A Modern Christmas Carol
Hark! The cash till loudly rings!
Glory to the marketing!
Half our revenues depend
On the money you will spend
At the Mall this Christmas season
Buying things for no good reason.
Gifts for everyone you know,
Stuff unneeded, just for show.
Hark! The cash till loudly rings!
Glory to the marketing!
Hail our modern civic pride!
Hail the season, glorified
In October and November,
All the way into December!
Hail the wreaths on lamp-posts hung!
Hail "White Christmas", loudly sung!
Yet, in all this joy, we see
Bless us! No Nativity!
Hark! The cash till loudly rings!
Glory to the marketing!
Only at this season's time
Do we, in our mercy, find
Time and funds from our great store
Selflessly to serve the poor.
This we do because a saint
For our elevation came:
Born to serve in Heaven's cause,
Our example - Santa Claus!
Hark! The cash till loudly rings!
Glory to the marketing!
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Martian Manners
I noticed that Starke had a book under his arm. "What are you reading?" I asked.
He held it up: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. "Just doing a little research."
"Research about classic speculative fiction?"
"Something like that. But I might just drop the project - this Burroughs fellow has it all wrong, and I haven't sorted-out all the details yet."
"How could it be wrong? It's just fantasy."
"Yes, but the fantasy doesn't make sense. You can't really get lost in it, because in the back of your mind you know it couldn't really be like that."
I was perplexed. "What's wrong with it? You're supposed to suspend your disbelief, aren't you?"
"Oh, no. There's much more to it than that. You can't suspend your disbelief unless you have a good reason. And what's the payoff, if the fantasy isn't any better than the reality?
"The people of Barsoom - that's Mars, in case you haven't read the book - are too much like us. They speak good English, live in little kingdoms that fight constantly with each other. Their society is full of petty intrigues; they fall in love and scheme against each other, all that sort of thing.
"And they're all human. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs; all that. Some of them have four arms and two legs, but they're symmetrical like we are, and anyway, they act like us. And the odd-looking ones are all villains.
"But they grew up on Mars, where they have canals instead of oceans. And yellow vegetation instead of green. A smaller sun, less water. Surely that would change their attitudes, and society; even their physiology. I'm not sure what they ought to be like, but they'd have to be different from us."
"Can't you ignore all that, and just enjoy the story?"
"Sure, but that wouldn't be much fun. I prefer to imagine what Martians would really be like. Cobalt blue hair, maybe, and light green skin. Four eyes, or perhaps six - bright purple and always bloodshot; three arms and five legs. Maybe it takes three or four of them to create one baby, or maybe it takes only one. Or maybe they grow on trees, like figs.
"And their disposition would be so strange to us, we'd find them unpredictable, even dangerous. Maybe when they want to kiss each other, what they actually do is spit in each other's faces. It means the same thing to them, even if we'd find it repulsive, and it's no less hygienic than our custom.
"Maybe they have customs that make no sense at all to us. Maybe it's all right to steal your best friend's goods on the night of the full moon, but only if you've known him for more than ten years. He's supposed to act outraged, but that's only for show. Actually, he's secretly delighted you think so much of him that you're willing to do him this great honor.
"Imagine you're one of these Martians who's come to Earth to live. You manage to make a few friends, get a job, get along. Everyone thinks you're a little strange - not to mention ugly - but they leave you alone because it's none of their business.
"After ten years, one night when the moon is full, you're thinking how much you love and respect your best friend. He's accepted you all these years even though you're a blue-haired, green-skinned horror with three arms, five legs, four purple bloodshot eyes, and doubtful gender.
"He was even understanding the time you got sick all over his rug, when he served you stewed figs for lunch. You're so grateful for his kindness you decide to give him the highest honor you're capable of.
"You sneak over to his house in the dead of night, and steal his furniture, his wife's jewelry, his golf clubs, and several other things he really values. Just to make sure he understands the honor you're giving him, you leave him a note proudly announcing you're the one who did it."
"The next morning he arrives at your house, furious. He demands to know why you stole all his stuff. You say, 'Because I love you and I'm grateful for everything you've done for me.'
