All the Little Children

Night in the Canyon. A chill settles over the Santa Monica Mountains and the sounds around my house assume a clarity of pitch unmuted by heat or heavy clouds. Even the bark of the dog takes on an operatic tone.

I write from a room that looks over a rolling vista of oak trees and ridgelines. The lights of homes speckle the dark slopes like stars scattered on the hillsides.

Immediately outside my window, our cat sits on a deck railing and stares in at me. I stare back. For long moments, our gazes lock. When my daughter was little, she called it a stare-down.

We’d sit in the living room and stare at each other with the intensity of Rasputin. Invariably, I’d blink first. “Ah-ha,” she’d say triumphantly, “Magic Eyes wins again!” Magic Eyes is 32 now. We don’t play that game anymore.

“What are you doing?” My wife looks in the door. She’s been in the other room wrapping presents. Red ribbons are draped over one arm.

A memory flashes by. Christmas, 1952. A young Marine dying on a hillside in Korea. His eyes fill with anguish then go blank. Blood trails off like red ribbons in the snow . ...

“Hey,” my wife says again, “I asked what you were doing?”

“Trying to write a Christmas column,” I say.

“You were staring at the cat. Do you draw mystic energy from the cat?”

“The cat supplies the adjectives. Words like ‘thrilling’ and ‘amazing.’ ”

She smiles, shakes her head and returns to her wrapping. I look back at the window. The cat is gone.

I’m taking next week off and this is both a Christmas and a New Year’s column. I ought to be able to say something significant. It is, after all, the end of a decade.

I’ve thought of all the usual things. The Great Events of the ‘80s. The Great Hope for the ‘90s. New Life for Eastern Europe. New Despair for Latin America. The Old L.A. The New L.A.

I look out the window. The cat is back, staring. I ignore him. Cats are like columnists. They can’t stand being ignored.

“Say something nice about Christmas,” my wife calls from the other room.

“If the ice will bear a man before Christmas,” I call back, “it will not bear a goose after.”

It’s a 19th Century weather proverb I got from a logger in Eureka. We have no idea what it means.

“If the beard were all,” she calls back, “the goat would preach.”

I couldn’t outstare my daughter and I can’t outwit my wife. I look to the window. The cat is gone again.

Say something nice about Christmas.

I think about that. A colleague named Dave Freed gave $40 to a man near an automated bank teller. The guy had a story that would make a serial killer cry. Dave’s a tough reporter but an easy touch.

“I gave him my card and he promised to pay me back,” Freed says. “Now I know I’ll never see the 40 bucks. It was a scam. Why did I do that?”

Dave cursed but his wife stayed calm. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t get the money back,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

The $40 was meant for dinner that night at a restaurant. They ate at home instead.

I turn my chair to face the door. I can see my own wife wrapping presents in the other room. She loves Christmas. She loves giving. “Money isn’t spent when it buys for someone else,” she says when I whine about bills.

Women are different. They think in visionary terms. There is a higher logic to a woman’s conclusion.

“Let’s compromise,” I say. “Rather than giving, let’s sell at a discount.”

She sees me watching from my writing room.

“Just one nice word about Christmas,” she calls. “You can do it, Martinez.”

I turn back to my desk. I have a stuffed piranha on a shelf above my word processor. The mouth is open and the lower jaw juts forward in a sinister smile. The teeth are like needles.

I am smiling back at the piranha when there’s a knock on the door. Children gather on our porch and sing Christmas carols that float like dreams on the first night of winter.

I return to my room, filled with the voices of children. The cat is back, asleep on the railing. My wish for Christmas. May your cat sleep peacefully and your piranha keep smiling.

And all your winter dreams come true.