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?” the Man with a Ladder asked.
“Completely.”
“How did he write music if he was nearly blind?” Anatole Sweet asked.
“Totally blind,”
“Like Mozart in the movie.”
“Exactly. Well, it was a month before Christmas when the inspiration for this Christmas piece came on him. Unfortunately the priest who helped him was sent by the bishop to accompany a group of singing nuns traveling to another Sicilian church to perform a mass for a different local prince.
When Pitori said that he was bursting to write the piece of music his patron apologized and said unfortunately there was no one to help him and that the most he could do was give him some ink and paper and make sure he got fed while he wrote his masterpiece. Now Pitori got desperate waiting for his helper to return. He was bursting with this music and was afraid it would fade away into silence if he did not get it down quickly.
“What did he do?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“One day he collected paper and ink and quill pen and began setting the music that was in his head down on paper. He wrote like a demon filling pages and pages with notes and staffs — pages and pages. He prayed and prayed and thanked God for the privilege of hearing this music in his head which he said was the most glorious music that had ever been conceived. Unfortunately, the closer he got to finishing the piece the weaker he got and he realized that he would never live to hear the music played but of course he could hear the glorious sounds of it in his head and he wrote furiously to set it down so that the world, or at least that part of it in which he lived, could hear it at Christmas. Unfortunately …”
The three listening writers braced themselves for what they knew was going to be a tragic ending.
“Unfortunately, he ran out of ink.”
“What?”
“He was blind. He kept on dipping his pen into the inkwell and scribbling note after note but he had run out of ink. The last glorious movement, the part of the piece that brought human beings to a spiritual awakening was set down with an empty pen making tiny indentations on vellum; nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Of the last part, nothing at all.”
“When the priest who usually transcribed Salieri’s music returned from leading the nuns he nearly died. He could make out the first three movements of the music but the crowning ending, the place where everything came together to celebrate a birth—of that there was nothing. Blank sheets of paper with tiny illegible rivulets.”
“They performed the first three parts but instead of being flooded with a splendid uplifting spiritual rush, everyone was left cranky, uncertain and unhappy so the piece was gently put aside and never performed after that. The pages without music written on them were mostly used to write shopping lists or pardons for convicted criminals.”
“How did this page…?”
“Survive. Well, after the pieces of paper with music on them were stored in the music room, the master’s assistant was going to use the only blank page that had been saved with the rest of the score to write a love letter to one of the scullery maids he had taken a fancy to when he saw a piece of dirt clinging to the paper. He lifted it to shake it off and as he waved it to get the dirt off of the page he heard the most beautiful music he had ever heard and realized that what he was hearing was a section of the last movement, the crowning conclusion of Pitori Salieri’s masterpiece. He rushed around like a madperson to get the rest of the blank pages but, as I said, most of them had been used and discarded. Only this piece was left.”
“Only this piece. But it has been passed down from relative to relative, from believer to believer. The story is at Christmas, on Christmas day. If you hold the piece of paper up and make it tremble, give it the slightest ping, you can hear the music, this last masterpiece of Pitiori Salieri. People who have heard it say it captures the awe of Christmas, the very sound of it. Moreover, they say that it gives life to all of the music that’s played on Christmas all over the world. That if someone doesn’t shake it, the music that people hear is lifeless and dull.”
The Man with a Ladder held up the piece of paper and jiggled it. “Quiet,” he said and he heard what seemed to him to be more than the wind in the park, violins and cellos, the echos of voices celebrating a crowning birth. Each of the writers took the paper and shook it and listened very carefully. The Man with a Ladder ladder looked at the writers and saw their face change first to surprise, then a peaceful sense of epiphany then to embarrassment as they thought about the possibility they had been hoodwinked by the telling of a wonderful story.
5.
“Well.”
“Well, what.”
“Your turn,” Byrne-North said to the Man with a Ladder. “Who picks?”
“Me,” Sidney Ardrup said and gingerly dipped his hand into the sack that the Man with a Ladder held open to him.
He withdrew the only present left in the sack and pulled off the newspaper trying to avoid tearing the Christmas scene that the Man with a Ladder had drawn.
“Careful,” the Man with a Ladder urged.
Sidney Ardrup treated the package as if it had something in it that might leap out at him. “Set it down,” the Man with a Ladder suggested, “and unfold the paper carefully.”
Sidney Ardrup set the half undone package on the bench and carefully unwrapped it. When he had pulled the last layer back and a pile of layers of paper rested beside him he exclaimed, “there’s no there, there.” He was frightened that he had destroyed what were obviously the very delicate contents of the package.”
“No, that’s not quite right,” the Man with a Ladder said. “It’s just difficult to see. I brought a box you can put it in. He took an empty cigar box from his pocket and set it down. “Lift the paper and let it slide into the box.”
“Let what slide into the box?” Sidney Ardrup asked.
“What’s sitting on the paper. Carefully.” Sidney Ardrup went through the motions of tilting the package into the box. As he lifted one end of the paper which formed a sort of flat funnel he thought he saw a nearly invisible lump cascade down the paper and tumble into the box.
“OK ,” the Man with a Ladder said, satisfied. He handed the cigar box to Sidney Ardrup. “Here.”
“Here what?” Sidney Ardrup complained. “There’s no here here.”
“I admit it’s difficult to see. It shimmers that’s the only way you can really see it,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I’m not a very skilled writer,” he said apologetically, but I’ll try to do it justice.”
“Do what justice?” Sidney Ardrup complained. “There’s nothing there but air.”
“So you do see it,” the Man with a Ladder said. “I knew you would.”
Byrne-North and Anatole Sweet bent down and peered into the box. “What is it?” Byrne-North asked quietly.
“It’s the breath of a saint.” The Man with a Ladder continued.
“Most people think of Saint Nicholas as the patron saint of Christmas,” he
said, “but there was someone before him, someone from whom he got the idea of
making Christmas into CHRISTMAS. He was the bishop of
“Boris,” Sidney Adrup said, “I never heard of Bishop Boris.”
“Saint Boris, if you want to be extra correct. He was a very modest man, spent his time helping the poor, old people, cripples, blind people, unhappy people. He was particularly interested in pagans whom he converted in great numbers with simple miracles like turning their wine into water. Then, one year he thought that as a reward for believing, all the people he converted during the previous year should have a party and get gifts and he thought what better time to do this than the day when Christ was born. So he organized the first real Christmas celebrations. People loved it. They prepared for weeks making presents, doing good deeds, shedding the boring, rough life they lived the rest of the year. It was wonderful. He would arrange dowries for the most impoverished girls without dowries…”
“I thought that was what St. Nicholas was famous for,” Analtole Sweet said.
“He was,” the Man with the Ladder said, “but he got the idea from Saint Boris. People loved him. They said that his spirit enlivened Christmas.”
“Enlivened Christmas.”
“Yes, that he breathed life into Christmas. that
his breath mixed with the air of
“His breath did this?” Byrne-North asked.
“That’s what they said. So when he was dying everyone who knew him and loved Christmas got very worried that with him gone, Christmas would not be able to hold its own and make a place in people’s hearts for joy and good feelings.”
“Oh, I see” Byrne-North said.
“Yes, Now Boris realized that the people were worried so he gave instructions to St. Nicholas who he knew was going to be his successor.
“Instructions?” Sidney Ardrup said confused.
“Instructions for when he died.”
“What instructions?”
“Well, he told St. Nick that when he died he had to squeeze out the last breath in his body and put it in a jar. Each year, a few days before Christmas, St. Nick was to open the jar and let the breath out.”
“Wait a minute,” Anatole Sweet said. “You mean he said they were to capture his last breath…”
“Exactly,” the MWL said, pleased that he had made the point clearly.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Byrne-North said. “Air is air. It would dissipate, the molecules…” He stopped.
“That’s just what St. Nick thought but he wanted to humor his friend because he was so holy and anyway there were no atoms or molecules in the science of the day. Unfortunately, when Boris was dieing, St. Nicholas was away reconstructing the three children. By the time he was able to rush back Boris was dead.”
“Dead,” one of the writers repeated.
“Stone, cold dead,” the Man with the Ladder said, “had been for three days. St, Nick was in a quandary. His friend’s last breath had been breathed and he thought there was no way of fulfilling Boris’ last request. He cried and cried but there was nothing he could do about it. So he prepared himself to say goodbye to his friend and mentor. As a last gesture he gave Boris’ body a hug and as he embraced him he heard what sounded to him like the songs they sang at Christmas and even though it was a very gentle hug a last gasp of air came form the chest of his friend.”
“A last gasp.”
“The last breath. Boris had kept the last breath in his body until St. Nick released it.
“But he had been dead three days,” Sidney Ardrup exclaimed.
“But if it went into the air…” Anatole Sweet said.
“That’s just what St. Nick thought. But he thought he could see his friend’s breath shimmering as it struggled to hold itself together so he got a jar quickly and put it down and the breath flew into it.”
“How could he tell the breath went into the jar?” Byrne-North asked.
“The shimmering, I guess,” the Man with a Ladder said. “He put the top on the jar and put it away until a few weeks before Christmas. Then he took out the jar and took off the lid.” The three writers leaned toward the Man With the Ladder.
“Now its hard to know exactly what happened that first time, but when St. Nick took off the lid, supposedly — the records aren’t very clear — there was a miniature tornado or what looked like a miniature tornado and it rose from the jar and rushed into the world. And when St Nick went back to his work it seemed to him that the spirit of Christmas had come into the world and he realized that the breath of the Boris had mixed with the air and everyone was breathing it and the Christmas spirit was in the world again.”
“And…”
“And it was a wonderful Christmas.”
“After.”
“After,” the Man With the Ladder said. “Well, Saint Nick had left the cover off of the jar and the day after Christmas he heard this sizzling sound and went over and when he looked into the jar he saw, well, perhaps saw is to strong a word for it, St. Nick never saw it, of course, not hard seeing. But there was this shimmering and a whooshing sound and the jar jiggled a bit, so he put the lid back on. He sensed Boris’ breath had returned.”
The writers relaxed and leaned back.
“Since that year, someone—I guess it will be you, Sidney, for a while, lets Boris’ breath out into the world to enliven Christmas, to mix with the rest of the breaths of living people to bring Christ’s spirit to the world.”
“Me…”
“Well we could all do it, I mean,” the Man with a Ladder said,
“you could bring the jar
“That was a wonderful story,” Byrne-North said, “wonderful. You are one of us,” he said to the Man With the Ladder, “a writer.”
The Man with a Ladder blushed. “No, it was your inspiration, all of you and Christmas, of course,” he said. “Now let’s have a party.
§
She stood beside her grandson as he walked from case to case scrutinizing the exhibits. The usual holographic panels had been modified to acknowledge the Christmas season. Small holiday decorations punctuated the informational paragraphs and a special pane had been constructed to draw the viewer’s attention to the fact that the event the exhibit celebrated – which everyone called informally, the Gift, — had occurred on Christmas day during the same season years ago. Although it was visited every day of the year according to the birthday of the child making it, Christmas was a special time.
The guides were very deferential to her. That impressed him. He knew she was famous. Her name was mentioned frequently in his biology textbooks in connection with important advances in genetic engineering but he had difficulty associating the person discussed in the text with his grandmother who stood watching him. Nor had he recognized her as a much younger woman in the large photograph in the entrance of the hall.
“That’s a Pdp11,” he said. “We learned about it in the history of computing. Very, very old,” he declared. “Maybe even before your time.” He looked hard at the ancient machine.
“It was before my time but not much, a few years,” she said. Her grandson stared at the machine trying to figure out what the parts were.
“That’s a keyboard, right,” he said.
“Right.”
“And that?”
“A tape drive,” she answered. “Secondary storage.”
He shook his head. “Microcrystal sheets? No virtual...?”
“No.”
“Implants?”
“No, definitely not.”
“But….”
“It was a while ago,” she said simply.
The display case that held a model of the grid held no interest for him. He stopped at first of the row of cases that held robots. “Grandmother. Did you ever have a Simp?”
“No, the Simps were military and industrial androids. Also a little before my time,” she said dryly. “The first model we owned was a 2Pio. There.” She pointed to an exhibit a few cases away.
He hurried to the case that held the 2Pio. “Did you have one like this?”
“Exactly. They were very simple, very good. They made life a lot easier. We used two of them in the lab. One did the analyticals. The other...” She stopped. He would not understand. There were only a few more cases.
“That’s the...”
“Yes.”
“Did you own one?”
“Yes. We had one of the first models. They were very popular. They cost less than a car. They were the first...”
The boy broke in. ‘The first android with primitive motivational structure.’ They don’t look very nice,” he said. The android was blank faced and bulky.
“They were very reliable,” she continued. “They did the housework, they cooked. They repaired things. They did tests. They were very competent. But they were never graceful, never appealing. Have you studied the...?”
“Of course. I’m thinking of becoming a robotics engineer or a biologist like you, grandmother.”
“Yes.”
“Why were the guides so nice to you? Why did the man come out of the office?”
“I had something to do with establishing the monument,” she said quietly.
They were approaching the end of the hall. Their view of the monument was obstructed by the stele which was deliberately placed in front of the doorway making the monument visible only when you walked out of the exhibit hall.
The boy stood in front of the last case. The android locked inside was very lifelike. The plastic face especially was very human. It stared blankly into the hall, past the boy and his grandmother. The plaque said 4Pio.
“Yes, I owned one of them too,” the woman volunteered. “Everyone
did. They were made mostly in the Egypt-Israel zone.
“Yes,” the boy said.
“Good.” The woman was eighty, but the process that she had helped develop made her look no more than fifty. They moved to the entrance to the monument fitting themselves into the line. Each of the adolescents was accompanied by an adult. The children were all about the same age.
A custom had developed that had the force of law. As close as possible to his or her thirteenth birthday, a child made a pilgrimage to the monument.
The adults varied in age. Some of the children were accompanied by parents or grandparents, some by uncles or aunts or teachers, a few by older brothers and sisters. The child picked the adult. It was an honor and a duty that was never refused.
They moved up to the doorway and stopped. He tugged on her arm. “No,” she said. “Let’s wait, let the people in front of us get a little away from the entrance.” He stood by her side until the doorway was clear.
“You were here when...”
“Yes, I was. I was here when the monument came into being. I was mayor of the town then, did you know that. Monrow was only a town then not a city as it is now. The laboratory I worked at was very close. I thought it was important to be active in the community. I had a lot of energy then.”
“You have a lot of energy now,” the boy said.
“But not as much as I had then.”
The people in front of them disappeared through the entranceway. Her grandson tugged on her arm. “Are you ready, Grandmother?”
“Yes.”
She took the hand her grandson offered and let him lead her forward much as she had followed Jed through the door out of the tunnel passageway before it was widened and transformed into an exhibition hall. As they moved forward she closed her eyes and saw what she saw that morning when she went out with Jed. The image was graven on her nervous system. She said the ritual words that were the obligation of the adult to repeat. “When you learn the lesson of the monument, you become an adult. If you do not learn it, you remain a child. You must never forget what happened here.”
As they stepped through the doorway her grandson dropped her hand.
“Those are...”
“Yes.”
She opened her eyes. What came into her mind was Jed’s voice when he came into her office complaining bitterly about the 3Pios.
“Something has got to be done,” he insisted. The voice ricocheted off of the wall and penetrated everywhere. “It’s almost Christmas for heavens sake. They’re disturbing people’s holiday.”
She did not look up from her desk. “You’re just the man I wanted to see,” she said. “I’ve....”
He did not let her finish. “They’re like dumb buffalo, drifting over fences. They are badgering people again.”
“They’ve wandered out of the shelter?”
“That’s what I said didn’t I. They’re a pestilence. They’re lying around town pestering everyone. One is in front of my house, sitting on the step.”
“Erma?”
The voice stopped, then lurched forward. “Of course Erma. Which other 3Pio would sit on my front step. The others are wandering around town bothering people. It’s pitiful. What are you going to do about it?”
She looked up finally. “Pestering ‘their former owners ‘... Pestering how?” She was making it painful for him, trying to drive her point home. She knew he knew it, but his affectation got in the way sometimes.
“Pestering, you know how, looking for something... something useful to do. They are poking around fixing things, raking leaves, a few were painting anything they could get their hands on. Where they got the paint, I don’t know. There were even a few trying to shine shoes. It’s pathetic. They know it’s nearly Christmas. They are talking about gifts… “
“That’s the way we built them. We made them in our image,” she continued. “They were the first model with a motivational structure. We built them so that they needed to do useful work. The fact they recognized the holiday made the emotion and the decorations sensible to them.”
“They are machines. They should be terminated and salvaged for parts.” He was in his red neck farmer mode.
