December 12, 2008
Friday

“It’s queer,” she said; “I see the light
As plain as I beheld it then,
All silver-like and calm and bright-
We’ve not had stars like that again!”
              — Dorothy Parker, 1893-1967
                  American poet, fiction writer, and critic
                  from “The Maid-Servant at the Inn” 1927

I carry a lot of stuff in my head — remembered images, due dates for bills, the ongoing plot complications of Prison Break, a developing strategy for untangling an insurance snafu, and the requirements of the new (ha!) Weight Watchers program (count your lean protein now, and keep a graph of your hunger levels). I carry ideas for stories, lines of other people’s poetry, concern for a friend’s potential health problems, and regret that Sam on ER broke up with Tony last night. (Hey! Luka and Abby got back together, and Carol and Doug. There’s hope!) It’s a jumble in there, I could say of my brain.

In looking for Carl Sandburg’s poem yesterday I tried to remember some word or phrase that, coupled with “Sandburg,” would pop it up in the top  tier of a Google search. I knew there was “star,” and “silver,” but I also included “maid” and “inn,” because I conflated the Sandburg piece with the Dorothy Parker piece I quote today, and that came up first.

“The Maid-Servant at the Inn” is another old favorite that I’ve known for a long time. Like Amahl and the Night Visitors and The Little Drummer Boy and countless Sunday School pageants with grumpy innkeepers, it imagines a character into the Christmas story. In this case it’s a maid-servant who recalls a night long ago when a girl younger than herself gave birth in the dark and drafty barn that has since been torn down. “I never saw a sweeter child –/The little one, the darling one! –” The text suggests that this maid-servant assisted at the birth and helped to comfort the young mother, admiring the baby (“. . . when he smiled/you’d know he was his mother’s son”). 

It’s a tender and haunting poem, and though I remembered the content pretty well I had utterly forgotten it was by Dorothy Parker. Most biographical sketches will emphasize her caustic wit, her sharp tongue, her ability to skewer the pretensions of the society of her day. She had an unhappy childhood, thought herself unattractive, had three unhappy marriages (two to the same man), attempted suicide several times (once following an illegal abortion) and abused alcohol regularly. I have sometimes seen something of myself in her — the insecure woman who covers her fear that she is not good enough with sarcasm and demonstrations of intellectual superiority.

Parker was ambivalent about her Jewish heritage (she hated her father, whom she remembered as physically and emotionally abusive) and was expelled from the Catholic convent school her Protestant stepmother sent her to after referring to the virgin birth as “spontaneous combustion.” There is very little sentimentality in her work. That Parker could create a character as sensitive as the maid-servant is possibly a testament to her talent, but it also could show us a gentle and compassionate side that was perhaps her true self but that she sought to protect by muffling it with cynicism and numbing it with booze.

The poem ends with a quatrain tailor-made for illustrating dramatic irony:

“It’s queer that I should see them so-
The time they came to Bethlehem
Was more than thirty years ago;
I’ve prayed that all is well with them”

This is a season for remembering people who have passed through our lives,some of whom continue as friends and acquaintances,some of whom would never guess that we would think about them. I was a teacher for thirty years so I have maybe more than the usual quota of people with whom I interacted daily, and who then left without a word of farewell or lingered for a while and then gradually faded into that third tier of memory where it takes a snippet of a song on the radio or a mention of their name by somebody else to bring them freshly to mind.

I pray that all is well with them.

 *********

A year ago, I listed the things I’d learned in twenty-nine days in Wyoming.

Two years ago, I explained why there is a figure of Alf in our crèche.

Three years ago, I did not post on this date.

Four years ago, I wrote about seeing Amahl and the Night Visitors through the mother’s eyes instead of Amahl’s.

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