About half the Americans I know wouldn’t qualify for citizenship.
Besides not getting passing scores on the exam, some haven’t participated in elections for a long time except to bark and bleed and moan a little louder just before the second Tuesday in November every year.
As for taking oaths, however, most of the people I know would swear to Almighty God that the problem with this country is all those lazy, stupid, double-talking, chowderheads who are running the government.
It’s all the rage. “Term limits? Damn right! Throw the rascals out!”
But are we any better than the rascals we throw in? I say, let’s find out.
I say: Tough standards for all elected and non-elected officials of government.
Suppose that every twelve years we lose our perks and privileges of office. We reapply, submit our record as citizens, get examined, tested, and checked out for competency, and pay our fees. If we pass, we get a citizen’s license, stamped with big red letters saying: “USE IT OR LOSE IT.”
If we flunk, we’ll be given mercy and sent back for retraining in history, law, and civic responsibility. We’ll be allowed two more chances to pass muster.
However. Recall our latest standards: Three strikes, and you’re out.
CRAYOLAS
GOOD FRIENDS FINALLY PUT their resources together and made themselves a child. A son. Me, I’m the godfather in the deal. I take my job seriously.
So far I’ve introduced the kid to the good things in life—chocolate, beer, cigars, Beethoven, and dirty jokes. I don’t think the kid cares much for Beethoven. But he’s only a year and a half old. Which is why beer, cigars, and dirty jokes don’t cut much ice with him, either. Yes on chocolate, though. I haven’t told him about sex yet, but he’s got some ideas of his own already. I won’t go into details here, but if you have ever had a little kid or have ever been a little kid, then you know what I mean. We seem to figure out right away where certain parts are.
Also, I introduced him to crayons. Bought the Crayola beginner set—the short, fat, thick ones with training wheels. Every few weeks I would put one in his hand and show him how to make a mark with it. Mostly he just held it and stared at me. Then we went through the orifice-stuffing phase, where the Crayola went in his mouth and ears and nose. Finally, last week, I held his hand and made a big red mark with the Crayola on a sheet of newsprint. And WHAM! He got the picture. A light bulb went off in a new room in his head. YES! And he did it again on his own. And again. And again. Now, reports his mother, with a mixture of pleasure and pain, there is no stopping him from making his mark on the walls of his existence—wherever and whenever he feels like it.
Crayolas plus imagination (the ability to create images)—these make for happiness if you are a child. Amazing things, Crayolas. Some petroleum-based wax, some dye, a little binder—not much to them. Until you add the imagination. The Binney Company in Pennsylvania makes about two billion of these oleaginous sticks of pleasure every year and exports them to every country in the United Nations. Crayolas are one of the few things the human race has in common. That green-and-yellow box hasn’t changed since 1937. In fact, the only change has been to rename the “flesh” color “peach.” That’s a sign of progress.
When I bought my godson his trainer set, I indulged myself. Bought my very own set of sixty-four. In the big four-section box with the sharpener built right in. Never had my own set before. Seems like I was always too young or too old to have one. While I was at it, I bought several sets. Got one for the kid’s mother and father and explained it was theirs, not his. Fine gift.
What I notice is that every adult or child I give a new set of Crayolas to goes a little funny. The kids smile, get a glazed look on their faces, pour the crayons out, and just look at them for a while. Then they go to work on the nearest flat surface and will draw anything you ask, just name it. The adults always get the most wonderful kind of sheepish smile on their faces—a mixture of delight and nostalgia and silliness. And they immediately start telling you about all their experiences with Crayolas. Their first box, using every color, breaking them, trying to get them in the box in order again, trying to use them in a bundle, putting them on hot things to see them melt, shaving them onto waxed paper and ironing them into stained glass windows, eating them, and on and on. If you want an interesting adult party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of Crayolas for everybody.
When you think about it, for sheer bulk there’s more art done with Crayolas than with anything else. There must be billions of sheets of paper in every country in the world, in billions of boxes and closets and attics and cupboards, covered with billions of pictures in crayon. The imagination of the human race poured out like a river in low and high places. Even presidents and prime ministers and generals all used Crayolas sometime in their lives.
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one first—before we tried anything else. It would explode high in the air—explode softly—and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth—boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either—not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn’t have his hand blown off.
Guess that sounds absurd, doesn’t it? A bit dumb. Crazy and silly and weird.
Let me be clear about this. When I consider the horrible things we have developed at horrifying expense to drop out of the sky, and when I think about what those weapons will do—well, then, I’m not confused about what’s weird and crazy and absurd. And I’m not confused about the lack of, or the need for, imagination in low or high places. We could do better. We must do better.
There are far worse things to drop on people than Crayolas.
MIDWINTER
THESE NEXT TALES are about a real season as well as a season of my mind—midwinter—from about Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day. Midwinter has a lot of stress in it. Darkness, cold, family tension, hope, despair, religious beliefs wrapped in the confusion of social obligation and economic necessity. Christmas just happens to come in the middle of all this. Sometimes Christmas seems more like Halloween to me—all the ghosts and goblins that appear out of season.
