Christmas Eve — It’s early morning and Val, our lost-and-found dog with a bad eye and I are on our way to Noxubee County to spend the morning in the woods.
I turned on the radio and caught the opening carol of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” from King’s College in Cambridge, England. The choir was singing “Once in Royal David’s City.” The opening solo is ethereal, thrilling, as though an angel is singing it.
What a wonderful thing it must be to file into that 400-year-old chapel in the fading twilight of a Christmas Eve and hear live this celestial music.
Not that there aren’t glories here.
The landscape outside looks like a Constable painting: a dramatic sky, showers off in the distance, a strip of green pasture between two woods, cows.
The mind wanders. I’m driving a pickup made in Japan, drinking coffee from Central America, carrying a phone made in China I just used to call my mother and listening to a British choir sing songs of praise to a child born in the Middle East. And, there are more connections to other people in other parts of the world than I’m realizing.
Even so, it’s not been a good year for the family of man in this soon to end 2015. While there have been wars, genocide, terrorists attacks in Paris and elsewhere, here in Mississippi most of us live in harmony with our families and neighbors in relative peace. We have plenty to be grateful for.
Christmas seems to take its sweet time getting here, and then it goes by you like a road sign at 60 miles per hour.
The Writer’s Almanac on Christmas day published a story about a 1956 Christmas gift that very likely led to one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.
Harper Lee dropped out of law school at the University of Alabama in 1949 to move to New York City where her childhood friend Truman Capote had become a literary sensation with the publication of his first novel. She, too, intended to write.
In New York Lee found a job as a ticket agent for an airline and for seven years had written on weekends without success. She had two friends, Michael and Joy Brown, who she had met through Capote with whom she celebrated Christmas.
She couldn’t afford the trip home to Alabama that Christmas of 1956 and was especially homesick.
She had a tradition with the Browns; they would try to give one another the best gifts that cost the least amount of money.
Lee’s present for Michael Brown was a portrait of an 18th century Anglican cleric and writer she’d found for 35 cents. Lee was disappointed to see there was no gift for her. The Browns told Lee to open the envelope under the tree addressed to her.
Inside the envelope was a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
Brown wrote musical jingles for corporations and had enjoyed a particularly successful year. At first Lee thought it was a joke, then she said it was too big of a risk.
“No honey,” Michael Brown replied. “It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.”
Lee wrote: “I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle. Christmas trees blurred softly across the street, and firelight made the children’s shadows dance on the wall beside me. A full, fair chance for a new life. Not given me by an act of generosity, but by an act of love. Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best not to fail them.”
“To Kill a Mockingbird” was published in 1960; it went on to sell 30 million copies.
Within that story is a New Year’s resolution: out of love came faith, from that faith a courageous act of generosity. Grant us the insight to recognize when we can help a friend, loved one or co-worker realize a dream. When we do, may we have the boldness of spirit to act on it.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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