A rainy December day, long thoughts therein

The Column: 12.14.22

I saw the phrase “friendship recession” in a headline last week, which has a musical swing to it but refers to growing social isolation, particularly among men, due to people working from home, avoiding crowded places, being reluctant joiners, and then I stopped reading because sociology has always bored me ever since I was nineteen and sat in Dr. Cooperman’s class and looked around at the girls in the room and tried to imagine how I might strike up a conversation with one of them. Talking about sociology did not seem like the way to begin.

I grew up in a family of eight who belonged to a tight group of devout evangelicals, half of them relatives, who believed in holding the secular world at arm’s length, so my parents didn’t associate much with neighbors, but of course we children did and we went to school with non-evangelical kids and so we lived in two worlds and had to keep them separate. I knew the words to “Great Balls of Fire” but didn’t sing it around my parents and I didn’t talk to my classmates about the Second Coming. I had cousins who lived on farms and used an outhouse and cooked on a wood-burning stove and I had city cousins who had flush toilets and rode the streetcar. A lot of sociology going on around me.

And now I feel friendship recession in the form of people dying off who share my history. More and more I’m with people who don’t know “Minnesota, Hats Off To Thee,” who never drove a stick-shift car, who never went ice-fishing or worked in a newspaper city room, writing on a Remington typewriter, the copy coming back from the Linotype operator on a long galley sheet for you to correct, and a couple hours later you felt the presses rolling in the basement and you got a fresh warm paper with your story about a famous celebrity who very few people you know now would remember.

To me, this seems like a privileged life. I feel slightly sorry for anyone who never waited for the school bus in a cave you’d dug out in a snowdrift, you and Eloise and Diane and Corinne huddled together. I’m sorry you didn’t listen to a gospel preacher talk about death awaiting us, we know not when or where. I’m sorry you didn’t meet my city editor Mr. Streightiff in his starched shirt and suspenders; the man had a bark to him that you don’t hear anymore. I miss the evenings we played hockey until our feet were numb and then sat in a warming shack with a woodstove until feeling returned. And now I live in New York among people who know nothing of any of this. Isn’t it sad?

No, not really. Open your eyes, the world invites our attention. Last week in New York, musicians hauled instrument cases off to Christmas gigs, and in the 42nd Street subway station a wild-haired old man pounded out “Winter Wonderland” on an electric organ as two battery-powered Santas danced. Nearby, a trumpeter was giving “O Holy Night” a good workout and then the doors closed and we racketed uptown as an old man came into the car and wished us all a Merry Christmas and launched into “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” as he came up the aisle, jingling his Styrofoam cup. It wasn’t glories streaming from heaven afar and heavenly hosts singing Alleluia, but in the grimness of urban hustle, Christmas is all the sweeter.

I stood in line at a coffee shop that smelled of fresh pine boughs and the tall dark-haired woman ahead of me ordered a venti mocha latte with 2%, and the smell of chocolate and pine and then an orange she bought and started to peel it and that was enough. Oranges were essential to our Christmases. An orange sat in the toe of your stocking and you ate it in the dark Christmas morning, the lights on the tree, your parents upstairs asleep.

A few smells bring the blessed day to mind, when the city conspires to cheer itself up. Joy is too much to expect. Cheerfulness is what we need: put yesterday out the back door and seize this day and blessings on your house, and Lord, if you possibly can, please send us a few inches of snow.