A Christmas Story

MAYERLING AT MIDNIGHT

“Give me any two pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a picture.”

~ Cecil B. DeMille

I love sappy, sentimental Christmas movies. I cry as soon as a bell rings and Clarence gets his wings in It’s a Wonderful Life. When Jimmy Stewart goes all Alfred Hitchcock and frightens Donna Reed into the middle of Valentine’s Day, I get chills. That film is one of my favorites.

 And how about those big galoots in Miracle on 34^th Street that were too obtuse to see that Edmund Gwynne was not playing a role? He really was Kris Kringle. Anybody with half a brain could see that.

There is another film I love, although it may not be a true Christmas film. Mayerling, the romantic portrayal of a royal love affair gone tragically awry, is a movie I always watch during the holidays.

I was reminded of it the year I went to Austria for Christmas hoping for a snowfall, something we Southerners know little about. Upon arriving in Vienna five days before Christmas, there was plenty of seriously cold weather, but not one snowflake could be found. I bundled up like an Eskimo and walked around the city shivering like a jellyfish.

I saw performances of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker and then sashayed across Philharmoniker Strasse to the Hotel Sacher for a reviving cup of hot Viennese coffee and a decadent Sacher torte. Yum.

In short, my days and nights leading up to “C” Day were pleasantly full with only one snag. Austrian merchants and hoteliers go home at mid-day to be with their families leaving skeleton crews to take care of tourists like me. Consequently, I had nothing to do on the Eve of Christmas or for “C” Day itself.

That is the reason why on Christmas Eve I wandered alone in the near-empty hotel lobby leafing through travel brochures. What to my wandering eyes should appear, but a red and green pamphlet promoting a traditional Christmas Eve dinner deep in the Vienna Woods, culminating with Midnight Mass at Mayerling.

“Mayerling,” I sighed breathlessly as I shoved the brochure toward the only employee left in the hotel. “Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve starred in that movie. So romantic, so tragic and so...”

The hotel person raised his eyebrows and sniffed. “Bitte?”

I nodded vigorously.  “Mayerling,” I said as plainly as I could. “Ya?”

In perfect English, he told me there was one seat left on the bus for Mayerling. Could I be ready by four o’clock?

Grinning wildly, I shouted, “Ya! Ya! Mayerling. Hot diggidy dawg!”

The bus was warm and noisy and loaded with as many nationalities as a NATO Summit. We chugged along until finally arriving at a quaint restaurant steeped in old world charm that might have been decorated by Heidi herself, (played by Shirley Temple).

After a traditional Austrian Christmas Eve dinner of fried carp, roast goose, baked celery root and marzipan, we re-boarded the old bus and rode to the bottom of a hill in the thick of the Vienna Woods.

It was close to midnight when our tour guide doled out lighted “torches” to us with instructions to walk quietly, single-file up the hill to the chapel for Mass. The penitential convent, she said, had once been the site of a hunting lodge where Crown Prince Rudolf (played by Omar Sharif) and his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera (played by Catherine Deneuve) sealed their fate in a murder/suicide pact.

“The altar,” she said to her captive audience, “stands over the very spot in the Prince’s bedroom where the bodies were discovered.” A chorus of expected “oohs” and “aahs” followed.

I had hiked almost to the top of the hill when the first soft snowflake danced on my nose. When I looked behind me, what I saw snatched away what was left of my breath. Dozens of flickering hand-held torches twisted, turned and meandered up the hill illuminating an otherwise black night. The only sounds to be heard came from icy footstep crunches that accompanied the gentle purr of falling snow. C. B. DeMille, uber Hollywood king of dazzling productions in the Fifties could not have staged it more beautifully.

In that moment, all romantic illusions of Rudolf and Mary and their tragic love affair vacated the premises of my conscious mind. Omar and Catherine playing a role were no longer available to cloud my vision of the sacred moment. The quiet midnight torches below etched themselves on my soul as indestructible strips of celluloid.

Eat your heart out, C.B.

I had seen unforgettable images before but none as indelible as the one stamped on my soul that Christmas Eve. I will always cherish the vision of that quiet group of people ambling up a hill at midnight to honor the Christ Child, born to bring us love, peace and hope for a better world.

I expect one day I’ll take that journey again. No, the inner etchings of that night have not faded, nor will they. That said, a remake is not out of the question. Stay tuned!

A Feeling of Christmas

 

“It’s fruitcake weather Buddy!”

                                                    ~A Christmas Memory, Truman Capote

  

Our house is unusually quiet today while Babe recovers from serious but successful surgery that saved his life. He sleeps a lot. After a certain age recovery is no walk in the park. Emotionally, I am overwhelmed with relief each morning when I wake up to find him still snoring next to me. I am overjoyed that the two of us have been granted additional time together. 