"He gets a strange look in his eyes and says, 'Well, if that's how you feel, why don't you just come on over and take the rest of it?'
"You're so overcome with love for this man who is willing to give you everything he's got, you lose control of yourself. Even though you're not given to displays of affection, you spit in his face. He turns purple, and runs out of the house.
"You're standing there thinking what a wonderful experience this is. He's so overcome with the emotion of the moment, he can't stand it, and has to go calm himself down. While you stand there enjoying the moment, he comes back with six policemen, who throw you to the ground, handcuff you, and drag you off to jail.
"You have enough sense to know what jail is, so you know it's a grave insult to be taken there. And while you sit there for weeks waiting for your case to come to trial, you turn the situation over and over in your mind, trying to figure out why your friend betrayed you, when you had just given him the highest honor you knew how to give.
"Meanwhile, he's sitting across town, trying to figure out why someone he's been kind to for ten years suddenly turned on him.
"Neither one of you is really in the wrong - it's just that your expectations, based on your backgrounds, are quite radically different. From your perspective you behaved reasonably, and from his perspective, so did he.
"Now that's what I think an encounter between citizens of Earth and citizens of Mars would be like. It would be great fun to try to figure out how these two people could resolve their differences, and be friends again.
"Or maybe they don't become friends again. Instead, they start a feud that lasts twenty years, and results in the death of half their descendants. Maybe the earthling develops the mad habit of cutting down fig trees wherever he finds them."
I objected to a basic flaw in his story. "Isn't the idea of stealing someone's possessions as a sign of affection pretty far-fetched? That doesn't make any sense."
He pounced almost before I finished speaking. "That's just the point. Our Martian friend would have habits that make no sense at all to you or me, because we didn't grow up with them. But habits that make perfect sense to us would seem positively outrageous, even immoral to him."
I still wasn't satisfied.
"But those two knew each other for ten years. Wouldn't they discuss their differences? The Martian had lived on Earth for quite a while. Wouldn't he learn that burglary is considered wrong here?"
Starke shrugged. "Maybe so. Of course they would have talked about their two separate societies, and their customs. And when the Martian puked on his friend's carpet, that would have had to be explained."
He frowned in thought. "But a lot of what you learn in life doesn't stay in the front of your mind. It's stuff you learned without thinking about it, so deeply buried you don't really even know it's there.
"Do you remember learning about kissing? I don't, and I doubt that it would ever occur to me to discuss the meaning of kissing with anyone else: I'd just assume he knew what it meant. If the subject never came up, it wouldn't occur to me that someone else expressed affection some other way. I'd sure never guess spitting in someone's face was one of the possibilities.
"And when it comes to stealing, our customs would be just as strange to a Martian as his are to us. We have this strange custom where buying the right pieces of paper gives you the right to throw a man out of his office, or even his home. The Martian legal system wouldn't have to be very different from ours for this to make no sense - what has paper got to do with where you work or live?
"And our peculiar rules for thievery depend on the circumstances, just like in his world. If you threw a man out of his office or home without proper papers, you'd be a criminal. In his world, you'd be guilty of a crime if he wasn't your best friend, or you'd known him less than ten years, or it wasn't the night of the full moon. Which set of rules do you suppose is the more outrageous?"
I started to object again, but Farrell, standing behind Starke, grinned and shook his head.
"It's no use. Of course he's crazy - we all know that - but he's thought it all out. I doubt you could come up with anything he can't answer. Don't encourage him - he can go on like this for hours."
Starke grinned. "And why not? I'll bet you didn't think about your bum leg even one time while we talked."
He held it up: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. "Just doing a little research."
"Research about classic speculative fiction?"
"Something like that. But I might just drop the project - this Burroughs fellow has it all wrong, and I haven't sorted-out all the details yet."
"How could it be wrong? It's just fantasy."
"Yes, but the fantasy doesn't make sense. You can't really get lost in it, because in the back of your mind you know it couldn't really be like that."
I was perplexed. "What's wrong with it? You're supposed to suspend your disbelief, aren't you?"