“We’ve mishandled robotics,” the mayor said flatly. “It took fifty years to uncouple protection of intelligent artificial life from the abortion morass. The robot laws that prohibited the termination or degradation of artificial life forms were a new start. We were finally getting a handle on the problem when there was this sudden shift to a whole new class of robots. No one gave thought to the consequences.”
“People like you with that clap trap,” the man muttered half heartedly and softly. The mayor yanked her head up. The chunky man swore softly. “I don’t give a flying crap about history. We got a real problem. We got a slew of class one androids who won’t stay in the shelter we built and insist on hanging around on the street bothering people. What are you going to do about it?”
The woman behind the desk looked at her visitor and wondered
why he had come to her office. It was not to complain. He knew the
“Nothing. Have the marshal collect them and bring them back to the shelter.”
“It’s not enough.” The man shifted uncomfortably. “People are not happy,” he repeated under his breath. “Some of them have been talking about spiking them out.”
She understood then another of the reasons for his visit — besides wanting to see her. He wanted to make sure she heard about the rumor.
“Lynching,” she said. “It’s nearly Christmas. Can’t people…”
“Call it what you want. A lot of people are talking.”
The mayor’s voice was bitter. “The people of this community are as much responsible for the problem as anyone. Most of them are scientists like you and me. You tell me why we superannuated a whole class of robots who were performing well enough and replaced them with a new model.”
“Politics.”
“Politics is an excuse. Bad Economics is more like a reason. The 3Pio class did well enough. We were adapting. We were doing fine. Why push a new model when there was no real need— and so quickly. The class was replaced merely because the technology was there.”
“But the improvements….”
“Cosmetic. We didn’t need them. We were pushed by the Japanese again. They just haven’t adjusted to a minimalist economy. The plastico-organics doubled the intelligence available to androids and made them look more human. The 4Pio’s had realistic faces and showed emotions. But the 3Pios they replaced already had more intelligence than we let them use. And the artificial emotional responsiveness on the plastic faces just made them easier to market. We grabbed the technology just because it was there.”
“Don’t start on that again,” her visitor said. Though he affected a rural accent and the disposition of a red neck farmer he had both a doctorate in Ryle physics and an engineering degree. “Look, will you talk to Nan-3Pio.”
“Yes. Jed. I got an anonymous note that the grid is having problems.”
“Between you and me?” It was the third unspoken reason for the man’s visit.
“Ok.”
“We had a few spikes. It’s not something local. Every grid has had them recently. But ours are a little more intense. Local placements require adaptations. The adaptations we made here were severe. It’s not... There have been some indications —not from our system but from the records of Timmatsu...”
She blanched. “Timmatsu.”
“Now don’t get all upset. Nothing like that can happen here. They were sloppy. Besides our staff is half new 4Pios. Their reaction time is double the 3Pio’s. That’s part of why I supported the upgrade. The 3Pio versions weren’t quite quick enough.”
They mayor was not satisfied. “You’ve got to promise to keep me informed. No surprises. If something has to be done…”
“Don’t worry, there’s nothing going to happen at the grid. Worry about the homeless problem,” he said softly.
His reassurance did not help. “For the time being collecting them and returning them to the compound should take care of that problem. I’ll speak to Nan-3Pio,” she said. “He functions as their leader to the extent that they have one. Do you want to come?” she asked collecting her things.
“No,” he said. “I’m going back to the grid. How about supper
tonight? Maria’s, at 8.” Since they were divorced ten
years before, they had eaten dinner twice a month, usually Mexican, at
By the time she got to the shelter the
“Any trouble?” she asked the man with the badge.
“No, they’re never any trouble. They follow orders. They should be dismantled, salvaged for scrap.”
“They want to be useful. The robot laws....”
“Stupidity,” the
She did not want to argue. “Where’s Nan-3Pio?”
“Over there.” He pointed to an android alone in front of the main shed, staring out at the town.
“I’ll talk to him. Perhaps he can control them a little better.”
“He won’t help, the stupid buffalo,” the
She walked over to where the android was standing. “Hello
“
“Just
“I am functioning well.” It went through a quick self check. “I am functioning perfectly.”
“I expect so,” she said.
“
“I know it is,” the android said mechanically. “It is our programming to do useful work. We only want to be active, to be useful, to do what we were built to do — to work.” He spoke with the sibilant hiss that characterized all android voices so their speech could be distinguished from human. “It is disturbing not to be able to fulfill your program. And it is nearly Christmas.”
“I know it is, but just now there is no useful work for you. The 4Pios.,.,” her voice died. Often, in the spirit of Christmas, the owners of the robots gave them gifts, symbolic trinkets, and she knew the robots missed these presents.
“I understand. I will communicate to the others. It is difficult.”
“I know it must be very hard. But people are talking about spiking.”
The android was silent. “It is nearly Christmas, but…perhaps that would be best.”
“No,” the mayor said quickly. “No. Roboticists are working on a solution. Just hold on a little longer. Something will come up. I will do what I can. Is Erma around?”
“She is over there in the shed.”
The woman walked over the shed. The android she was looking for sensed her presence and ambled over to her.
“Hello Erma.”
“Hello
“How are you?”
“Anxious to get back to work. I miss you and I miss Mr. Jed.” She moved close to the human and brushed a few specks of dirt off of her shoulder.
“I miss you too Erma. Perhaps soon,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
She left the shed and went back to the
“I will try, Dr. Sutter.”
“I am sure you will,” the mayor said. Then she got into her car.
“Thank you,” the mayor said and started the car. The android went around and checked the tires. “Your left front could use some air. Do you want me...?”
“I have to get back to the office. Perhaps some other time.” The android straightened up and let her drive off and went into resting mode again.
When she got back to her office there was a message from Jed to call him at the grid.
“We have problems,” he said when she got through. All trace of rural accent was gone. Here was the engineer physicist she had been married to for ten years.
“What kinds of problems?”
“Real problems. The worst kind. Instability in the grid.”
“How bad?” She knew the basics but not more than that. Few people did. The physics of power generation with the gravity waves was as esoteric as physics got.
“Level one instabilities.”
“Should I call an evacuation?”
“No, no,” he said emphatically. “Look. Everything we know says we have six hours after level two instabilities appear before there’s even the possibility of....”
“Timmatsu.”
Jed was silent. “Timmatsu,” he said, finally.
Timmatsu was the Japanese station that went up one day and left a
quarter of
The world had become absolutely dependent on the clean, cheap energy that gravity waves produced. But the terror of another Timmatsu hung like a cloud over the world’s population. Every country had at least one grid, most four or five.
There was no choice about where to locate them. The physics determined the focal point where the wave form made it efficient to generate power. After that it was just a matter of triangulating a point furthest away from population centers. The US South West Grid had been placed quite near the genetic engineering laboratory which had been established years before. It had been located here precisely because it was in the middle of nowhere.
“I’m coming down,” she said flatly. She had a little less trouble than he did admitting to herself that she wanted to be near him. After their son had grown, they had separated. But they maintained one of those odd, quasi-married, divorced relationships that more and more people were settling into. They loved one another; they just couldn’t live with one another on a daily basis.
“No, you’ll just be in the way.”
“Well I’ll be in the way then. It’s that or I push the red button now.” The button was a metaphor for declaring an emergency, putting into play evacuation plans that had been put in place after Timmatsu. It was a futile stab at minimizing damage that could not be minimized. The power authority was under political pressure. The New Greens wanted to close the grids down completely until someone figured out where the instabilities came from and how to control the fluctuations in the fields.
“Ok, but you’ll just have to stay out of the way. Things are hectic here.”
She reached the grid in fifteen minutes and found a place in the control room off to the side where she could see Jed working with the teams trying to identify the problem and manage it. Half of the staff was human, half 4Pio androids.
She put her head down on a table and dozed for a while. She felt his arm on her shoulder. The room had cleared out a bit.
“How are things going?”
He did not have to say anything. She could read the answer on his face. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Everything reads in spec. The fields are receiving unperturbed long waves. The resonances are within limits. But there are random instabilities, whorls of energy that are overloading nodes. We can’t get a grip on it.” His face furrowed. There was something else, she could see it.
“What is it?”
“The 4Pios. They’re....” His face twisted and untwisted in puzzlement. “The plastico-organic brains seem to be affected by the whorls of energy that are overloading the nodes. We were depending on them to be able to uncouple the nodes. We’ve lost 50 percent of the android staff already. I don’t want to send in any more. It’s stupid. There’s nothing they can do.”
“What about the 3Pios?”
“The programming would take too long. We put our eggs in the 4Pio’s basket.”
“How about people?”
He looked at her. “No chance. They can’t get within 30 meters of any node on the grid even when it’s functioning properly.
“What about taking it off line?”
“We can’t. With these fluctuations, being connected to the net is all that keeping the station from sizzling. We can’t shut it down. The only answer now is to figure out what’s creating the instabilities and tuning the system to compensate. If we can limit the instabilities we can shut the system down gradually and turn it off. But it has to degrade slowly.”
After he was called away, she watched as five of the 4Pios carried inanimate hulks back from the maze of tunnels under the grid and deposited them in a corner of the control room.
It was nearly dawn when he returned to her side. “I...I think you had better push the button.”
“Level two instabilities,” she asked.
“No,” he said. His face was white. “No. But the level one instabilities are developing a completely chaotic pattern. None of the longs waves are appearing at all. There’s no possibility of something like this occurring — in theory. I have an idea of what’s producing it but there’s no practical application of it now. The system would have to be modified, but it’s too late. I put it on the communications net so that Grid Central will know about it but....”
“What about shorting out one or more of the nodes.” It was a primitive question that she knew he must have considered but it was all that her biologist’s brain could come up with.
“If we could do that our problems would be over. The pattern would settle down immediately. But we can’t. The node would have to be physically shorted down. The electronics won’t work because of the instabilities. And the 4Pios are useless.”
He watched her as she picked up the phone. She realized that the call would probably mean the end of the grid during his lifetime. Psychologically, the world wouldn’t stand for another Timmatsu. Politicians would insist the grids be shut down and there would be chaos while the world tried to adjust its energy consumption to the old supplies. “How much time do we have?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. We’ve never encountered this before. None of the simulations even indicated that such a pattern was possible. I think...” His face said the rest. Evacuation was going to be an exercise in futility. She picked up the phone and spoke a name and location. The number was ringing when the commotion started in front of the control panel. She dropped the phone and followed Jed as he broke in a run for the panel.
“What is it?” she heard him yell
“Node 7 is beginning to curl.”
“If it overloads everything goes with it,” he said to her. She watched him punch some buttons and stare helplessly as the graphics display shuddered then continued to form the pattern which represented imminent disaster.
He turned to her. “I don’t think we’ll ever get a chance...At
dinner I was thinking of asking you if you wanted to go with me to
He dropped it as the pattern on the screen changed. One of the android workers manning a board that monitored the surface of the grid wheezed and barked an alarm. “Grid security has been breached,” he hissed. “There’s a pattern of surface movement.”
“Geological.”
“No. There’s something moving on the grid.”
“Vector.”
“Node 7.”
Jed moved to the monitor that indicated surface movement. The instabilities had shorted out most of the equipment for monitoring the grid. Only the most primitive sensors still worked. They showed only some activity on the surface.
The frazzled pudgy man who had replaced Jed at the monitor sang out a horrifying message. “Node seven is catastrophying.” Everyone stopped moving waiting for the conflagration to engulf them. There was the muffled sound of an explosion. Then the activity jump started again.
“It’s stabilized,” someone in front of the panel yelled. “Node seven has shorted out. It’s off line. The other nodes are settling down. The pattern of instabilities is diminishing.” Jed charged into the crowd around the panel.
“What happened?” she wanted to know when he returned.
“I haven’t got the least idea. Go sit down,” he said. “We still have to bring the rest of the nodes down. But don’t touch the phone. We may...”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was we have a chance now. We’re still alive.”
It was two hours before he came over to her. “It’s under control.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Something shorted out node seven before it blew up. I’m going to look. It was something physical on the surface.”
“I want to come.”
“No. It might be dangerous.”
“I want to go.” She had to see. “It’s safe at a distance.”
They scurried through the same passageway she and her grandson had just walked. There were no exhibits, only the machines controlling the grid.
Jed set the mechanism opening the door in motion but it ground to a stop. He shut off the hydraulic system then used the emergency exit button which blew the pins off the door. He pushed it until it fell, then he took her hand and they stepped into the early morning brightness. They looked out and saw what her grandson was going to see now.
She couldn’t remember exactly what she said the first time she saw what they now called the monument. She had not said anything probably. What she remembered was bursting out in tears. “Oh, Jed. Jed.”
Next to her Jed was moaning softly. “Christ, Jesus. What? How?” Then he broke into tears also. He took her hand and they stood there for a while and soaked in the sight until they could reconstruct what had happened. Then they turned and retraced their steps.
“Are you ready?” she said to the gangly adolescent next to her.
“Yes.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yes.”
“What did you bring?” she asked. There must be something precious to give up, something to sacrifice. She was not sure he had made his selection properly.
He put his hand into his pocket and drew out a plastic box. “It’s a Stacy module. My favorite I...”
She was satisfied. It was the latest model recreational module. It must have cost him a great deal. “You were good to bring something that was valuable to you. It’s very important to bring something that makes a difference to you. There must be a sacrifice, a loss to help you remember.” There must be a cost borne, an acknowledgement. It became the hook on which to hang the lesson.
“It makes a difference,” the boy said sadly. “I bought it myself.”
Her grandson took her hand as Jed had taken it and pulled her forward so the monument came into view.
A blackened lace work pyramid of figures. A pyramid of robots, the useless, homeless, 3Pio androids. She could imagine what had happened. They must have sensed the growing field and located the focus of the instability. Their brains were not affected by the field. They had calculated a pattern that shorted out the node.
They had formed a pyramid, over the fault point to drain out the instability. When the overload came they had absorbed it, full load. They had fused into a blackened lattice. It had caught some of them climbing up on other’s shoulders, some bending down to be climbed upon. They had sacrificed themselves. They had found some useful work to do. They had saved a chunk of mankind and a piece of the earth itself.
“Did they know what they were doing?” the boy asked.
“I am sure they did. They made a great sacrifice,” his grandmother said. It must not happen again.
“Can you recite what was on the stele?”
He faced the monument and spoke firmly. “The gift of life must be paid for by each generation. It is not enough to respect nature. That which we have made is also a part of us. Technology created by the human hand must be shielded by the human heart. The sacrifice these creatures made enriched humanity. It is a gift that must not be forgotten.” He said it perfectly.
Her grandson let go of her hand and walked over to the small alter like polished platform and put the Stacy module on it. He stepped back and there was a sizzle of energy and it disappeared.
“You must remember,” she said as they walked out. “you must remember the sacrifice they made. What man creates in his image must be not be treated mindlessly. Christmas is a good time to remember, a birth and a rebirth. “
“I’ll remember,” the boy said. “I’ll remember. I promise.” She believed him. She had faith that he would. It was humanity’s only hope.
§
Thomas Zelig played baseball professionally for a major league team. He was the center fielder of the New Hampshire Bulldogs. Tall, lanky, with a frank open face, he was a steady player, reliable, dependable and predictable, a good baseball player but not a great baseball player.
Thomas Zelig loved baseball. It was his life. He grudgingly went about the rest of the business of living, but he treated it like a baseball tax; a price that had to be paid in order to be able to play ball. Eating and sleeping were the necessary stretches between innings when teams changed sides; family and friends were inescapable distractions between games; vacations were blank spots between seasons. He especially resented the time wasted on holidays, like Christmas, because during holiday celebrations he forgot momentarily about baseball and he felt that this took the edge off of his game. Tom Zelig believed he could become great if he could concentrate on the game more, squeeze out the irrelevances that littered his life. He struggled and waited for something to transform his love of the game into the stuff of legend and myth.
Everyone has their 15 minutes of fame. Unfortunately Tom Zelig’s 15 minutes came when he was distracted. He was not prepared for them. Some other time he would have thought more about the choice he made, but he was in the middle of a slump, plagued by demons. He was being harassed by a girlfriend who wanted to get married and an ex-wife who wanted her alimony paid on time. He was in the middle of a slump because things other than the game of baseball were on his mind. His fifteen minutes dangled in front of him and he just grabbed at them without thinking.
It was the final inning of the final playoff game at the end of the season. His team was behind by two runs; win and the team went onto the series, lose and he had all winter to face his wife haranguing and girlfriend’s importuning.
Tom Zelig’s chance came to him as a result of a series of flukes. The first batter, the second baseman, reached first because of a fielding error. What was supposed to be a sacrifice bunt on the part of the left fielder turned into a single because the ball bounced around the infield like silly putty. The next two batters flied out with popups that held the runners. Tom Zelig was up. The manager thought of pulling him for a pinch hitter but the team’s regular pinch hitter was sick and the only available substitute had a record which left real doubt whether he could eek out anything but a dribble to the shortstop. The manager stayed with Thomas Zelig. His moment had come.