The contradictions of midwinter drive me crazy. Some years I have wanted to hide in a hole, while in other years I wanted to organize extravaganzas, and some years I wanted to do both at the same time. One cannot live and be free of contradictions. Maybe I’ll get used to that someday.
Several years ago I gave away my substantial collection of Christmas decorations, including many boxes of wind-up toys and a fine selection of wooden things made in Bavaria and Austria—the kind that go round and round driven by the heat from candles. An era was over—pass the stuff on to the next generation—no fuss or muss in my house for Christmas. My kids stored these boxes in their basements and attics.
This year I missed my Christmas stuff. Took it all back. Put it all up. Had a fine time. Next, year? Who knows?
THE GREAT HEATHEN
“JESUS WAS A JEW.” This is my father’s voice. He’s acting as a theological matador to my mother while she charged around the arena of our living room getting ready for the Christmas competition.
“Jesus was a Jew, dear. He wasn’t a Christian, dear. And he wasn’t born on December twenty-fifth, dear. Jesus is dead, dear. And he isn’t coming back, dear. So calm down and shut up, dear.”
My mother would retreat from the room crying, and my father would go back to reading his newspaper in peace, which is all he wanted in the first place. Peace on earth—beginning in our living room this evening.
He once asked me, “Son, do you know why God didn’t have Jesus get married?”
“No, why?”
“Because having him crucified once was enough.”
My father was a born-once-and-once-is-enough heathen.
My mother was a born-again-and-again-and-again supplicant of the Southern Baptist Church. There was a brick wall between them on the subject of religion—built and buttressed with bitterness over the years.
Every December I heard my father exclaim, “Jesus was a Jew, dear,” and lay out his theological land mines. My mother would sob, “You’re going to burn in Hell,” and flee the room.
That’s how I knew Christmas was coming.
Ding-a-ling ding ding.
In the late afternoon of a windy, cold December day—in front of the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in Waco, Texas, a middle-aged man in suit, tie, overcoat, and Stetson hat stands by a red steel tripod from which hangs a black iron soup kettle.
An eight-year-old kid, bundled up against the cold, stands beside the man. The kid is working up a little rhythm with a small brass bell. This is the first year the kid has been allowed to ring the bell. Warned by the man not to do anything silly, he is trying to mix joy with the necessary reverence required of one who has been entrusted with a serious job.
Ding-a-ling ding ding.
I am that kid. The man is my father.
For a couple of hours we are the Salvation Army.
My father was not a Christian. At least not by the standards of the Salvation Army, the Southern Baptist Church, or my mother. He was a heathen in their eyes and proud of it. So it was puzzling to me that the Great Heathen would work for the Salvation Army year after year as long as he lived. I never asked why. He never explained. But every year he was there.
Now I know the explanation lay in something he often said to me: “It doesn’t matter what you say you believe—it only matters what you do.”
After my father died his sister told me that their family home had burned down when they were children, leaving them destitute. The Salvation Army came to the rescue. My aunt said their family was so humiliated about their poverty and plight that they never talked about it. If it had not been for the Salvation Army, the family could not have stayed together. The Salvos practiced what they preached.
Now I understood why my father and I were there at the kettle every year.
Simple. We owed the pot. Do unto others . . .
The Great Heathen said I didn’t have to be a Christian or a Jew to do right.
Ding-dang-ding-dang-ding-dang-dong!
HONG DUC
A SUNDAY AFTERNOON it was, some days before Christmas in 1979. With rain, with wind, with cold. Wintersgloom. Things-to-do list was long and growing like a persistent mold. Temper: short. Bio-index: negative. Horoscope reading suggested caution. And the Sunday paper suggested dollars, death, and destruction as the day’s litany. O tidings of comfort and joy, fa la la la la!
This holy hour of Lordsdaybliss was jarred by a pounding at the door. Now what? Deep sigh. Opening it, resigned to accept whatever bad news lies in wait, I am nonplussed. A rather small person in a cheap Santa Claus mask, carrying a large brown paper bag outthrust: “TRICK OR TREAT!” Santa Mask shouts. What? “TRICK OR TREAT!” Santa Mask hoots again. Tongue-tied, I stare at this apparition. He shakes the bag at me, and dumbly I fish out my wallet and find a dollar to drop into the bag.
The mask is lifted, revealing an Asian kid with a ten-dollar grin taking up most of his face. “Wanta hear some caroling?” he asks, in singsong English.
I know him now. He belongs to a family settled into the neighborhood by the Quakers last year. Boat people. Vietnamese, I believe. Refugees. He stopped by at Halloween with his sisters and brothers, and I filled their bags. Hong Duc is his name—he’s maybe eight. At Halloween he looked like a Wise Man, with a bathrobe on and a dishtowel around his head.
“Wanta hear some caroling?”
I nod, envisioning an octet of urchin refugees hiding in the bushes ready to join their leader in uplifted song. “Sure, where’s the choir?”
“I’m it,” says he.