"Oh, no. There's much more to it than that. You can't suspend your disbelief unless you have a good reason. And what's the payoff, if the fantasy isn't any better than the reality?
"The people of Barsoom - that's Mars, in case you haven't read the book - are too much like us. They speak good English, live in little kingdoms that fight constantly with each other. Their society is full of petty intrigues; they fall in love and scheme against each other, all that sort of thing.
"And they're all human. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs; all that. Some of them have four arms and two legs, but they're symmetrical like we are, and anyway, they act like us. And the odd-looking ones are all villains.
"But they grew up on Mars, where they have canals instead of oceans. And yellow vegetation instead of green. A smaller sun, less water. Surely that would change their attitudes, and society; even their physiology. I'm not sure what they ought to be like, but they'd have to be different from us."
"Can't you ignore all that, and just enjoy the story?"
"Sure, but that wouldn't be much fun. I prefer to imagine what Martians would really be like. Cobalt blue hair, maybe, and light green skin. Four eyes, or perhaps six - bright purple and always bloodshot; three arms and five legs. Maybe it takes three or four of them to create one baby, or maybe it takes only one. Or maybe they grow on trees, like figs.
"And their disposition would be so strange to us, we'd find them unpredictable, even dangerous. Maybe when they want to kiss each other, what they actually do is spit in each other's faces. It means the same thing to them, even if we'd find it repulsive, and it's no less hygienic than our custom.
"Maybe they have customs that make no sense at all to us. Maybe it's all right to steal your best friend's goods on the night of the full moon, but only if you've known him for more than ten years. He's supposed to act outraged, but that's only for show. Actually, he's secretly delighted you think so much of him that you're willing to do him this great honor.
"Imagine you're one of these Martians who's come to Earth to live. You manage to make a few friends, get a job, get along. Everyone thinks you're a little strange - not to mention ugly - but they leave you alone because it's none of their business.
"After ten years, one night when the moon is full, you're thinking how much you love and respect your best friend. He's accepted you all these years even though you're a blue-haired, green-skinned horror with three arms, five legs, four purple bloodshot eyes, and doubtful gender.
"He was even understanding the time you got sick all over his rug, when he served you stewed figs for lunch. You're so grateful for his kindness you decide to give him the highest honor you're capable of.
"You sneak over to his house in the dead of night, and steal his furniture, his wife's jewelry, his golf clubs, and several other things he really values. Just to make sure he understands the honor you're giving him, you leave him a note proudly announcing you're the one who did it."
"The next morning he arrives at your house, furious. He demands to know why you stole all his stuff. You say, 'Because I love you and I'm grateful for everything you've done for me.'
"He gets a strange look in his eyes and says, 'Well, if that's how you feel, why don't you just come on over and take the rest of it?'
"You're so overcome with love for this man who is willing to give you everything he's got, you lose control of yourself. Even though you're not given to displays of affection, you spit in his face. He turns purple, and runs out of the house.
"You're standing there thinking what a wonderful experience this is. He's so overcome with the emotion of the moment, he can't stand it, and has to go calm himself down. While you stand there enjoying the moment, he comes back with six policemen, who throw you to the ground, handcuff you, and drag you off to jail.
"You have enough sense to know what jail is, so you know it's a grave insult to be taken there. And while you sit there for weeks waiting for your case to come to trial, you turn the situation over and over in your mind, trying to figure out why your friend betrayed you, when you had just given him the highest honor you knew how to give.
"Meanwhile, he's sitting across town, trying to figure out why someone he's been kind to for ten years suddenly turned on him.
"Neither one of you is really in the wrong - it's just that your expectations, based on your backgrounds, are quite radically different. From your perspective you behaved reasonably, and from his perspective, so did he.
"Now that's what I think an encounter between citizens of Earth and citizens of Mars would be like. It would be great fun to try to figure out how these two people could resolve their differences, and be friends again.
"Or maybe they don't become friends again. Instead, they start a feud that lasts twenty years, and results in the death of half their descendants. Maybe the earthling develops the mad habit of cutting down fig trees wherever he finds them."
