“It’s not mid-winter,” I said to Knox, the artist from upstairs, who’d insisted it was.
“It is,” he insisted, with icy adamance.
“Winter’s just a month old astronomically, ” I said. It’s just a month since the Solstice,” I said. “February, that’s mid-winter.”
“I don’t care what the stars say,” he said. “I’m feeling it here on earth.” But he seemed deflated by my failure to yield on the subject, and so, out of respect, I relented. “Maybe it’s mid-winter in our souls,” I said.
I had to admit, wherever we were in winter, it was feeling — bleak.
Knox was sitting over his Blushing Monk. “Have it your way, Wayland. But I’m feeling — bereft. Christmas came and went. I never got to sing my favorite carol — my MID-WINTER carol. Seriouis people sing it at Christmas, mid-winter or not.”
“So you’re going to sing it?”
“I absolutely am,” Knox said.
How about that! Knox was going to sing — and (a little late) sing a Christmas Carol. All I’d ever heard him sing was “Frosty The Snowman.”
A big bad storm was sweeping across the country. Deano, at the bar, was watching reports on The Weather Channel. It was coming our way. We’d all be isolated. The whole country would feel the sting and white blight of winter, even Dallas. Deano had gotten in extra provisions. There were exactly seven people at four tables, all strangers, none of the regulars, not even Sticky and the Crow. I guess they were somewhere getting ready for the big white freeze. Had the lights dimmed, or was it my imagination? It was quiet. That wasn’t my imagination.
I said to Knox, “you had plenty of time to sing your carol.”
“I’m going to sing it now,” he said. It was written by one of my favorite poets.”
“Who’s that?”
“The lovely, the magnificent Christina Rosetti.”
Christina Rosetti. A Victorian, a famous one, too. 1830 to 1894. Of course I’d read her in English class, not really paying much attention.
“How about that,” I said. And I was recalling that I’d once dated a girl, a very nice, smart girl, who loved the poetry of Christina Rosetti. She wasn’t destined to love me. She sort of gave up quickly on me because of my drinking. Too bad, because we could have read poetry to each other, and sung carols – at least while our time together lasted. At least for a little while. I didn’t feel like we were a forever-together couple. But — well, we were lifting each other up — for a while. As it was, we dated about a month.
“Where is she now?” said Knox, “this old girlfriend of yours?”
“She died,” I said.
Knox grew grim. “Sorry to hear that,” he said.
“It was a long time ago. I was waiting for a landlord to let me into a new apartment in Cambridge,” I said. I was sitting on a little wall, reading a copy of the Boston Globe I’d picked up on the way. I was paging through it, reading as I went, when I came upon the obituaries. And there, right in front of me, was her picture, and the obit telling me she’d gone off to be a college professor in Pennsylvania and died of cancer. She was still young. I hadn’t seen her in years.”
Knox sank, on my behalf, into a vicarious melancholy. Indeed, with that memory, I’d slid down in my chair as well. The memory had blown into the bar out of nowhere, through closed doors, along with the ghost of Christina Rosetti.
Knox, his cocktail of choice, Blushing Monk half gone in front of him (he drank one a day), said, “What’s this about your drinking? You don’t drink.”
“Once upon a time,” I said.
“Fairy Tales begin that way,” he said. “Once upon a time.”
“They don’t always end in Fairyland,” I said.
“Well, I’ve ended here,” he said. “My fairyland.”
I slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ve got miles to go before you sleep,” I said. I was paying tribute to another poem — about a dark, snowy night. “So go ahead. Sing your carol. We’ll have one for my old date, and old Christina, and maybe for the Ghost of Christmas Past —one month past.”
“Yeah, let’s here it, ” a guy chimed in from the next table, like another ghost. Seems like The Mile was full of ghosts that night.
And with that, Knox commenced singing,
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.
The place went silent, everybody listening. Deano turned down the TV.
Knox has a nice voice, actually. Everybody knew that from him singing “Frosty” at least once every December. He sang on.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow
Snow….. on snow
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
And so the song went. I’d heard it from choir lofts, never from a bearded soloist in a saloon. And it gets religious — it’s a carol, after all, not just a song about winter, like “Slay Ride” or “Jingle Bells” — or “Frosty.” . Odd and sweetly mysterious, hearing Knox siinging religious words, he being decidedly UN- religion. The verses took us through the cold mid-winter to Bethelehm , a month late for the birth….
Angels and Archangels…
May have gathered there, Knox sang.
Cherabim and Seraphim
Thronged in the air.
And it seemed, Cherabim and Seraphim flocked overhead in The Last Mile in a season we’d decided was mid-winter, whatever the calendar might say. Of course, that famous carol, for all who know it, went on for a few verses more. And so, Christmas had come back briefly and flashed again at The Last Mile, like a fluttering bulb on a snow-covered evergreen. The tree and Knox’s voice, and every vestage and reminder of The Birth vanished in the lingering dim light.
Cold and snow were coming.
The handful of patrons went back to their drinks, I to my cup of hot tea, thinking about that girl I’d known so briefly. Knox, very pensive now, back to his Blushing Monk with its Benedictine, lime and exotic what-not. He might have been thinking of the Maltese Hairdresser who sped in and out of his life.
It was night – in the bleak (almost) mid-winter, at The Last Mile.
Deano at the bar turned from the Weather Channel to the Bruins. They were beating the Vegas Golden Knights at The Garden.
Life went on –in a bleak, paralyzing mid-winter.
But I like to believe the angels lingered, with Ms. Rosetti and that red-headed brief acquaintance who, according to that old obituary, as I remember it, went on to do her doctoral thesis on, none other than the poet Christina Rosetti.
Listen to Gustav Holst’s arrangement of “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”:
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