Fair usage (one hopes) GR Xmas snippets

[Michael Bailey]

Merry Christmas, one and all! May your Yuletides be gay!


https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/woya5gx6rcl95rpmgniyd/IMG_1982.MOV?rlkey=5ocuvrzy23y44tlaev4f7dcev&dl=0

(Yes there’s a gap in the smile…dental work on deck (-; frickin' Razor
scooter faceplant)


 Jessica said, “Oh, I remember . . .” but didn’t go on. She was remembering
other Advents....

Roger pulled over, and they watched the scuffed and dun military going in
to evensong. The wind smelled of fresh snow. “We ought to be home,” she
said, after a bit, “it’s late.” “We could just pop in here for a moment.”
Well, that surprised her, but def....

. . . . They walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she
gravely on his arm, wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once on
ice. “To hear the music,”
he explained.


                               With the high voice of the black man riding
above the others, no head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest
breast, a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding up to this
range . . .

. . . . So the pure counter-tenor voice was soaring, finding its way in to
buoy Jessica’s heart and even Roger’s she guessed, risking glances at his
face sideways and up through brown ghosts of her hair, during recitatives
or releases. He wasn’t looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so....

….
It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel
singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not
spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There
must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as
long as there have been nights bad as this one—something to raise the
possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows,
light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between
our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the
one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you
saw, almost too frail,


…
for a baby to come in tippin’ those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin’
he’s gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined. . . . But on
the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just
held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your
shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him.
For the moment not caring who you’re supposed to be registered as.

For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.   O Jesu
parvule, Nach dir ist mir so weh . . .   So this pickup group...

 …men who don’t remember you either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a
little sleep, not out here performing for strangers, give you this
evensong, climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale,
voices overlapping three- and fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire
hollow of the church—no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom,
not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us,
our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outward—praise be to
God!—for you to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across
the snow’s footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create
by yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas
you have crossed, the way home.