I objected to a basic flaw in his story. "Isn't the idea of stealing someone's possessions as a sign of affection pretty far-fetched? That doesn't make any sense."
He pounced almost before I finished speaking. "That's just the point. Our Martian friend would have habits that make no sense at all to you or me, because we didn't grow up with them. But habits that make perfect sense to us would seem positively outrageous, even immoral to him."
I still wasn't satisfied.
"But those two knew each other for ten years. Wouldn't they discuss their differences? The Martian had lived on Earth for quite a while. Wouldn't he learn that burglary is considered wrong here?"
Starke shrugged. "Maybe so. Of course they would have talked about their two separate societies, and their customs. And when the Martian puked on his friend's carpet, that would have had to be explained."
He frowned in thought. "But a lot of what you learn in life doesn't stay in the front of your mind. It's stuff you learned without thinking about it, so deeply buried you don't really even know it's there.
"Do you remember learning about kissing? I don't, and I doubt that it would ever occur to me to discuss the meaning of kissing with anyone else: I'd just assume he knew what it meant. If the subject never came up, it wouldn't occur to me that someone else expressed affection some other way. I'd sure never guess spitting in someone's face was one of the possibilities.
"And when it comes to stealing, our customs would be just as strange to a Martian as his are to us. We have this strange custom where buying the right pieces of paper gives you the right to throw a man out of his office, or even his home. The Martian legal system wouldn't have to be very different from ours for this to make no sense - what has paper got to do with where you work or live?
"And our peculiar rules for thievery depend on the circumstances, just like in his world. If you threw a man out of his office or home without proper papers, you'd be a criminal. In his world, you'd be guilty of a crime if he wasn't your best friend, or you'd known him less than ten years, or it wasn't the night of the full moon. Which set of rules do you suppose is the more outrageous?"
I started to object again, but Farrell, standing behind Starke, grinned and shook his head.
"It's no use. Of course he's crazy - we all know that - but he's thought it all out. I doubt you could come up with anything he can't answer. Don't encourage him - he can go on like this for hours."
Starke grinned. "And why not? I'll bet you didn't think about your bum leg even one time while we talked."
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The Pearl of Great Price
The point of the Pearl of Great Price is that the Kingdom is so precious that we would be willing to give up everything we have – our very lives, even – to be a part of it. This can be distinguished from what we have been led to believe all our lives – that Christ is the solution to our problems. Indeed he is – but that is not the point, and if we focus on Christ as a solution, we fail to see how the Kingdom benefits us. We all have problems in varying degrees, for that is the human condition, and in addition to Christ there are various solutions to at least some of our difficulties. Some of the solutions, though not directly attributable to the work of the Cross, are legitimate and beneficial and we would not depart from virtue to pursue them. Of course Christ is the ultimate solution to everything in the sense that by his death and resurrection he defeated death and made all things new, but the ultimate reason for entering the
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
I never really believed there was such a thing as an actual Tooth Fairy - the idea demanded a level of credulity too great for even the seven-year-old mind. There was talk around school as my classmates began to lose baby teeth: your Dad (or Mom if he wasn't available for some reason), would sneak into your room while you were sleeping and leave money in place of the tooth, which you must be sure to put under your pillow. He'd probably wake you up, but you were supposed to pretend to be asleep. I recognized the story at the time for what it was, a cultural tradition full of shared pretense and good humor, passed down with a nod and a wink from one generation to another.
I was thus well-prepared as one of my front teeth began to come loose. Not wishing to reject the traditions of my society - indeed, relishing the things I could buy with the money I was sure to get - I carefully placed the thing under my pillow, and soon enough fell asleep.
I awakened the next morning to find no money under my pillow. The tooth still rested there, where I had placed it. I stumbled into the kitchen with the tooth in the palm of my hand and there was my Dad, enjoying one of his curious breakfasts. I was a bit diffident, thinking perhaps my friends had deceived me, or that this was not the tradition of our family, just everyone else's. I was reluctant to demand to know where was my money lest I shame this wonderful man who was otherwise a source of constant delight. I set the tooth carefully beside my place at the table, got my cereal, and sat down.
