ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 1, 1997 TAG: 9701020012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
COLUMN: BEN BEAGLE
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
After the Christmas bills came, I fainted briefly and began to write like Papa Hemingway again:
The snow stayed too long that year and began to look indecent. The old man believed that such a thing invited new snow.
The lights still burned on the tree, but they had gone out in the old man's heart. Each year, he thought, the glow is more fleeting and it is of less warmth.
The woman had left the decorations up the week after Christmas and to the old man they seemed cruel reminders that time and money both spend themselves out.
"Take down these trinkets, mujer," he told the woman. "The time is past for them, just as it soon will be for me. Look at the dinero we have spent this year in pursuit of Feliz Navidad."
"I will choose the time of their coming down," the woman said. "It is a sad thing that you regret the dinero spent for the happiness of your progeny. Madre de Dios, truly do the people of the Road of the Highfields call thee El Scrooge."
"That may well be," the old man said, a coldness creeping into his heart because he sensed this was an argument he could not win. "But is it not also true that the people who deal in the plastic dinero call me El Sucker?
"They say: `Here is a live one, amigos. We could sell him the purported frozen corpse of the great cat on the mountain. He would have no use or place for such a thing, but he would put it on his plastic.'''
Although men engage in arguments they cannot win, he thought, there is something magnificent within them that makes them try. Perhaps it is a quality of the soul that makes them do this.
"Viejo," the woman said, decades of sorrow showing in her eyes, "it is the time of the nuevo year and it is my hope that thee might try to be as once thee were - cheerful, buoyant, undaunted and unwhining."
"Aiyee, esposa," he said, "thou knowest how to strike the places of a man's memory. It was good when we were young and drank the beer of the Miller's in the Cafe de La Avenida de La Walnut. But this was a simpler time before time itself grew old. When there were no cards of the plastic, no Miller Lite, and we knew nothing of hyenas and their smell of death."
"Whatever," the woman said.
The old man decided he would call Senor L.L. Bean. The buying of manly outdoor clothing seemed to keep the hyenas at a distance.
And no pesos would be due until February.
LENGTH: Medium: 52 linesby CNB