We Twa Hae Run About The Braes

I almost made it. It was very close. Indeed, even as I closed in on the possibility with just hours to go, only the formality of a few hours of thinking and ordering and typing would have landed me at dawn's early light with a benign and pleasant product ready to close the old year. But it is now not so. Too much gin, too late in the evening, and a junior citizen who refused to accommodate my demands for compositional calm unraveled all my twelfth-month dreams.

I have of course written mostly happy essays full of warm wishes and good cheer before. But have I ever done so twice in succession? Has ever a whole month remained unsullied by my complaints? My friend the road commissioner says he won't even read me any more, relying instead upon one or more firemen (he is also head of the A.V.F.D., since his powerful intellect, robust constitution and engaging personality combine to allow him effortlessly to handle both offices, both salaries) to interpret the parts of each column that may in some way pertain to him or his interests or empire. "All you do is beat up on poor old Bush," he laments with a mixture of sadness and disgust.

Well, it's not all I do. But it does need doing and I do it proudly.

But my work of 13 December did not wallow in that field. Aside from one gratuitous but well-crafted reference to the vice president (so satisfying I'll repeat it here: slithering and slavering ) that essay was positive and laudatory. Persons from many states and walks of life wrote to tell me so. But could I hold myself in good humor for the fortnight necessary for a repeat engagement, closing out the holiday season happily and unoffensively? Apparently not so. Although I did, as I say, get close.

The boy and I went to Brunswick Christmas Eve to receive a gift for him from a customer and former neighbor of mine. I drank their gin and encouraged them to continue to fantasize about interesting and expensive remodeling projects that might help guarantee my income for another year. Karter played with their slow-witted dogs and surprisingly accommodating cat. On the way out he found a piece of filthy ice in the driveway and in the dark of the truck cab coming home he happily sucked from it the burden of heavy metals and hydrocarbons it had accumulated riding about the roads on the underside of Skip's plow truck.

And we had some Christmas lights up and the woodstove was fun to play with, not to mention the bag of junk trucks the Crosses had thrown in with the wrapped gift they sent home, and he was hungry, then he was thirsty, and he may be more than a touch hyperactive anyhow, and he wasn't bad but he wasn't sleepy either. And Grandma wasn't there to enforce her eight o'clock bedtime. It's a hell of a thing, a man's wife unwilling to live with him, but that's the fact of it, and if you can't have your wife beside you on Christmas Eve you probably need a toddler, especially if you and he have been through much uncertainty together in his first three years, and he earned his emotional keep all right, but it was midnight before he was sort of asleep, and by then pretty much all my resolve and ambition has dissolved, and I made no effort to craft that happy column I had so recently been so sure I had within me.

So now it's Wednesday morning, the day after Christmas, and maybe it's too late to even get this in the paper this week. It might be my first piece of 2008 instead of the last of 2007. So be it. Neither I nor my readers expect much of me except that I shall reveal our common reality refracted through the peculiarities of my experience rather than poured from the can of common puree that most other newspaper and broadcast essayists render. No I do not wish to retract or apologize for that bifurcate metaphor.

So sloth undid my good intentions. Then I turned on the evening news Christmas day, desperate for entertainment or elucidation of any sort less sluggish and distasteful than the constant stream of Christmas music and Christmas stories the radio had been awash with for several days. And what was the lead story on the CBS Evening News that night? Climate? War? Disease? Poverty? Torture? Domestic Spying? The greasy fingerprints of our own nation all over those very topics? Democrats in bed with Republicans and liking it? Mitt Romney's shallow slipperiness? Huckabee's Christ-soaked craziness? Obama's happy vapidity? None of the above.

