XLI. Offerings of the Wise

Once I had a neighbor in Southern California who grew up in England in a rambling, old, drafty house that even the many fireplaces failed to warm, and with servants attending to every need. Consequently, here in America she was lost in the kitchen. One day she rang me up to ask how to boil water, or maybe it was eggs; I don’t recall, but it was something that simple. We both had school age daughters who were friends. She was married; I was single.

“Tell me, dear,” she asked over the phone one day in her clipped British accent, “Are you getting any?”

“Um … {{{     }}} … what?”

“Are you getting any?”

“Uh, any? Like, any what?”

It turns out she meant spousal support, alimony. (No, I wasn’t getting any of that.)

When I ran my own businesses – hair design, catering – I assiduously supported my customers. In turn, they supported me; in fact, they’d go out of their way: for, on my bad days, they’d lift me up. It really was heartwarming. I did quite well operating in that thought; my customers were happy, we laughed a lot, and some of them remain my friends today. It works magic.

For five years Netflix and I maintained a good relationship; they’ve been supportive. But lately they’ve adopted the role of an ex-spouse wielding a number of smart-mouthed, disrespectful evil stepkids. Last night I had a disc that wouldn’t play, so I went online to report it and request a replacement. But I couldn’t sign in – even though my email address and password (in stars) were right there on the screen, Netflix told me they didn’t match. Probably you’ve been there.  I phoned them. This female, whom shall be named Rachel, asked me for the last four digits of the credit card I used for the site. I couldn’t remember which card I’d used, I told her. “Then, I’ll wait,” she said, “while you go get your wallet and rifle through it.” I’m not kidding: these were her exact words. “You must have other means of identifying me,” I told her. She said, “I’m just going to put you on hold until you calm down.” She gave me a time out. I hung up and called back. After an hour on the phone with various stepkids – including discussions suggesting pulling four-digit numbers out of a hat, I got Rachel again. I probably sounded like Jerry Seinfeld, from his TV show, opening the door of his apartment and findng, “Newman”: “Rachel.” By then I was asking for a month’s free service: eight dollars and sixteen cents – mere pennies; it was the principle of the thing. Supervisors told me it is not their policy to offer free service – “unless for special circumstances,” said supervisor Molly: “It’s our policy.” I asked when they had changed their policy; she said it has always been their policy, that’s how she was trained. “Then you were not thoroughly trained,” I pointed out, “because a month’s free service has been offered me before for poor customer service.” Anyway, it could have gone on. During years I have had Netflix I have found the day crew to be much more accommodating than the evil stepkids of night. I’ll have to explore alternatives. Those may be limited because my computer doesn’t meet the requirements to watch most video online. Ultimately, I clicked on the button to set a new password, set the same password and cracked open the safe. But before it was done, I vented my frustration on someone else’s blog (where we’ve discussed Netflix and United States postal carriers getting our New Yorker magazines wet, ripping them, and then cramming them into our mailboxes). Those turkeys. I was steamed. I thought I’d better come home and vent on my own blog.

Apparently Netflix doesn’t need my business, eight dollars and sixteen cents a month. (In the end, they have given me two bonus discs, however.) Conversely, Amazon offers excellent customer service – Amazon is simply an excellent company in no matter which of their varied venues you work with them. Oh, occasionally I’ll get a rep on the phone who sounds like she’s sitting in her living room in the Philippines eating peanut butter – I encountered two such yesterday – one named Clarence (yes, I spelled it back to her) and another young woman named Al Pacino (although, to my incredulousness, she did repeat her name as Albertina, I think), and a guy named Safari (I spelled it back to him. “Are you sure it’s not Peggy?” I asked him.  “What? Peggy?” You have to have seen the TV commercial.

The best service comes from Apple, though. As with all of their products, their service comes impeccably packaged. “I have the good fortune of being selected to help you,” emailed one rep.  Not only do they help you promptly, they check back with you – like stroking your back and your arm to make sure you’re O.K. – and then they follow through until the problem is resolved and you are blissfully soothed.

And, of course, Emma and I are fortunate to have the unfaltering support of our health care aides and our Hospice team.

Yesterday Jetta’s veterinarian had the florist deliver a pink carnation to us in her memory. Our sweet little teacup poodle has become a beautiful flower.

Then there are the irreplaceable offerings of my friends, those who came bearing food, drink and honey for my annual Christmas party the other night.

Support is important. In supporting each other, each of us makes an offering, gives of oneself; thus, we are exchanging gifts and we end up smiling.

Support – giving and receiving – is a place that feels like home inside one’s heart, that safe, secure place beside the hearth. In this spirit, therefore, I offer you, first, Keith Olbermann’s poignant reading of James Thurber’s “There’s No Place Like Home,” and in parting, my favorite Christmas story, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”

May your holiday stockings overflow with light and love, keeping you happy, safe and warm.

–Samantha Mozart, December 21, 2011

 

Keith Olbermann Reading James Thurber’s “There’s No Place Like Home”

 

 

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI

by O. Henry

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”

The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling–something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: “Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”

Down rippled the brown cascade.

“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

“Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation–as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value–the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends–a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do–oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?”

At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two–and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again–you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice– what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you–sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year–what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs–the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims–just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”

And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The magi, as you know, were wise men–wonderfully wise men–who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

This copy of The Gift of the Magi comes from Project Gutenberg, at http://www.auburn.edu/~vestmon/Gift_of_the_Magi.html