The antique clock we bought at a flea market in Pennsylvania is ticking away the minutes, a stoic sentinel on the mantle over the fireplace. It is flanked on both sides by the traditional manger scene that I gently boxed up last January and with even more care unboxed early this morning. Hoping to festive things up around here, I went outside and pruned the magnolia tree down to a nub to make Christmas wreaths for the front door, side door and back door. Okay, so I got a little carried away. After hanging the wreaths, I rested before I attempted to decorate a six-foot tree with ornaments collected for the past twenty something years.

Although the house is too quiet, the old mantle clock seems to be ticking louder than it usually does. An annoyed part of me wants to get up, grab the pendulum and stop it in mid-tick but I don’t because the ticking sound is constant. When I analyze the prevailing stillness I realize that this house of ours has every reason to be hushed. It is what houses do when there is a sick person about.

The tree is up. It looks awful. I nearly lost my religion stringing lights on the darn thing, so now I am folded into Babe’s recliner trying to recuperate. The top of the already lopsided tree did not get the proportioned amount of lights because my five-foot-four body was too lazy to look for a step stool high enough for me to be able to get up there. The angel looks more deranged than heavenly. If she topples over, she’ll just have to deal with it. Light stringing is normally Babe’s job. This year? Not so much.

The reason I have written a lot of Christmas stories is due to the fact that I was inspired to capture my seasonal thoughts on paper after reading Truman Capote’s 1963 short story, A Christmas Memory. That haunting tale about baking fruitcakes with his cousin Sook is why today I continue writing my own holiday memories about growing up in a small Southern town. 

Looking out my window at the leafless, birdless winter morning, two words thread through my mind unbidden: Fruitcake weather. Could it be the ghost of Capote trying to tell me something? Babe is napping, and when I go in to check on him, I feel an overpowering desire to do something to make him smile. The leafless, birdless trees gently sway in the cold winter breeze as if singing a familiar phrase directly to me: “Oh my! It’s fruitcake weather.”

It hits me that the song of the trees is telling me to go to the store and buy candied cherries and pineapple, pecans and walnuts. The whispered directive instructs me to chop, mix and bake until the fragrance of freshly baked fruitcake is wafting out of every crack, cranny and mouse hole in this unusually quiet house. According to the leafless, birdless trees, baking a fruitcake will help me drown out the sound of time ticking away.

Mama’s White Fruitcake

1             Cup Sugar

2             Cups Flour

5             Eggs

2             Sticks Butter

1             Teaspoon Baking Powder

½            Teaspoon Salt

1             1-ounce Bottle Vanilla

1             Teaspoon  to ½ ounce Almond Flavoring (depending on your love of Almond)

1             Pound Candied Cherries

1             Pound Candied Pineapple

4             Cups Chopped Nuts (mix walnuts and pecans if both are available)

Chop fruit and nuts and dredge with 3 Tablespoons of flour.

In a separate bowl:

Cream sugar and butter until fluffy and add well-beaten eggs, one at a time

Slowly add remaining flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla and almond flavorings.

Combine batter and fruit/nut mixture and mix it all up with your hands, squeezing to get the batter evenly distributed.

Pour into a greased tube pan and bake for three hours at 250 degrees.

If you have a pressure cooker, steam the cake for one hour, then cook in the oven for an additional hour at 325 degrees.

If not, place a pan of water under the tube pan for the entire cooking time.

Cool on cake rack.

For Nina — Februrary 22, 1940- November 13, 2014

If I could make days last forever

If words could make wishes come true

I'd save every day like a treasure and then

Again, I would spend them with you.

                                          ~Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle

“We should write down all our information,” I told my cousin. “Just in case …”

“What information? And who’s going to read it if …”

In 1952 we were two years into the Cold War. When McCarthyism denounced Communism, Russian dominance took command of the news and scared the dickens out of us.

Better Dead Than Red, became a battle cry. Repent Now, the churches preached. The end is near!

Our public schools showed the Civil Defense film, Duck and Cover to teach us what to do when (not if) the A-bomb dropped. Duck and cover your head under your desk! Do not look up!

Scared out of our minds, my cousin and I cowered under our desks in mortal fear of the dreaded mushroom cloud. In bed at night, we held tight to our teddy bears for comfort.

Joe McCarthy easily convinced Americans that impending doom was a certainty if the country did not purge itself of Communists. His obsession was contagious and served to usher in the Cold War along with cold fear that spread like cancer throughout the body of our country.

Some people in our town built Fallout Shelters for protection. With no shelter in either of our backyards, my cousin and I figured we would no doubt be nuked into kingdom come. The Civil Defense films we had been shown in school gave us no reason to believe otherwise.

