Two years ago, Mrs. T and I made plans to spend Christmas on Florida’s Sanibel Island, our beloved home away from home, for the first time ever—but then her doctors told us in no uncertain terms that it was no longer safe for her to travel by air until after her double lung transplant. Instead, we stayed put in our Connecticut farmhouse, thinking about how much nicer it would have been to walk on the beach hand in hand, watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, and dine on Yucatan shrimp and key lime pie.

Mrs. T spent the greater part of 2018 in Connecticut. That’s where the two of us were a year ago when, deep in the middle of the night after Christmas, she found herself overwhelmed without warning by a pair of desperately urgent health crises that forced me to call an ambulance and landed her in the intensive-care unit of UConn Health Center’s John Dempsey Hospital.

In the year that has passed since she survived that terrifying ordeal, her condition has continued to deteriorate, slowly but inexorably. As a result, she’ll be spending this Christmas in the ICU of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the transplant center whose entrance is a mile south of the front door of our apartment in upper Manhattan. She was rushed there by ambulance two Saturdays ago, just in time to save her life, and she’s been there ever since.

I wish I could say that the two of us are still keeping Christmas as usual, but I’m afraid I’d be kidding you. Neither one of us has had the energy or inclination to do so this year. We aren’t sending cards or exchanging presents, nor are there any symbols of the holiday season on display in our Manhattan apartment, unless you count the tin of homemade Christmas cookies that my brother and sister-in-law, true believers in the inestimable value of family traditions, sent me a couple of days ago. “Our” Christmas tree this year is the table-top model at the nurses’ station of New York-Presbyterian’s medical ICU, and Mrs. T, alas, can’t see it from her bed. She didn’t even know it was there until I showed her this snapshot.

I’ve felt this way before. My old friend Nancy LaMott died two weeks before Christmas in 1995, and I was so devastated by the appalling fact of her loss that it temporarily destroyed my ability to revel in the holiday season. A number of years went by before I found it possible to truly enjoy Christmas. Much the same thing seems to have happened to me again: I’ve been so preoccupied with Mrs. T’s continuing plight that I simply couldn’t summon up the Christmas spirit.

Fear not, though, for this grim catalogue of current events is but a prelude to what I think it’s fair to call the best of all possible Christmas presents: Mrs. T has just been taken off the ECMO machine that saved her life last week. The doctors decided that she’d improved enough to do without it, and she underwent an extremely risky surgical procedure on Monday afternoon in order to unhook the machine, whose prolonged use is fraught with potentially lethal side effects, from her circulatory system.

Not surprisingly, I’d been wondering—with good reason—whether Mrs. T would live to see another Christmas. But yesterday’s procedure, much to my relief, went smoothly and uneventfully, and I am overjoyed to report that her blood pressure and oxygen saturation level are now gloriously stable and she is resting far more comfortably. (By way of contrast, she was in so much pain a few short days ago that at one point she was yelling with agony.)

To be sure, we don’t expect her to be coming home any time soon. It’s far more likely that she’ll have to stay in the hospital until after she’s been transplanted and has recovered from the surgery. But what of it? For now, the headline is: Mrs. T is alive!

And what kind of Christmas are we going to have in 2019? The very finest kind, of course—because we’ll be spending it together.

Not so long ago, we were both singletons, but we found one another against all odds, and since then we’ve learned over and over that nothing in the world is more important to us than our abiding love. As I wrote in this space apropos of the first Christmas that we spent together, “To be happy, not in memory but in the moment, is the shining star on the tree of life.”

I can’t know what the future holds in store for my gallant Mrs. T as we wait impatiently for the Big Call that will upend our shared lives and, if all goes well, allow us in time to return to Sanibel Island at long last. The wait may be brief…or not. It’s out of our hands, and like the song says, Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow. What I do know, though, is that neither one of us has to muddle alone anymore, even when we can’t do much more than sit quietly in an upper Manhattan ICU, holding hands and listening to soft music or watching pre-Code movies on her trusty iPad.

My friend Whit Stillman said it: “Happiness in life is often constructed from tiny wonderful things—hot toast with butter—not big things.” But wonderful as it is, there is nothing tiny about our loving companionship. It is the pearl of great price that for us has become the true meaning of Christmas. We may not have presents or a fancy tree, but that doesn’t matter in the slightest: we have the gift of one another, and so we are happy beyond all possible measure.

May you, too, know such happiness, today, tomorrow, and always.

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Desmond Earley and the University College Dublin Choral Scholars perform Benjamin Britten’s “Deo Gracias,” from A Ceremony of Carols, in Newman University Church, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, in 2011. The harpist is Denise Kelly:

From Meet Me in St. Louis, directed by Vincente Minnelli, Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. The orchestration is by Conrad Salinger:

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, five months before his death:

To learn more about the history of this recording, go here.

“Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination—for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”

Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space

Lennox Berkeley’s “I sing of a maiden,” performed by Stephen Cleobury and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, in 2016:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ new play. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stephen Adly Guirgis is on a prolonged roll. “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” and “Between Riverside and Crazy,” his most recent plays, were serious comedies of urban life whose well-constructed plots kept them roaring down the dramatic track and whose smart, crackling dialogue had all the idiomatic savor of August Wilson at his best. Who knew that the sophomoric author of such earlier plays as “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” would become a purveyor of taut moral tales that are also richly funny?…

Now the Atlantic Theater Company and LAByrinth Theater Company, Mr. Guirgis’ home base, have collaborated on a new play in a similar vein with an equally dumb title, “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven.” (I really wish he’d seek outside counsel when naming his shows.) The results, once again, are purest delight, all the more so because Mr. Guirgis has turned over a fresh leaf in his writer’s notebook. Unlike its more tightly wrought predecessors, “Halfway Bitches” is a big-cast ensemble piece set in a halfway house for troubled women whose near-plotlessness reminded me of nothing so much as one of Chekhov’s group portraits of turn-of-the-century Czarist Russia on the verge of revolution. It is, truth to tell, a bit too long—nearly three hours—but I wouldn’t want to have to cut it, for “Halfway Bitches,” for all its “Heartbreak House”-like looseness of structure, is so excitingly eventful that your attention will never wander.

Most of Mr. Guirgis’ 20 characters, played by 18 just-right actors, are the staff and occupants of Hope House, described in the script as “a government-funded residence for women providing transitional shelter and support for women in need in New York City.” Some drink, some use drugs, while others seek to break themselves of the no less devastating “habit” of being battered by their faithless partners….

I don’t want to single out any of the actors in “Halfway Bitches” for particular praise, since they’re all giving performances so real that you’ll feel as though you’d recognize their characters if you ran into them on Ninth Avenue after the show….

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Read the whole thing here.

Shirley Temple is interviewed by Michael Parkinson on Parkinson. This episode was originally telecast by the BBC on July 22, 1972:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I recall the career of Boris Karloff, who was as fine a stage actor as he was a movie star. Here’s an excerpt.

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Chuck Jones’ much-loved 1966 animated version of Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” will be telecast for the umpteenth time by NBC on Christmas night. The narrator is Boris Karloff, whose speaking voice (he sounded like a kindly Edwardian uncle) will be familiar to anyone who’s seen “Grinch,” though he was far better known in his own day for having played the heavily made-up monster in James Whale’s 1931 screen adaptation of “Frankenstein,” the movie that made him a full-fledged star. Julie Harris, who later appeared opposite Karloff on Broadway and TV, called him “a great actor…He had an enormous warmth and humanity, and this fascinating darker quality. It was mysterious. You wanted to know where such a man came from.” But unless you’re old enough to have seen “Frankenstein,” it’s possible that you won’t recognize his name—and you certainly won’t know that there was far more to him than the monsters and madmen he played on screen….

As a result of the success of “Frankenstein,” alas, he was permanently typecast, and spent the rest of his life appearing in horror films that were mostly of indifferent quality (remember “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”?). A few of them, fortunately, above all “The Body Snatcher” (1945) and “Bedlam” (1946), produced by Val Lewton, and “Targets” (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature film, were more than good enough to suggest how sensitive an actor he was beneath the bogeyman makeup that he often wore on screen….

Karloff’s first real opportunity to show his stuff came when, in 1941, he returned to the stage after a long absence—in a comedy. He made his Broadway debut in the original production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” Joseph Kesselring’s now-classic black farce, which ran for 1,444 performances. In it, he created the role of Jonathan Brewster, a psychopathic mass murderer whose life is ruined when an alcoholic plastic surgeon inadvertently makes him look like—yes—Boris Karloff.

At first he was terrified by the thought of acting in front of live audiences after having spent so long in Hollywood. A month after the show opened, he recalled, “I got on the scales and I had lost 26 pounds—in sheer fright.” But to everyone’s amazement, his own included, he turned out to have a knack for comedy, and the rave reviews that he received for “Arsenic” inspired him to continue performing in plays as a more artistically fulfilling sideline….

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Read the whole thing here.

Julie Harris, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone star in the 1957 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV version of the Broadway production of The Lark, Lillian Hellman’s English-language version of Jean Anouilh’s 1953 retelling of the story of Joan of Arc:

A live TV version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, starring Roddy McDowell, Eartha Kitt, and Boris Karloff and originally telecast live on Playhouse 90. Adapted by Stewart Stern and directed by Ron Winston, this program was originally telecast by CBS on November 6, 1958:

“Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.”

William James, “Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument”