Maybe (Maybe Not) Page 4
Weekly, I go for a haircut. Not because I’m that concerned with tonsorial tidiness. I have a fondness for small-town barbershops and the tale-tellers who hang out in them. Old guys who fought and still fight the Great Wars, but who spend a lot of time discussing prostate problems and the new nurse over at the clinic. A relative newcomer like me is fair game for the tales they’ve told a hundred times. Here’s one told on a Saturday afternoon in October. Have a seat.
Our storyteller is best described by his cousin as “barbed-wire lean and barbed-wire mean—he chews nails and spits rust.” A flinty little old man with a plank-flat face weathered ruddy brown below a line just over his eyebrows. Above that line his face is pasty white from a lifetime of wearing a hat. Add to his two-tone face a nose red-veined from too much hard drinking, plus some curly tufts of hair on the side of his bald head, and you have a joker’s face without benefit of greasepaint. It’s hard to believe he was once the town mortician and a deputy sheriff. He’s eighty-two now and occupies his time being the resident historian at the barbershop called Moon’s.
“Moon’s Barbershop. Used to belong to old Moon McCloud. That’s where this place got its name, you know, from him. He run the best barbershop this town ever seen. They called him “Moon” because of what he did in the Big War. Got himself captured over in France and them Germans they hauled him off to a prisoner-of-war camp. Well, he got fed up with them krauts who ran the camp and one day at a count-up when his number was called he turned around and mooned ’em—dropped his pants and hung his behind out at ’em. One of them krauts shot him in the butt right there. Bam. Wrecked his ass all right, but it made him a hero. The other prisoners called him “General Moon” after that. Give him a medal made out of tinfoil—for bravery beyond the call of duty. A little hard to explain when he got home, but word got around and people was always asking him to drop his pants so they could see his war wounds. Moon he wouldn’t do it. But he was elected commander of the American Legion on account of what he done. A hero. Only one we had.
“Well, old Moon he opened himself this barbershop in the back end of his daddy’s old service station. Learned to cut hair in the prisoner camp. He hated being a barber, but he said it was a job he could do standing up, since he had half his butt missing and sitting down was hard. He only had one price and one kind of haircut—cheap and guaranteed to be shorter when you left than when you come in.
“Moon he was ambitious. He ran the service station and the barber shop and got himself appointed to be a justice of the peace and a notary public, too. When the uranium boom come to town, old Moon he added a little café and grocery store to the barbershop. Said he was going to be the first stand-up millionaire in the world. You could get just about anything you wanted over at Moon’s—haircut, get married, eat lunch, tank of gas, six-pack and a quart of milk, loaf of bread, and drive off. We always said all he needed was some hardware up front and a whorehouse out back, and he’d have all the bases covered.
“But Moon he died before he was sixty. Right in the middle of collecting the offering in the Methodist church one Sunday morning. His heart attacked him. Preacher said Jesus took him. Hard to believe Jesus needed a barber. Don’t ask me. Don’t know nothing about religion. All I remember is Moon saying he didn’t care where he went after he died just as long as he could sit down in comfort forever after. A lifetime is a long time to stand.”
It’s February. Morning. Cold, gray, windy, wet.
Winter conditions outside and inside. A morning to crawl back into bed, pull up the covers, and wait for something better to happen. Like spring, for instance. Instead, I am in a doctor’s waiting room in a small-town hospital. In a state of nonspecific ill health. Miserable in body, soul, and mind. Don’t know why. “You’re going in for a checkup,” says my wife. So here I am. Fix me.
Across from me is an aged couple, sitting side by side, holding hands.
Neat and clean, washed and pressed. In her white hair, the woman wears a flowery arrangement—holly with red berries and some red poinsettia leaves. Odd.
The old man catches my eye, breaks into a grin, and says, “Merry Christmas!” My automatic pilot shoves “Merry Christmas!” out of my mouth at the same time that my brain wakes up and asks, “What, what, what …?”
The old man sings softly: “Oh, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town.” He finishes the song, chuckles to himself, and again addresses me with a cheerful “Merry Christmas!” His wife smiles.
Just then the nurse sings out from behind her desk, “Merry Christmas, Uncle Ed. The doctor will see you now.” From down the hall, the doctor shouts, “Merry Christmas, Ed! Good to see you.”
(Right. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it really is December instead of February. Mind is going. I knew this would happen someday. Why now?)
The nurse and the old man pass down the hall to an examination room.
Uncle Ed’s wife crosses over to sit by me. A bit embarrassed, she apologizes, pats me on the knee, and explains:
“I hope he didn’t upset you. The doctor says he’s had a minor stroke or two and may be in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. But in our family we know it’s just that he’s getting old and feeble. He’s eighty-eight, and his wiring’s coming loose. Most of the time he’s OK, but every once in a while something a little crazy happens. Like this Christmas thing. A couple of years ago he shouted down from upstairs something about how he’d forgotten it was Christmas Eve and hadn’t we better get the ornaments out and the packages wrapped. I didn’t know what to think. Because it was March. But we didn’t have anything else to do that day, and I thought I might as well humor him. So we spent the morning getting ready for Christmas. I called the girls—we have three grown daughters—and they came over for lunch and helped untangle the lights and wrap some packages. We sang carols and made cookies and had a wonderful time.
“When the girls left, he asked me to tell him about Christmas when he was a boy—because he was having a hard time remembering. Now I’ve known this man all my life. He had a terrible childhood, father was a drunk—beat him and his mother all the time. His father ran off with a woman from the drugstore, and his mother took sick and stayed home in bed most of the time. Ed never had a Christmas when he was a child. Well, how could I bring all that up again? I just didn’t have the heart.
“We’ve been married sixty years. And I’ve never lied to him, ever. But I decided I’d just make up some good memories for him. What harm would it do? So I told him about the year he got a tricycle, and the year there was a wind-up train under the tree, and the year he saw Santa Claus, and the year he got to be in the Christmas pageant at church. It made him very happy—me remembering the Christmases he never had but always wanted.
“You know, we never did get around to Christmas that March. Just Christmas Eve. Because by evening his mind was back in the present. Christmas Eve and good memories seemed to be enough.
“But four months later it happened all over again. I heard him singing carols upstairs one morning, and here came Christmas down the stairs. MERRY CHRISTMAS! Again in July. Also in October—instead of Halloween. Twice in December. And now in February.
“Every time, he wants me to tell him about his childhood again, and I do. I’m getting so good at lying about how wonderful his Christmas used to be that I half believe it myself. I call the girls each time, and they come over to help out. They’re really into it now. They bring him presents and sing carols and bake cookies. And twice we’ve even got as far as putting up a tree. They love to do it. See, they don’t think of it as Christmas anymore. They think of it as Father’s Day.”
Just then the old man comes shuffling back up the hall. He and the nurse are finishing off a last chorus of “Jingle Bells.” They both shout “Merry Christmas!” at me, and I shout “Merry Christmas!” right back at them.
The old lady patted my knee again, smiled, and rose to leave with her husband. He gallantly held the do
or open for her, and they went off into another day, hand in hand.
I didn’t have time to ask her what they did when other holidays came up.
But I guess every day is Valentine’s Day for them.
That old lady in the Valentine story planted a seed in my head that didn’t sprout until the following November. She had said, “It’s kind of refreshing to have Christmas come as a surprise.”
The early warning signs of the inevitable coming of the holiday juggernaut had appeared in the form of gift catalogs in late September. A fog of anxious dread began rising out of my spiritual swamp. By November I was in a serious Christmas-phobia funk. I wanted out. I lay awake half a night with a full committee meeting going on in my head. In the morning, I wrote a letter.
Dear Family and Friends:
I saw the cover of the December issue of Esquire magazine this week and bought it to take home to my wife. Because the headline on the cover fitted my mood exactly:
“O H M Y G O D (It’s Christmas)”
Maybe “Jeezus Christ, here comes Christmas again” would be more ironically accurate. Neither exclamation reflects much joy.
Nevertheless, Lynn and I couldn’t seem to help falling into the inevitable what-are-we-going-to-do-about-Christmas discussion—the exasperating one that leads to deep sighs and the making of long lists of people and long lists of things to buy and long lists of things to do as soon as possible even though soon is not so possible. Christmas as a crisis.
At about the same time, we both realized we are just not into doing the Christmas thing this year—at least not in the usual way. It’s not that we’ve become Scroogish about the season—it’s that we don’t want to become Scroogish.
We are still influenced by the memory of being in New Mexico for part of the holiday season last year. We passed through the manic little tourist town of Taos, which was geared up for the maximum level of kitschy consumerism, and drove farther on up the road to the Taos Indian pueblo.
Peace and quiet reigned there. The time from December 15 to January 15 is observed as “The time of being still.” The pueblo is closed to tourists and all commercial activity for a month. To us it felt like the little town of Bethlehem must have been a long time ago.
And so, in the sensible spirit of our Indian cousins, we intend being still this year. We’re not going shopping. The money we might have spent can go to some other good cause. Take the time you might have spent shopping for us and be still a little yourself. Think of us, who wish you quiet joy this Christmas. God rest you, merry gentlemen, and gentlewomen, too—God rest you.
In late December, my wife and I went off to Utah for a time—just the two of us. On Christmas Eve we chopped up the trunk of last year’s tree and built a fire to sit by while we ate homemade bread and chili. We took a long walk up the valley in the snow.
We came upon a midnight clear.
The silent stars went by.
The world in solemn stillness lay.
And when the angels sang, we were there to hear them.
That experiment in Christmas damage control has continued and expanded.
Since Christmas went so well, I explained to my family and friends that I would like to try treating other official occasions in a similar way. I asked them to forgive me my obligations for birthdays or anniversaries for a while. And I would do the same for them—no expectations.
I wanted to be free of dates. How would it be, I wondered, to celebrate the seasons of the heart as opportunities, not obligations? I promised to keep them in the forefront of my thinking—all those whom I love and cherish. I promised to pay attention to them and give to them when they most need something but least expect it. To let gifts and favors and affirmations come, from me, as a surprise.
