The sweet day draws near

I did a Christmas show last week in St. Paul that ended with the audience singing “Silent Night,” three verses, a cappella, the infant tender and mild, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, and minutes later who should come backstage but my cousin Phyllis and her family, which made me happy. Her mother was my aunt Jean, who was funny and had a big heart and who, when I was a toddler and Dad went into the Army, took my mother and her three little kids into her big house in St. Paul and I still remember how welcome we were. There was a chair at the table that I guarded and if anyone tried to sit in it, I said “Daddy’s chair” and waved them away.

I go back home now and then and people walk up to me in the Hotel St. Paul who remember me as a friendly radio voice and some of them were apparently quite attached to that voice — I met a young woman last week who gasped as if I were a ghost and said, “We listened to you every Saturday at five o’clock. I still miss you.”

I’d feel that way if I ran into A.J. Liebling; I’d be stunned and tell him how I loved his writing when I was in the eighth grade at Anoka High School, read The Sweet Scienceand The Road Back to Paris, but he’s been dead since 1963.

I miss St. Paul, which is still my home but not because I’m admired there. I love it for the same reason my wife loves New York. She came here from Minnesota as a teenager to study violin and become a musician and so she went through hard times, experienced poverty, stayed true to her vocation and when she got the blues, she found relief by taking long walks around Manhattan. She was proud and never asked for help and that makes Manhattan her true home, the place where she gained independence.

I did my hard times in St. Paul, was broke there, lived for years with no savings or insurance, once had to live in my in-laws’ basement for three months, pure humiliation though Marge and Gene were hugely hospitable. I got fired in St. Paul twice. But I survived and bought my first house on Goodrich Avenue in 1982 for $80,000.

I like living in Manhattan, I love the fact that my wife loves Manhattan, I like being a pedestrian, an invisible nobody. I take my solemn face around the town and experience the here of the here and the there of the there without ever needing to impersonate myself. I go forward for Communion at St. Michael’s and am just one more sheep. I’m a perpetual tourist here because I had money when I came here and never had to struggle. I am in awe of Jenny’s dedication: her beloved grandparents lived in New Jersey, they were well-to-do, she never asked them for help.

The happiest Christmas I remember was the year after we married and we put on a big Christmas Eve dinner for a bunch of her freelance musician friends. We made a feast and they were delighted, it was a long evening of hilarity and loose talk and merriment, and I didn’t know them but I felt honored by their friendship.

And looking back to that marvelous night, I see it was due to their having known poverty. A person will enjoy a feast more if you’ve experienced living on the edge. There is a dullness that comes with the comfortable life. My parents grew up in the Depression and strove to give us a life free from want and now I think I was drawn to the literary life by a craving for danger. I was fired when I was 25 and set out to be a writer and wound up in Marge and Gene’s basement.

And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly beautiful, the circle of love and friendship, the lighted candles, the anticipation of the child, the radiant beams, the redeeming grace.

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