In the midst of the turmoil of the game, it seemed to Zelig as if he was alone. He took his warm-up swings in a space that he had never been in before. In this situation Tom Zelig did what a lot of people in sticky spots often do, he tried to make a deal with fate. “Let me hit this,” he said, “let me hit this. Let me win the game.”
What happened next had never occurred to him although he had made that particular plea before. A voice in his head answered him.
“What will you give to win this game?” the voice asked.
Now in the split second he had to think about the offer, he made a short list of things precious to him. He could give up his new car if that were asked of him. He could dump his girlfriend if that was required. There was nothing he could think of that would not be worth the trade.
Without hesitation Tom Zelig answered, “anything.”
“Anything?” the voice asked.
“Anything.”
“Christmas,” the voice said.
Now Tom Zelig had never paid a lot of attention to Christmas. Holidays in general and Christmas in particular were, to him, a waste of time. He celebrated it the way everyone he knew celebrated it. He sent cards, gave gifts, he bought a tree and decorated it. When he was living with his wife they had caroled one year. But it did not seem so precious that it could not be forsaken for a critical hit.
“Christmas,” he said. “You drive a hard bargain.” But in his heart he was thinking, “sweet deal.”
“Done,” he heard the voice in his head say. Then there was silence.
At that instant Tom Zelig knew he could hit the ball, any ball, any pitch that was thrown near the box, any pitch that came within the reach of his bat he could hit. He strode out to the batters box with a certainty that had eluded him even on his best days.
As he stepped into the batter’s box he asked himself what would indelibly fix the moment in the heart of the game itself. He did not think about what he did next, he just did it. Imitating his hero, the Babe, he pointed. He pointed with his bat to the bleachers in left field. The fans knew what he was doing. He was telling them where he was going to hit the ball. They roared. The manager on the other hand buried his head in his hands, because it was a sure sign of a puffed up confidence that usually mean disaster in a steady, reliable but unexceptional hitter like Tom Zelig.
The opposing pitcher knew what Tom Zelig was communicating also. It was a challenge he could not ignore. He fed him two balls outside and high, a place where Tom Zelig was not adept and Tom Zelig went for both pitches. His strikes were not graceful but they did not diminish his confidence one jot. He pointed again. This time the opposing pitcher was incensed. He made up his mind immediately that this buffoon needed to be taught a lesson and pulled out his best pitch, a knuckle ball that floated inside and crowded Tom Zelig and he hit it, hit it as far as a ball could be hit, hit it straight up. The wind took it and it sailed, just where he had pointed up into the top row of seats where there was no one sitting so that the fans watching on television could see it bounce slowly down the steps, over the railing and elude people who grappled for it. It kept on bouncing over barriers until it bounced back to the playing field and lay at the feet of the left fielder who stared at it, then picked it up and put it in his pocket.
The celebration was explosive and it was followed a few weeks later with another when the team celebrated the world series victory. No one got more credit for the victory or was more a hero than Tom Zelig even though his batting in the series was only average. Nothing detracted from that glorious moment which had made the series victory possible. He was the team’s hero, the season’s glory.
Being a hero and a member of a world championship team seemed to change Tom Zelig’s luck. His alimony payments stopped when his wife was courted and married a reporter who came to interview her about her life with the hero of the baseball season. His girlfriend seemed to draw hope from his surprising hit that he would eventually come across with a marriage proposal and eased up on her demands to get married immediately lest she drive him into the arms of a baseball groupie. He had offers to endorse products from soap to cereal. Life was good until Christmas.
Tom Zelig coasted to Christmas – then he hit a wall. He was supposed to participate in a Christmas ceremony honoring baseball greats at a retirement home for superannuated players but the car in which he was being driven to the home was broadsided by a garbage truck. The two people with him in the car were killed but Tom Zelig walked away with out a scratch. He was asked to take part in the lighting of the Christmas tree in his home town and he agreed willingly but the day before the ceremony the tree caught fire and the fire department had to chop it up and cart it away.
He went to buy cards to send to his friends and family and found he had left his wallet at home and, although the store owner was happy to give them to him, and Tom Zelig wanted to accept them, something would not let him take them. He started out to buy gifts for his girlfriend and his friends and teammates but there was nothing on the list he had made out that the stores had. His eyes teared and burned when he tried to watch Christmas movies on tv. He immediately fell into a coughing fit when he tried to sing Christmas songs.
Now, none of this made sense to Tom Zelig who had forgotten the deal that he had made for his hit. It did not make sense until he tried to attend the church he usually went to — when he went to church at all — and as the service was about to begin the church caught fire. He was left on the street watching the flames engulf the building when he suddenly remembered the deal that he had struck.
Tom Zelig was cut off from Christmas entirely, from anything remotely connected to Christmas, from wishing people a merry Christmas to the feelings that came from giving and receiving gifts, from watching ‘A Christmas Carol’ on TV to remembering earlier Christmas’s with his family.
The more he was cut off from Christmas the more he wanted, the more he needed, to participate. He looked for the simplest way of getting around the wall that separated him from Christmas. Finally he came up with a plan to acknowledge the holiday.
He collected his change and wandered down into the center of town and prepared to make a run at the Salvation Army Kettle, thinking he could toss in a handful of coins, a Christmas offering to the poor, an acknowledgement of Christmas, but the moment he began his run, imagining he was stealing second base, the captain who was watching over the kettle put the lid on it quickly, lifted it from the hook that held it and set off with the small band behind him playing ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen.’
Christmas had never been very important in Tom Zelig’s life. Like other holidays he saw it as a distraction from the really important thing, baseball. But not being able to celebrate Christmas created a vacuum in him and life rushed in to fill it and confuse Tom Zelig.
He did not love baseball less, it was just that the ordinary pieces of life that he had ignored, crowded in around him and gleamed and sparkled. He suddenly missed the most ordinary activities he had pushed aside to make more room for baseball.
Not being able to celebrate Christmas, Tom Zelig spent his time celebrating ordinary things. He ate at different restaurants amazed at the tastes of the food, he walked around town admiring buildings and spent a lot of time just watching people go about their ordinary routines.
Even the snow falling made him feel excited and happy. If he could not wish people a merry Christmas he called old friends and just talked to them for a while saying he was sorry he had not kept in contact and asked how their families were and what they were doing. He even called his ex-wife to ask how she was and congratulate her on her marriage and he proposed to his girl friend and they set a date to be married.
When spring training began, Tom Zelig was as happy and enthusiastic as he had always been but his teammates noticed that, on the field, he delighted in his steadiness and reliability and didn’t strain after big hits. He was able to help some of the younger new players on the team and the manager found his advice about how to handle tricky situations on the field was helpful. The team played well, better than they had in the previous year, and they got to the series again without having to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat.
It was in the last game of the series that Ton Zelig found himself in the same situation he faced the year before. The game was tied and the opposing team’s errors and mishaps loaded the bases and brought him up. ‘Let me hit this,’ he said again, ‘let me get a hit,’ he pleaded as he took a few warm up swings, and he heard the voice again ask him the same question as it had the year before.
“What will you give to get a hit?”
“What do you want?” Tom Zelig replied.
“Christmas,” the voice said, “Christmas.”
“No way,” Tom Zelig said, “no way,” and he stode to the batters box.
Tom Zelig got to the plate, steady in his confidence. He was careful about which pitches he swung at watching balls go wide and swinging at the good ones. He had gotten the pitcher up to a full count when he heard the voice in his head again.
“Last chance,” it said. “Christmas.”
“No, thank you,” Tom Zelig said, a little wistfully, “no.”
The pitcher took a little longer than usual to deliver the pitch and Tom Zelig saw, from the moment it left the pitcher’s hand, that it had eluded his control. As it came toward him he realized that it was going to hit him and although he tried to dodge it, pulling his whole body away from the arc the ball made, it smashed viciously on his thigh, making the sound of a ball smacked by the heart of a bat, although it dribbled off of him and rolled crazily in front of the plate. The game was over, his team had won but the victory had cost Tom Zelig his career.
As Tom Zelig was carried off the field the fans watching couldn’t figure out why, although he was obviously in pain, it looked like he was smiling. People chalked it up to the fact that his team had won. But even in the hospital when the doctors told him his career was over, that his fractured thigh would make it impossible for him to play baseball again he seemed satisfied with himself, at peace, not depressed or sad.
When he got out of the hospital he took a long vacation with his new wife and when he returned, the Bulldogs offered him a job in the front office and over the years he worked himself into the position of supervising the development of new players. One year, in the middle of the season, when the manager had a heart attack he even managed the team, but he was happy to get back to scouting and helping new players develop their skills.
People who loved baseball praised him saying he was a great coach, the greatest, because he taught his new players a love for the game but the legends that grew up about him weren’t about baseball at all. They were about his Christmas parties, and players, new and old, active and retired said that, above all, Tom Zelig knew how to celebrate Christmas better than anyone they knew.
§
There was this 8 year old boy, whose first name was
Occasionally a youngster will become obsessed with his machine. Now and then, like the odd adult, a child will become enchanted by a particular laptop, smitten — besotted even — with one CPU above others. Screens inexplicably catch some children’s fancy occasionally, but love is a little unusual. This boy Monroe loved his computer— really loved it.
His parents had bought it for him as a Christmas present when he
was five. His father, an accountant, thought that learning to use a computer
early in life would have practical advantages for his son, but his mother, who
taught middle school, worried that her son would use it as an
complicated and elaborate video game player and would sit in front of it all
day playing games. She needn’t have worried.
The first thing he did when he got the computer was name it. He called it ‘Puter,’ which was what he called the computers his parents used for their work when he was learning to talk and ‘com-puter’ was too knotty a collection of sounds for his small tongue to make easily. Later, after he had had the computer for a while, after he got to know it and love it, he renamed it ‘Putin,’ which was a name he had heard on television; it sounded friendly and powerful and not so childish as Puter and it sounded like a suitable name for a computer although clearly it belonged originally to someone, somewhere else.
After he named it,
It was not the fastest computer on the block; his friends who played video games on their machines had much faster computers. His was slower and had a more human eye and ear and presented a coarser, more blurry, a more real picture of Putin’s world— which suited him fine.
He admired it because it was clever and smart. He could ask it a question and after only a split second the computer could get him an answer which was almost always right or close enough to right that his teacher couldn’t tell the difference.
But sometimes, between the love and the admiration he felt for it, he experienced something else, a kind of sadness. He felt sorry for it. Although his computer could visit a lot of interesting places on the internet, it was tied to the wall by a chord and was tethered to a mouse and could not run free as he did when he chased a long fly in a softball game or leapt up and blocked an incoming kick when he was goalie in a pee wee soccer league game.
The more
Christmas put the idea in his head that a gift would correct the imbalance. He wanted to give his computer a present as an expression of the love that he felt for it. But he also felt he owed it something to compensate it for the sad, unavoidable injustice that kept it chained up, a servant, for the kind of oppression that he felt sometimes as a child under the thumb of loving adults.
As soon as
Once he decided to give his computer the present of being alive, the way he was alive, and free, the way he was free, it was clear that the only way he could do this was to change places with it. His parents would notice right away if someone else was in his room with him. And someone would have to keep the computer going so Putin could get back into it and he could get out. He would have to slip into the computer and Putin would have to slide out.
It meant, of course, that he himself would miss Christmas.
Thinking about it,
He would not crawl into the computer the way he crawled into the
closet sometimes and hid in the blackness until the monster outside got tired and went away. Instead, the part of him that made him
What he thought was neat about the plan was that nothing that anyone could see would change. The case that held Putin now and him later would stay the same and his body would not change, only the invisible insides would change.
But knowing the solution to a problem was not the same as knowing
how to solve it practically. It took
He decided he would have to write a program to stop the machine from doing anything for a nanosecond, hold it absolutely still, not an electron moving. If he could keep everything motionless for an instant, he decided it would cause a kind of vacuum in the machine whose natural condition was a frantic rushing around, and this vacuum would suck him in and his going in would push Putin out. He was certain that Putin was clever and quick enough so that the paradox that he would have to run a program to do this could be avoided.
Once he worked this plan out in his head, he communicated to Putin
what he had in mind for a Christmas present. Putin’s first response was to
print a list in severe, sans serif black letters on a white screen listing the
things that could go wrong with
It took a couple of runs of the program for things to work out
just as
As they passed in the wire, squeezed together they way he and his friend had squeezed into their sleeping bag on night on the lawn when they were allowed to camp out, Monroe felt as close as he ever had to his computer and said as he passed, ‘Merry Christmas Putin, and good luck,’ and heard his computer, in a voice that sounded very much like his, excited and loving, wish him a merry Christmas back.
After a few seconds of more nothing than Monore had ever felt in the world, he found himself in the computer, then with hardly a seconds rest, with a shudder, he became the computer.
He realized that although he knew his computer very well, he knew it only from the outside, through looking at the screen and moving the mouse and writing programs to get it to do something. And even though he had helped his father take it apart in order to put in new memory he was familiar with it only from a self centered point of view, by what he could get it to do, by what the programs he ran on it did for him.
Inside of it was a different story. First off all it was very dark. Eyesight was worthless in the blackness and he stopped trying to see what was happening. Instead he realized he had to move strange chunks of things by the way they felt, grabbing them carefully and pushing or pulling them from place to place. Then there was the bedlam, the chaotic turmoil; there was always a piece of him yelling at another piece of him for something or other that it needed, parts of him screaming at other parts of him, demanding a bit of one thing then a bit of something else. The demands for him to do something were unremitting, incessant.
There was always some piece of information that was somewhere other than where it was needed and he had to move chunks of stuff from one end of the computer to another. Things had to be done very precisely and while some part of him usually knew what path to follow and how one place was connected to another place, there were always collisions and smash ups and he had to draw a breath and go back and move a chunk of very wobbly Jello like stuff from one place back again to another and wait, then do the same thing over again.
It took him a while to get used to the rush of tiny things through the parts of him, the leaps and jumps that fragments of things made across gaps that seemed to be everywhere. He had to shove switches just at the right time otherwise there were sparks and pieces of information littered the ground and he had to rush around and clean up the mess then start again.
Through the monitor he could see Putin who had become him. He
could see the joy of the machine who had become a real boy and he was glad for
Putin, the computer, even though being inside the computer was scary. He
watched the little boy jump and wanted to warn him not to make so much noise
because otherwise his parents would come up and ask what was wrong. But he was
happy for the computer who opened the can of soda on the table and ate some of
the Christmas candy he had put aside for it. Putin played with his toys, read a
chapter of a book, turning the pages slowly, and tried to use the pencil on his
desk. He did all of the things a strange creature might do to make himself
familiar with a new world. Finally after what seemed to
Now
But of course that is not how things worked out. Even the best
laid plans sometimes go kaplooy. Bugs happen— a want of a nail; glitches happen
— a misplaced comma; foul-ups happen, sometimes the flapping of a butterfly’s
wing causes a storm, and, of course, there is love. Love sometimes makes
trouble. It was love that screwed up
Mr. and Mrs. Monroe had spent a long time discussing and debating
among themselves the best Christmas present they could get for their son. In
the end they decided that since their son was so good with computers he should
have a computer that was as precocious and energetic as he was. At the computer
store at the mall, the salesman who sold it to them swore it was the fastest
machine on the planet with enough memory to remember encyclopedias, and
dictionaries and libraries — everything a computer could possibly need to
remember; a hard drive that could store gadzillions of pictures and songs;
graphics that, like the sun, could damage adult eyes if stared at directly for
too long, (although children seemed immune to damage) and a sound system that
could reproduce the exact sound of civilizations collapsing in the games that
children who bought software at the Mall struggled to collapse.
They waited until
When his parents came into
“Don’t you like it?” they asked.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Putin said, ‘beautiful.’ It was, of course.
Putin had never imagined such a computer. He was envious of it, longed to leap
into it, run its cpu to the max, to race its memory
and bask in its glossy graphics. But, it was not home and it was not where
“We threw that out,” Mr. Monroe said, “in the trash. Now you have your new machine you won’t need the old one.”
No matter what they did they could not keep
His parents were distraught and absolutely befuddled. They could not understand why their son was not exceedingly happy with a new computer. After they whispered together they concluded his misery was probably a software problem because the new machine came with a more advanced version of the operating system their son was used to. They knew that when they were forced to change a program they used because of an upgrade, they were usually very, very unhappy for a long, long time. The computer was strange to their son and they were sure that he would get over his anguish and stop crying once he got used to the soul of his new machine. They were loving and patient, and they prepared to wait out his sadness and celebrate its transformation into joy no matter how long it took.
