ALAN writes:

So evil, so ugly, and so drenched in depravity had life become in this nation and in my city, St. Louis, last year that I was scarcely aware that Christmas had come and gone. Memories of Christmases Past did not even begin to occur to me until the year had ended.

I composed these words at six o’clock on the night of January 1st as I listened to Christmas carols sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Only then did my memory turn to the happiest Christmases I ever knew, those between 1949 and 1970, and to the few people to whom I owed all gratitude for those things: Principally, my mother and grandparents.

A photograph stands before me, printed from a color slide that I took at our Christmas dinner in 1966. It shows my mother, grandfather, a cousin and her husband seated at our table. My mother is wearing her Christmas apron, my grandfather wears his usual light-blue shirt and dark-blue sweater, his snowy-white hair reflecting his 87 years of life, and my cousin and her husband look so young, happy, and confident, having married that summer.

Daylight streams in through windows behind our Christmas tree in the background, two rooms away.  A 1966 calendar hangs on a pantry door. And there on a ledge is the black telephone I used in so many conversations with my father and friends. The table is set with four wine glasses and the gilt-edged Homer Laughlin china that my mother and grandmother brought out only for special occasions, and Christmas was the most significant special occasion.

While contemplating that picture as I sit here in my solitude and remembering such days in those years, I am overcome by the realization of what gratitude I owed to them for those things that I took for granted when I was young and ignorant.  The picture shows an example of the wealth that I inherited at no cost to me:  Moral, philosophical, metaphysical wealth in grown-ups who exemplified the best that grown-ups can be and the best that this life has to offer.

The Christmas music to which I listened included a series of recitations by veteran character actor Walter Brennan about Christmas back home on the old farm.  In “Christmas Together”, he spoke in memory about how his family and friends would celebrate Christmas together and how he would now do the same…..alone, because all of them were gone.  In my case, in all, most, or some of those years, there were 34 people in family or among friends with whom I was fortunate to share the splendor of Christmas.  Nearly all of them are gone now.

There was another recitation by Walter Brennan that made an impression on me 59 years ago.  When it was played on KXOK Radio in the summer of 1962, I heard a kind of magic in the story-song “Old Rivers”.  So I went out and bought the 45-rpm record in the familiar blue-and-white paper sleeve issued by Liberty Records, and then sat there listening to it on our living room floor.

There was no cuteness about it, nothing loud, no bombast, no pretentiousness, no trendiness.  Through Walter Brennan’s voice and the backing by the Johnny Mann Singers, it captured the hopes and dreams of ordinary hardworking people.  It also captured the swiftness and shortness of life, and the emotion we feel at the moment we learn that one of the best people we have known has died.

It has always been one of my favorite records from 1962, though I appreciate it now more fully than I could then.   The summer of 1962 was no paradise, but it was a whole lot better than what is out there today.

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