THE TURN OF THE YEAR
Mayer, Milton
The Turn of the Year by MILTON MAYER CHRISTMAS is the hinge on which the year turns. The world is suddenly quiet for the event, as quiet as the world can be. The sun, the source of tumult, is...
...You're in wonderful shape," says Bob McCabe (who's on a diet now), "but don't shake your head or it might fall off...
...I'll go through that pine like a knife through butter...
...I remember when my father was 48...
...Or you can do your work, and know your place, and smile and read and gossip and go to the movies, but home (now that the kids are old enough to leave them without a sitter) seems to be the best place to be in the evening...
...Not at all...
...So I love Little Julie the best, because she is most like me...
...You can fight it, by drinking a pint or chasing a girl or playing three sets of tennis, but you can't fight it off...
...more crowded than last, and the next one more crowded than this, with the companions of the spririt of Christmas Past...
...At the top of my powers...
...We want Grandma to come and live with us, to be dependent, but Grandma won't come...
...it is the time of times, of redemption from the solstice dark, from the atomic age, from the hypocrisy which drives us to succor the victims of Communist bullets in Budapest and ignore the victims of Democratic bombs in Port Said...
...Providing I take care of myself...
...You're not unhappy...
...This year the Spirit of Christmas Past brings new companions of his own to the table —my old teacher, Anton Carlson, rightly called "Ajax," who knew the living organism so well that nobody doubted that he would live forever, and he almost did...
...Some nice people gave us an old automobile a couple of years ago—they felt sorry for us because we didn't have one—and it had a little ridge of rust around the trunk lid...
...And I am a writer, and my kids, in the faster moving democracy than ever, are all going to be something else...
...I'm down...
...And it isn't a matter of running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place...
...I want to be born again, but I don't want to live forever...
...The heck I do...
...An old man—he seems to be much older than I am, but Rocky looked at the class the other night and couldn't tell who was the teacher —teaches it free...
...Nope," says Dicken, "he didn't'' And I know that Dicken is slipping away from me and into the world of the Joneses...
...Making me old growing up—and then pushing me playfully down the stairs...
...The oculist says you haven't a sign of glaucoma or cataracts, and at your age (he says) that's unusual, but, still, you shouldn't wear your distance glasses for reading any more, and it won't hurt (he says it like that) to quit typing, just for a couple of minutes every hour, and rest your eyes...
...Good lives, but not mine...
...Of course you can always trade it in on a new one...
...and I love Little Dicken the best because he is most like the men I most admire, tough-fibered and tough...
...What did he know about the Charleston, except that it ought to be banned, and what do I know about rock'n'roll, except that it ought to be banned...
...That'* ~a| worst...
...I was told once that the German would never be forgiven for that they did to Belgium...
...maybe...
...Do you want to live forever...
...A settled melancholy is upon you now...
...A sorrowful time, the turn of the year...
...Not on your tintype...
...still good for three, four, or five squares a day...
...The leaves are falling...
...I know better than to try to hang on to them...
...You've been dying, physiologically, since you were twenty-five, but now you know it...
...But the spirit of Christmas, Present, Past, and Bmure, consoles me with glad tidings Kfreat joy, the good news of salva-tion...
...Each of us has his own private birthday, coming any old time in the year, and which of us remembers the birthdays gone or, as we grow old, anticipates the birthdays to come the way we wait for Christmas...
...It keeps me awake nights, and nothing else does...
...Say, listen, I'm still in my prime...
...The new head of NATO is exactly my age and he says that the Russians understand nothing but force...
...You're in the pink...
...so we have no one to lean on us to hold us up...
...What do I know about television...
...Joe Schwab's Jill got married...
...Little Julie, my first-born, is finishing college...
...Meyers, that we're not as young as we used to be...
...Noel Sullivan, bringing Negroes lo swim in his swimming pool because why else, he wondered, would Christ give a man a swimming pool...
...I think I'm a riot...
...You can still carry two suitcases and a rucksack on your back in Europe, but you can't laugh any more while you're doing it...
...Oh, I'm still good for a little tame foot-hall or basketball when there's no-bdy else around...
...You're not unhappy...
...Yep," said Dicken...
...No, you're not...
...I could not imagine being so old...
...Then there's the Oxford boy who, a couple of centuries ago, asked the Dean of Christ Church what good it was to learn Greek and was told, "Not only is it the original language of the Holy Ghost, but it leads to great dignities and emoluments...
...Little Rock has a newspaper route, and with his first month's take bought a $25 television set at a rummage sale...
...and I love Little Rocky the best because he is most like what I tell the sinners to be, kind and forgiving...
...Providing I take care of myself and forget about everything else...
...Did you know that you've got to lay off milk (and you've always loved milk) because its fat is saturated with hydrogen producing cholosterol and cholosterol is the insulation that the little carpenters are tacking up inside your arteries...
