 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 6 , 2003 Volume V Number 1 |
FOCUS - The Magi
It’s time for the decorations to come down, and time to face the inescapable reality. The year 2002 is gone. The new year is here.
The breakdown of Christmas paraphernalia is as much a tradition as the setup. But it is always bitter-sweet. As you pull down the lights, and stow away the ornaments and the wreaths and the miniature village and wooden soldiers and candles and the manger scene, as you take down the tree, now brittle and dry, and haul it out to the curb for pick-up, I trust you are in possession of new memories, barely more than a week old, still fresh, and good enough to cherish.
As the years pass, the season roars through our lives like a freight train. That train picks up speed as we age. About the time you are ready to sit back and take it all in, the caboose flies by. The whistle fades off into the horizon, the bells go silent, along with the clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the gates lift and it’s time to cross over into the promised land of a new year.
I suppose it’s the reason we take pictures. Photographs freeze the moment in time and we can for as long as we like, ponder moments gone too quickly, but not gone forever. I hope you remembered the camera on Christmas day.
Our house is quiet now. Our kids are gone away, back to the place they now call home. It’s the way it should be. But for Christmas day they were here, together again, and we made some of those memories worth cherishing. My camera was charged up and at the ready.
* * * * * * *
William Sydney Porter was born in North Carolina during the Civil War. He dropped out of school at age fifteen, taking employment at his uncle’s drug store. But mostly, he loved to write. People recognized and encouraged his gift. By the time he was twenty, he was ready to leave his home town, so he packed up and moved to Austin, Texas where he took work as a bank teller. He married, and settled into adult life. But things got complicated at the bank. Some believe that his obsession with writing was a conflict for his employers, selling his stories to several major newspapers while on the bank’s payroll. Porter, thinking of himself as a humorist, even attempted to create a weekly humor magazine. It was 1894. He called it The Rolling Stone. After a few weeks, he had to shut it down for lack of money. Bank examiners shocked the town and Porter himself when they made a formal criminal charge. They accused young Porter of embezzlement. The amount of money was small, and while to this day, many believe he was falsely accused over a minor accounting error, the threat was real. Real enough for Porter to go packing once more, fleeing his wife and home and the dusty little town of Austin for South America, Honduras to be exact, where he found refuge and escape from certain prosecution.
While there, he continued his writing, until word came that his wife, back in Austin, took sick. She was gravely ill. Wracked with guilt and anxiety, Porter returned to Texas where soon after, she died. He was arrested, charged with the crime and convicted and then sent to a federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, where he served three years of a five year sentence. In the dank halls of the prison, from a dark cell, pen and paper became is companions. He wrote. And wrote.
By the time he was released, he possessed a stack of manuscripts. He moved to New York thinking the anonymity might give him a chance at a new start. It was barely the turn of a new century, and he believed he could make his mark. He assumed a pen-name, as many writers did. He also liked the idea of discarding the name that had been besmirched in Texas.
Most of us only know William S. Porter by his pseudonym.
* * * * * * *
Della Young, newly married to Mr. James Dillingham Young (the name on the mailbox in the vestibule of their tiny flat), counted her money. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. The sum total of her savings the day before Christmas. Their eight dollar per week apartment had been affordable when Jim’s salary was thirty dollars a week, but these were hard times. His pay was cut to twenty, and every penny counted.
Della began to cry. Through her sobbing, she wondered what she could possibly buy as a suitable gift for the man she loved so dearly with a pittance of one dollar and eighty seven cents?
Jim’s dilemma was the same. Neither had ever in their lives felt more deeply about another, nor ever more deeply possessed by a desire to give an extravagant gift. But neither possessed the means; except for some extraordinary thinking.
Della wiped her tears, and looked at her image in their only mirror. She loosened her hair, and as her shiny long brown locks fell down over her shoulders like a cascade, this same hair Jim spoke of so fondly and so often, an idea bolted her to action. Down the street, at a sign which read, “Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds” she entered, and asked the Madame, “Do you buy hair?”
“Twenty dollars,” the terse reply.
Within a few short minutes, and a few ravenous snips, the Madam wielding the scissors, she was back outside, shorn, with twenty one dollars and eighty seven cents with which to purchase a suitable Christmas present for her beloved Jim and a new look - short cropped curls. She caught her reflection in a window pane, and would have been horrified except for the exhilaration of the cash in her hand (my hair grows very fast, she whispered) and the shops just ahead where she knew she would find just the right present. And she did – a gold chain to attach to Jim’s pocket heirloom timepiece, his most highly prized possession. It would replace a tattered leather strap.
Jim’s agony matched Della’s, until, checking the time, he realized he had something to sell, something he would willingly relinquish. His burning desire was to find a gift that would express his deep affection. He knew the watch would bring a fair price. With the proceeds, Jim acquired, on Christmas Eve day, a pair of exquisite tortoise shell combs, with jeweled rims, worthy of the flowing brown hair he believed to be the most beautiful head of hair to adorn any woman in the annals of time. This gift will make this first Christmas a fitting start for a happy life.
The irony of it all - so wonderfully absurd.
When Jim arrived home, later than usual, and the two embraced as newlyweds do, bright eyes, eager anticipation – lovers on Christmas Eve. But there was no hair for the combs. And no watch for the chain.
And in the end, it didn’t matter. For the meaning of the two gifts far surpassed their practical use. Just like the Magi, bringing their gifts to the newborn child in Bethlehem.
And
when William S. Porter (O. Henry) drew his short story to a conclusion, he
compared the young Jim and Della to those gift-bearing wise men, whose
extravagant gifts given from a heart of generosity and love and affection, set
the standard for all Christmases to follow.
The Gift of the Magi, first published in 1894 by O. Henry, the beloved storyteller, who wrote out of the pain of personal experience, is read and cherished to this day.
* * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
I can’t think of many things more heartwarming that watching your children give gifts. Ours have reached a new level of independence, and they are living far enough apart these days that times together are rare and appreciated. Our two daughters are, like Della, deeply in love with their mates and creating new homes of their own and becoming sentimental about giving and making memories and so we were together Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and their youngest brother is watching and listening, too, thinking about how his own future might unfold, and I couldn’t help myself.
With Carolyn’s encouragement, I opened the book by candlelight, and read out loud as I did when they were younger, the story of Mr. and Mrs. James Dillingham Porter, struggling to make their start, and so deeply in love, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi.
O’Henry, locked in a penitentiary cell, must have thought long and hard about the woman he loved, and married, and buried, and out of those painful memories came a story that lives on, and will be told generation after generation.
I trust your Christmas story found time for similar love and affection.
May those memories be your launch pad for the year 2003.
It’s a new beginning.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
|
|