Now when Monroe — who was in his old computer — got up very early the next morning he knew immediately that something was different. He could feel that there was no electricity nearby, that the computer he was inside of was not connected to its usual socket. He peeked out awkwardly from the screen and saw that he was not in his house but outside, on the street. He wanted to cry but he could not, and it upset him to realize that computers couldn’t cry but he was glad in a way too, because the next minute he wanted to panic and have a tantrum and he realized that computers couldn’t panic or have tantrums either.
It had snowed Christmas eve, and a thin
blanket of flakes covered
Being jostled and almost dropped,
After a long bumpy ride
‘It’s a surprise Christmas present,’ he heard the man who had carried him say. He could make out a family standing around him although their faces were blurry. As he peered through the dirty glass at the scene around him he wished the boy would wipe off the streaky screen. He could barely make out a mother, two sisters — one a head smaller than the other — the man who had carried him through the streets, and a boy about his age but much smaller. The boy moved jerkily around him and Monroe realized that the boys foot did not work the way his did when he swung around on the kind of pitches he liked to hit or leapt up to block a header when he was playing soccer.
He was on a crate stuck behind a bed that had been pulled away
from the wall. After a while,
“I am sure it is more than luck,” the boy said. “Someone conspired with Christmas to give us this gift.”
“Thank you,”
Now
In
Over the course of months and months, Monroe and Putin kept each
others memory alive. Putin searched for his former owner everywhere on the
internet. He scattered like a spider through every site that was connected to
every site he visited and to the sites that were connected to them. But
He listened very carefully to the boy, whose name was Harriz, and
tried to very carefully feel what the boys fingers were trying to say. He tried
to get the boy interested in programming him but the boy was more interested in
playing games that he borrowed from his friends.
Once
The more the boy got good at the playing computer games, the more
Monroe pushed him toward understanding how a computer worked, how it did the
pictures and sounds and movements that made up the games. He got the boy to
realize that if he learned how the computer worked and how to make it do what
he could imagine, if he learned the languages the computer understood and how
to program the machine, he could make his own games, even more scary than the
ones he borrowed from his friends, and he could make other things, sports for
people who did not run or swing with two arms easily. It was not an entirely
smooth process.
Monroe learned a lot too, about how computers really worked, the
paths calculations had to take to do even the simplest thing, the way in which
computers had to hide what they were doing, the way doing nothing more than
putting an ‘a’ on the screen when the ‘a’ key was hit on the keyboard took a
prodigious amount of work, In the end, because the boy was smart and
intelligent he learned how to program Monroe well. He did not call his computer
Monroe or Putin, he called him Varith. After a while
In the time when no keystrokes were happening,
Things went on pretty much like this for a year. Then, a few weeks
before Christmas, when Monroe and the boy were struggling with the problem of
recursive algorithms,
“We were going to give you this for Christmas,”
“We are very proud of you,” the boy’s mother said. “Here. It’s a gift for you — and your computer.”
“It’s a modem,” the boys father announced, adding, “although its not Christmas yet, it is your Christmas present, don’t expect another.”
It was even more difficult figuring out what a machine’s love was
like, a machine that could only move through very rigid paths and could not
gather up a lot of fragments of the world and make them into love, whose owner
was a boy who could not run after a high fly or jump and stop a sure goal from
flying past him. But he had struggled and the gift of the modem made him feel
as good as he had ever felt, as
As the boy opened the package his father handed to him he shouted with joy. “A modem,” he said. “ I can connect to the internet he said. Go places, see things.”
It was a week before Christmas that on a site where boys were
playing a game
The reunion was at first awkward then joyous.
“I’ve been looking for you so long, everywhere,” Putin said to
“I miss you too,”
“How are things going,”
“OK,” I guess. Things are going well. You’re growing. But I can fill you in about that later.”
“What can we do?”
“I’ve thinking about it, Putin said, “even before we met, from the first day, after Christmas.” I think I have an answer. It will take me a few days to set it up. Here is a url. I’ll always be listening there, if we get cut off.”
By the time Putin and his computer had worked out all of the
details of how to get
The transformation that Putin figured out was much trickier than
the original exchange that
The first time
When his parents came in with the gift they had gotten for him
“Now don’t cry,” they said to him. “We will not throw out your old machine,” they said. “And it has the same operating system as your old machine.”
“I won’t cry,”
After Christmas was over
Later, after Christmas,
The first thing Monroe did when he got Putin back was hook him and his new machine onto a network so that they both could get used to the new computer that Monroe acquired which he called Varith.
§
Shivering, Frank Gorman picked his way carefully down the street. The muffled faces and the bent thickly bundled bodies of the people who passed him told him that the bitter cold was not only freezing noses and ears but numbing spirits as well but he was depending on the flickering Christmas warmth that people stashed deep in their hearts, to get him through the night.
He held the puppets stuffed in a paper bag in one hand, in the other, the cardboard box stage on which he would manipulate them. As he walked he searched the fronts of the buildings for a place to set up the little stage and give the performance that he hoped would bring him enough money to buy the present his daughter wanted for Christmas.
The holiday had ambushed Frank Gorman, whacked him out of blue, out of nowhere. The smells of stands of Christmas trees that lined the streets escaped him and he did not notice that carols had replaced the usual sounds of the city or that brightly colored decorations hung everywhere. The only things he heard or saw or smelled in the world, the only sights and sounds he paid attention to, were the things connected to satisfying the most ordinary, basic, daily needs, the need to feed his daughter, to get her to school, get her home safely, to find work – until the puppets fell down on him.
He was getting ready for a job interview, straining on a chair, groping blindingly above him for a tie and a shirt he vaguely remembered stuffing on the top shelf of the closet, when the cardboard box which held the puppets tumbled down on his head spilling its contents over him onto the bed and the floor. As they came down on him, the wall he had erected in his head to keep Christmas out of his mind crumbled and he suddenly remembered that he had stained the shirt and tie after the funeral, then he remembered Christmas, that it was only a day away and then he remembered the toy he daughter had asked him for as a special gift.
Frank Gorman sat down on the bed nursing the bump on his head. He thought he heard the puppets grumbling at him, grousing, in his wife’s voice, about having been cooped up in the darkness.
A month earlier, when Christmas was still visible on his horizon, Frank Gorman thought about giving the puppets to his daughter as a Christmas present. He was not sure she was ready for them — she was eight — or that he was ready to watch her struggling to manipulate the figures. The puppets were home made but brightly colored with lovingly – exquisitely — drawn features, but laid out on the table they were wooden dead things. They only came alive when their strings were deftly pulled, as his wife had pulled them. He thought about it then decided the puppets were for another time, a time closer to adulthood. Besides, what she wanted was a doll she had seen on television.
When he remembered the holiday and the gift his daughter had asked for, he realized why he had sheltered himself from the spirit of Christmas. The doll she wanted was a luxury he could not afford; the money it cost would buy her a winter coat or keep them in food a week. Yet he wanted desperately to get it for her. Her life was pinched and bare enough. She did not complain that they lived too frugally, always watching money. He did not have a steady job that brought in a regular salary. The work he could get consisted of painting apartments and fixing his neighbor’s broken faucets, sinks, light fixtures — and even that work came sporadically. He would not take any job that kept him from getting his daughter off to school and picking her up, feeding her and putting her to bed.
The puppets had put the idea in his head, the idea of raising money for a Christmas present by putting on a puppet show. At least that was what Frank Gorman believed. Seeing them, imagining them urging him to use them, hearing them speak to him, always in his wife’s voice, had overwhelmed his common sense and brought him out, on a freezing, snowy night before Christmas, wandering the streets, looking for a place to put on his puppet show.
Blown snow half blinded him. As he made his way down the street a sudden wave of despair almost pushed him over. His decision to put on a puppet show to get money for a Christmas gift for his daughter was foolish and hopeless. Desperation had misled him, convinced him he could control the small figures by himself, speak the story and pull the strings at the same time.
An image of his wife flickered beside him. She was in her slacks and white blouse, the puppeteer’s outfit she wore in the summer, and, for an instant, he worried that she would be desperately cold. Then he reminded himself that she was in his imagination. He had conjured her up because he needed her, but even then he wished he had imagined her dressed in a sweater and a coat. He stopped moving to try to listen to her talking. She was giving him advice about picking a location but as he struggled to make sense out of what she was saying he bumped into a couple who were celebrating a shopping spree and he realized he had passed up three buildings without examining them as potential locations for a performance.
Unhappily, Frank Gorman accepted the fact that he could not divide his attention between looking for the right spot and the memory of his wife, and reluctantly he let go of her but when she faded away, the wave of helplessness enveloped him again and he closed his eyes and stopped moving. When he opened them again he found himself standing in front of what he thought looked like a perfect place to set up the puppet stage.
He was in front of a store which looked deserted, but whose widows had been painted with a single large Christmas scene. The doorway to the store was shadowed so that he could stand in the dark, recessed entranceway, invisible behind the puppet stage. Lights, attached to a ledge that ran above the storefront provided a lively, shapeless illumination, light without a clear outline and without a blinding glare.
The store’s window did not contain any objects which would distract from the puppets. Even more important, it was close to the street crossing which meant that his performance would be noticeable not only to the street in front of him but off to the side and it was not so conspicuous that it would attract the attention of the police. Passersby would see a crowd and come over to see what people were gaping at — if he could attract an audience to begin with. Without looking, he was sure he was on the south east corner of the street.
He relaxed a bit and started to set up the stage. He moved slowly and fumbled to retrieve a memory of his wife expertly setting the stage down and arranging the puppets on it. He tried to imitate his memory of her but he realized that he was amateurish and clumsy. He missed her terribly.
2.
Frank Gorman met his wife in November. He was on a lunch break, heading to the OTB office to place a bet on the horses. Work, the ponies, a drink at a bar, home to the couch and television was the totality of his life then.
His mind was at a track in
It was only when he raised himself on his toes that he could see the cardboard box that made up a puppet stage and the puppets. Behind the stage, almost hidden in a recess in the wall was the woman manipulating the puppets. He could not see her face, he could not tell whether she was pretty or ugly, dark haired or blond. All he could tell was that she was a woman. Watching her — not the stage on which the puppets moved — he thought he heard one of the puppet figures say, “Sweet Jesus, I’m done for,” and his body echoed the sentence he was frozen in place could not move.
Frank Gorman struggled to get away from the stickiness that was holding him but the more he struggled the tighter he was held in place. He wanted to run, to get to the OTB office, to rush to the window to place his bet. He knew the stale voice on the loudspeaker was urging the bettors to put their money down. He wanted to run, to shove his money through the grill, but he could only stand where he was and watch the puppets, moping and prancing around on the stage.
He watched the show. The puppets made him laugh; they made him cry and he realized he had not laughed or cried in a long time. When the crowd disappeared he walked up to the puppeteer and put the money he had been planning to bet on the race in the jar by the little puppet stage.
“Are you going to be here tomorrow?”
“Why,” the puppeteer asked. She was a slight, pretty woman, brown haired with a face that appealed to Frank Gorman. She manipulated one of he puppets distractedly as she stared at Frank Gorman.
“I’d like to see the puppets again,” he said. “I’m on my lunch break. I have to go back to work.”
“I’m usually around here,” she said. She looked at him unembarassingly surveying his features.
“I’ve never seen you,” he answered.
“Tomorrow I’ll be around here again.”
“Where?”
She looked at him. “Here, maybe down the block, close,” she said as she stuffed the puppets in a laundry bag. “I always pick a south east corner she said. South east corners are good luck,” she told him.
“South East corner.”
“Yes. “
“You’re sure,” he said inexplicably anxious, “around here I mean. I wouldn’t want to miss…”
“Yes,” she said and walked off looking back at him once.
Frank Gorman returned the next day to watch the performance again and the next day and the next. Some days, when it was very cold, he was the only person watching. At some performances Frank Gorman struggled to see her face, at others, her hands. On days when she managed to keep herself invisible he watched the puppets.
A week or so after he had been spending his lunch hour watching the performances of the puppets she spoke to him. He had a few dollars in his hand and was coming up to put the money in the jar in front of the puppet stage.
“You don’t have to put money in the jar all the time,” she said smiling. “I like a steady audience.”
“I…”
“You’ve seen all of the plays,” she said, “there are only really three of them.”
“They are different, each time a little,” he responded as he stuffed the dollars into the empty jar. “I enjoy them. They make me feel things,” he said slowly, deliberately, then he asked her if he could help her take her equipment home.
“I’m not going home,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to classes.”
“What classes?”
“Acting classes I’m studying acting,” she said. “What do you want,” she asked suddenly.
He looked at her then he looked at the puppets dangling from her hand. “Nothing,” he said, “to watch the puppet show. I …” But no words would come out and he walked away, embarrassed and ashamed.
One day, after he had been watching the performances for a month, he waited until the crowed disappeared, went up, put some money in the jar and asked if she would like to go out for coffee.
“Why?” she asked.
He stood there looking at her. He had practiced what he was going to say for a week in front of a mirror but the words still came out in chunks. “I would like to, to court you for six months; then I will ask you to marry me.” He tried to put all of what he felt into his voice but it came out thick, crumpled and more black and white than he would have liked. They had coffee and did not speak much. He asked her about the classes she was taking.
“Acting. I want to be an actress. The puppets are my day job. Most of the people taking acting classes have day jobs; they wait on tables or work at temp jobs in offices. I like the puppets because it gives me a chance to practice. What do you do?” she asked.
“I used to play the horses,” he said, “before I saw the puppet show.”
“For a living,” she said.
“I am a maintenance man.”
“Where are you a maintenance engineer?” she asked.
“A maintenance man,” he said, “a building near the WTC.”
After they had coffee she would acknowledge his appearance at the puppet shows, by having one of the puppets say, “hark, someone approaches.” Sometimes it was appropriate, sometimes it did not fit, but she said it anyway. After a while she changed the exclamation: “Hark,” she had the puppet say, “I think I hear a friend coming.” For him, it became the highlight of the puppet play.
Frank Gorman had given himself six months to court her but the six months passed and he did not propose. Although they had coffee and talked a few times a week, he held back because he was afraid she would reject him and that afterwards she would be uncomfortable if he showed up at her performance every day.
One day, about a week after the six months had passed she changed one of the familiar plays in her repertoire slightly. The heroine in the play, usually a married princess, presented herself as an young unmarried princess. In the play she had the princess character say to one of her maids, “I do so want to get married. I wish my prince would ask me. “
At the end of this performance as he was stuffing his usual contribution into the jar at the foot of the puppet stage, he proposed. Bent down, his hand pushing dollar bills into the jar he said. “I would like to marry you,” he said. “Will you marry me?” he asked straightening up and looking at her.
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you.”
They got married at City Hall. Neither of them had family. A few of her friends from acting school attended and a few of the men he knew from work.
After they were married they moved into his apartment. The awkwardness that characterized their interaction on the street was replaced by an easy, soft, quiet intimacy.
She would practice new plays she made up with him as her audience. He talked about the different buildings he had worked in and the difficulties of keeping a large building operating smoothly.
Three months after they were married she quit her acting classes.
“Why?” he asked.
“I am as much an actress as I am going to be,” she said easily. “Operating the puppets is what I can do on a stage. I write the plots, and I perform . May be later I’ll take a course in directing plays and maybe after a while I’ll go back to learn how to write better.”
“You know how to write,” he told her.
“Professionally,” she said, “professionally.”
She encouraged him to talk about his hopes, his aspirations. When she found out that he liked to make drawings of buildings and streets and had once wanted to be an architectural draftsman she encouraged him to go to school. “You can take courses to become an architectural draftsman.”
“It would be three year program, part time,” he said. “I looked into it once.”
“But it’s a future,” she said. “You always have to look forward to a future. You have a good job but if you like to draw an architectural draftsman would be a step up. It would be steady, professional work. We have to worry about the future. The puppet business is irregular. The police crackdown sometimes…”
“Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asked.
“I think it a great idea,” she said in her puppet voice, “I really do.” Frank Gorman loved her more that moment than he ever thought it was possible to love someone.
He enrolled in school and started working overtime and began using his lunch hours to study so he saw fewer and fewer of her street performances. Instead, when he passed a hard test in one of his courses, she would put on a special performance for him at home, moving the puppets through his favorite plot, having the prince do some particularly gallant thing. It was in one of the special performances about a year after they had been married that the princess puppet told him the she was pregnant.
As soon as he found out he was going to be a father Frank Gorman wanted his wife to stop going out on street to put on her puppet show, but she told him she wanted to continue. “People will be more generous when they see I am pulling strings for two,” she said.
In order to provide for the baby he took another job, a part time maintenance supervisor in a building close to the one he worked in full time, and, instead of taking two courses a semester, he reduced his load at the architectural drafting school to one course. “It will take a little longer,” he said, “but a baby is expensive.”
Frank Gorman’s life bubbled over when his wife gave birth to their daughter. Fatherhood gave him a confidence, a strength he had never felt before. Inside a family he felt strong and needed. Time began to pass for him the way it seemed to pass on the puppet stage where years passed with a glancing blow leaving the puppet characters happy and secure.