Shopping ! That's what we most needed to learn about the state of the universe and the affairs of men. Worse, full five minutes at the top of the hour, the money-shot of broadcast news, was devoted by the insightful geniuses at the Columbia Broadcasting System to the breathless revelation that while plastic gift cards were the gift of choice for most Americans this season, many of us would never redeem them for merchandise ! Well Holy , as Scooter Rizzuto used to say, Cow ! Imagine that. That's a crisis! An outrage! Does Homeland Security have an action plan? What will Mrs. Clinton do about that if she succeeds the child idiot in the White House?

Speaking of the White House, and the Naval Observatory where the vice president lives, and Congress where the deals are made that tax you more and millionaires less, and allowing me this brief aside to bring all three structures into a pellucid Potomac focus, there was a brief accounting recently of a fire in Dick Cheney's office that disappeared from the airwaves almost as soon as it piqued our interest. A cover-up? A line of inquiry quashed? It's happened before. But I'm pretty sure I know what that was all about. I've studied the vice president some.

I believe Dick Cheney has a trap door in his office floor, probably behind or beside his desk, perhaps concealed under a heavy rug. Opened, it would reveal a ladder descending into the netherworld, where Mr. Cheney spends much of his time (the "undisclosed location" of Washington lore). Coming back from Hell one day recently to promote legislation further restricting aid to children and the infirm or to make more convenient the befouling of streams and aquifers by refiners and chemical conglomerates, Mr. Cheney failed to shake the last of the hot coals from between his cloven hoofs and, one thing leading to another, he set the carpet or the drapes on fire. No? You tell me a more likely cause.

But to get back to my situation. The most important story in America Christmas night was the fact that some fools let their gifts languish in their wallets or desk drawers, carelessly abetting the enrichment of Dunkin Donuts and Target and Best Buy. I don't care. And neither does the mother of any kid blown up in Iraq in furtherance of what has now become the Democrats' war (you don't fight it, you own it, boys and girls).

Neither do your neighbors who have no oil, maybe no food, certainly no gift cards. I'm telling you people, I wanted to do right by you, but CBS ruined it for all of us. So here I am, and here it is. Happy New Year, whichever side of the holiday my tardiness lands this column at Karter and I do want to tell all you sophisticated persons and businesses and municipalities out there that after riding around a good part of the state this last week including all the way up to Magalloway to see my little girl, Hazel's little girl, as she approaches a year of age on the last day of the old year, that we think your very tasteful white Christmas lights pretty much just suck .

I remember when towns used to use great big old medium-base incandescent bulbs for the town spruce (what watt-hogs those trees must have been). Karter has no inhibitions—he knows what he likes and what he doesn't and he says so. Christmas lights are multi-colored. White lights are boring, snobbish, too self-conscious and precious for good decent working-class persons to accept.

And a weak single string draped in the crown of a crabapple just looks stupid . Christmas is conifers and colored lights. Young and old agree.

So that's our New Years message, we guess. We hope you like it. If you don't, we hope you are among the multitudes who years ago gave up reading me, sparing yourself the burden of disagreeability I must so often bring. (The road commissioner will read at least this one as soon as his henchmen tell him he's featured in it).

But let me say just one more thing before I leave you to your revelry. This world is truly a terrible place and it hurts me grievously that my own country is so much to blame for so many of its ills, and its people so complacent about all that. And this birth of Christ business doesn't make any of it better for me. I hold little hope for Heaven and as John Eddy sings, if Jesus is coming, he'd better come soon. But don't hold your breath waiting, I'd say. If we're going to survive what we do, we'll have to find the ability and the reserves of sense and decency to save ourselves.

But some births have saved me, in a way, to a degree. Karter, my grandson, my adopted son, saved me from being alone on Christmas Eve. And Hazel's daughter, Allie, will I do not doubt bring her the same amazement that she gave me two decades of struggle and strife ago. So, unashamedly, proudly, I use this last of '07 or first of '08 allotment of my space to show you something far more interesting and worthwhile and newsworthy than the once pre-eminent news outlet in America could discover. Gaze upon my granddaughter. Do what you can to build a better future for granddaughters everywhere.