...He's the Sunset School tetherball champ, is Dicken...
...I believe I will have a second cup of coffee, thank you...
...You're going great...
...Do you know what did it...
...that's one nice thing about an automobile...
...I knew doggone well it was Mr...
...Suez is quiet...
...You've got twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten good years in you yet...
...Think of the trouble you've seen, and it doesn't add up to a fraction of the trouble that others have seen—or shut their eyes to...
...Which is reason enough for learning Greek...
...Let 'em go, let "em go, God bless 'em...
...I'm displaceable person...
...ME Jones, who's supposed to be teaching seventh grade subjects to seventh grade kids at the Sunset School ought to be canned for saying that but I can't tell Dicken that his teacher ought to be canned, so I say "Did he say anything about the Eng-lish and French attack on Egypt...
...Leaves have fallen which hung on through the sunless solstice of the turning years of yore...
...Quite easily, that's how...
...I can't imagine it now...
...You've had a jolly good time and you've been a jolly good fellow and you might have been and done worse...
...Al Widdifield of the bull sessions of a quarter century ago, disappeared into business, reappeared in an unlucky plane over the Grand Canyon, the Vice President in Charge of Advertising of the Sunbeam Corporation, insured for $650,000 against unlucki-ness...
...you mustn't run as fast as you can any more, and that's all there is to it...
...None of your chain-saws for me...
...Cecil Hinshaw became a grandfather, and ladies whose necks are lined (their grandmothers would have worn real or false pearls right up from the clavicle to the chin) tell you how becoming your hair is with gray in it...
...Main Street is quiet...
...whether you wanted to be a saint or a satrap, the chances against you have changed categorically from one in a million to one in a billion...
...Holy Russia is quiet...
...At one of the turns of the years it became the time to be old, and to talk a new kind of talk, talk of can cer and smoking, of wills to write and places to settle down in, of things you never did, and meant to and had better do now...
...It was their dependence on me that made me independent...
...Jones...
...she's gone past 48 and learned how to stand by herself...
...Now the doggone thing is eaten away completely...
...I feel like Cii ero getting home from his proconsw late in Spain and saying to the oM keeper of the city gate, "What hid happened in my absence...
...but I'm not good enough to go steady with any more, the way I was when I was leaning on their baby-carriages...
...The year is going to turn, and who, whether or not he knows it, is not» brought to prayer that he will find less hate and more love within him next year than last...
...And salvation is better than...
...My kids don't know that I'm here...
...It was the children that kept me young, while they were young...
...What did it...
...I remember the gray in his stubble before he shaved late (just as I do) on Sunday morning...
...the wind, which blows creation into its holes, is coldest...
...innocent secrets, but not mine...
...They have their problems, but they are not overwhelmed, or at least not overwhelmed enough to come crying to me with them...
...More of them are gone every Christmas time...
...it's upon you, the last of life for which (the poet said) the first was made, and if you try to slop the first over into the last you are only sloppy...
...I dreamed that my babies left me outside the supermar ket in my wheelchair while they wenl in to do their shopping, and got to talking, the way babies will, and ig nored my whimpering and my drools ing, and then the Spirit of Christmas Past came down the street and snatched me out of my wheelchair and made off with me, and I cried to my babies to save me, and I heard them say, and it was the last thing they said before I woke up, "He doesn't really want anything—it's just an attention-getting device...
...Slipping away, without ever a no-|gP that they're pulling the props K'from under me...
...and you know, even though you've been in the pass for miles, even though the road ahead has its ups and downs, that this is the summit, and now you're over the summit and on to the slope...
...But I don't want to be cut off in my prime, and I tell you I'm just really approaching my prime...
...Who—me...
...it's just that you aren't a tomcat on a tin roof any more...
...he must be half my age...
...They let me sit at the head of the table still, but it's only out of respect for the aged...
...But I am...
...or twice my age, but he isn't my age...
...A little brown around the edges, maybe, but I've got twenty-thirty good years in me yet...
...and the old gatekeeper said, "I didn't know you were away, Cicero...
...Now that you know how to beat the world, or save it, whichever you wanted to do, it goes tearing by you...
...I had a dream...
...The liquorous celebration of merchants and statesmen only contributes to the quiet, for when they are making merry they are not making mischief...
...He was the oldest man in the world...
...Bill Dickinson quit smoking because he Ekes to play tennis, and his leg hurt when he played, just a little...
...And those that are left in the garden of your life are all sere, or just on the verge...
...It was two years ago that Dicken—he was nine then—beat the pants off me at tether-ball and waited while I came up the hill to the house after the game...
...So Christmas time is a sorrowful time...
...He reaches for my hand...
...It is a time for quiet, in which the pagan ear is open for the sound of a snowflake pushed aside by the crocus...
...I can't stand up the way I could, and there's no one to lean on...