Dad studiously ignored me for a moment, then seemed to notice me for the first time. A stern look flickered over his face. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a dollar, which he extended across the table toward me. "Here," he said, "This is yours. I'm afraid the Tooth Fairy failed in her duties last night, and I had to track her down, and beat this out of her."
Dad never did talk to me or my brother and sister as if we were children. His discourse everywhere and with every audience was always the same. He talked to us in the same terms, using the same words, as he used with the learned colleagues in his mysterious job at the university. He didn't seem to much care whether we understood what he said, or whether we addressed him in similar adult language, but we all found ourselves aping his style from an early age.
"I don't understand," I said. "Isn't the Tooth Fairy supposed to sneak in at night and trade money for your tooth?"
"Well, yes, she is," he answered, "but something you have to know about the Tooth Fairy is that she's a drunk."
"How could the Tooth Fairy be a drunk?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm sure she has some excuse," he answered. "She has problems like everyone, and maybe they cause her to drink too much. But when it comes down to it I suspect she just likes beer. Anyway, she drinks, and lately she's been drinking when she should be doing her job. It's an international scandal - everyone complains about it. Congressman Grimm's Subcommittee on Fairy Tales and Children's Literature is looking into it.
"When she didn't show up last night, I knew what had happened: she was down at Bobby's Broadway Bar, spending all that tooth money on beer after beer . . . and I decided it was time to do something about it. Other people might let their children be deprived of their rightful wealth, but not mine! So I went down there and sure enough, there she was, three sheets to the wind. She didn't want to give me the money, but after I slapped her around a bit and threatened to call the cops, she finally gave in."
Bobby's Broadway Bar really was a place, although by the time I was grown it had ceased to exist. It was one of those dives down on Vine Street before the Civic Center consumed the center of town, with a police car permanently parked out front, ready to collect the perpetrators of the nightly brawl. For us it developed a unique significance as our childhood mythology unfolded, becoming a mysterious and exotic place where notables of the family mythology hung out when they should have been engaged in the serious business of fulfilling childhood fantasies. But this was the first I'd ever heard of it.
I don't know if my Dad just made up the story on the spot to obfuscate his own dereliction of duty, or if he had been crafting this story for some time. Every encounter with him always had a quality of spontaneity, but everyone around him knew he had a rich inner life. Sometimes I think his real business in life was creating a personal mythology and drawing others into it, just for sport. Much of it had an extemporaneous quality, and sometimes I think he was just glibly spewing fantastic ideas to see where they led. But at seven I was too young to think of such things, and I was tickled. I started giggling, he smiled, and that was the end of it.
Every family is of course part of the larger culture, but it also has its own particular traditions, shared experiences that forge the identity of the clan. Most I suppose involve Christmas with the grandparents or Saturdays at the beach, or something of the like. We had those experiences too, but they had little to do with our family identity. Instead, the experiences that formed our sense of identity involved the evolutionary elaboration of a shared mythology that was more than a bit mad and always entertaining. My Dad's sister, once I was grown, remarked to me that the problem for me and my siblings was that we had grown up inside a Marx Brothers movie. It fit, but I had trouble seeing why it was a problem. Aunt Sally never did have much of a sense of humor.
I learned soon enough not to voice the family culture to my playmates. Mostly the family mythology brought incomprehension, but sometimes - particularly when some adult got into the act - I found myself confronted with shock, or even hostility. The reaction seemed to be related to the salience of the particular icon in the culture at large. Someone might find the idea of the Tooth Fairy as a drunk curious or even mildly amusing, but the notion that she spent most of her evenings carousing with Santa Claus was clearly, to the minds of other children and their parents, an aberration of some seriousness. I guess you had to be there to get the joke.
After a few adventures with uncomprehending or hostile playmates and their parents, I ceased to share the family mythos with outsiders. Dad didn't seem to care one way or the other: he floated these aberrations in the family culture to accomplish whatever purpose he had in mind at the moment, and where they went after that was of little interest to him. Aunt Sally had a comment on that too: "You'd think a man with children would care at least a little what people think. But your Dad never has cared for anyone's thoughts but his own, not even when it cost him."