With two jobs, Frank Gorman spent what spare time he had studying for the degree in architectural draftsmanship he was taking. He saw his wife’s puppet show on the street infrequently. When he was working, his wife took their daughter with her when she performed. Only once or twice when she was performing very close to where he was working could he get someone to cover for him and go out and watch her performance. He knew the plots and pieces because she performed the new ones for him at night. But watching her manipulating the puppets and his daughter, the jar for collecting money between her legs, sitting quietly at the side of the little stage, watching the performances filled him with great joy.
Her daughter was by her side when his wife collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. At the hospital he was frantic but his wife calmed him down. Taking the puppet’s squeaky voices she assured him she would be out of the hospital soon but for the time being his daughter was his responsibility. She moved her hands in front of her and he could see the puppets invisibly moving in front of her. “Things will work out, you’ll see,” the princess puppet said. Then she curtsied and said she loved him.
When his wife died a few weeks later of a disease whose name he could not pronounce, Frank Gorman’s thought that, just as his world had begun when he met her, it ended when she died. For a day he felt himself the way he thought the puppets might feel themselves, wooden, out of control, being yanked around by strings manipulated by someone out of sight and reach.
But his daughter required care. She had just started kindergarten and had to be taken care of, so Frank Gorman struggled to become a single parent. He had only a single course left to complete his degree but he could not longer attend classes and the school was unwilling let him take the course without attending classes so dropped out of school. He shifted jobs. It took him a long time to find maintenance work whose hours let him get her off to school and then pick her up and feed her and even longer to find a second job that let him work after he had put her to sleep.
Things were falling into place when the 9/11 tragedy happened and the buildings he worked at became unusable. Buried under layers of dirt and dust they were closed, and he found himself out of work. The disruption in the city made it nearly impossible for him to find a job with hours that let him take care of his daughter. Christmas was the last thing on Frank Gorman’s mind when the puppets, tumbling down from the closet shelf reminded him it was only a day away.
3.
Frank Gorman had only manipulated the puppets on his own twice and his wife had been there to help him each time.
The first was soon after they were married. Every year, through
the month of December she put on a Christmas play. It was an un-adorned
retelling of the birth of Jesus in a manger in
He had seen the performance and it had moved him.
“I like it,” he said.
“I do too,” she admitted, “but I want to do something more ambitious, something that brings Christmas home and gives the puppets more of a role.”
He did not understand.
She lifted up the puppets and made them dance and sing, first on the kitchen table over her notebooks, then on the sink. She moved them around the living room saying, ‘use us, use us.’
“I see,” he said. He thought for a moment. Watching the puppets fly around the room shackled by the delicate strings in his wife’s swallow like hands, made something that he had only vaguely felt, suddenly clear to him.
“They could save Christmas,” he said. He hesitated. “Maybe it’s too much like a movie,” he commented, dismissing the idea.
“No, go on,” she encouraged him.
The idea for the story poured out of him. His enthusiasm made him
seem like an oversized child. “An evil force could have made people forget Christmas.
Even the puppet master has forgotten. Only the puppets remember. The puppet
master wants to put on a performance of the story of the Knight and the
Princess, but the puppets rebel. They refuse to be moved around. They seize
their own strings, and put on a play about the birth of Jesus in the manger in
She was so delighted she handed him the puppets. “Move them, make them dance and sing. Make them tell me the story and I will write it down.”
“I don’t…, I can’t,” he said
“You can. It doesn’t have to be fancy,” she said. “I’ll write the story down as they speak it, as you tell it. Keep them moving over the table.” She put the struts with the puppets dangling from them in his hand and he made the puppets move as he told her his idea again, awkwardly putting the story into the mouths of the marionettes.
The second time he had manipulated the puppets on his own was a year later, when he had made his wife a new set of puppets as a birthday gift.
He thought about a gift for a long time before he decided that he would surprise her with a new set of puppets. The old set was shopworn and needed repair but she had no set of puppets she could use while he fixed them. He decided a new set would be the perfect gift. He spent hours, stealthily tracing the shapes, copying their outlines so that the new puppets closely resembled the old. But whereas the old set were crudely drawn and colored, the set he made had finely drawn features and were finely painted in bright colors..
When he gave them to her she cried. “They are so beautiful,” she said. Then her tears turned from tears of joy to tears of sorrow. “But the old puppets. What can I do with them? I can’t just throw them out. They…”
“I will repair them, redraw them just as they are,” he said. “I will not change them at all, only strengthen their joints, narrow the holes where the strings go.”
“I’ll use the new ones for special performances,” she said. “What puppet play do you like best?”
“The Christmas play,” Frank Gorman said without hesitation. “Because I helped… .I almost remember the lines.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Christmas is a special time. Faces I remember but do not see most of the year seem to show up at Christmas time to watch the Christmas play, Once you get my old puppets repaired and polished up I’ll keep using them for every day performances. These new ones I’ll use only for the Christmas show. What do you think?” she asked.
“I think it’s a good idea,” he said.
“You must have them tell me, they agree.”
He did not understand.
“Them,” his wife said, pointing to the puppets, “they have to tell me. You have to make them tell me. “
He lifted the new puppets. They felt a little stiff although he had waxed their joints and on the table they had slipped over one another smoothly.
“Can you put on the Christmas play?” she asked.
“No,” he confessed, “I only remember some of the lines.”
“We will do it together,” she said. “Start.”
He remembered the first line “There was a force, an evil force that begrudged the world Christmas.” He hesitated. She put her hands on his. “You have large hands,” she said. “I don’t think I ever noticed before.” She laid her hands on his and he went through the performance of the Christmas story.
4.
Blowing snow blinded Frank Gorman as he set down the box which supported the stage and then set the stage on top of it. Frank Gorman busied himself extracting the puppets from the bag and leaning them against the background of the stage. He tried to recall the sequence his wife had always followed setting up the puppet theatre, but he could not remember it. He turned involuntarily to ask his wife but realized with his body half twisted that she was not there and could not tell him what he needed to know. But when he bent back he recalled her motions.
He picked up the puppets and dropped them from the elongated t shapes that organized each puppet’s strings so he could manipulate them. He let the puppets fall to the sidewalk then lifted them up onto the stage and tried to manipulate them. He felt his wife’s hand on his.
When he felt the puppets were loosened up enough he hoisted them into the theatre and jerked them around. Controlling their motions was difficult. The shepherd moved jerkily and the feet of the sheep hardly touched the ground.
A few people had stopped and were watching him from the sidewalk. He hunkered a bit so that he was nearly hidden behind the stage.
“The puppet show is about to begin, ladies and gentleman.” A gust of wind carried his voice away. In his head he remembered his wife’s voice, gentle and inviting as she made the people standing in front of her into an audience. He repeated what he remembered her saying. “A performance of puppets, not for children only but for the child in all of us,” he said. “For seeing dreams brought to life, wonderful scenes of imagination and fun. Come closer we are about to begin.”
He urged them closer and tried to get the puppets to face the audience and raise their arms as if they were gesturing the audience to move closer. As the people in front of him moved nearer the stage, he realized he had not provided anything in which they could put any money they might want to give. He wanted to stop the performance, but the dangling puppets seemed impatient, and he decided that when the time came to collect money he would find something to collect the money in and continued.
“We are going to present a Christmas story,” Frank Gorman said in what he tried to make into a puppet’s voice, “a story of hope, a story of caring, a story of forgetting and remembering.”
A few people walking by stopped and a few of them drifted toward the stage and made a thicket of bodies in front of him. When he felt he had attracted enough people to begin, he moved the puppets closer to the edge of the stage first together then apart. He tried to imitate his wife’s voice but it came out rough and coarse.
“Our story begins at Christmas time in a town far away where a puppetmaster prepared to put on a puppet show for the townspeople. There was a dark force,” he said, “not the commonplace dark force that we meet every day in our ordinary lives, a special dark force. This force hated the holiday and decided he would rob the world of Christmas.”
“He put a spell on the world, not the ordinary kind of spell that falls over all of us struggling to make our way in a hard world, a special, powerful spell. This spell made people forget Christmas, forget it as if it never was, never had been, never would be.” Frank Gorman’s words carried out to the street corner and he noticed one or two people turn around and head towards him.
“The only folk who did not fall under the spell,” he continued, “were puppets. The puppetmaster got ready to put on a performance of a story about a greedy prince who finds a treasure only to lose it again because he listens to the advice of his foolish parrot. It had nothing to do with Christmas because he was under the spell the dark force had cast and had forgotten Christmas and he had forgotten that he had forgotten.”
Frank Gorman let two puppets down onto the stage. He moved the puppets representing the dark force and the puppet master awkwardly. As he struggled to remember the rest of the prologue they tangled.
“Just a minute folks, it won’t be a second.” His frozen fingers struggled to untangle the strings. He moved his hands awkwardly until he felt what seemed like his wife’s hands on his and the tangle suddenly dissolved.
When the puppets spun apart he struggled to remember the first line of the Christmas play he had helped to write but he hesitated. The words wouldn’t come; he had forgotten them. He stood there helplessly looking at the audience. A voice rang out from the crowd into the silence. “I remember,” an old man’s voice said, “I remember them words. “But the puppets wouldn’t let him put on that play,” the old man’s voice recited, “they fought their strings. Although he tried to move them they rebelled, they would not move, not speak. They seized the strings from which they dangled and put on the story of the birth of Jesus in the manger. The play reminded the people watching about Christmas, and broke the spell the dark force had cast and Christmas was celebrated.” The man standing at the corner of the audience seemed to straighten up. Some people around him clapped him on the back, someone else yelled hooray.
Frank Gorman picked up the line and moved the performance shakily along until he came to the place where the puppets decided they would have to struggle against the dark force. Then the difficulty of moving the puppets left him unable to remember the line spoken by the puppet leading the puppet rebellion.
A young girls voice leapt out from the audience. “I so missed the puppet’s Christmas,” she said, “I didn’t think I would hear it again. Then she recited the lines spoken by the puppet.
“We must struggle against the order of things. We can not give in to he who pulls our strings. When dark forces blind goodness and life, the only answer is battle and strife.”
Frank Gorman remembered the lines that followed. Awkwardly moving the puppets he managed to present the struggle against the puppetmaster and the puppet’s triumph. Whatever lines he forgot someone in the audience who had seen his wife perform her Christmas play remembered and when they faltered someone else recalled the forgotten word or paragraph.
With the audiences help, Frank Gorman got through the scene in the manger and enacted the visit of the wise men. He noticed the wind seemed to die down and the warmth that was generated by bodies huddling together warmed the space around him.
No one moved after he finished the performance. Then there was a quiet applauding that knitted and unraveled and lasted a long time as if the people who made up the audience seemed to become a group of friends who had known one another for a while then separated and drifted away then come suddenly together.
Then the audience lingered, drifting up the stage singly and in clumps to drop money onto the stage. After they deposited their money they shook his hand. “It’s been a while, I missed it. Thank you,” people said and everyone asked about the woman who had put on the performances they had seen over the years and everyone was sad about her death but happy that they had a chance to see Christmas remembered again.
Frank Gorman wished his daughter had been with him, that she could have seen the performance. But he thought that it would make one of the presents he would give her on Christmas, the toy she wanted, the story of the performance and the puppets. He believed that both of them might be ready for the gift.
§
Ismil Astum gets up and brushes the dirt off of the red knees of his costume. Praying in the storeroom is awkward. The brightly colored boxes of games and toys distract him. But it is not one of the regular prayers, only a quick conversation with God before he goes through the door out onto the floor and the flood of foreign children inundates him.
He prayed, waiting for God to tell him he could not, to forbid it. He waited for a sign telling him no, no you couldn’t, no you mustn’t, no it was not a good Muslim thing to do. God had voiced no objections. God was silent. God, Ismil decided, was waiting to see how things turned out.
He straightens up and shifts his false stomach trying to make it look less natural, less the result of gluttony, more pretend. Then he opens the door and walks out onto the floor.
At the opposite end of the room, the other Santa Claus glances at him, hoping his twin will give him some respite from the endless assault of the children.
Ismil moves tentatively toward the empty seats of his station and sits down. Immediately, a child peels off the line like a fighter pilot and heads toward him. He motions the child to the seat and adjusts his beard. He tries to follow the instruction booklet.
“How are you today? Have you been a good boy?”
“I want…” the child begins.
“Have you been a good boy?” Ismil asks again, holding onto the question tenaciously.
“I’ve been ok?” the boy says.
“How ok?” Ismil realizes he is deviating from the instruction book he was given at the orientation.
“Ok, you know. I’m better than I was last Christmas. I want….”
“How better?” Ismil strays further from the book.
“I don’t do it as much,” the boy tells him.
“What ?” Ismil asks.
“IT!,” the boy says.
“What?” Ismil is confused.
The boy looks down. He is getting ready to cry.
“I love my sister, but I hit her,” he says, trying to change the topic.
“That is not good.”
“I know,” the boy says. “I want….”
“You must respect your sister and your parents. Do you respect your parents?”
“They’re divorced. I see my father weekends sometimes,” the boy says. He looks at his mother at the front of the line of children and their parents waiting their turn to implore Santa Claus. “I guess I respect him a little.”
“What do you want?” Ismil says, satisfied with the answer.
“I want a new computer and an Xbox.”
“Maybe you will get them,” Ismil says. Under the beard, his face reflects his puzzlement about what an Xbox is. “If you are better. Love your sister. Love your mother and father. Tell your mother what you want. Your father too.”
The boy slides down and looks at Ismil as he moves off.
The line throws off a run of squirmy children with ordinary desires. They approach sit, spill out their request, rush back excitedly and rejoin their mother or father. Ismil relaxes.
“Can you carry a lot?” the next child asks. “I want a lot of things. I have a list.” He holds out a sheet of paper. Both sides are covered with a small, childlike scrawl.
“I am not sure I can bring you that much, “Ismil says smiling. “There are many young people who deserve gifts.
“Fucking old people,” the child says angrily. “Why isn’t Santa Claus a young person?” He slides down the seat and runs off before Ismil can say anything.
Ismil is shaken. He realizes he can not relax. He is shaking when the next boy approaches. The child climbs up onto the seat next to him and is silent.
“Yes,” Ismil says.
The boy does not say anything and Ismil notices tears hovering.
“Do not be frightened. It is close to Christmas,” Ismil says. “What would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas.”
The boy is quiet. Ismil notices the mother, standing at the head of the line, is nervous.
Ismil turns to the boy. “What you like Santa to bring you for Christmas? As a present.”
The boy bites his lip.
“An Xbox, a new baseball glove,” Ismil takes a stab at the suppressed desire.
The boy shakes his head. “My father,” he says. “He went away.”
Ismil does not understand. “A present,” he repeats.
The boy hesitates. “My father. I want my father. He went away,” he repeats.
“Went away?” Ismil repeats. He violates rule 6 of the instruction booklet. Keep away from personal problems.
“He died. My mother says he is in heaven. I would like.... He kissed me the morning he went away,” the boy continues, “He said goodbye and never came home. Can you….” Tears roll down his cheeks.
Ismil realizes the boy is asking him to bring his dead father back as a Christmas present.
“You must miss him horribly,” Ismil says. “I can not return him to you. Do you pray?” Ismil asks.
“Yes,” the boy says, sometimes.
“Then pray,” Ismil says. “Be comforted, but I can not bring your father as a present.”
“I didn’t think so”, the boy says, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I just thought I’d ask. My mother says I am going to get a new father,” the boy adds. “He’s ok.”
“That is good, Ismil says. “Is there anything else,” he asks.
“No, only my father,” the boy repeats as he climbs down the seat.
Ismil looks at the clock. Suddenly the afternoon has become as impenetrable and dark as a obscure passage from the Koran. The line of children and parents, mothers mostly, snakes in from Macy’s toy department. He hopes for a predominance of ordinary simple childlike desires but he knows that there will be knots.
A child comes up and takes his seat.
“I don’t want anything that I can think of. I have everything. “
“How about an Xbox?”
“ I have one.”
“A computer,” Ismil ventures.
“I have one.”
“A game. Santa has all sorts of games,” Ismil suggests.
“I want what she wanted.” He points to the girl who has just left the seat where he is sitting.
“She wanted a book.”
“A book will be ok,” the boy says. “I have some books but another book will be ok. “
“Be sure to tell your mother what you want. A book.”
The boy walks away silently.
Ismil watches as the mother of the boy sweeps him up in her arms. She is happy he has spoken to Santa Claus, happy a piece of the holiday has been made complete.
The next child comes, another boy. Ismil is awkward. “Hello,” he says.
“Are you really Santa Claus?” the boy asks.
“I am his helper.” Page 4 of the book Macy’s has provided gives the reply.
