GK: The darkness descends and I talk to friends

The Column: 12.03021

“Omicron” sounds like a pharmaceutical, an omnipotent drug against deadly microbes of a chronic nature, but it’s a flu variant just setting foot in America, whose ingenuity is not yet known, so we have one more excuse to stay home and not go to big fundraising dinners or games where unmasked people stand close together and sing the school fight song, emitting clouds of droplets in the air with every “Fight, fight, fight” and “Rah, rah, rah.” I am scheduled to do some Christmas shows hither and yon and am debating whether I should, as I normally would, invite the audience to sing the song about all being calm and bright. I’ll certainly scratch the song about the figgy pudding but “Silent Night”? All of Christmas is in this lullaby. You could skip the stockings, the cranberries, the tree with the tiny lightbulbs, and if you and your loved ones only sang about the quaking shepherds, you’d have Christmas in your heart, which is where it belongs.

Some of my Danish relatives are crossing the Atlantic to join me for Christmas and we’ve made a solemn compact that it will be modest, and not the gaudy jamboree that the Danes put on. They call it Yule, which they spell “j-u-l,” and thereby leave Jesus out of it, and they cook a goose and hang real candles on the tree and light them and dance around it, singing, and polish off a good deal of mulled wine and by sunset on the 25th, the nation is fairly unconscious. A boatload of Swedes could cross the Storebælt and take over the country, but then they’d need to learn the language, and why bother? There are vowels in Danish that are pronounced low in the throat and can induce gagging.

So we shall light a candle at midnight and sing the song, and I’ll make turkey sandwiches on the Day and we’ll pick up a couple pine boughs from the corner Christmas tree stand, and we’ll sit and converse.

This is one benefit of the pandemic, the rediscovery of conversation. My interest in adding COVID to my list of life experiences is minimal and so we’ve seen few people this year, other than passersby, and we’ve rediscovered Mr. Bell’s telephone, a wondrous gift, especially now that the curly cord is gone and you can carry it everywhere. I was once in the radio business and so telephone conversation comes naturally to me.

I’m a writer and my best work is done before noon, which leaves plenty of time for palaver, and I have a dozen regulars on my list, and another couple dozen occasionals, and this dispels loneliness very nicely. I don’t do FaceTime because I have a forbidding face as a result of growing up fundamentalist. I walk down the street and small children look at me and cling to their mothers. I look like Cotton Mather with a migraine. But on the phone, I can be actually sort of charming.

So I am at home with my love who orders food to be delivered by a masked man and she reads hygienic e-books from the public library while I write a screenplay and we play Scrabble on a board cleaned with antiseptic wipes, same as our phones and our pillowcases. We go for walks but we avoid runners who are breathing hard. We do not talk to unvaccinated persons on the phone. When we receive mail from states with high COVID rates, we boil it for seven minutes.

I notice in my phone conversations that I seldom hear people say, “When we get back to normal” or “When this is all over.” People don’t talk about plans for next year, they talk about next weekend. I worry about our kids and grandkids who have decades ahead of them, on whom uncertainty must weigh heavily. I worry about Minneapolis, my mother’s beloved hometown, where, in her old neighborhood, shootings and stickups are commonplace. I worry about how the Supreme Court might rule if asked to defend the right of high school students to carry a loaded weapon to class. And what is the constitutional basis for compulsory school attendance? Why shouldn’t six-year-olds be free to take factory jobs? Their little hands would be perfect for assembling small parts.

I think about these things but it’s not what we talk about on the phone. I believe in cheerfulness. If the subject of death comes up, I sing: “Ole lay on his deathbed, he knew he was going to die. And then he got a little whiff of Lena’s rhubarb pie. He crept down to the kitchen; there it was, he let out a moan. Lena whacked him upside the head, she said, ‘That’s for the funeral, leave it alone.’” Thank you for your attention and goodbye.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

THE WASHINGTON POST (OPINION)

“CHRISTMAS LIVES ON”

By Garrison Keillor, December 20, 2016

It is hard to believe that the Creator of our universe with its billions of galaxies could have sent Himself to this little blue blip not so long ago in the form of an infant born to a virgin, to be first worshiped by illiterate shepherds where He lay in a feed trough, livestock peering down at Him, Eastern potentates following a star to the site. But here we are again, singing those songs, so we shall see.

My mother loved Christmas with her whole heart. With six children and no credit cards and my father ever watchful for unnecessary expense, Christmas was a mountain for Grace to climb, requiring endurance, planning, stealth and skill, but she brought it off to perfection every year, until she was in her 90s and then she coasted on her memories.

Her mother died when my mother was 7, and Mother had no memory of her, which troubled her deeply. She looked at photos of her mother, tall, haggard, from the early 1920s, and tried to dredge up some recollection, anything at all, the sound of her voice, what she cooked, what her hand felt like. Grace was third from the end of 11 children, the 12th having died with the mother, of scarlet fever, and Grace was raised by her older sisters, Marian and Ruby and Margaret. Complaint was not encouraged in that family, and mental health was not a topic for discussion, but clearly Christmas was a shining moment of gaiety in a family of modest means and strict decorum.

When I was 19, my older brother asked me to look after his house over Christmas so he and his young family could drive out to New York for a week. His house was in the woods, and I, intoxicated by Thoreau at the time, was more dramatic than necessary and announced that I would spend Christmas alone out there “to figure things out.” A poem of mine got in the college literary magazine, with the lines:

The ice is thin and deep is the dark

Below, green lights in the trees and red,

Winding my way into the winter mist.

Coat open and the silver blades are sharp

And that long long bend ahead

Will take me out and away from you and all of this.

Which was about skating, but a girl I knew thought it was suicidal and she came out to the woods to visit me and bring me dinner from her mother — turkey, candied yams, cranberry, in tinfoil. We lit candles and sat and meditated on the mystery of life, and it was pleasant to have someone be so concerned about my well-being. At the time, I thought of suicide as poetic, an artistic choice stemming from great emotional depths. Two months later, her boyfriend Leeds was killed when a drunk driver pulled out of a parking lot and into his mother’s car coming back home from a play at the Guthrie Theater. Twenty-some years later, sunk in depression, my friend filled her pockets with rocks and paddled a canoe out to the middle of a lake and capsized it and drowned.

Life is good. On a winter night, looking into a fire, our dead are around us, testifying to that. The books on the shelves, the young people around the table, the carols on the radio in the kitchen, the shining snow on the hill that looks out at the Mississippi River.

As you get old, you gain a stripped-down life, minus the clutter and hullabaloo, the excess food and alcohol, the meaningless gifts, and it is quite satisfying to sit with your true love in candlelight, a plate of cookies on the table, and let memories come and go. My mother is there. It’s 6 a.m., still dark out, and I’ve come down the stairs in my pajamas to the darkened tree, a note from Santa, the crumbs of the gingersnap I left for him, and I hear the padding of bare feet on the stair, and suddenly the tree bursts into light, and my mother is standing there in a raggedy robe. She missed her dead mother and found her every year in making Christmas for us.

Even after she moved to Florida, she flew back for a proper Minnesota Christmas with frost on the windows and wind in the chimney. What you do for children is never wasted: This Christmas will live on and nourish them long after you have faded away.