I want to
wish a Merry Christmas to my entire readership and indeed to the conceivably
even larger whole of humanity of which I sometimes sense my readers may be but
a portion. If you absolutely insist,
feel free to emend that greeting to one of “Happy Holidays”. Among the several reasons I find “Happy
Holidays” such a feeble bromide is that the generic seldom has the interest or
conviction of the specific. If I walk
into a good restaurant, consult the extensive menu, and ask the waiter for a
couple of recommendations, I do not want to hear “Well, I’d go with the Food.” You don’t have to be Jewish to bask in the
good will of someone’s “Shabbat shalom”, nor do you actually have to file for
French citizenship to enjoy dancing in the streets of Paris on Quatorze
Juillet.
I am also
partial to old words that survive only in certain immemorial and ossified
constructions: the quick and the dead, by hook or by crook, and so forth. The adjective merry is among such words.
It’s an Old English word without many cognates in the other Germanic
languages. Merry meant something between
joyous and hilarious, with a definite possibility of the excessive or the
transgressive. The phrase “merry
England” meant something on the spectrum between “A nice place to be” and “Let
the good times roll”. A “merry Andrew”
was a clown or court jester or a dark prankster in the Owlglass tradition. I recommend the page on “merry” in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The nominal form mirth, which after a fashion survives in modern English, has lost
the darker overtones it has in the biblical “house of mirth” taken as the title
for Edith Wharton’s brilliant novel.
So it is
with a slightly edgy sensation that we shall set out a little later today on a
merry holiday adventure of nearly a week’s duration. The old dogma that old dogs cannot learn new
tricks is a piece of proverbial misinformation that must find its origins in some
particularly unfriendly quarter of the feline world. Should you actually happen to be an old dog
you will know precisely how absurd the slur is.
We are learning new tricks all the time, often as a matter of
survival. In fact most of the Old Trick
programs have been so savaged by budget cuts and would-be reformers that we
don’t have a whole lot of choice. What is true, perhaps, is that old dogs learn
more slowly than they once did, and they must bow to a humiliating reversal of
the natural order of things by being instructed by their own pups. The specific New Trick we are about to
perform under these conditions is that of the New York City Christmas.
For the
first time in many years all three of our adult children will be merry-making
in distant parts. Under these
circumstances we briefly considered various possibilities of which we had read
in books. These in effect boiled down to
two. One was to get on an airplane and
fly to somewhere sunny and warm. The
other was to get into a car and drive somewhere north or west into a
snow-covered forest. Then two other
ideas came into our minds. The first was
that it is the heart’s desire of upwards of a million of our fellows world-wide
to spend the holiday amid the bright lights of New York City. The second was that a generous but
galavanting daughter was temporarily abandoning a handsome apartment on
Washington Square, thus maximally facilitating a most appealing parental New
Trick. So armed with pre-arranged
theater tickets, a restaurant guide, a dozen “Friends of X Museum” cards, and
some good walking shoes, we are about to be whisked to the Big City in time for
a celebrative dinner with the family of our Brooklyn son before they all fly
off to Tennessee. This will be followed
by several days of mainly pagan indulgence—though partially redeemed, we hope,
by Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Luke’s in the Fields. I am sure you can understand the feelings of exhilaration
the Old Dogs are enjoying under the
circumstances.
