I can’t remember anything in particular about how I spent Christmas last year. I didn’t want to, and still don’t. Not so Christmas of 2019, which I will never forget: I spent it with Hilary in the ICU of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she had just been disconnected from the ECMO heart-lung machine that got her through a near-fatal respiratory crisis. (COVID has since taught the rest of the world about ECMOs, but I knew first.) “Our” tree that bleak year was a Charlie Brown-sized tabletop model on the counter of the nurses’ station, and it wasn’t even visible from the bed in Hilary’s ECMO-crowded cubicle.
She never had another one, nor did she leave the hospital again. A year later, I was a widower, and my sorrow blotted out the December sun, such as it was. As I wrote in this space on Christmas Eve:
I find myself in the same boat as pretty much everybody else, staying home, missing Hilary and my family, not seeing my friends save on a screen, and feeling…well, blue.
At my age, of course, you have no choice but to accept the increasingly obtrusive presence of death in your life. The fact that it has come so often around Christmastime, though, is a thing I find hard to tolerate. Something had to give, and what gave was my ability to celebrate Christmas. It’s not entirely gone: I still love A Christmas Carol, Meet Me in St. Louis, and all the wonderful seasonal songs. But there is no tree in my home, nor is my heart light, and both of these things were true last year as well.
For someone who has found boundless comfort and joy in Christmas through the years, first with my own family in Smalltown, U.S.A., and then with Hilary, this loss was grievous. “To be happy, not in memory but in the moment, is the shining star on the tree of life,” I wrote after trimming the first tree I shared with the woman who would soon become my wife.
I rejoice, then, to tell you that my star has risen again: I found a new partner six months ago, and today my beloved Cheril and I, as the song says, are close as pages in a book. Hilary wanted nothing more than for me to find a new love after her inevitable passing, so I am in no doubt that she would have approved.
On Thursday Cheril will pick me up in Manhattan and drive me out to Long Island, where she lives and works, to spend the long weekend celebrating a holiday that has come back to life for me. Among other things, we both love Christmas movies and plan to watch a stack of them, and she’s also promised to drive me around Long Island to look at Christmas lights, the gaudier the better. While we’ll be seeing her mother at some point in the day, we mainly plan to be together, reveling in the great good fortune that is ours. Cheril has a tree, but it is our mutual happiness that will be our shining star.
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Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Christmas” in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis. The song is by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and the orchestral arrangement is by Conrad Salinger:
Bing Crosby sings “Close as Pages in a Book,” by Dorothy Fields and Sigmund Romberg. This performance, arranged by John Scott Trotter, was recorded in 1945:
I have a million things to do in New York, and I’ll be more than ready to get back to my desk. I love my work—probably more than I should—and I love my friends with all my heart. I even love New York, though it took me long enough to admit it to myself. (I didn’t really make up my mind about New York until after 9/11.) It is the place of my real life, and increasingly of my memories as well. I won’t be surprised if I spend the rest of my days there, whereas it isn’t likely that I’ll ever again spend more than a week or two at a time in Smalltown. Yet this town, and this house, are what I think of when I think of home.
“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Lincoln Center Theater’s premiere production of Flying Over Sunset. Here’s an excerpt.
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I didn’t know what to make of LSD. It was illegal, of course, and Sgt. Joe Friday assured me on “Dragnet” that taking it was the first step down a short road to psychotic hippiedom. Yet the radio was simultaneously full of trippy hit singles like the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” and the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” that seductively begged to differ. Being the cautious type, I ended up steering clear of the stuff, but I wonder what I’d have done had I known that in 1958, a full decade before possession of LSD was criminalized in the U.S., Cary Grant took it every week under a psychiatrist’s care and thereafter swore by it, claiming that his hundred-odd trips effected a “beneficial cleansing” of his soul.
James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim’s longtime creative collaborator, took LSD frequently in his younger years, and now he has written the book of a new musical called “Flying Over Sunset” in which he portrays onstage the LSD-related experiences of Grant (played here by Tony Yazbeck), the novelist Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton) and the playwright-politician Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack), who all took acid trips around the same time. The heavily fictionalized conceit of the show, whose score is by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie, is that the members of this peculiarly sorted trio got to know one another by chance and took flight together under the guidance of Gerald Heard (Robert Sella), a wealthy scholar of Eastern religion who doubled as an ardent advocate for hallucinogenic drug use. While Mr. Lapine and Lincoln Center Theater, which is producing “Flying Over Sunset,” have struck it lucky—microdosing of LSD for therapeutic purposes is now in the news—this deliriously strange show would have been irresistibly watchable under any circumstances….
