Falling Through Space (16 page)

Two and a half hours later the four of us emerged from the mall and began to search for the car. “I'm too old for this,” the child-worshipper said. “This is one generation too many.”

We had purchased a pair of Superman pajamas with a Velcro cape and a package of T-shirts that might someday fit someone and we had left a children's department in tatters. Only the unbelievable patience of a saleslady named Laverne had made it possible for us to purchase anything.

The child-worshipper took us home and declined my invitation to come in. Later, I allowed the four-year-old to watch a Care Bears movie four times in a row — and that after all my tirades against children watching television. It was a movie called
The Care Bears in the Land without Feelings
. By bedtime he had mastered all the parts and had chosen for himself the role of Professor Coldheart. “THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR BEING SO TENDERHEARTED,” he kept telling me. “SO MUCH FOR LOVE AND TENDERNESS AND LITTLE FUZZY WUZZIES.”

The sun fell below the horizon. We had some cereal and milk. We dressed for bed. The child-worshipper called to see how we were getting along.

“How's it going?” she said.

“How did I do this?” I said. “How did I do this day after day?”

“You weren't very good at it,” she answered. “It never was your long suit.”

H
ERE IS
my Christmas carol.

The best thing that has happened to me so far this holiday season was a discussion I had at the drugstore with two women who work there. The three of us decided that there was no way we were going into debt for Christmas. No way we were going to wake up on January first with a lot of bills to pay. God bless you, Merry Gentlemen, sell this plastic junk to someone else. You won't sell it to Libby and Darlene and me.

“What do you want for Christmas?” I asked Libby as I was leaving. “I want grocery stores and drugstores to stop putting candy by the checkout counter,” she said. “So children scream for it while their mothers wait to pay. What do you all want?”

“I want folks to stop selling dope to kids,” Darlene said. “My doctor at the clinic, he's got his only son locked up with his brain dead from taking dope. My doctor was crying when he was seeing me. Imagine that.”

The three of us hung our heads over the idea of anyone selling dope to children. We Three Kings of Orient Are. Three wise women at the Katz & Bestoff Drug Store.

Well, this is the saddest time of year and everyone knows it. Adeste Fideles. O come, all ye faithful. Everyone suffers the winter equinox, the death of the year. Everyone knows the sadness of Christmas afternoon after the presents are opened and the dinner eaten and there's nothing left to do but pretend you had a good time.

One Christmas, I stayed all alone on a mountain and didn't eat anything all day while Christmas went on below me. I was the Grinch of Christmas and it was one of the best days of my life. I wrote the last chapter of a novel and wouldn't even answer the phone.

You'll lose all your fans if you start knocking Christmas, the voice of bah humbug cautions me. Not my readers, I answer. My readers are literate people who can think for themselves. They are people who write me letters I like to read and tell me things I want to know.

So here is a Merry Christmas to all my friends and all the people who have helped me make these essays by doing the things I wrote about, and to all the little children screaming and crying for candy at the checkout stands and to all the parents who give in and to all those who say no.

I
WENT TO
the inauguration of the Radio Reading Service for the Blind and Print Handicapped Citizens of the state of Mississippi. There was a party at ten o'clock in the morning in the Mississippi Public Broadcasting studios and most of the writers in the state were there to start things off by reading from their books. This is a service that will go out day after day to all those who cannot see or are unable to hold a book or turn a page.

It was a bright January morning and everyone looked grand in winter suits and dress-up dresses. The director and manager of the service were there, looking properly nervous and excited. There was an opening ceremony with members of the legislature and doctors and lawyers and actresses and other volunteer readers. There was fierce competition for those spots. Mississippi is not a state where a chance to be on stage is taken lightly.

After the ceremony we all trooped over to the studios and the recording sessions began. Eudora Welty led off with her haunting and beautiful story “A Worn Path.” The rest of us were in the anteroom listening on a scratchy desk radio. The minute Miss Welty's soft enchanting voice came on the air things changed in the room and the magic of storytelling was upon us.

“It was December,” she read, “— a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.”

Miss Welty was followed by Willie Morris and Ellen Douglas and Gloria Norris and Richard Ford and Luke Wallin and Charlotte Capers and Carroll Case and Felder Rushing and Patrick Smith, some on tape and some in person. In the midst of this excitement a troop of sighted sixth-graders passed through the room with a string of blind and print-handicapped fifth-graders in tow. They were being led by a wonderful-looking little redhead in a plaid dress. She weaved her way in between Eudora Welty and Ellen Douglas and a pair of senators. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me, please,” and led her charges back to tour the studios which would produce the books they would be hearing.

In a world of television watchers it is nice for a writer to know there is an audience who still needs words unaccompanied by pictures other than the ones they make up in their own minds.

S
OME TIME AGO
I decided to leave the secluded life where I wrote my books and go out into the world and see what was going on.

I spent two weeks on a reading tour. First I went to Boulder, Colorado, and read a story to the students and had a wonderful time walking around in the snow. Then I flew to Minneapolis-Saint Paul to read a story in the beautiful Walker Art Center. Outside, only a few blocks away, seven hundred volunteer workers were putting the finishing touches on the Ice Palace. In the dead of winter, in one of the coldest cities in the world, seven hundred grown men and women have cut blocks of ice out of a frozen lake and built a palace one hundred and twenty-eight feet high.

Minneapolis is always full of wonders for me. The Walker Art Center was showing the fifteen-and-a-half-hour film,
Heimat
, by the German director Edgar Reitz. It is one of the most beautiful movies I have seen in years. The story of a small German village and its inhabitants from the end of World War One to the present.