“Future generations, if there are any,” I told her in what I thought was an analytical declaration, “should know that the two of us lived and breathed.” We were so naïve but we were only twelve-years-old.

So we scribbled out our names on Blue Horse notebook paper, included what we liked to eat and the fun things we liked to do. We also wrote down our favorite movies. (Duck and Cover was not one of them.)

We wrapped our life story in tin foil because we figured radiation would not penetrate metal. Then we stuffed it inside a loose brick in my cousin’s house and there it remains to this day. When I drive through our old neighborhood, long since vacated by both our families, I always wonder if what we hid inside a brick that day was ever found. If so, did it make the finder laugh?

Our fears of gamma rays, isotopes, and alpha and beta particles occurred during a time when the A-Bomb monster threatened to put an end to all living things. In today's world, another fear eclipses the one that haunted us in the Fifties. It, too, begins with the letter A. It doesn’t break bones; it breaks hearts. It doesn’t kill people; it kills brains.

Thank God my cousin and I never experienced the first A-bomb, but a few years ago she became a victim of the other A-bomb: Alzheimer’s. When she became bedridden she seldom spoke but she clung to pieces of her past while embracing a teddy bear for comfort.

I don’t know where she went when she retreated to that solitary place in her mind, but I’d like to think she went back to a time when we were kids having fun. If she passed by her old house in her mind, I hope she remembered to laugh about the day we sealed our lives within the folds of a double thickness of tin foil before shoving it behind a loose brick on the side of her house.

Not unlike the A-Bomb, Alzheimer’s takes no prisoners. Its victims are not only the ones diagnosed, but also the families who pray for a moment or two of clarity with a loved one. That few seconds of light may be only a blip on the mind’s radar screen, but it has the power to call up the sweetest, most precious memories.

Our days are made up of events, good, bad and so-so, many of which remain locked inside our minds. Experiences become footprints and in the end eulogies verifying the fact that we stood on this earth and we mattered.

My cousin hugged her teddy bear one last time this week before leaving us for a better existence.

If I could save time in a bottle

The first thing that I'd like to do

Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you.

Two Words

I am one of the fortunate people of the world with lifelong friends. One of them, Mary Stripling, is a poet who writes from the heart ... and always with a twinkle in her eye and a delightful smile on her face. She sent me the following poem tonight that she'd written after I told her that my new address is on Memory Lane.


Two Words

We sat silently in the Pathfinder as Ted guided it along North Druid Hills Road.
The thing ought to know the route
and drive itself by now.

Mary broke the silence.
“Memory Lane.”

Ted smiled.
“I wonder if that was the name or if she bought the road and named it.”

We chuckled and sat quietly again.
The Pathfinder turned, no faster than a trot
into the Publix parking lot.

This time Ted’s gentlest voice broke the silence.
“Only Cappy.”

My Everlasting Last Party

My Everlasting Last Party

(The following is one of the pieces I am writing to be collected into a

book of prayers. The name of the book is “Hey God ~ Can We Talk?”)

Hey God ~ I am wondering what will happen after I die. I don't want to cash in my chips any time soon, but I'm not getting any younger. I figure it’s probably not so unusual for people of a certain age to ponder life’s mysteries.

I don't wonder specifically about the hereafter, although if there is a heaven and if there is still any credit left on my tarnished gold card, I hope it will buy me a one-way ticket. But if reincarnation is what's up for me after this life, then please let me come back as a cellist. It sure would be nice to spread Yo Yo Ma music throughout the world.

I know I have to die before anything beyond the veil takes place so before that day arrives I want to make certain of a few things. For example, those I leave behind already know what a clotheshorse I am and that my love affair with shoes is legend. My people also know that I ain’t going nowhere looking tacky, even dead. Lord, please keep one of my good friends alive long enough to fix me up properly for my extended trip to wherever.

Many people have shared space with me during my brief stay on Planet Earth. Most of them I have loved with all my heart and they have loved me back. The others have basically put up with me and vice-versa. The burning question on my mind today is this: will any of them show up at my farewell party to say a few kind words?

I went to the funeral of an acquaintance not long ago and a bunch of beautiful things were said about her. I was seriously surprised. If I had known she was such a saint, I'd have been a little nicer to her while she was stabbing me in the back.

I hope a few mourners will shed tears after I'm gone, but what if they don’t? What if they sit in the back of the room playing Angry Birds on an iPhone or worse, what if they just sit there Tweeting? 

What will people say about the kind of person I was?

          She was nice?

          She loved her family and tolerated Republicans?

          She had a soft spot for cats?

