1st Moanin' of Christmas

December 23, 2013

Greetings from the greeting,

The room was technically a rectangle, but it had been so long since anyone had seen the original shape it was unlikely a visitor would be able to testify to that fact.  The walls were crowded with tables, old desks, and piles of papers, magazines, and old drawings.  The open space where the two men worked was an approximate triangle carved in the flotsam. 

Two desk lamps lit the center of the room, green glass shades over mismatched bulbs, spilling two ovals of yellow-white light on the desktops.  Dust motes floated aimlessly into the light.  Plates with scraps of lunch, from today and other lunches, crowded the workspace.  The two men sat facing each other, or would have been if they had looked up.  Both held their heads in their hands, as if they shared the same migraine.

They had worked across the desk from each other for almost fifty years.  They had both joined the company when LBJ was president, started as apprentices, worked for peanuts, held on until someone saw what they could do.  They were partners from the first words they wrote on paper.  Hank and Chet.

Hank and Chet.  It was a brand now; all of their cards had the names embossed on the back, along with the prices in U.S. and Canadian currency.  Hank and Chet.  They didn’t even use their last names on the paychecks anymore.

Five decades of writing greeting cards.  Funny, inspirational, silly, serious.  Holidays, birthdays, occasions or no occasions.  Belated thank you, humorous graduation, romantic New Year, condolences for loss of pet, congratulations on legalization of same sex marriage.  They filled in the blanks for tongue tied teenagers and husbands who forgot how to say, and grateful parents and proud stepmothers, absent friends.  

 They wrote like it was the most natural thing they could do and it always seemed to work out.  They had been stuck before, and one or the other would break the logjam and the ideas would roll out and they would scribble and draw until they left exhausted.  And they would produce cards.  Good ones.

But not now.  They had been staring at blank paper for a solid week, both of them filling whole wastebaskets with ideas; some were bad and the rest were worse.

“Lissen lissen..” Chet said, snapping his fingers to get his partner to look up, “this is it: ‘Making Holiday Memories are like lighting candles, … they make the moments brighter.’  Close up of a candle, real kinda frosted lens shot.”

“It’s too cliché,” sighed Hank.

“Really?  You’re worried about cliché?  You just threw away your best offer: ‘Hope you’re squeezin throughout the season’.  Jee-Zuss.  I’m gagging.”

“The couple hugging on the cover was the key.” said Hank, clasping his own shoulders to demonstrate an embrace.

Chet said nothing.  He pinched his nose, like he smelled something sour. 

Hank scribbled a drawing in front of him: “How about on the cover we have, like, a serious looking pig, and inside ‘We wish you a very muddy Christmas’. 

“I don’t get it.”

“Seriously?  Come on, you get it, don’t be obtuse.”

“Pigs and Christmas.  Really?  I don’t get PIGS.  Not at Christmas.”  Chet scowled, his eyebrows dueling under a new layer of wrinkles.

“Then you come up with something.”

“Psssh.” Chet flipped his hands out in dismissal. “I can’t work with you.”

The clock on the wall was given to them by the department director, long since passed away, when they won the ‘LOUIE’ award in 1987.  There was a small brass plate on the base of the clock.  A testimony to brevity, driven largely by their boss’s indifference and the engraver’s charge per letter, it said: ‘To Hank & Bob. Congts’.  After that, Hank called Chet ‘Bob’ and it was a funny for about ten years, and then not so much. 

The clock snicked quietly, pushed the arms around the face until it said nine-fifteen.  They had been sitting at the desk for twelve hours.

“Here,” said Hank. “The cover says ‘You might want to reconsider your naughty..’”

“This is a stick figure!” Chet snapped. “This is what we get?  I could get my four year old grandson to…”

“It’s Santa. Here, I’ll add a beard.” Hank reached for the page.  Chet snatched it up.

“Don’t bother, it’s ridiculous.  Let’s go back to the nativity theme.”

“No, it’s overdone.  No one is going to reach for another red flocked card with a star on it.  We gotta update.  I tole you.” Hank raised his hands over his head.

“And I’m telling you, we are not going to put the word ‘twerking’ in a Christmas card.”  He wadded the page up angrily and threw it across the desks.

“Fah la. La. La. La. Whatever.”  Hank folded his arms and lowered his chin to sulk.

The radiators clunked, moaning uselessly behind the piles of paper near the wall.  The room was usually too warm, even with the mounds of cardboard insulation between the hot water heat and where the men sat.  The room aged; an oval inside a triangle inside a rectangle.  Outside the windows, snow began to cover the sills. 

Chet sagged in his chair.  “Seriously Hank, I am not enjoying this.  I gotta get out of this business.  It’s sucking the life out of me.  I can’t even enjoy the holidays anymore.”

“Again with this,” Hank said, throwing his hands up.  “What are you going to do?  Start over?  ‘Welcome to Walmart?’  That’s not a career for us Chet.”

“US? Who asked you?” Chet sputtered, “Stay here, on another Christmas eve, working on some card nobody is going to remember in a week.”

The two men sat staring at one another.  Fifty years of creative juices, deadlines, dead ends, and arguments and sweating out inspirational messages for people who would never think twice about throwing their work into the trash.  And for fifty years, they did it anyway.  Across the desk, thinning hair, shoulders sloped, thin arms jutting from rolled up sleeves, crepey skin stretched over brittle bones, Hank and Chet, slightly mismatched bookends, waited each other out.

 “You gotta stick it out with me Bob,”  Hank said finally. 

Chet snorted a little and held back a smile.  He lowered his gaze to the desk and folded his gnarled hands together as if he were praying for something to change. 

The room was quiet, only the sound of Chet’s breathing, a little whistling sound from his nose.  Hank waited.  Chet did not look up.  Hank pulled a sheet of paper in front of him, sketched out something freehand and etched a caption under it.  He slid it at Chet.

“Read it.” 

Chet spun the paper around. A simple line drawing of a box with a single bow. 

“Read it out loud.  Like you’re at the drugstore picking it for somebody.” said Hank.

Chet pushed his glasses up so he could rub his eyes and then focused on the paper.

“Your friendship has been the most important gift I’ve known. I enjoy opening it every day.  Merry Christmas.”

The page drifted from his hand and settled in front of him.  The two men looked at each other across the chaotic desks, and felt the years melt away, felt the aches fade and the worries dwindle.  The room closed around them, and the piles of paper disappeared; their world shrank

down to a spill of oval light on the stained oak in front of them.  They exchanged smiles and said nothing. 

Hope this finds you gifted,

David

Copyright © 2013 David Smith