Maybe Aunt Sally was right, but after many years of thought I have come to a different conclusion. Dad was otherwise a realist in just about everything, sometimes rational to the point of self-immolation. For him, I think, myths were too important to be treated as real. He didn't think it appropriate to muddy the facts, and thought to do so was a lie. But myths could be altered at will, giving you an opportunity to create an escape from the unrelieved bleakness of reality.
I guess that explains the family take on Santa Claus. Mom was from a fairly conventional family, full of Christmas good cheer every year, ready to bamboozle her children into believing in the jolly old elf. Dad on the other hand had grown up in a Fundamentalist household where any secularization of the True Faith was anathematized as heretical, and belief in Santa qualified as one of the worst examples of secular misappropriation of Christian symbolism. Dad had long-since abandoned his childhood faith, becoming a Methodist, but having never believed in Santa, he saw no reason why his children should either. At least not the Santa presented by the popular culture. Dad won out for no reason other than his refusal to support Mom - or anyone else - when they fostered the conventional Santa myth. She wanted to act as if Santa really existed: Dad insisted Santa was just one of those fictional creatures, like the Tooth Fairy, who are fair game for invention.
I believed in Santa Claus very briefly, until Dad disabused me of the notion. It began with Santa's curious habit of coming down the chimney: when I mentioned this to Dad, he snorted. "How could anyone do that?" He demanded. "Come down the chimney? Have you ever seen a picture of Santa? As fat as he is, if he tried to come down our chimney, he'd get stuck. Then we'd have to call the Fire Department, and if he was very lucky he'd get rescued before he roasted to death. And what about people with no chimney? Does he come through that little hose in the heat pump unit?
"No, son," he went on, "Santa doesn't come down the chimney. He comes through a hole in my pocket."
This seemed as unlikely - perhaps even less likely - as Santa coming down the chimney. After all, narrow as it might be, a chimney is considerably bigger than a pocket. But of course, a challenge to one of Dad's stories was just an opportunity to widen the myth. When I mentioned my misgivings, he stared at me for a long moment, then slowly turned his pocket inside-out. "See?" he said. "There's no money there. Santa comes through the hole in my pocket and takes my money. Then he goes down to Bobby's Broadway Bar."
Now I got it. "And drinks with the Tooth Fairy!" I shrieked, delighted to be able to participate in the family madness.
"Exactly," he answered. "But before he goes, he leaves a big pile of useless junk under the tree, some of which takes hours to assemble." Then with a sigh he said, "You know, Santa is not a nice man at all."
Just once as a child I told that story to a friend. I was dumb enough to do it in front of my third-grade teacher, who promptly took me aside and cautioned me in the strongest terms to keep such ideas to myself. When I told her my Dad had told me the story, she just shook her head. "Not everyone has parents like yours," she said. I don't think she meant it as a compliment - my third-grade teacher, like Aunt Sally, had no sense of humor.
The curious thing is that what scandalizes small children and the adults who serve them may delight the adult mind, unfettered by the need to maintain cultural standards of childhood belief. I next told that story to a group of college friends, over beers a few days before the beginning of Christmas break. They were thunderstruck. "Your old man told you that?" One of them demanded. "Come on, now, tell the truth."
"It's true," I asserted. Then I related the tale of the Tooth Fairy. They sat in silence for a while, then one of them said the one word, "Cool." Then silence for a while longer, and the laughter began, at first as a series of giggles, then loud guffaws. When the laughter ended, they began to tell stories, with laughter and not a little sadness, of how they had been disabused of the existence of Santa Claus. And I realized that Dad had presented us with a gift most children are never given, entry into a world of adult humor that somehow enriched rather than restricted childhood - and avoided the greatest common betrayal most American children experience.
I was thus well-prepared as one of my front teeth began to come loose. Not wishing to reject the traditions of my society - indeed, relishing the things I could buy with the money I was sure to get - I carefully placed the thing under my pillow, and soon enough fell asleep.