How’s it going? As I write, it’s February, and I’m thirteen months into the trial. It hasn’t been easy. It means getting funny looks when official dates are imminent. It takes extra effort, but the effort so far is pleasure, not hassle. Friends and family seem to like knowing I’m thinking about them, but it’s hard to tell enthusiasm from friendly toleration sometimes. Only my five-year-old granddaughter has actually complained. She would like to be surprised a little more regularly.
I don’t know what my friends and family really think about this experiment in gift-giving. They don’t say, and I haven’t asked. They are all ahead in actual loot, if one looks at this deal from a strict accounting point of view. But that’s not the point.
The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers.
How will you know someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?
A man and woman I know fell into BIG LOVE somewhat later in life than usual. She was forty. He was fifty. Neither had been married before. But they knew about marriage. They had seen the realities of that sacred state up close among their friends. They determined to overcome as many potential difficulties as possible by working things out in advance.
Prenuptial agreements over money and property were prepared by lawyers. Preemptive counseling over perceived tensions was provided by a psychologist, who helped them commit all practical promises to paper, with full reciprocal tolerance for irrational idiosyncrasies.
“Get married once, do it right, and live at least agreeably, if not happily, ever after.” So they hoped.
One item in their agreement concerned pets and kids. Item Number 7:
“We agree to have either children or pets, but not both.”
The man was not enthusiastic about dependent relationships. Kids, dogs, cats, hamsters, goldfish, snakes, or any other living thing that had to be fed or watered had never had a place in his life. Not even house-plants. And especially not dogs. She, on the other hand, liked taking care of living things. Especially children and dogs.
OK. But she had to choose. She chose children. He obliged. Two daughters in three years. Marriage and family life went along quite well for all. Their friends were impressed. So far, so good.
The children reached school age. The mother leapt eagerly into the bottomless pool of educational volunteerism. The school needed funds for art and music. The mother organized a major-league auction to raise much money. Every family agreed to provide an item of substantial value for the event.
The mother knew a lot about dogs. She had raised dogs all her life—the pedigreed champion kind. She planned to use her expertise to shop the various local puppy pounds to find an unnoticed bargain pooch and shape it up for the auction as her contribution. With a small investment, she would make a tenfold profit for the school. And for a couple of days, at least, there would be a dog in the house.
After a month of looking, she found the wonder dog—the dog of great promise. Female, four months old, dark gray, blue eyes, tall, strong, confident, and very, very, very friendly.
To her practiced eye, our mother could see that classy genes had been accidentally mixed here. Two purebred dogs of the highest caliber had combined to produce this exceptional animal. Most likely a black Labrador and a weimaraner, she thought. Perfect. Just perfect.
To those of us of untutored eye, this mutt looked more like the results of a bad blind date between a Mexican burro and a miniature musk-ox.
The fairy dogmother went to work. Dog is inspected and given shots by a vet. Fitted with an elegant leather collar and leash. Equipped with a handsome bowl, a ball, and a rawhide bone. Expenses: $50 to the pound, $50 to the vet, $50 to the beauty parlor, $60 for tack and equipment, and $50 for food. A total of $260 on a dog that is going to stay forty-eight hours before auction time.
The father took one look and paled. He smelled smoke. He wouldn’t give ten bucks to keep it an hour. “DOG,” as the father named it, has a long, thick rubber club of a tail, legs and feet that remind him of hairy toilet plungers, and is already big enough at four months to bowl over the girls and their mother with its unrestrained enthusiasm.
The father knows this is going to be ONE BIG DOG. Something a zoo might display.
Omnivorous, it has eaten all its food in one day and has left permanent teeth marks on a chair leg, a leather ottoman, and the father’s favorite golf shoes.
The father is patient about all of this.
After all, it is only a temporary arrangement, and for a good cause.
He remembers item No. 7 in the prénuptial agreement.
He is safe.
On Thursday night, the school affair gets off to a winning start. Big crowd of parents, and many guests who look flush with money. Arty decorations, fine potluck food, a cornucopia of auction items. The mother basks in her triumph.
“DOG” comes on the auction block much earlier than planned. Because the father went out to the car to check on “DOG” and found it methodically eating the leather off the car’s steering wheel, after having crunched holes in the padded dashboard.
After a little wrestling match getting “DOG” into the mother’s arms and up onto the stage, the mother sits in a folding chair, cradling “DOG” with the solemn tenderness reserved for a corpse at a wake, while the auctioneer describes the pedigree of the animal and all the fine effort and neat equipment thrown in with the deal.
“What am I bid for this wonderful animal?”
“A hundred dollars over here; two hundred dollars on the right; two hundred and fifty dollars in the middle.”
There is a sniffle from the mother.
Tears are running down her face.
“DOG” is licking the tears off her cheeks.
In a whisper not really meant for public notice, the mother calls to her husband: “Jack, Jack, I can’t sell this dog—I want this dog—this is my dog—she loves me—I love her—oh, Jack.”
Every eye in the room is on this soapy drama.