January 7: A Few Items, Birthday Card, Letting Go

But most sorrowfully, there were a few items kept hidden in a closet that related to his son--a white leatherbound New Testament, a baptismal card, a pile of paperbacks, and a new watch, never used, that had been purchased as his Christmas present at Macy's the afternoon before his death.

I understand Edward Ives' inability to let go of these items belonging to his son.  Throughout the novel, Ives sinks deeper and deeper into depression over the murder of his son.  It's devastating to read.  He simply cannot move past this tragic loss.  He holds onto his son's belongings, frozen, unable to let go.


I think I'm a lot like Ives.  I love the sentimentality of Christmas.  The lights and music and church services.  And I have a hard time letting go.  For instance, I shared the same birth date as my friend, Ray, who passed away just before Thanksgiving.  Every year, we gave each other birthday cards, trying to find the funniest or most inappropriate.  A couple weeks ago, I found the card Ray gave me in October.  The last card.  I've been carrying it around ever since.  Every once in a while, I'll take it out and read the personal message he wrote on the inside.  It makes me smile and feel sad at the same time.

Letting go is tough.  I have all the diaries and journals saved from the time I was in middle school.  I've never reread them, probably never will.  They simply reside in a box in my closet.  Maybe, when I win the Nobel Prize in Literature, they might be valuable.  Or maybe not.  Perhaps I should pull a Franz Kafka and ask my wife or best friend to burn them after I've died, tragically, of consumption.  That way I don't have to do the letting go.

When I return to teaching next week, I'm going to put Ray's birthday card in my office.  I may even frame it.  Just to remind me of his snorting laugh, his kind spirit.  Letting go is a process, like sand being eroded from a beach.  It takes time.  Lots of it for me.

In the mean time, Saint Marty's got about 40 or 50 diaries/journals to keep hidden.

Not ready for this yet...

December 1: A Churchyard, "Mr. Ives' Christmas," New Cartoon

A churchyard.  Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground.  It was a worthy place.  Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite.  A worthy place!

What point I have to make with this passage (aside from the fact that Charles Dickens uses way too many semi-colons) is that A Christmas Carol is a pretty dark book.  As Scrooge wanders with the Spirits, the images and scenes become more and more desperate and bleak, leading to this churchyard with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  Some people criticize the book for its sentimentality.  I find the book more terrifying than sentimental.

Most of my favorite Christmas books and movies have this streak of darkness.  It's A Wonderful Life has George Bailey contemplating suicide on a bridge.  The Santa Clause has Scott Calvin locked in a custody battle with his ex-wife over their son.  And Mr. Ives' Christmas, a novel by Oscar Hijuelos, has Edward Ives grieving for his teenage son, who is gunned down in front of a church on Christmas Eve.

Mr. Ives' Christmas is one of my favorite yuletide books and my Good Read for this week.  Hijeulos published it in 1995, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year.  I love this book.  I could say it like Oprah, holding up my copy of it and declaring, "Mr. Iiiiiiiiiives' Chriiiiiiiiiiiistmaaaaas!!"  It's an amazing writing accomplishment.  Hijuelos writes a book about a truly good man who suffers a great deal.  Think the Book of Job.  There really isn't a "bad guy" in the novel.  Even the boy who kills Ives' son isn't bad.  He's a victim of poverty and drugs.

I've always thought Mr. Ives' Christmas would be the book Charles Dickens would have written had he been a twentieth-century novelist living in New York City.  Hijuelos and Dickens both write about  the underprivileged and neglected members of a society.  They both magnify issues of hunger and crime and the transcendent power of faith.  And they both have ghosts wandering in and out of their pages.

Edward Ives, Hijuelos' protagonist, is a kind, gentle, religious advertising executive living a decent life in New York City.  He has a beautiful wife, a son who is going to be a priest, and a daughter who eventually joins the Peace Corps.  Everything is perfect for Ives.  Until December 24, 1967, when his son, Robert, is murdered by a young Hispanic man near the steps of their parish church.  From that moment, Ives' life takes on Job-like dimensions.

He suffers from crushing depression for close to twenty years.  His best friend turns into a philandering husband who beat his son.  His wife contemplates divorcing him.  Tragedy follows tragedy.  Yet, Hijuelos never loses sight of redemption and hope, the hallmark of any Christmas tale. And there are passages of pure poetry in the book:

Years ago, in the 1950s, as a young man working for a Madison Avenue advertising agency, Ives always looked forward to the holiday season and would head out during his lunch hours, visiting churches, to think and meditate, and, if he was lucky, to hear the choirs as they practiced their hymns and sacred songs.  Often enough, he walked along the burgeoning sidewalks, crowded with shoppers and tourists, and made his way to Saint Patrick's Cathedral, where he'd become lost in a kind of euphoric longing--why de did not know.  And in a moment, he would find himself, as a child, attending Mass with his adoptive family again, so many memories coming back to him:  of standing beside his father during the services and noticing, as he looked up at his father's kindly face, just how moved he seemd to be by the prayers, and the Latin incantations, and the reverential chants; so moved, especially during the raising of the host, that he almost seemed on the verge of tears.

There is much I find miraculous in this novel.  The most miraculous is the redeeming power of hope.

Considering the last day or so, perhaps Saint Marty needs to reread Mr. Ives' Christmas to refill his well of hope.

Confessions of Saint Marty