Maybe (Maybe Not) (6 page)

I
t’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.”

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 door 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.

T
hat 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.

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.

T
hat 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.