...A sorrowful time, not because I would be made a child again, but because I want my children made children again, and it was only a few litile years ago that they were...
...You'd better be learning Greek right away...
...Nothing's up...
...not in the least...
...said die Duke of Wellington to his men...
...They have their lives and their secrets...
...Quite easily, really...
...But the other evening, on our way home from the postoffice he said, "You know what I think...
...Well, maybe he'll be a pacifist some day...
...J think the Russians will never be fori given for what they did to Hungary.'' "Who told you that," I said, "Mrl Jones...
...a little like a bunch of drunks going down the street, the drunks on the outside leaning on the drunk in the middle and, by doing so, holding him up...
...Only a few little years ago that I could hold them in one hand—and get my hand wet...
...Well, we would never have a television set in the house, and Mommy and I wondered, before the fact, just what we should do, and then I remembered that when I peddled bills for Spivak & Stein's Grocery on 51st Street, I stuffed them down the sewer and wanted worse things than a TV set...
...But of them all, only Dicken (he's eleven now) still feels for my hand and takes it in his, instead of the other way around...
...scatter-brained Little Julie...
...They know I'm a pretty nice« low, for all of my hollering, but don't hold their attention...
...Amanda is away for a year at a time, at a school in England, a good school, she says, and it's fun there, but—my Little Amanda, how can she grow up without me...
...Maybe when you're thoughtful, or sentimental, or Jewish, the time comes a decade ahead of its time, and the thoughtless, the reasonable, the gentiles are rolling along as merrily as ever and going ahead and cutting down trees, competition, men...
...I want him to be a paci fist...
...Somewhere 'way back there you quit drinking, ostensibly for religious or financial reasons, but somewhere up here you know it's because it was Bad for you, meaning your organism...
...There's still Dicken...
...A time to be old, at 48, older than you will ever be again...
...My gan are great...
...There is no time like it for man, no time so well and so widely known as the time of change and the time to change, if change there will be and if to change is possible...
...You've never been happier, and the Spirit of Christmas Past is not a gloomy companion, just a quiet one...
...The children did it...
...At Christmas the English eat, the French are hospitable, the Germans joyful, the Americans generous...
...He calls me for his prayers...
...What...
...You've been going through, say, the Sonora Pass, up and up and up, and then there's a sign that says Sonora Pass 9624 Ft...
...What do I know about Elvis Presley (including how to spell it, if I've spelled it wrong, and I'm ashamed to ask Rocky...
...Carroll Binder, patiently particularizing the flash of current history in solid editorials...
...That's why I kept them young as long as I could...
...You've got to take care of it or it will go to pieces on you...
...Think what might have happened to you over Hiroshima, or in Madison Avenue...
...What, at 48, could he tell me when I was a kid...
...What did he know about the phonograph...
...He walks to the postoffice with me...
...The sun, the source of tumult, is farthest and palest...
...and the things that grow grow slowest...
...It is a time to be young, a time of skates and sleds and Lebkuchen and Lights, and a time to be old and welcome the Spirit of Christmas Past, of skates and sleds, Lebkuchen and lights, to the table...
...Ike Rosenfeld, 38, young enough to have been a student of mine, too fat for his heart...
...where, when the year turns, the lifetime turns...
...And now the children are independent—they really are, you know —and I am dependent again...
...What did he know about Gallagher & Sheen...
...Aristotle wasn't a fool clear out to the rind, and he said that all men want to live forever, and, since this is impossible in themselves, they t>\ to do it in their children and to make their children in their image...
...but I'll sit down for a while, in between logs, and be sorrowful...
...He doesn't even suggest any more that we play...
...You are what you are, and all your contemporaries are what they are, and this is the way it will be, give and take a little luck here, a plane crash there, every Christmas time from now on...
...No, sir...
...Chuck Sills had a heart attack, and how easily he gave up smoking...
...But the kids go right qj snouting their soup, and when Main who loves me, laughs at the gags, the kids raise their pink little snout from the trough and say, "Whaw up...
...As the year turns I've been learning Greek...
...I was telling the teacher, last time, that I was so tore up over the first and second aorist that I couldn't remember the accusative singular of potamos, which was the first word we learned, and an old lady in front of me turned around and whispered, "The trouble is, Mr...
...What good could he do me?—He was a salesman and, in the great mobile democracy of America, I was going to be a writer...
...So has your automobile, if you take care of your automobile, and if you take good enough care of it you haven't got time for anything else...
...how can she finish college without me...
...and I love Little Manda the best because she is most like what I wanted to be, deep and beautiful...
...The don't think I'm funny...
...If you want to go to Athens—you always wanted to go to Athens and find out about Socrates —you'd better be thinking about doing it...
...Just look at the damage I've done and think of the damage I'd do...
Vol. 21 • January 1957 • No. 1