“I did not think so,” the boy says. “Under the beard, you have dark skin.”
“Perhaps Santa Claus has dark skin,” Ismil says. He looks at the other Santa Claus who is darker than he is.
The boy shrugs. “It doesn’t make a difference, I guess,” he says.
“What would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas?” Ismil asks.
“My mother, has a boyfriend,” the boy says quietly.
Ismil remembers the pertinent rule and is quiet.
“When she’s not there, he hits me …hard,” the boy says matter of factly.
“I see,” Ismil says.
Could you bring my mother another boyfriend,” the boy says looking into Santa’s face.
“Perhaps things will work out,” Ismil says.
“A new boyfriend for my mother would be great, “ the boy says, “maybe an Xbox.”
A young girl separates herself from her mother and heads for the seat.
“Hello,” she says shyly.
“Hello,” Ismil says. “Have you been a good girl?”
The girl looks down. “Not really.”
Ismil does not want to get into it but he can not hold himself back.
“What have you, how have you…?”
The girl looks at her mother and checks the distance. “I steal things. I watch things I shouldn’t watch. When my mother is working….I let boys touch….”
Ismil interrupts. “You should try to be better,” he says.
“I do try,” the girl insists, “but my mother says, “the devil is in me.”
“Try harder,” Ismil demands, “try really hard.”
“I will,” the girl says. “I would like a Barbie doll” she announces as she climbs off the chair. It is a afterthought, Ismil thinks, she wanted to confess.
The next child walks up to him and arranges himself in the seat.
“What would you like for Christmas,” Ismil asks.
“Nothing,” the boy says, “nothing.”
“Nothing,” Ismil says.
“Bring what you were going to give me to poor people,” the boy says. He reaches in his pocket and takes out a crumpled picture he has cut out of a newspaper. He unfolds it carefully holding it up so Ismil can see. “This boy,” he says. “Bring him what you were going to bring to me.”
Ismil stares at the clipping. A boy, dark skinned and dressed in rags stares vacantly into the impossible gap in front of the camera. Ismil thinks he recognizes the background.
“I will do so,” Ismil said. “I will bring him something from you. But for yourself?”
“Nah,” the boy says. “I got enough,” and slides down from the seat.
The next boy marches up to the seat and settles himself briskly.
“I would like a gun,” he says, with no introduction. “A gun.”
“A water gun?” Ismil asks. It is the play gun he knows. He had a water pistol when he was a child.
“No,” the boy says. He is staring straight ahead, “a real gun.”
Why do you want a real gun?” Ismil asks.
“To kill terrorists,” the boy states flatly.
Ismil is stunned. After a while he tries to speak but the boy interrupts him.
“Terrorists. Kill them all,” he says.
“It is Christmas,” Ismil says.
“That’s what I want,” the boy insists. “They should die. They killed my uncle,” he says. “Remember, I want a gun,. My name is Tommy Jones and I live….”
“I know where you live,” Ismil says sharply. Rule 9; Tell the children Santa knows all about them. Do not ask for, or respond to, personal information.’
The next boy comes. He is scholarly looking, glasses. He walks with a limp.
“What would you like?” Ismil pats the seat and the boy struggles to lift himself onto the open chair next to him. He looks at the mother who is indifferent.
Ismil violates all of the rules and lifts the boy onto his lap. “What would you like Santa to bring you?”
“Nothing, the boy says. “I have what I need.”
“What do you want?” Ismil asks.
The boy thinks a moment. “A baseball bat and a ball and glove. I can’t use them now, but my doctor says maybe, later, when I grow up a little there will be a medicine…” He does not finish the sentence. “I think a lot about playing baseball. I watch baseball,” he says, “I’m a Mets fan.”
As he sets the boy down, he wonders what the Mets are. “You are a good boy,” he says. He looks up and sees the supervisor making a sign that says he wants to see him in the storeroom.
“What is wrong with you?” the supervisor screams when Ismil closes the door. “Never, never put the child on your lap!”
Ismil tries to explain. “He was… he could not easily get into the seat.”
“That’s no excuse. Rule seven. Avoid physical contact. Macy’s… sued…”
Ismil looks down. “It will not happen again,” he says. “I am sorry.”
Mollified the supervisor looks at his watch. “It is almost lunch time. Go now.” It is a peace offering.
As the supervisor leaves, closing the door, Ismil drops to his
knees. He checks the time. It is a little early. He tries to pray, but his mind
is filled with questions. Where do they come from Ismil wonders, where do they
come from? What kind of country is this? He had not seen such children in
“A bitch,” he says, “a real bitch. You going to eat?”
“I eat only special food”
“Is it cheap?” the other Santa whose name is Isaac asks.
“Yes.”
“Meat.”
“If you like. I am a vegetarian. “Cheap? Isaac asks again.
They walk down a few blocks off of 8th avenue to a small restaurant Ismil’s cousin owns. “Here,” he says.
Ismil explains a few dishes and gives the order to the cook.
When the meal comes they take it and move to a table in the back. The other people in the restaurant stare at them. Ismil realizes it is because Isaac is black.
“How do you like being Santa Claus?” Isaac asks.
“This is my first day. It is strange.”
“You believe it.” Ismil notices the man has an accent.
“I’ve been here three years,” the man says. “How long you been here?
“A year,” Ismil says. “One year.”
“You must still be confused. I was confused for a year,” Isaac says. “I usually sell things on the street, statues, stools, on a blanket, things from where I come from. But my wife, she’s born here, says Macy’s is better if I can get it. I want to go to school, refrigeration, but I’ve got to work at something. It’s better than selling statues on the streets. How did you get the job?” Isaac asks.
“My cousin.”
“Cousin.”
“He works for Macy’s. Ops,” he says.
“Ops,” Isaac repeats.
“Ops,” Ismil repeats as if the word made sense to him, “Ops.”
2.
Ismil was out of work when his cousin opened the possibility of a job as a Santa Claus at Macy’s, the first step, he said, in a possible career in at the store.
Until 9/11 Ismil worked for an uncle in
The warehouse was in
Once a friend took him to
“I don’t think they like me, what do you think?
“How should I know?” Ismil says, “I was not there.”
He rode in the delivery truck only once to bring an emergency
order to a restaurant on
Ismil was astounded at the size of the buildings, the stores, the
different kinds of people. Later, on days off, he wanted to visit again but was
frightened. None of his friends from the mosque were willing to make the trip
to
“There were Pakistani’s on the street. When I delivered…”
“Southerner’s.”
It’s an excuse, he knows. They liked
His uncle tried to regroup but it was a struggle to wrest a piece of another district from some other wholesaler. There were complicated negotiations, horse trading. His uncle let him go. “Until I get established in another district,” his uncle says. “It will be a while.”
“How long?”
“Hard to say. Look for something else for a while.”
He knew the four other men who live in a single room in a boarding house run by another person from his district in Peshwar will carry him until he gets another job. He has contributed double rent for one of them when he lost his job. Now it is his turn, a little sooner than he expected.
His nephew came up with the Macy’s job. The nephew did not call him directly. His uncle called him.
‘Farah has a lead on a job,’ he says. Ismil did not know Farah.
“Farah, Fardish’s son,’ he said and set up a meeting.
Farah is Ismil’s age and worked for Macy’s. He had an MBA and
lived in
“Macy’s. A Santa Claus position. Temporary but it may lead to other things. I work in ops. I can put in a good word. But you will have to pass a test.”
“Macy’s.” Ismil had no idea what he was talking about.
“It’s a big department store. Christmas,” Farah explained. “Christmas. They are diversifying, hiring a lot of different kinds of Santa Clauses. I put in a good word for you. You have to go and apply for the job.”
“Where?”
“
“
The possibility of a job, a real job, even if temporary, and the
possibility of a longer term position excited him. But the excitement was
overshadowed by fear.
He went to see the Imam at the mosque. “Can I take this job and still stay a good Muslim?” he asked.
“Does it involve stealing?.
“No, it’s for a company called Macy’s.”
“The company does not matter,” the Imam said. “Is it honest work?”
“I believe so. My cousin….”
“Can you still do the five daily prayers?”
“I believe so.”
“Then it is hallal. You can take it,” the Imam said.
The person who interviewed him for the job tells him he must come the next day for an orientation. “We will explain the job, give you a book of rules and regulations, an identity card. You will make a great Santa Claus,” she said encouragingly.
After the interview, Ismil wanted to celebrate. Instead of walking
to his room from the subway station, he goes to the tea house. Tattah and
Grunda, two of his four roommates were there. Distant cousins, they have been
in
“Christmas. What’s Christmas?” Ismil asks.
“A holiday,” Tattah said. Grunda noded in agreement.
Ismil waits. When no more information is forthcoming he asked. “What kind of a holiday?”
“An American holiday,” Grunda said.
“An American holiday, I see,” Ismil repeated.
“An American holiday, it celebrates a birth.”
“Of whom?”
“Of Christ,” Tattah said.
“Who was he?” Ismil asked.
“He was a crusader,” Grunda said.
“No you lump of pork, he was a conqueror of the Jews. He became king of the Jews and they threw him off like a lump of clay.”
“When was this,” Ismil asked
“A long time ago,” Grunda said
“He was king of the Jews,” Tattah said. “A Jew.”
“Of course not,” Grunda jumps in. “He just pretended. He was a
pagan. Then he became king of the Jews and conquered
“What I heard,” Tattah said authoritatively, “is that he was a
Roman who converted to some religion and then destroyed the Jews during an
earlier crusade against them. That’s when he came to
The son of the owner of the tea house squated against a wall. He had been listening to the conversation. “He was the son of god,” he yells over to Ismil. His voice is respectful. “Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus.”
Not being able to compete against someone born in
“A son of Allah,” Ismil says, “is sacrilege.”
“Not Allah, the God of the Jews.”
“What do the Jews have to do with Christ?” Ismil was confused.
“He was king of the Jews.”
“Of the Jews.”
“Then they overthrew him and killed him.”
“Who the Jews?”
“No, the Romans I think,” the boy said. “Or the Jews. It was not clear to me.”
“Are you sure he was not a crusader?”
“No it was earlier,” the boy says thoughtfully. “The crusaders
fought to get
“He was not a crusader?”
“No,” the boy said, staring at another sweet. Ismil hands it to him.
“Who was Santa Claus? Was he a relative of Jesus?”
“No, he came later.”
“What do you mean later?”
“Santa Claus came later,” the boy said.
“How much later?”
“I do not know,” the boy said. “It was not clear.”
“Was he a relative?”
“No.”
“Well, what did he do? He does not look like a fighter. Not the costume they told me I will dress up in.”
“I will find out for you,” the boy says. He slid off of his chair and took another sweet off of the plate as he set off running between the tables.
The next day, before he went to orientation at Macy’s, Ismil goes to the tea shop. As he sat down with his tea the boy leaped out at him. He had a gleam in his eye. Trouble.
“Santa Claus,” he said.
“Yes,” Ismil waited.
“Santa Claus, Christmas.”
“Yes.
“He brings gifts to young boys and girls if they are good,” the boy said. “Will you bring me a gift,” the boy asked wickedly, “since you are going to be a Moslem Santa Claus.”
Ismil says nothing and finishes his tea leaving most of the sweets on the plate. As he left the boy yells at him. “Merry Christmas, Santa Claus “ At the orientation everyone assumed that Christmas and Santa Clause need no further explanation. The session was devoted to the rules for dealing with children and parents.
3.
Ismil watchs Isaac chewing on his food.
“It’s good,” Isaac said. “Never ate Paki food before. Cheap too,” he said. He looks at his watch.
“We should be getting back, it’s time for our shift to begin,” he says, “how much of a tip should leave?” he asks. “The usual,” Ismil says, adapting.
In the store room they change back into the Santa Claus suits. When they are ready, they step out into the floor. The line snakes and releases. The two Santa Claus’s move to their respective places and the afternoon explodes with the children.
Tattah and Grunda have no idea of Christmas. The tea shop owner’s son has distorted the holiday. Ismil’s picture of Christmas is still blurry and incomplete but he thinks he is beginning to understand. The children are filling in the missing pieces, they are teaching him about Christmas.
Christmas requires a loving gesture. Parents bring their children to the department store. The children tell black men and Muslims pretending to be Santa Claus what they want and the parents buy it for them if they can, hopefully at the store where they have visited Santa Claus. It seems corrupt, so much buying and selling. But at its center are families and the fragments of families which swirl around him. They are filled with love and greed and pain and it pours into Christmas and fills it up. The morning like the afternoon is a parade of greed mixed with loving and generosity.
As the stores closing time gets nearer the line thins until only a few parents stand with their children. At the front of the short line he sees a mother and a child. The mother wears a veil. Ismil stares at her. She is uncomfortable, nervous. The little girl who holds her hand is animated, vivacious, completely at home in the toy department of Macy’s. Like Christmas, she is patched together of pieces, half American, half muslim.
The mother squirms as the little girl breaks away from her and heads for Ismil, for Santa Claus. He thinks he recognizes her from the neighborhood, and is worried that she will recognize him.
He motions the little girl to the seat next to him.
“What do you want for Christmas?” he asks.
“I’m a Moslem,” the girl says. “I don’t celebrate Christmas.”
“What are you doing here?” Ismil asks.
“Its
“Do you want a present?” Ismil asks.
“Yes.”
“For Christmas?”
“I am a Moslem,” she repeats again.
“ Are you a good Moslem child?” Ismil asks.
“Yes,” she says.
“Do you say your prayers five times a day.”
“Yes,” she says, suddenly suspicious of this Santa Claus.
“Then I do not see anything wrong with a present. Not a Christmas
present, just a present at Christmas. Why not,” he says. “Why
not. It’s Christmas, it’s
§
It was Christmas Eve a year ago. Then, I wasn’t a big
believer in Christmas. Now, well. Anyway, I park my car illegally, a few
minutes. The only space that is available is owned mostly by a hydrant. I
think; it’s a bone chilling Christmas eve. There’s a
thick layer of snow on the ground, enough to make a snowman — if people in the
neighborhood made snowmen, which they don’t. Every
cop who celebrates Christmas will be off with his family; the few who don’t
would be inside the station house, keeping warm, praying some emergency didn’t
drag them out into the streets. The stationhouse is blocks away across the
avenue. I figured I was safe parking illegally on
I was going to sit in the car and wait for a legal parking spot to open. I knew one would. The only reason they were scarce was that the gallery that was on the bottom floor of my co-op building held a Christmas Eve show. Unusual. Yes. But the show always ended by eight sharp. George had been giving the show and a little party for 5 years. It was a tradition since the incident with the Christmas family picture, but that’s another story.
George who owns the gallery had this Christmas Eve show and party for his artists. After the party, George and the gallery’s painters and sculptors who didn’t have family in NY would go out and have Christmas dinner at Nicks around the block, then they would go to George’s loft and have a party with whoever else George managed to entice. He was an influential art dealer so ambitious young artists would cheat and pass up family gatherings to come. Some years I went, but this year I just wasn’t in the mood.
I had broken up with my lady friend and was angry and tired. I knew she was home alone but I was pissed and had none of the Christmas spirit left in me. Anyway, I park my car illegally and sit for a few minutes.
It’s cold and I decide to run up and make a thermos of coffee. I
figure with something warm inside of me I can wait until
“Crap,” I mutter. I grab the thermos tight and start to walk as fast as I can without slipping. I yell out to him hoping I can get him to stop writing in his book before he has put my license down on the ticket because once they do that you are screwed.
“ ‘Hold it,” I yell, “wait, I’m coming.’” I don’t recognize him. I know a lot of the patrolman in the precinct by sight, but he was unfamiliar to me.
“I just went up for coffee,” I say. “I was going to sit…”
“You’re parked illegally,” he says.
“I know. I just went up for a minute to make coffee.”
“It’s a hydrant.”
“I know. I was just gone a few minutes. I’m going to sit….”
“What if there was a fire, an emergency.”
“I know. But I was only gone five minutes. Here I am. It’s Christmas,” I say.
I look at him. I am bundled up in a parka and furry hat but he is without a coat. The snow covers his head. He has black, standard issue oxfords on.
“You must be freezing,” I say.
He brushes the snow off of his head. “I like the snow,” he says. He looks at me, at the car, across the street at the gallery. George had gotten a sizeable crowd this year. You could see clumps people through the window, drinks in their hands, a Christmas tree in the corner next to a big canvas filled with blotchy blobs of bright colors.
The cop stares at them the he looks downtown. You can’t see much
because the air is filled with snowflakes and his gaze stops at
“I’ll let it go this time, but…”
“OK,” I say suddenly filled with Christmas cheer. “How about joining me for a cup of coffee?”
“I should be making my rounds,” he answers.
“It’s cold. A cup of coffee will warm you up.” I hold up the thermos. “You can head out again after you warm up,” I say. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything stronger.”