I awakened the next morning to find no money under my pillow. The tooth still rested there, where I had placed it. I stumbled into the kitchen with the tooth in the palm of my hand and there was my Dad, enjoying one of his curious breakfasts. I was a bit diffident, thinking perhaps my friends had deceived me, or that this was not the tradition of our family, just everyone else's. I was reluctant to demand to know where was my money lest I shame this wonderful man who was otherwise a source of constant delight. I set the tooth carefully beside my place at the table, got my cereal, and sat down.
Dad studiously ignored me for a moment, then seemed to notice me for the first time. A stern look flickered over his face. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a dollar, which he extended across the table toward me. "Here," he said, "This is yours. I'm afraid the Tooth Fairy failed in her duties last night, and I had to track her down, and beat this out of her."
Dad never did talk to me or my brother and sister as if we were children. His discourse everywhere and with every audience was always the same. He talked to us in the same terms, using the same words, as he used with the learned colleagues in his mysterious job at the university. He didn't seem to much care whether we understood what he said, or whether we addressed him in similar adult language, but we all found ourselves aping his style from an early age.
"I don't understand," I said. "Isn't the Tooth Fairy supposed to sneak in at night and trade money for your tooth?"
"Well, yes, she is," he answered, "but something you have to know about the Tooth Fairy is that she's a drunk."
"How could the Tooth Fairy be a drunk?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm sure she has some excuse," he answered. "She has problems like everyone, and maybe they cause her to drink too much. But when it comes down to it I suspect she just likes beer. Anyway, she drinks, and lately she's been drinking when she should be doing her job. It's an international scandal - everyone complains about it. Congressman Grimm's Subcommittee on Fairy Tales and Children's Literature is looking into it.
"When she didn't show up last night, I knew what had happened: she was down at Bobby's Broadway Bar, spending all that tooth money on beer after beer . . . and I decided it was time to do something about it. Other people might let their children be deprived of their rightful wealth, but not mine! So I went down there and sure enough, there she was, three sheets to the wind. She didn't want to give me the money, but after I slapped her around a bit and threatened to call the cops, she finally gave in."
Bobby's Broadway Bar really was a place, although by the time I was grown it had ceased to exist. It was one of those dives down on Vine Street before the Civic Center consumed the center of town, with a police car permanently parked out front, ready to collect the perpetrators of the nightly brawl. For us it developed a unique significance as our childhood mythology unfolded, becoming a mysterious and exotic place where notables of the family mythology hung out when they should have been engaged in the serious business of fulfilling childhood fantasies. But this was the first I'd ever heard of it.
I don't know if my Dad just made up the story on the spot to obfuscate his own dereliction of duty, or if he had been crafting this story for some time. Every encounter with him always had a quality of spontaneity, but everyone around him knew he had a rich inner life. Sometimes I think his real business in life was creating a personal mythology and drawing others into it, just for sport. Much of it had an extemporaneous quality, and sometimes I think he was just glibly spewing fantastic ideas to see where they led. But at seven I was too young to think of such things, and I was tickled. I started giggling, he smiled, and that was the end of it.
Every family is of course part of the larger culture, but it also has its own particular traditions, shared experiences that forge the identity of the clan. Most I suppose involve Christmas with the grandparents or Saturdays at the beach, or something of the like. We had those experiences too, but they had little to do with our family identity. Instead, the experiences that formed our sense of identity involved the evolutionary elaboration of a shared mythology that was more than a bit mad and always entertaining. My Dad's sister, once I was grown, remarked to me that the problem for me and my siblings was that we had grown up inside a Marx Brothers movie. It fit, but I had trouble seeing why it was a problem. Aunt Sally never did have much of a sense of humor.
I learned soon enough not to voice the family culture to my playmates. Mostly the family mythology brought incomprehension, but sometimes - particularly when some adult got into the act - I found myself confronted with shock, or even hostility. The reaction seemed to be related to the salience of the particular icon in the culture at large. Someone might find the idea of the Tooth Fairy as a drunk curious or even mildly amusing, but the notion that she spent most of her evenings carousing with Santa Claus was clearly, to the minds of other children and their parents, an aberration of some seriousness. I guess you had to be there to get the joke.
