Some years ago on a Fulbright to the States, I was based in Georgia when, the week before Christmas, my phone rang. And the conversation went something like this:

'Is this Wayne Brown?'
The voice was female, southern, black, and a child's.
'Yes.'
'Do you know somebody called Anita?'
'Anita? Not offhand, no. Why?'
'My name is Anita.'
'Oh.Well! What can I do for you, Anita?'
A pause. Then:
'Are you my daddy?'
It was my turn to pause.
'Your daddy? No, I'm not.'
'I'm looking for my daddy.'
'Your daddy? Why.how old are you, Anita?'
'Eight.'
'Why do you think I'm your daddy?'
'His name is Wayne Brown.'
'Are you sure?'
'Yes. My momma told me. His name is Wayne Brown.'
'Is your momma there?'
'No, she's at work.'
'Well, Anita, I'm sorry, I'm not your daddy.'
Silence.
'I'm going to go now, okay?'
'Okay.'
I put down the phone. A couple hours later it rang again.
'Hullo?'
' You gotta be my daddy.'
'Anita?'
'Yes.'
'Anita, I'm not your daddy. I told you.'
Silence.
'Do I sound like your daddy?'
'Yes.'
'When last did you talk to your daddy?'
'I never met him.'
'Well, how do you know I sound like him?'
Silence.
'Anita?'
'Yes?'
'How did you get my number?'
'I called the telephone people. They gave me two numbers.'
'Well, did you call the other one?'
'Yes. It just rang and rang.'
'Where are you calling from, Anita?'
'Sylvester.'
Sylvester was a small town a fair distance from Albany, GA, where I was.
'My daddy promised me a bicycle for Christmas when I'm eight.'
'I thought you never met your daddy?'
'I never met him.'
'Then how do you know he promised you a bike?'
'My momma told me.'
'When did she tell you that?'
'When I was five.'
'Did she tell you that again this year?'
'No.'
'Well, sweetheart, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not your daddy. I wish I was, but I'm not.'
Silence.
'Anita?'
'Yes.'
'I have to go now, okay?'
Silence.
'I hope you find your daddy, okay?'
'Okay.'
I put down the phone.
This time she didn't call back..

*********

Have you noticed how, in this country, Christmas has become a festival of lights - lights amid whose unblinking iconography, after dark, young couples stroll through malls?

I suppose when this unhappy world of ours becomes glumly and finally secular, and goes along bowed beneath the burden of life unrelieved by even a dream of redemption, that's what human piety will have shrunk to: a stubborn, last longing for lights; for the Light. Which is probably apt for a species whose future awaits it out among the stars.

But what a hard thing, that impersonal glory, the Virgin, the Christ-child and the Wise Men gone!
In the meantime, the spirit of Christmas is probably best preserved in its songs. And I don't mean the past century's Christmas 'hits': Blue Christmas, White Christmas, We wish you a merry blah blah, or that loathsome jingle, The Little Drummer Boy. I mean the carols, the old songs.

Or some of them: because I don't mean, either, a carol like Adeste Fidelis (O Come All Ye Faithful), that PR exhortation, much too far removed from its original emotions, so that even while it declares them - 'joyful and triumphant' - the melody smacks of complacency, and the song is a preaching to the converted. And I don't mean either a beer hall rugby song like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, where the refrain - 'comfort and joy' - is clearly too inebriated to apprehend the eliding annunciation, the innuendo of wings, and one knows that a grosser birth than Christmas is being celebrated.

But think instead of the perfect stillness of that lovely lyric, Silent Night, of its moonlit serenity, its motionless gleam!
'All is calm, all is bright. Sleep in heavenly peace.' And the last line, repeated, fading to a hushed sibilance, the merest whisper of a breeze in the trees.

And then think, for contrast, of the Wagnerian turbulence of O Holy Night, how it begins in solemnity and awe, and then moves, through the transition of thrilling expectation - 'For yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn' - to the paradoxical triumph of adoration - 'Fall on your knees! O hear the angels' voices!' (and what a thunder of jubilation in that 'Fall'!), and then to the imperious affirmation, 'O night.divine!' with its sobbing withdrawal - 'O night when Christ was born!' - and the wave-surge coming again: 'O night! Divine!'
I don't know when that carol was composed; but I can feel behind it a whole civilisation in its prime, Christian Europe in its prime: supremely confident in its beliefs, without the least flicker of agnosticism, and thus free, as few thinking Christians today are free, to surrender itself to joy and thunder its praise at the God-secreting heavens, as a free man laughs out of a surfeit of life or bulls bellow away their excess in June.

I am awed by the thought of such a civilisation - and completely perplexed to know that, at the same time that it was giving voice to such religious elation, it was also giving birth to the crippling racism and socio-economic conditions which, centuries later in the Deep South, would one day fuel the desperation and impoverishment - eight years old! - of:
'You gotta be my daddy!'

Executive Class

Gardens with Gravel

Death to the Mullet!