Reflections of a stormy petrel

Nativity scene now complete, with Baby in crib and three kings. Sorry about the lighting, I don't have a camera flash.

EXCUSE ME, SIR - by Paul Greenberg

You can never tell when one of them might approach you. Sometimes you see them coming from afar off. Or they can suddenly materialize at your side. "Got a match?" "Sir, I'm stranded here and just need a few more dollars to get a bus to...." "Could you help a...."

The homeless, they're called now. Which only distances us from them further, putting them in a neat socio-economic category, reducing them to paperwork, field studies, articles in journals of sociology. ... When they actually approach, we may hurry on. Who's got the time? We have so much to do, especially four days before Christmas. When there is still so much to do, lists to check off, cards to address, packages to send....

It was a another December 21st more than 40 years ago now. Dec. 21, 1967. That's when they found him out by the railroad tracks that freezing morning.

Unbidden, untended, unnoticed, he lay there. Who knows how long? He'd come at a most inconvenient time -- just four days before all Christendom celebrates the birth of Him who said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me."

But what would have been a convenient time? He would have been a bother any day. Just another bum down on his luck, riding the rails, and sick at that. He was heading West, but Pine Bluff, Ark., would prove the end of the line.

He wasn't sick enough for the hospital to take him in, but he was too sick for the Salvation Army to accept him. So, all through the short, waning hours of that December 21st, the shortest day and longest night of the year, he was trundled back and forth, from one station of his cross to the next. Until by nightfall, there was no place for him but the county jail. Not because he belonged there, God knows, but because he didn't belong anywhere else.

And night fell.

That cell would be the last place he would know in this life. He would die there unattended, in the darkness, some time during the long night. As alone as any of us in the end. When they found him, they shipped out the body, no questions asked, before an autopsy could be performed. And he was gone, as silent as he had arrived.

That might have been the end of it.

But the newspaper got wind of the story. It took a while for a dogged reporter to confirm the basic facts, and even longer to ferret out the details.

In the end, more would be known about how he had died, hour by hour, than how he had lived, year after unrecorded year. For his was an unimportant life by the world's spotty reckoning -- a forgotten grayness punctuated here and there by a vague brush with the law, the traces of a family, an illness no one ever quite diagnosed ... all the ordinary desperations of such a life. Or rather existence.

It took the longest time just to discover his name: Joe Telles, as in Tell Us.

It was as if the only mission he'd ever completed had been reserved for that last, mercifully shortest day of the year. He had passed through like a messenger unheeded, yet every December 21st I think of him.

Strange how things work out. And how you never know, really, why you should be in a certain place at a certain time. There are no coincidences, a rabbi once told me. Maybe I'm not here to think Deep Thoughts and write about Big Issues and New Paradigms and The Next Big Thing. Maybe I was just meant to say kaddish for Joe Telles every December 21st.

What a strange gift Joe Telles was -- unrecognized, even rejected and resented. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.

One year a local businessman stopped by the newspaper office with an impressive list of complaints about the paper's editorial positions -- political, economic, aesthetic, miscellaneous, you-name-it. ... Oh, and one more thing: He was sick and tired of having to read every year about that bum they found out by the railroad tracks. Why couldn't I write about something positive for a change?

And, no, he couldn't recall the guy's name.

I should add that the caller was a friend, charitable in all outward respects -- and always a good man of business, as Scrooge told Marley's heavy-laden ghost. He just couldn't see some things.

The light shined in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

Yet the darkness still has not overwhelmed the light, even so many years later. It happens every December 21st, four days before Christmas: Joe Telles arrives again in my mind.

He's sick unto death, at the end of his rope, one of the poor in spirit. I was blind when he came so many years ago, but now I see. And for one rare, blessed moment realize what really matters. Amazing grace.

'Tis the season. We seek the Star, and may not perceive the light of every day, or hear that lonesome whistle, and see our brother approaching.

I had a relaxing day, exactly as I wanted it, though with less things getting done than I wished. One silly individual picked Christmas day to criticize me for calling Philip Pullman a hater of Christianity - which is not unlike criticizing someone for saying that basketball players are tall. Well, never mind. Other than that, I had the quiet, relaxing day I wanted.

Now there is something I want to say. I already said in an e-mail, but I don't have the e-mail addresses of every one of you. I just want to say that the best of many good things the Internet has done for me is to allow me to know so many good, and interesting, and precious people. Even the ones I had fights with. Thank God for making each and every one of you, and thank you all for what you add to my life. It may be an obvious thing to say, but it does not stop being true for all that.

Having come back from shopping with a strong feeling that Xmas muzak ought to be made a crime, I want to get a little of my own back. Hence I invite all my friends and readers to mention the worst song they can think of - one or many, as many as you like - and a description of what the sentence on the criminals who wrote and/or performed it should be. Then copy this meme and post it on your own LJ.

I'll start:
Santa baby. Its authors and everyone who is so base of soul as to perform it should be forced to wear titanium steel chastity belts for the rest of their natural lives.
Wonderful Christmas time. Sir Paul McCartney should be forbidden from ever publishing any song again until, in the opinion of a jury of 200 music lovers chosen at random, he has produced at least two songs of the quality of Hey Jude or Fool on the Hill.