December 13, 2013
This afternoon I sent out a dozen Christmas cards to France, to those who welcomed me in the village of Caunes-Minervois this summer.
I took pleasure in sending out the cards, choosing a particular card for each of my new acquaintances, hoping to lend a more personal touch to the mailing than sending the same to all.
Yet even as I was writing the cards, I was dreading having to send the remaining cards on my list. There is no season like Christmas for bringing feelings of obligation to the fore.
I have one friend overseas who always sends me the same card, a standard, rather pedestrian card from her law firm, postage paid for, no doubt, by the firm. (I send her her card not to her office, but to her home on my own dime.)
Former colleagues of my late husband send me cards in his memory, which I appreciate. The trust and estate bar of which he was a part is a close-knit community, and those practitioners who Bill dealt with were really friends, not just professional associates. They know the ways and days of families and are united by an esprit de corps based not on how much money they make (which is a fraction of their corporate colleagues), but how well they serve their clients. A good trust and estate lawyer is discreet in soliciting his clients' confidences, silent as the tomb in keeping them and sharp in his perception and protection of his clients' interests. It is the interaction with clients who have inherited or achieved material success and make contributions of their wealth to their communities that makes the work interesting and fulfilling to practitioners. Every one of the lawyers and private bankers I am thinking of feels proud of the contribution to society their work establishing charitable foundations, helping parents teach their children about the responsibilities of money, and protecting future generations provides. They are honorable men and women.
All of these send out at least a few hundred cards every holiday season. The idea of it befogs my consciousness. No one thinks anyone with a holiday card list of a few hundred sends the cards out expecting anyone to think an intimate exchange is intended. It is a form of marketing; at a minimum, of keeping in the good graces of someone who may, in the future, require the services of the sender of the card, or may refer someone. So my sentimentality about the cards sent by Bill's former colleagues is perhaps misplaced.
What if, however, the same card on the list of five hundred recipients is sent to me, not because I am going to ever need the services of one of Bill's former colleagues, but "for old time's sake"?
As we grow older and start to lose people we grew up with, went to school with, worked with amicably for a happy term, that connection can be taken less and less for granted. I am more and more aware that my perspective on the world is the product of the generation I was born into, the place I was raised, the places I went to school and worked. I long more and more to encounter new people as bright, as optimistic, as funny, and as willing to work hard to achieve a result as those who were my cohorts and classmates. Yet I find few outside my small milieu: Is the pool of them dying out, eclipsed by a new set of values with little resemblance to my own? Or were they always rare?
I am fond of recollecting the St. Crispin's Day speech of young King Henry V in the eponymous play. It speaks of "we happy few", those the young prince Hal, now become King Henry, exhorts to give their all, that they might be able to look back and recognize the specialness of that "band of brothers" who fought together on the fateful day. Stendahl used "to the happy few" as the epigraph closing his novel, "The Charterhouse of Parma". There I first encountered the phrase and took it for a signpost about what relationships among friends are meant to be.
For all that we allow ourselves at Christmas, the Christmas joy often misplaced is to give vent to our feelings of association with those we bonded with long ago. I've been struck by the outpouring of grief that Peter Kaplan's death has given rise to since it was announced the day after Thanksgiving. Kaplan, who edited The New York Observer for fifteen years, and in so doing, taught a generation of journalists how to write a news story with verve and finesse, was widely beloved and admired. In the very cynical profession of journalism in a very cynical town, New York, that is extraordinary. Yet Kaplan never ascended to the heights of the profession, preferring instead to edit a small paper, mentor writers and raise a family in Larchmont, in New York's northern suburbs.
"Life is all about relationships, nothing else", another editor and writer, Jon Messmann, a friend, told me once. Jon was, by turns, a violinist, a cartoonist, an editor of Paulist pamphlets on the Catholic faith, and the country's biggest selling writer of adult westerns. ("Stories where the cowboy does more than kiss his horse", he used to say.) Most of us won't be famous, won't be recognized, won't be rich or celebrated --although those of you reading this probably feel deep inside that you work hard, abide by the law and live honorably --and wouldn't it be nice if someone noticed?
At Christmas, we all need to give ourselves --and each other-- a break. Write that card, make that phone call --we're all we have. --And that's more than enough, because in doing so, we recognize ourselves in each other, acknowledging our connection --whether it grew out of sharing an office or sitting next to each other the first year of law school. The exterior world may change before our eyes, but our internal world will remain constant so long as we remember how vital our relationships are and take the time to honor them.
And that's not sentimental nonsense. Whatever the materialists say, for a good many of us those connections born in the classroom or the workplace are capable of spiritual dimension. It's not publicly articulated (to do so would be mawkish), but gestures of friendship feed our need to affiliate. "Yes" (to return to the topic of Christmas cards), I'm sent the card because I'm on a list that dates back to when Bill was a fellow practitioner; but the sender remembers when he and Bill were in law school together, just starting out, with no sense of how their lives would turn out. "We didn't do too badly", the man, now managing partner of a major firm, said to me not too long ago, remembering Bill.
And he said it with a sense of shared pride, this sharp as a whip New York lawyer who sends me one of his five hundred holiday cards every year.
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