It's Christmas Eve, By God

Everyone loves a good story and the Jesus myth is one of the best. It deserves all those great hymns, choirs and carols. The sense of awe it creates has me thinking of my own tumultuous birth and the eleven days that shook the world. This is how the second greatest story ever told came to pass.

In the near spring of 1933 Peggy found herself in Los Angeles living with her uncle. She had been driven out here from Manhattan where she lived with another aunt. But why, I ask you, did destiny locate her in so propitious a place so far from home?  Early on a March morning she felt the earth move.  

As far as I know it never moved for Mary and Joseph. However buildings rumbled from Long Beach to Beverly Hills. It was the heralding of a momentous event. It was a 6.4. It was portentous. It was me……or rather I, being born. And grammatically correct as well.

Peggy was not yet twelve at the time; far too young to interpret the colossal significance of these Ides of March. Of course I have no pretense, no unearthly claims. I’m but an ordinary man with the milk of humble reduced fat 2% running, by the pint, in every vein. No haloes. No three wise men, except perhaps the Ink Spots singing a cappella with a messianic harmony.

Peggy returned to New York for the fall term. It would be years before the extraordinary conflation of events would become clear. Could it have been anything less than providential intervention which brought her to witness the quake that was my boisterous journey down the birth canal? Never mind that I was born in a manger-turned hospital in Queens, NYC.

Twenty-four years later we were brought together no less than six times under Peggy’s roof for a poetry group. I must have been a ghostly figure as yet not altogether materialized since she has no memory of my corporeal being. This only further demonstrates the mysterious ways of the Almighty.

Another twenty-three years would have to pass before we were brought together and in a church no less, albeit a godless Unitarian one. Shortly after, we were biblically joined. Need I say that windows broke in Pasadena and the Richter scale has never fully recovered?

Our union is no less holy than that other one of great repute, as are all such communions of love sanctified by devotion and daily renewal. We are all the stuff of legends and hallelujahs!