holy land had brought the relic to the monastery. Anyway, they would keep it locked up until a week before Christmas then they would bring it out and put it in the chapel and welcome in Christmas with it. They said that without a place to put his head, father Christmas would not come each year and that the nap he took in the monastery the day before Christmas brought Christmas peace to the world.”
“Well, there was this nobleman who owned the land around the monastery and he wanted the wooden pillow because he had a terribly hard time sleeping because he was so evil and he thought if he had the relic he could get a good nights sleep even at the cost of Christmas.”
“A pagan,” Sidney Ardrup said.
“No, he was a Christian of sorts,” Byrne-North corrected, “but selfish. Really selfish. Well he got a gang of vassals together and threatened to kick them off of his land if they did not go along with him and steal the relic. So this pick up army set out a few days before Christmas to steal the relic. Now one of the peasants who had been pressed into the service of this terrible lord was very religious and he got word to the monastery telling them what the lord had in mind and the monks got together and decided they had to do something. The chief monk suggested a plan and the other monks went along with it although they were confused and thought it was too drastic a solution to their problem.”
“What did the chief monk suggest?” the Man with a Ladder, asked genuinely puzzled.
Byrne-North stared at the piece of wood in Anatole Sweet’s hand. “The chief monk knew they could not hide it from the lord. He would torture them until they gave away its hiding place. So he suggested they change it a bit.”
“Paint it,” Sidney Ardrup guessed.
“No,” Byrne-North said, “cut it up.”
“Do what!” Sidnet Ardrup exploded.
“Destroy it, to keep it out of the hands of the nobility,” Anatole Sweet summarized tentatively. “A little drastic don’t you think.”
“Not destroy it, change it a bit,” Byrne-North said. They got th monk who was the leading craftsman in the monastery, the one that made plates, and crosses and repaired paintings and altars to cut it up into little pieces.”
Each of the writers shook his head.
“He cut the relic into pieces and each of the monks got one piece and the chief monk sent them out to other monasteries, telling them to return when they got word that the trouble had died down. And that is what they did. The relic was very carefully cut into 40 pieces because there were forty monks and each got one and hightailed it out into the countryside with their piece of the relic.”
When the lord came to the monastery only the chief monk was there. The lord searched the monastery and tortured the chief monk until he died but he did not reveal what had happened to the relic.
“Well the lord was sorely disappointed and he returned home to his castle and his life got even more miserable if you can imagine that. He died about six months later, people said from guilt and lack of sleep because he had never found the relic which might have given him peace.
“So this is one of the pieces of the relic,” Anatole Sweet said.
Byrne-North looked at him. “Do you think that would make a Christmas story worth the effort of a writer?” he asked rhetorically. “No there’s more to it.”
The writers drew a little closer to him waiting for his to reveal the end of the story.
“Well, after the lord died, the monks returned. It was just before Christmas. ‘Not a moment too soon,’ the monk who had taken charge of the monastery said when everybody returned. “Let’s reassemble the relic and welcome Christmas.”
“They put each of the pieces they had carried into the countryside onto the workbench and watched as the craftsman monk reassembled the relic. He was so skilled and had done such a good job that you could not tell it had been cut apart then reassembled. ‘Done,’ he said holding up the relic.”
“Wait, the chief monk’s replacement said, “what about this piece?” He pointed to a single piece of wood that sat on the table.
The monks looked at the piece and then at the relic. The relic was complete and whole; nothing was missing, but on the table was a piece of wood that was identical to the pieces that had been reassembled into the relic.
“The craftsman monk took the relic apart again and then made it whole again, but the same piece was still left over. The monks sat around trying to figure out where the extra piece had come from.
Finally the monk who had become chief monk said, “A whole is always more than the pieces that make it up. This piece is certainly the essence of the relic which was held by the spirit of our dead brother.’ And they all agreed that the piece of the relic that was left over when all of its visible pieces were reassembled probably was the most important part of the relic and they set them both out for Father Cristmas.”
“How did you get it?” The Man with a Ladder wanted to know.
“Can’t say,” Byrne-North said easily. “Only, I promised that I would take it out each year a little before Christmas so that the spirit of Christmas could … You get the idea. I promised. Now you have to make the same promise,” he said to Anatole Sweet, “otherwise I can’t let you have it.”
“I promise,” Anatole Sweet said after thinking about it for a few minutes.
“You don’t have to do much. Just take it out a week or two before Christmas. Leave it on a table and let the spirit run around until Christmas. Then you can put it back.”
“Well, Ok,” he said but…”
4.
“Pick.”
The Man with a Ladder put his hand into the bag fingered a present for a moment then shifted his choice and pulled his hand out. A patch of the Bosch painting stared at him as he examined it.
“Ok, Sidney,” he said as he opened the package trying to avoid damaging Bosch.
“It’s not a real Bosch,”
The Man with a Ladder pulled the wrapping off of the gift which was itself wrapped in tissue paper.
He peeled the tissue off of the present revealing a blank piece of paper. He held it by a corner and turned it over then back. “It’s blank.”
“Well, yes, blank, more or less. I mean there’s nothing you can see on it. But it’s not quite blank.”
The Man with a Ladder examined the paper carefully. “I must be missing something,” he said. “I don’t see any writing or a picture or…”
“Bumps,” Sidney Ardrup said.
“Bumps?”
“Indentations. The slightest of indentations. They were made with a quill not a lead pencil, so they are very light.”
The Man with a Ladder scanned the paper.
“It’s the wrong way,” Sidney Ardrup said.
“What do you mean the wrong way?”
“Let me tell the story and you’ll see what I mean.”
The rest of the writers group setlled back on their benches while Sidney Ardrup grasped the seat of his bench and leaned forward.
“You’ve heard of Antonio Salieri?” he asked.
Everyone nodded.
“Yes, that film about Mozart made him famous. But I‘ll bet you haven’t heard about his cousin, Pitori Salieri. He was even more famous than Antonio who was involved with Mozart. He didn’t write quite as much as either of those composers. He was the court musician to an Italian prince who unfortunately was tone deaf. Now Pitori wrote marches, fast loud pieces for this prince’s marching out to conquer some neighbor and for his marching back with some booty.
Pitori didn’t mind because the prince’s absence left him time to
write wonderful music for the church in Piezieri which was a suburb of
“Blind?”