And he launched forth with an up-tempo chorus of “Jingle Bells,” at full lung power, followed by an equally enthusiastic rendering of what I swear sounded like “Hark, the Hairy Angels Sing.” And finally, a soft-voiced, reverential singing of “Silent Night.” Head back, eyes closed, from the bottom of his heart he poured out the last strains of “Sleep in heavenly peace” into the gathering night.
Wet-eyed, dumbstruck by his performance, I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped that into the paper bag. In return he produced half a candy cane from his pocket and passed it solemnly to me. Flashing the ten-dollar grin, he turned and ran from the porch, shouted “GOD BLESS YOU” and “TRICK OR TREAT,” and was gone.
Who was that masked kid?
Hong Duc, the one-man choir, delivering Christmas door to door.
I confess that I’m usually a little confused about Christmas. It never has made a lot of sense to me. Christmas is unreal. Ever since I got the word about Santa Claus, I’ve been a closet cynic at heart. Singing about riding in a one-horse open sleigh is ludicrous. I’ve never seen one, much less ridden in one. Never roasted chest-nuts by an open fire. Wouldn’t know how to if I had one, and I hear they’re no big deal anyway. Wandering Wise Men raise my suspicions, and shepherds who spend their lives hanging about with sheep are a little strange. Never seen a flying angel, either, and my experience with virgins is really limited. The appearance of a newborn king doesn’t interest me; I’d just as soon settle for some other president. Babies and reindeer stink. I’ve been around them both, and I know. The little town of Bethlehem is a war zone.
Singing about things I’ve never seen or done or wanted. Dreaming of a white Christmas I’ve never known. Christmas isn’t very real. And yet, and yet . . . I’m too old to believe in it, and too young to give up on it. Too cynical to get into it, and too needy to stay out of it.
Trick or treat!
After I shut the door came near-hysteria—laughter and tears and that funny feeling you get when you know that once again Christmas has come to you. Right down the chimney of my midwinter hovel comes Saint Hong Duc. He is confused about the details, like me, but he is very clear about the spirit of the season. It’s an excuse to let go and celebrate—to throw yourself into Holiday with all you have, wherever you are.
Where’s the choir? “I’m it,” says he. Where’s Christmas? I ask myself. I’m it, comes the echo. I’m it. Head back, eyes closed, voice raised in whatever song I can muster the courage to sing.
God, it is said, once sent a child upon a starry night, that the world might know hope and joy. I am not sure that I quite believe that, or that I believe in all the baggage heaped upon that story during two thousand years. But I am sure that I believe in Hong Duc, the one-man Christmas choir, shouting “TRICK OR TREAT!” door to door. I don’t know who or what sent him. But I know I am tricked through the whimsical mischief of fate into joining the choir that sings of joy and hope. Through a child, I have been treated to Christmas.
BRASS RULE
AND SPEAKING OF GIFTS, I should tell you a rule. It is not my rule, necessarily. It came from a very grumpy-looking man at a holiday office party. A man coming down with a full-blown case of Scrooge-itis. He had just unwrapped his dinky little present from under the office tree. In tones of amused sorrow he said to nobody in particular:
“You know, it’s not true that what counts is the thought and not the gift. It just isn’t true. My mother was pulling my leg on that one. I have collected so much gift-wrapped trash over the years from people who copped out and hurriedly bought a little plastic cheapie to give under the protective flag of good thoughts. I tell you, it is the gift that counts. Or rather, people who think good thoughts give good gifts. It ought to be a rule—the Brass Rule of Gift Exchange.”
And he stomped off toward a garbage can carrying his little gift as if it were a dead roach.
Well, maybe so. It’s a kind of harsh judgment, and cuts a little close fo
r comfort. But the spirit of the season has been clear for a long time. God, who, it is said, started all this, cared enough to send the very best. On more than one occasion. And the Wise Men did not come bearing tacky knickknacks. Even old Santa, when he’s making his list, is checking it twice. And the Angels came bringing Good News, which was not about a half-price sale.
To be honest, I do know what I want someone to give me for Christmas. I’ve known since I was forty years old. Wind-up mechanical toys that make noises and go round and round and do funny things. No batteries. Toys that need me to help them out from time to time. The old-fashioned painted tin ones I had as a child. That’s what I want. Nobody believes me. It’s what I want, I tell you.
Well, okay, that’s close, but not quite exactly it. It’s delight and simplicity that I want. Foolishness and fantasy and noise. Angels and miracles and wonder and innocence and magic. That’s closer to what I want.
It’s harder to talk about, but what I really, really, really want for Christmas is just this:
I want to be five years old again for an hour.
I want to laugh a lot and cry a lot.
I want to be picked up and rocked to sleep in someone’s arms, and carried up to bed just one more time.
I know what I really want for Christmas: I want my child-hood back.
Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn’t make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? Christmas is about a child of long ago and far away, and Christmas is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded, and vulnerable to joy. A child who does not need or want or understand gifts of socks or pot holders.
People who think good thoughts give good gifts. Period.
The Brass Rule is true.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Page 11