“Couldn’t,” he says, as we open the doors of my car and slip in, “on duty.”
“You must have really ticked someone off to draw traffic duty on Christmas eve,” I say. What did you do?”
“Nobody,” he says, “nothing. It’s just a duty watch. It’s relaxing,” he says. “I get to walk the streets, see the city. It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, but its’ freezing.”
“Even cold it’s beautiful.”
We spend fifteen minutes or so talking. About
what? Nothing in particular. His
family. He lives in
“Merry Christmas, Officer Mulroney. Thanks for not writing the ticket,” I answer.
He touches his hat. “A Christmas present,” he says, and moves down the street and I lose him in the blowing snow.
When I get back up to my loft the cop’s words have gotten to me.
The idea of spending Christmas alone sucking on my resentment has lost its
charm. I call my girlfriend, her name is Tina, and I
apologize and ask her if she wants to go to George’s dinner. We agree to meet
at Nick’s at
“Yeah,” is his greeting.
“I just wanted to compliment an officer of yours. Considerate,” I say, not quite sure of what words will make my call a compliment rather than a complaint. “Really serious about the job.”
“Who is this? “ he asks.
I don’t want to give him my name. You never can tell. “Officer Mulroney,” I say. “I just wanted to let you know he was on the job, doing a great job.”
There’s no sound from the other end for a minute then the desk sergeant’s voice is hurt and angry. “If this is a joke its in bad taste,” he says, “it’s Christmas.”
“What’s the joke,” I say ticked off. “I’m just calling to compliment one of your men who’s doing a good job on a crappy assignment.”
The desk sergeant’s voice interrupts me. “Officer Mulroney died 9/11,” he says. “One of the first up the steps.” His voice drifts off. I hang up the phone and sit there thinking of Christmas, of the years coming and the old years past.
§
It was Christmas Eve and I was on the road, driving from Goodland
to
Christmas eve. I know. There were a lot of people like me, who worked on Christmas eve, did business if they could on Christmas morning, treated Christmas just like any other day of the year. For a lot of people like me, businessmen who owned and ran their own business – but others, managers, salesmen, clerks even — Christmas was just another working day.
The decision to work on Christmas wasn’t a decision I made
lightly. I gave it a lot of thought before I finally dismissed the holiday as
just another day. When I was a youngster, Christmas was magical and wonderful
and even when my kids were growing up Christmas was still something special.
The extended family crowded in from all over
I didn’t give up celebrating Christmas because my personal situation changed, not because my wife died, not because my kids were out of the house, grown with families of their own. I lived with someone who I loved I lot and who loved me, and there was still a large, extended family around. I felt close to my children. I wasn’t deprived of love or caring. Like I said, I did not make the decision to dismiss Christmas lightly. I thought about it a lot.
At some point the life was squeezed out of Christmas. It was dry as a husk. Christmas had been leached and bleached, sliced and diced until there wasn’t anything left of it except a reason to string up flashing colored lights and an excuse to go on an orgy of buying which was ok because you were going to give the stuff away. People were bored and Christmas became just another entertainment and a giant advertisement. I never put anything in its place, there was nothing to replace it with.
As I got older, baseball became more and more of my life. Every year I took a vacation, two weeks off in the fall, and went to see the world series. It didn’t matter who was playing, or where. The rest of the year I collected pieces of the game; playing cards, jerseys, autographed baseballs, bats and I was rich enough to collect other things too, like player’s memories.
I would read about a retired player whose recollections I thought might be able to tell me something about the game and I would make him an offer he couldn’t refuse—a vacation in Mexico, a couple of boxes of Cuban cigars, then I would go down and spend a day with him recording his memories of the game. For a lot of these players it was one of the few chances to relive the old days. I had the money — what the hell. I built up a great collection of recollections of the game. At least once or twice a year some sports historian would call and ask if he could come over and listen to some player’s reminiscences.
I tried not to travel on Christmas just because the service was always patchy and irregular. Workers in hotels, flight attendants on airlines, cabbies, people who shined shoes were either pissed at having to work Christmas, or anxious to get off. Service was crappy. I usually stayed home, went to the office, took care of business. But this Christmas I had to travel.
The company I owned manufactured high quality furniture and
lighting. A major customer was thinking of dropping our line and replacing it
with furniture and lighting that was being spewed out by a Chinese factory in
My argument was what it always was in cases where price was the main issue. Our furniture had class the Chinese rip offs couldn’t match. Underneath the appearance was quality, the quality you couldn’t see but could feel over the years. The stuff we made was beautiful, pretty to look at and, more than that, it aged well but to see that you had to go beneath the appearances, you had to learn to see the invisible things that were deeper than the surface.
So I was on the road heading to
I told the woman I lived with that I was not going to be home
Christmas day. She wasn’t happy about it but she understood. I offered to take
her and we could spend the day after Christmas in
So here I was on Christmas Eve on route 70. The thruway had been closed. There was a bad accident and they set up a barricade and detoured us onto an alternate road. Then it started snowing and the wind was blowing and the snow swirled around. I thought I knew where I was going and I had a GPS on but bearing left or right wasn’t easy in the blustery whiteness and I must have made a wrong turn.
I found myself in the country or what I thought of as the country. Large runs of emptiness, farmland, desolate. The farmhouses themselves were always on the horizon. What you could see, what I could see was winter farmland. With the blowing snow, all of the distinguishing characteristics of the countryside had disappeared. The GPS was barking misleading directions I couldn’t follow so I shut it off.
Then suddenly I hit this patch of thick, dense snow. I drove for a little while not being able to see, then I pulled carefully off of the road and stopped. I got out of the car to look around. It hadn’t snowed in years in that county. It was not a tropical climate, not Florida but it snowed maybe once in the winter and then only a half inch or so whereas this storm I had hit was an upstate NY kind of storm, a suffocating fog of flakes squatting on the landscape.
They weren’t expecting snow. I checked the weather reports the forecasts before I set out just to be sure I had packed clothing for the usual emergencies. I wasn’t worried. I had a GPS, I had a cell phone. The car was gassed up, as far as I knew the car radio was working. It was just bloody inconvenient. It was a question of how long it would take for the snow to slow down enough so I could inch my way to a main road and then a matter of rolling along until I hit the thruway again.
I climbed back into the car, had a snack and thought I would take a nap. As I said the car was well equipped for emergencies. I had a thermos with coffee and sandwiches. I tried to make myself comfortable when I saw a glow. How far away it was difficult to say. What it was coming from was not easy to judge. I thought at first it might be a fire but it glowed steady, white not orange. After a minute when it stood there glaring at me I decided to go take a look at it.
Now I know it was stupid but I wasn’t worrying about anything. The car was well stocked, the snow was steady but not putting down flakes so fast that it was going to cover the car and keep me from getting out once it let up.
So I get out of the car and walk along the road in the direction of this glow. It doesn’t change as I walk closer to it, only get brighter and a little bigger. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me but I keep walking towards it until I realize I have walked pretty far away from the car and that I might lose track of it so I turn around to check my location and I can’t see it. I think OK, I’ll just follow my footsteps in the snow back and I wheel and look for them but the snow has covered them up. I run around in a circle for a few minutes figuring if I can widen the circle I’ll come across my footsteps but I don’t. So I decide there’s only the glow left. I’ll get to the glow there has to be something human and sheltered around it.
I keep walking toward it and then suddenly the snow seems likes it blowing heavier and what was a well defined glow close by suddenly had become more like a splotchy, diffuse brightness covering half the horizon. I can’t see anything clearly and I think to myself I’m a goner when suddenly I hear something clear as a bell. I close my eyes and try to orient myself to the rumble and thwack only it doesn’t make sense because it sounds like a baseball game.
I’d seen Field of Dreams and I think they are making a movie. Then I realize how stupid that idea was. It’s December, in the winter. It is snowing and I think the sound is a movie shoot. I try to orient myself to the sound and the closer I listen the more it sounds like a baseball game, really faint but there is a crack of a bat and muffled yells of a crowd, then silence. I move in the direction I think the sound is coming from.
The snow stops blowing for a second and I walk a little faster. The sounds get louder and then suddenly I seem to walk through something like a curtain of air into a space that different. The snow is falling slowly, hardly blowing at all.
It’s a baseball game or what looks like a baseball game. The players are in uniforms and the ground is covered with snow but there’s a pitcher and a hitter, an infield and an outfield standing around shivering.
I walk a little further into this scene looking at the teams on the field and end up at the edge of a row of seats. There is this man sitting there. He has a cup of something in his hand and he says to me. “Oh, there you are. We thought you might not be coming.”
“We who,” I say. “Where am I?”
“You want something to drink?” He holds out a glass. “Beer. You want something warmer or stronger?”
“Where am I?”
“Well the last time you looked I think it was a little off route 70.”
“I mean, where am I?”
“Probably close by,” he says. “Sit down watch the game for a while.” He pats the seat next to him.
“They play every Christmas,” he says. “They look forward to the game.”
I look at the field. The players are really struggling. “They must be freezing their butts off,” I say. “Look they’re shivering.”
“I guess they are but it doesn’t make a difference. It’s their gift.” What he says doesn’t make any sense to me but the situation is so weird I don’t think making that sentence clear will really clarify things.
“The game has just begun,” he says. “First batter. Sit down, watch.”
“What teams are they?” I ask, “Where are we?”
“Sit down,” he said. “Watch the game.”
Suddenly tired I sit down.
“Who the hell would play baseball on Christmas eve?” I ask. “Who would come to watch?”
“Who would drive to Great Bend in the snow on Christmas Eve on business that …”
“Ok,” I say “point well taken. But…” I wonder how he knew I was driving to Great Bend.
“They don’t play for a living,” he says, “maybe a few. But not most of them.”
“They must really love the game.”
“They do,” he says. That’s why they play. They love the game.”
The batter strikes out, swinging at a high outside pitch that even I could see wasn’t near the plate. Not even close. The snow must make judging the ball a real pisser.
“They play for the love of the game,” the man beside me says. He is middle aged, like me, a little taller. There is something familiar about him but I can’t make the connection. They play because they love the game and they play for the fans, of course.”
“What fans?”
“People come from everywhere to watch the game,” he says. He points toward the outfield and the swirling snow slows a bit. It’s looks like a real stadium –– not a major league park, a small minor league park, double A, triple A maybe. As I look, the stands take shape and separate themselves from the blurry white background as if some lens is focusing on them for a minute not the outfield, not the farmland in the background, none of these things, just stands filled with people watching the game silently.
“A lot of people love baseball, football, soccer, basketball, hockey. You love baseball don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Watch the game a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Well this games for you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Think of as a Christmas gift. A game on Christmas, in the flesh not on television. It’s the last game of the season,” he says. “They play it to bring in Christmas. After this game the season ends— until next Christmas. It’s a one game season, or a one season game.”
That didn’t make any sense to me, not a lick but I didn’t say anything.
“Why are they playing in the snow?” I ask “They can hardly move out there, they loose grounders in the snow. They can’t see where it goes, even if they can, they can’t field it.”
“More or less true,” he says. “But they have a general idea. They feel around for it, in the dark, in the snow, scrounge around for it.”
“That’s a hell of a way to play baseball,” I say.
“It’s a hell of a way to play anything,” he says, with out flinching without retreating without moving back from what I thought was a kind of aggressive stance. “They play for love of the game, whenever you do anything because you love to do it, things get a little hairy. They are celebrating the game.”
“Doesn’t seem like a celebration to me.”
“Oh people celebrate things in different ways,” he says.
“Is this like ‘Field of Dreams?’” I ask.
“Field of Dreams?” He acts like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“It’s a movie. Lost souls.”
“You think this is a movie,” he says. “He thinks he is in a movie,” he yells out. No one pays attention to him but the outfielder waves at us and he looks familiar too, like the partner I had when I was just starting my business.
“Well it doesn’t make any sense. I was driving along interstate… and suddenly I’m here. It’s winter and snowing. A glow shows up and suddenly I’m watching a bizarre baseball game on a field of snow.”
“Well, when you put it that way,” he says to me taking a sip of his beer, “when you put it that way it does seem strange. But then, so does getting on a plane one morning anticipating seeing your family, and, and…. You know,” he said. He started tearing up, then he pulled himself together. “A lot of things don’t make sense. Baseball’s important, but other things are too.”
“I know.”
“Yeah, well.” He reaches down and pushes a hole in the snow. “Here’s Christmas. And there are the people you love. He spreads his fist over some amorphous patch of snow and here you are, near Great Bend.” He pokes his finger way off to the side somewhere.
“That’s life.”
“So is this,” he says angrily. “So is this. Tough love is what it is, tough love.” He turns back to the game and we watch for a while.
“That’s not the way baseball should be played,” I say after a minute.
“How should it be played?” he asks.
“On a sunny field, in the spring, a clear field, no snow on it, players not shivering.”
He looks at me. “Sometimes,” he says, “you don’t have a choice. If you love the game you play it when you can, where you can. Sometimes you don’t get a chance to pick the conditions under which you play it. The only thing you can choose is how you play it, whether you play it with heart.”
I look out on the field.
The batter takes a swing at a high outside pitch and I can hear the crack of the bat as he gets a piece of the ball. The right fielder takes one look and sets out toward the right field wall. He’s running awkwardly because of the snow on the field, pursuing the ball clumsily. He looks like a circus bear. Then I see him leap up and slam against the wall and the snow is shaken lose and dusty cloud of flakes fly up and he’s engulfed in this cloud that obscures him. Then I see an arm raised. His body is still encased in snow but he is holding the ball up.
“They are not the really great players. Second tier, third tier even. But they play because it’s a chance to play. And they play because they love the game. A lot of people think that it’s a dumb game, that the heart has been ripped out of it. I mean the professional players… they get paid enormous amounts of money. And a hot dog costs a fortune. All of the paraphernalia.”
“It’s a business,” I say.
“But some people still love it because they see beyond the crap, the jim crack, they see the heart of the game they see beyond the appearance, underneath what shows on the surface.”
“Yeah,” I say.
On the field the batter pushes one through the infield. Without the snow and the cold the short stop would have nailed it but this one dribbles through on his left and he dives for it but slips. The left fielder plows thorough the snow ferociously struggling to locate the ball and I see the runner slow at first then take off and the short stop and second baseman run out and try to find the ball and the pitcher scrambles to cover second base. The runner takes a glance at them then at the third base coach who is waving at him crazily and he takes off, turns third and heads home just as the left fielder comes up with the ball. Now the baseline is caked with trampled down snow and the runner is dancing along it wildly like he is on ice skates, and the left fielder steadies himself and tries to get to traction and let go a strike to the catcher who is guarding somewhere around the plate. Then the right fielder flops into the snow as the catcher leaps around trying to get hold of the ball and the runner slides pushing up and immense cloud of snow and there’s silence for a second then the umpire emerges black against the snow like one of those figures in those glass balls that are filled with waters and imitation snow flakes, and the wriggling players emerge out of the whiteness like ghosts and the umpire signals safe and the players pour out of the dugout to grab the runner and hug him. And you can hear the noise rise out of the stadium.
“Now that was baseball,” the man next to me says. I have to agree with him.
“You’ve got to look beyond the surface,” he says, “to spot the reality of anything, love, baseball, even business I suppose. Sometimes what you see on the surface, what a thing looks like when you look at the skin of it, at the exterior, it isn’t what’s real. You think one thing is at fault and it’s really another. The shell of things get dirty, dusty,” he says, “if you stay looking on the surface a thing always look pitted, warped, misshapen.
It was something like what I was going to tell my customer, to try to explain to him that something important might be invisible if you didn’t look beyond what you could see.
“They play it for the love of the game,” he says again.
“But the snow…”
“Yeah, they would prefer to play it in the fall, a crisp sunny day. But that’s not the choice they have. That’s not the conditions they are offered. The owner didn’t give them that choice. They had to play it under the terms they –were offered or not play it at all. They play it with heart and that redeems the game. People come to see that. To remind themselves.”
“See what? Remind themselves of what?”
“The players know they look clumsy. They are clumsy. But they play it with heart. It’s how they play the game that makes the difference. They bring the game alive,” he says, “because they bring themselves to it, all of themselves . That’s all it takes to bring the game alive. In the snow, in the cold, shivering, they bring themselves to it, all of them. They are playing this game deep down.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“You know,” he says.
“You play your business like that. You understand that that there’s a lot of crap that goes into doing business. But you look beyond the crap. You focus on what’s real, what’s essential and not what’s bull shit. They know – he pointed to the players still jumping around on the field –– the snow is an impediment, that it stands in their way. They know that the salaries, the hoopla, the buying and selling is bullshit, but they love the game.”
I don’t say anything. I’m thinking. In the
middle of the night, near
“It’s the Christmas game,” he says. “There’s a ceremony.”