After a few adventures with uncomprehending or hostile playmates and their parents, I ceased to share the family mythos with outsiders. Dad didn't seem to care one way or the other: he floated these aberrations in the family culture to accomplish whatever purpose he had in mind at the moment, and where they went after that was of little interest to him. Aunt Sally had a comment on that too: "You'd think a man with children would care at least a little what people think. But your Dad never has cared for anyone's thoughts but his own, not even when it cost him."
Maybe Aunt Sally was right, but after many years of thought I have come to a different conclusion. Dad was otherwise a realist in just about everything, sometimes rational to the point of self-immolation. For him, I think, myths were too important to be treated as real. He didn't think it appropriate to muddy the facts, and thought to do so was a lie. But myths could be altered at will, giving you an opportunity to create an escape from the unrelieved bleakness of reality.
I guess that explains the family take on Santa Claus. Mom was from a fairly conventional family, full of Christmas good cheer every year, ready to bamboozle her children into believing in the jolly old elf. Dad on the other hand had grown up in a Fundamentalist household where any secularization of the True Faith was anathematized as heretical, and belief in Santa qualified as one of the worst examples of secular misappropriation of Christian symbolism. Dad had long-since abandoned his childhood faith, becoming a Methodist, but having never believed in Santa, he saw no reason why his children should either. At least not the Santa presented by the popular culture. Dad won out for no reason other than his refusal to support Mom - or anyone else - when they fostered the conventional Santa myth. She wanted to act as if Santa really existed: Dad insisted Santa was just one of those fictional creatures, like the Tooth Fairy, who are fair game for invention.
I believed in Santa Claus very briefly, until Dad disabused me of the notion. It began with Santa's curious habit of coming down the chimney: when I mentioned this to Dad, he snorted. "How could anyone do that?" He demanded. "Come down the chimney? Have you ever seen a picture of Santa? As fat as he is, if he tried to come down our chimney, he'd get stuck. Then we'd have to call the Fire Department, and if he was very lucky he'd get rescued before he roasted to death. And what about people with no chimney? Does he come through that little hose in the heat pump unit?
"No, son," he went on, "Santa doesn't come down the chimney. He comes through a hole in my pocket."
This seemed as unlikely - perhaps even less likely - as Santa coming down the chimney. After all, narrow as it might be, a chimney is considerably bigger than a pocket. But of course, a challenge to one of Dad's stories was just an opportunity to widen the myth. When I mentioned my misgivings, he stared at me for a long moment, then slowly turned his pocket inside-out. "See?" he said. "There's no money there. Santa comes through the hole in my pocket and takes my money. Then he goes down to Bobby's Broadway Bar."
Now I got it. "And drinks with the Tooth Fairy!" I shrieked, delighted to be able to participate in the family madness.
"Exactly," he answered. "But before he goes, he leaves a big pile of useless junk under the tree, some of which takes hours to assemble." Then with a sigh he said, "You know, Santa is not a nice man at all."
Just once as a child I told that story to a friend. I was dumb enough to do it in front of my third-grade teacher, who promptly took me aside and cautioned me in the strongest terms to keep such ideas to myself. When I told her my Dad had told me the story, she just shook her head. "Not everyone has parents like yours," she said. I don't think she meant it as a compliment - my third-grade teacher, like Aunt Sally, had no sense of humor.
The curious thing is that what scandalizes small children and the adults who serve them may delight the adult mind, unfettered by the need to maintain cultural standards of childhood belief. I next told that story to a group of college friends, over beers a few days before the beginning of Christmas break. They were thunderstruck. "Your old man told you that?" One of them demanded. "Come on, now, tell the truth."
"It's true," I asserted. Then I related the tale of the Tooth Fairy. They sat in silence for a while, then one of them said the one word, "Cool." Then silence for a while longer, and the laughter began, at first as a series of giggles, then loud guffaws. When the laughter ended, they began to tell stories, with laughter and not a little sadness, of how they had been disabused of the existence of Santa Claus. And I realized that Dad had presented us with a gift most children are never given, entry into a world of adult humor that somehow enriched rather than restricted childhood - and avoided the greatest common betrayal most American children experience.
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