          She was a pretty good writer when she put her mind to it?

          She wrote prayers when writer’s block zapped her creativity?
          She was seriously into shoes?

Will anybody think to say that I made some hard choices in my life for which I spent years and years trying to forgive myself?

Will they mention that on days when words flowed from my brain through my fingertips and onto my keyboard, I was as One with You as a human is capable of being? Would they think to say that I loved learning but that every time I learned of man’s inhumanity to man, it broke my heart and left me bereft for days?

Please, God, don't let anyone say a bunch of ugly things about me at my last party. I hope no one will be so crass as to recall that I was selfish, pig-headed and impatient. I can think of a few girlfriends who would delight in getting in the last dig. I’m pretty sure I’d be too exhausted from climbing Jacob's ladder wearing my 5-inch high heels to respond with, Back atcha, Bitch!

Mark Twain said, Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Before my time comes, God, will You help me be a kinder person so that the undertaker won’t be the only person who’s sorry that I died?

Thank you for listening, God.

Amen

September Song for a Butterfly

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you

it’s going to be a butterfly.” — Buckminster Fuller

Several years ago, a very dear man, a poet I knew, left this world. I woke up thinking about him today, recalling the day we met.

He and his wife were at the same writing workshop I was attending. I noticed them both because there was a shine surrounding them, like a patina, and I found myself staring at them until my curiosity could stand it no longer.

I turned to my friend Mary. “Tell me about those two people sitting on the front row.”

“That’s B.C. and Vida Cole.” She rolled her eyes letting me know that anybody with a lick of sense would have known that. Mary’s facial expression always say a mouthful.

“They’re a permanent fixture around here,” she added. “They drive down from North Carolina every year because this is where they met and fell in love. Isn't that the most precious thing you ever heard?”

B.C. went to the podium and began reading one of his poems. It was humorous and we all giggled. B.C. talked like he laughed—as if his vocal chords were constricted. He twanged his “A’s” like hill people often do. When B.C. said something that began with an “A,” it came out flat, like “that fat cat.” 

I later learned that he loved to tell tall tales on himself. I once heard him say, “Last week Vida said to me, ‘Go look at yo’sef in the mirror, B.C., ‘cause you got chocklit ice cream stuck in your mustache.’ It was dripping off my chin onto my new shirt that she had paid a whole bunch of money for. So I said, ‘That would make a right good story.’ Haw. Haw.”

B.C.’s laugh, if not always his tall tales, was infectious.

He sported thick muttonchops that curved around his long face. Those sideburns suited him because they framed a ruddy complexion that turned a deeper red by the time it reached his pencil-thin nose. Every time B.C. smiled, that nose of his joined up with his lips and crawled up his face like the two were in cahoots, as indeed they were.

Grinning, he would take an index finger and push his silver rimmed glasses back up to where they belonged. He did that a lot because he smiled so often. I never heard B.C. whistle, but I always expected him to stride unhurriedly into a room with his lips poised in whistle-mode tweeting like a canary. Happy, contented men always whistle.

B.C. didn’t wear bright pink trousers, he headlined them. His royal blue suspenders topped off a black Polo shirt that was buttoned up to his chin. The Polo shirts he wore were probably the only concession to popular trends he ever made. B.C. Cole was way past caring about fashion statements because he made his own declarations and he made no excuses.

You have to admire a man like that.

He was a born romantic with an innate sense of how to make his woman feel special. It seemed as if he wanted to touch Vida as often as possible, if only with an occasional tap. I watched him as he listened to the lyrical words read by another poet. After a bit, he leaned in close to Vida until his smiling face brushed her silver hair, just behind her ear. Pretty soon, not hurriedly or without thinking, he kissed a little section of her hair. It was so gentle that Vida, accustomed to his loving ways, barely blinked. But she noticed.

Their devotion to one another stretched beyond their years as man and wife. Like Blue Boy and Pinky, one of them was incomplete without the other.

When Vida lost her hearing, B.C.’s ears became her ears. Much like the tender kiss he often gave her, Vida scarcely noticed the transition—it’s possible that neither of them was conscious of her hearing loss. They functioned as one finely tuned, well-oiled piece of people machinery, the kind that automatically slides into place at the first sign of a glitch. B.C.’s old eyes became weaker toward the end, but even with poor vision, he could see beyond hearing loss or time ticking away.

He was a special man whose loving ways provided him with a grin that emerged from a cocoon spun of joy. That grin crawled like a caterpillar across his innocent, child-like face to morph into a laugh that might have come from a butterfly— if butterflies could laugh. 

www.simplysoutherncappy.com

Nora Ephron quote

“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”

― Nora Ephron, Wellesley College Commencement Speech