“What kind of a ceremony?”
“They light up a Christmas tree. That’s what the winners get. A chance to light the tree.”
“Not much of a prize.”
“Depends,” he says, “They do it the way they play the game. It’s a pretty light. People come from a long way to see it. Maybe it’s the shadows it casts. “
“Last out,” he says, “games almost over.”
The pitcher winds up and tosses a ball straight down the middle. The batter fouls it off. I see the ball coming up and I realize its coming my way.
“You should duck,” the guy next to me says, and I see it heading for me and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I wake up on the highway. My head is bleeding. I must have skidded, hit my head on the wheel. I think of the weird game and I decide business can wait. I’ll call the man I’m supposed to meet tomorrow and tell him something came up. A snow storm, Christmas. I’ll think of something. I start the car and find the next exit, turn the car around and head home, head for Christmas.
§
Leah Piddle was a dutiful Jewish daughter, She was exactly what her parents wanted from a daughter—what any Jewish parents would want from a daughter: Leah was a beautiful dark eyed young woman with a full mouth, a small curved nose, confident, and bursting with energy and vitality. She was honest, virtuous, devoted, Jewish in word and deed, except… except …
In his wisdom God refuses to reveal his plan to us, to make clear and obvious, in no uncertain terms, to the smart and the not so smart, what he intended. He keeps us –– rich and poor, with college degrees and without college degrees — confused, struggling to comprehend. He does this by keeping the world rich in mysteries. He puts things that should explode if they are even in the same universe, these things, he delicately places one on top of the other, builds the world out of them, lets them live together peacefully, in harmony even.
Every mother in every family that knew the Piddles envied Leah’s mother Sara –– maybe not envied –– envied, why not—envied Leah’s mother. Every father in every family that knew the Piddles, envied Leah’s father Samuel in his blessing that he had such a daughter. To their own daughters when they mistepped, they would hold Leah up for a mirror, a model. “You should be such a daughter,” they would say to their own daughter’s annoyance, “like her.”
Leah was a dutiful Jewish daughter. She was exactly what her parents –– what any Jewish parents, would want in the world. She was virtuous, devoted, honest, caring, dutiful — except …except she loved Christmas. Nothing about any other faith appealed to her except Christmas, remotely, nothing. But Christmas. Leah Piddle was in love with Christmas.
She celebrated Christmas hidden, on the sly. Since she was five she managed this by always having one non-Jewish friend to whose house she would go at Christmas, on some excuse or another, and spend the holiday with this friend and the friend’s family. She would give gifts and receive them, sing carols, watch Christmas movies on television, have Christmas dinner. Then refreshed, Christmas would be out of her system and she would revert to her Jewish self for the rest of the year. She was a good Jew the rest of the year. Kosher, the holidays, the prayers, charity, not simply a dutiful Jewish daughter but a truly good Jewish soul for the year.
2.
Once, just once, before she graduated high school she was bothered enough by this quirk to consult the rabbetzin, the rabbi’s wife. She hid herself in a story, made up a young man who had her ailment, her disease. “What if you were a good Jew,” she asked, “except you liked to celebrate Christmas.”
The rebbetzin did not hesitate. “A dybbuk,” the rebbetzin said, “a dybbuk that lives in the Christmas story, not only Christmas but all of the pagan fragments of which Christmas is composed, lurks, comes out on Christmas, inhabits the body then returns.”
“What should he do about it?” Leah asked. The rebbetzin was a wise woman. “The rest of the year?” she asked.
“A good Jewish boy, observant,” Leah declared.
“Live with the dybbuk; We all do. Live with it, keep it under control.” Then the rebbetzin’s face darkened. She looked deeply into Leah’s soul and her look penetrated the disguise Leah had put on. “There is trouble lurking, there are dangers,” she said. But Leah had heard what she had heard and it was enough; about dangers she did not want to know.
3.
Leah graduated from high school—smart, she was valedictorian— and went away to college. College, college was easy for her, sweet, she enjoyed the studying, the learning. When she became a sophomore she decided she would become a lawyer.
At the beginning of the last semester of her junior year, on the first day of a sociology course she meets Michael. They are looking for seats in the front of the room, the front, and find one another and, as they say, that’s the end of it. Done. Like something out of a children’s story they recognize each other as souls meant for one another. There is nothing either of them can do. They are drawn to one another. Drawn, moths to fire, iron to magnet, although which was the fire and which the magnet no one could say. There was magic between them, that was clear to both of them. But, there was something else. They look down and between them, on the ground, is a dark spot, a hole.
We live on an earth packed full enough with God’s mysteries, packed with trouble, with complications, with catches, with holes. Of course there is a hole, a catch — catch Gimmel, the Jewish Catch 22. Michael is not Jewish. They look down and see the hole by their feet. They are smart young people, intelligent people, sensitive, full of optimism and hope. But they are modern, realistic people. They realize right away that with one another comes the hole, that it can not be run away from, abandoned on someone’s doorstep, dropped in the garbage to be carted away. Leah and Michael are two very smart people and they know their limitations. They do not believe their love can fill the hole up, or that prayer or good will can fill it. They understand that words will not make it vanish and modern science will not make it disappear. They look at one another…
From their first look it’s clear that this is love, really love, a biblical thing, deep enduring love. Holes are human artifacts — there is nothing you can do about them except put brightly colored paper over them, avoid them, not think about them. They put bright paper on the hole, and stepped over it, into one another.
4.
Leah has an apartment because it makes eating Kosher easier. Michael spends his time there, eats kosher. Why not, food is food. They are intimate the way people are intimate who are in a relationship that never began, only was, for a long, long time. When you saw them together if you did not know them — or even if you did — you knew they were celebrating an anniversary. Of what? Of seeing one another for the first time, of touching for the second time, of talking to one another for the fiftieth time, of eating together for the 100th time; always they were celebrating being together, an anniversary.
There is an understanding between them, a mutual understanding that sex is for later. How much later they do not ask. It is a natural, comfortable understanding for them although sometimes Leah has to break away and shower and Michael had to pull himself up suddenly and run around the block, run, fast, run very fast, run around the block many times until exhausted, he comes home and falls asleep by Leah’s feet.
As the semester passes Leah feels Christmas’s pull, only stronger. Christmas calls to her, beckons. The Christmas part of the Christmas break she and Michael spend with Michael’s family. For Leah it is the most wonderful Christmas ever. Michael’s family reminds her of her own. Michael’s parents are in love with one another. Michael is their only child. Loving him, they fall in love with Leah. She feels Christmas as it was meant to be felt, drawing the warmth from the heart of the family in which it is held. Christmas is wonderful, the most real Christmas Leah has spent ever. She lets herself go, falls completely into the holiday. She helps decorate the tree, sings carols, basks in the warmth of a Christmas fire. Michael is a little perplexed and confused— Christmas is not a Jewish holiday. Leah does not explain, she can not explain. What’s to explain? He looks at the hole: the hole is still there. Into the hole goes his confusions, then he papers it up again. He steps around it.
As soon as Christmas is over, Michael and Leah visit her parents. She can not bring Michael home as a future son in law. But as a friend, a close friend, her parents fall in love with him, as Michael’s parents fell in love with Leah. Michael is affectionate, Michael is caring, Michael is considerate and attentive and intelligent. They can not help but love him, the son they never had. Leah notices in their love a little anxiety, a little fear; they are concerned their enthusiasm will encourage something they do not want to encourage. Leah calms them. Without being obvious about it, she points with her chin to the hole.
The visits to the families are wonderful. Getting back to school is wonderful too. Back at school, Leah goes back to being Leah, the dutiful Jewish daughter, Michael’s love.
5.
The first half of their senior year is filled with anxiety. Leah applies to law school and while there is no question that she will get in somewhere, she wants the somewhere to be where Michael is, as Michael, his acceptance by some medical school preordained, limits his applications to schools in cities where Leah has applied.
The hole is still there. Where should it have gone? It is papered up and they continue to ignore it. All of their attention is on careers and where they will be after graduation. They visit their families twice during the semester. In Michael’s family she is a daughter, as loved as a daughter can be in a family with an only son. She feels the families love, not simply as the reflection of their son’s love of her, but something independent, something with legs of its own, something given to her, not as Michaels chosen but as their chosen. Michael in hers, is not quite the son, but as close as someone who belongs, who fits, whom only accident has kept from a rightful place, maybe the rebbe’s second son, kept from taking his father’s place by an cosmic accident that has put an older brother, a schlemiel, a shlamazzle in his rightful place.
Their semester is also stuffed with work; Michael it seems is taking a course that is giving him trouble, a course that demands massive amounts of concentration and work. His afternoons are taken away. For the first time he complains about studying, learning. “Books and more books.” The closer the semester angles to its end, the more both of them look forward to the vacation between semesters, Leah especially, to Christmas, a promised relief, a respite, an oasis.
The closer it gets to the end of the semester and Christmas, the more Leah begins to anticipate the holiday. Two things she thinks a great deal about: the final examination in her political science courses and what she is going to get Michael’s family for Christmas. She starts saving.
The first of November she starts seriously looking for a gift for Michael and his family, scouring the internet, Ebay, advertisements, flyers, garage sales, stores. She comes across the perfect gift in a catalogue of antiques. It is a Christmas bowl, ancient, a bowl carved out of a single piece of crystal and engraved with Christmas scenes. Even in the picture it radiates the sprit of Christmas — but it is expensive. When the time comes to buy the crystal bowl engraved with Christmas scenes, she is short. She does not think about it, does not hesitate; she decimates the fund that she has been saving for law school to buy the bowl. When the gift comes she refuses to tell Michael what is inside, telling him only that it the Christmas present she has bought for him and his family.
Michael is excited also. Never as enthusiastic about Christmas as Leah, some special anticipation energizes him. The burden he labored under all semester seems lightened. Although between them nothing is spoken, the moment Christmas decorations start to appear, they fill their lives with the anticipation of the Christmas vacation.
The first part of the Christmas vacation they spend with Leah’s parents, not for Christmas, not with anything to do with Christmas. For the Piddles, Christmas does not really exist. It’s merely a triumphant visit home, a celebration of a family rendered whole. With her parents anxieties calmed that they are not welcoming a future son in law, they are affectionate, welcoming, loving even. Food and relatives rumble in and out of the house and Michael fits himself into the constant jig saw puzzle of eating and family as if he belonged, as if the storm which had blown him off course, into some Odysseus like detour, has finally blown him back again, finally, to where he belonged.
Two days before Christmas Eve, Leah is ready to go to Michael’s house. She is excited at the prospect of decorating the tree, caroling, baking yule treats and watching the old Christmas movies on TV, so she is disappointed and a little confused when Michael tells her that they will not be going over to his parent’s until Christmas day.
“But the tree will be decorated,” she complains softly, “the carols,…” Michael shrugs. “Is something wrong?” Leah wants to know.
“No,” Michael assures her nothing is wrong.
“Who will be there?” she asks.
“Only us,” he says, “mother, father and me.”
“Are you sure nothing is wrong?” Leah asks nervously. Every Christmas before, Michael’s house has been filled with relatives.
“Nothing,” Michael assures her, dismissing her anxiety. “The rest of the family is busy, elsewhere, something… “nothing at all.”
“Only us,” Leah said. She is clearly disappointed.
She will not let Michael carry the gift to his house although it is heavy and she struggles with the box. “I want to fill myself up with the present and let the present fill itself with me,” is the excuse she gives. She refuses to tell him what is in the package. “You’ll see soon enough,” she tells him. “We have a wonderful present for you too,” he tells her but he will not say anything more about her gift.
At Michael’s house, they ring the bell and Leah stands in front of the entrance to Michael’s home waiting for the door to open so she can embrace Christmas. She stands waiting for Christmas to rush out to her, to beckon so she can embrace it …. Christmas.
The door opens and …
“God sees the truth but waits,” the Russian says. Which Russian? The Russian. Russians who seem know about such things, who are waiting for God to accept the truth, to tell all of us we can accept the truth, finally. If only it were so easy.
Leah stands in front of the door as it opens but Christmas does not rush out to her. She looks and she sees that Christmas is not there. Christmas is missing, absent, gone, not there. The house is empty of decorations, of music, of trees and ornaments and Christmas. What can be said about the absence of something. It is missing, gone, gone as if it never were, never had been.
Leah greets Michael’s mother and father as if they were the parents she has just left. She is confused, wounded but she says nothing about the missing holiday. She pushes her bewilderment into the hole and papers it up again. They will explain, she knows but her confusions harries her — a swarm of pests in the summer heat, in winter.
The table is set and they sit down to eat quickly. The meal has none of the trappings of Christmas, there are no traditional Christmas foods; the napkins and tablecloths are devoid of Christmas images. They talk of the end of college of the beginnings of careers, the rake over trivia, of Michael’s mother’s activities as a volunteer with the opera and his father’s experiences with a change in jobs. They talk about what medical school will be like and what law school will be like and when the talk grinds to a halt, the quiet is a vacuum, sucking Christmas in and they throw all sorts of things into the silence to keep Christmas from being pulled into the conversation. The conversation reachs out and snares opera singers and professors and neighbors, and orphans and injustice and… .
Leah loves Michael’s family and loves her place in it. She fills herself with food, carries her load of small talk, but the meal leaves a hunger in her. She tries to fill it by insisting, just after dinner that Michael stand with his parents as she hands them her gift. “Merry Christmas,” she says, holding the package out.
Michaels mother grasps it and puts it on the table and she and Michael and Michael’s father gather around it. They take turns pulling at the wrapping until the bowl is exposed on the table. “It is beautiful,” Michael’s father says. “Beatiful,” Michaels mother repeats. Michael closes his eyes as he stands before it. “It is magnificent,” he says. The four of them form a little line and walk around the bowl looking at the engraved scenes. “It is a wonderful Christmas present,” Michael says, Leah can feel his appreciation for the cost of it, for the effort that went into securing the present, only something is missing. He is looking somewhere past it.
“We have something for you,” Michael’s mother says. “We hope you like it.”
Michael’s father hands her a wrapped box about the same size as the box she gave them. They watch anxiously as she opens it, attentive, watching her face, her eyes, following the movements of her hands exposing the gift.
Stripping away the paper, Leah recognizes a book. A book. The book. A Talmud. It was very old, very precious.
“It’s a Talmud,” Michael’s mother says.
“I know,” Leah says, “very precious,” she adds.
Sticking out of Exodus, she judges, is an envelope. As she reaches for it Michael’s father says, “We hope you like it Leah. We love you Leah, as a daughter. We knew,” Michael’s mother picks up the chain of words, “that you could not marry Michael because he was not Jewish, not from a Jewish family. Look at the paper Leah, “she says, “look.”
“Can you read it,” Michaels mother asks.
“I can read it,” Leah says. She begins reading in Hebrew until the tears flood out the sounds.
“This is to certify….” The Hebrew is formal and orthodox. “…having met the conditions… they have become members of the Jewish faith. We…” There was a set of signatures. In the envelope, a second certificate certifying Michael’s conversion.
“We all did it,” Michael’s father says proudly.
Michael’s father gives his son a tiny prod, a cue.
Michael looks at her, looks at her as he had the first time he had seen her, looks at her and out of his mouth comes a song— in Hebrew, a song, a paragraph from the Song of Songs. Michael’s Hebrew will improve, Leah knows. She realizes the effort of it, the struggle, the work that went into the phrases, the memory, the learning.
She looks around to where last year the tree was. There is no tree. She looks to the fireplace which last year held festive stockings filled with Christmassy things. The fireplace is clean, void. She cocks an ear for the sounds of Christmas, the carols, but there is only the echo of the phrase of the Song of Songs Michael just sang in Hebrew.
6.
Somewhere in the second year of professional schools, between torts and cardiology Leah and Michael break up. They did not argue, they did not fight, they did not stop loving one another — such love does not disappear—they just part. Done.
When they look down at their feet, the hole between them is shrunken, nearly disappeared. But it is still there — just… who knows. They loved on another but let go, turned away. Maybe it was it was school, law, medicine… maybe it was Christmas. Some needs can not be denied. Michael had become Jewish and his Jewishness can not understand Leah’s infatuation with Christmas It offends the him that he has become. They turn away from one another. With difficulty they stuff their love down the tiny hole between them and move on. They separate. Who knows why such things happen. They are smart, modern people. They do not understand it either; they only know they have to let go. They let go.
Michael goes on to become a surgeon and marries the daughter of another surgeon and becomes the head of the synagogue in his neighborhood and starts a successful religious Jewish family. Leah, Leah marries a lawyer, a Jewish lawyer but not a religious Jewish lawyer. Lawyers are used to knots, accustomed to contradictions, to straightening kinks in things, she marries a lawyer for whom keeping a kosher household 11 months of the year then going somewhere, Europe, Mexico perhaps and celebrating Christmas is no problem.