December 3: Christmas Tree

I'm sitting in my living room after a really long day.  Yes, I'm still a little preoccupied with the events of the last few days, but, for the first time in a while, I'm finding a little peace of mind.  My daughter just got back from religion class a little while ago, and the living room smells like crescent hot dogs, which we had for dinner tonight.  On the TV is an episode of Extreme Home Makeover, my daughter's favorite show.

Things feel normal right now.  I'm almost able to forget the troubles of lost jobs and lost income.  The Christmas tree is on, and I don't have to be back at the office for another nine hours.  I'm tired, ready to climb under the covers and go to sleep.  The last week or so, we haven't been using a nightlight.  We've been leaving on the Christmas tree instead.  So when the alarm goes off at 4 a.m., I wake up to this:

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree...

For some reason, the Christmas tree puts things into perspective for me.  Yes, I've been stressed all day.  I put together medical charts.  Wrote letters to patients.  Made up the final exam for my Intro to Film class.  Created my lesson plan.  However, all those things seem distant and unimportant at the moment.

All that matters are the lights in the branches.  The tinsel swaying silver and orange and red and green.  The ornaments--Santas and candy canes and angels and crosses.  All these things tell the story of my life, my wife's life..  The story of our family.  And our home,

Saint Marty is a lucky guy.

December 3: Lean Christmas, "Carol" Dip Monday, Hope

This morning, I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that my wife lost her job on Friday.  I'm being quite selfish in my thinking right now.  I'm thinking about how much more difficult Christmas is going to be this year.  How I might have to reconsider my two-week vacation at the beginning of January.  How I'm going to miss the extra income, the peace of mind, it gave me.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

You know, Bob Cratchit has about 27 kids in A Christmas Carol, and he somehow manages to be upbeat and generous all the time, even with Scrooge as a boss.  Of course, Bob Cratchit is a fictional character in a novel that is guaranteed to have a happy ending.  There's no guarantees is my situation. No Ghosts of Christmas are going to visit my wife's bosses and teach them the error of their ways.  (I will admit to having an urge to go to my wife's former place of work this morning to create some awkwardness and anxiety, but my wife asked me not to.  I am still a little angry, if you can't tell.)

The hardest consequence of this whole situation for me is the holidays.  It's going to be a lean Christmas season.  No prize turkey from the butcher's window for this Cratchit family.  That's a tough pill for me to swallow.  A really tough pill.  But swallow it I will, with a few extra cups of low fat eggnog.

My question for Carol dip Monday is pretty simple this week:

Will my family have a good Christmas this year?

And the answer from the Inimitable Charles Dickens is:

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistably contagious as laughter and good-humour.  When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way:  holding his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions:  Scrooge's niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily as he.  And their assembled friends being not a bit behindhand, roared out, lustily.

Well, that's a pretty jolly little scene.  Of course, it's about Fred, Scrooge's nephew, who is practically Santa Claus.  But it's a good answer to my question.  An answer full of happiness and love and good will.  And hope.

That's what Saint Marty needs the most:  a little hope.



Well, not quite this lean...

December 2: Book Club, Favorite Thing, New Cartoon

One of my favorite things happened this afternoon.  The members of my book club descended on my house at 2 p.m. for an afternoon of munchies and literary kvetching.  Actually, there really wasn't much kvetching.  Everybody liked the book, which was Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River.  Usually, the group is split--half of us loving the book and half of us loathing it.  This time, it was pretty unanimous.  Bonnie Jo Campbell is a damn fine writer.

When I was in grad school downstate, I took a fiction workshop in which Bonnie Jo was a student.  From the first story she submitted for critique, I knew she was something special.  So did every other person in the class, including the instructor.  Her stories were surprising and raw.  Each one was better than the previous one.  I was reduced to making comments like this on her stuff:  "I really like the font you chose for this story."  (Actually, it wasn't that bad, but most of us couldn't find a whole lot to criticize.)

As I read Once Upon a River, I felt like I was back in class with her.  The main character of the book, Margo Crane, reminded me of the main characters of all her stories--independent to the point of being wild.  The narrative was laced with violence and sexuality, drugs and salvation.  Think Huckleberry Finn on crystal meth.  I loved rowing up the Stark River with Bonnie Jo Campbell.

And I love getting together with my book club groupies.  We are one, big, happy, dysfunctional family. We know each other's likes and dislikes.  We know who's Republican and who's Democrat.  As I said, we don't always see eye-to-eye, but, when one of our own is struggling, we offer shoulders to cry on, laughter to relieve the tears, and a lot of good food to eat.

Everyone should have a book club like mine.  One of our members affectionately describes the group like this:  "I am a member of the strangest book club in the world."

Saint Marty would agree with that description, and he wouldn't change it for the world.

Confessions of Saint Marty

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