New Year's Day 1968: A Quiet but Invincible Optimism

1 January 1968

I suppose I am risking snow blindness in looking out our glass doors onto the snow covered hill behind our house, but I am in a mood which I like to think of as a reverie, and so I stare out. What I see is not much besides the blinding whiteness: the deep blue of a noontime sky; shadowy geometries cast on the snow by the children's "swing set"; the observation platform, ladder, and fringed canopy that are a part of the swing set itself. A static scene, except for the movement of two thin icicles swinging from the canopy, reminding me of the tinsel "rain" on the Christmas tree. A moment ago, a dried oak leaf glided erratically over the snow crest looking like a frail piece of abstract sculpture foraging for a meaning, then it passed beyond sight.

Except for the cold and wind, I should enjoy planting the Christmas tree today. The sun and sky seem to have touched me with a quiet but invincible optimism: despite having been uprooted a week before Christmas and kept until a week after Christmas in a warm house, somehow it will survive the shock of having been replanted (in a new location) this 15-degree day. And I know that, despite the cold, I will get the tree planted today. This is what I mean by invincible optimism. In other years I should have left the tree in the garage for a day or so -- letting the tree get accustomed to the cold, I would tell the world -- before planting it. Today I don't feel the need for any such evasion: I shall go out there within the hour, not joyfully, perhaps, but but at least without hesitation. A third tree shall commemorate a "live tree" Christmas at this house. Some day, I suppose, our custom must come to a stop; we shall run out of space. But today is a day to dwell only on infinite possibilities.

The snow on the back hill is as new and unmarked as the year. It is a part of this optimism I feel that the year, like the hill, will be marked most conspicuously by footsteps taken in pursuit of the pleasures of human society. Half a day old, at the moment, the year is like a blank slate -- or rather, like an untracked hillside. Each will eventually be erased -- the one by time, the other by time's vicar the sun, and each will have been touched and marked by signs of quest, play, duty, or futility. But surely those ventures of compassionate and hungry human associations will leave marks upon the snows of the year that even the most intensive cross-trackings can never quite efface. Events of the past year have shown this to be a sound expectation.

Faith, Hope, and Charity

Her name was Hope. Fortunately, no one at that time saw the irony of her name. No one, that is, except her mother. The elder woman had a saying she used often: "Where there's strife, there's Hope -- right in the middle of it!" She'd begin with a despairing here-we-go-again note, but end with a motherly smile so that everybody got the joke. Her daughter, after all, was twenty-four, and it was too late now to do much about her proneness for catastrophic involvement. (Once again, Hope had become entangled in someone else's personal problems. This time it was Halcyon Somerset, a somewhat fluttery friend of twenty-two, whose stormy engagement to Buster Bragdon was nearing the breaking point.) In fact, it was likely to be atomized at any moment. The Gaines family was sweating out another of Hope's vicarious crises.

If Hope had a talent -- a theory no one seemed eager to defend -- it was her apparent knack of innocently precipitating a disaster while in the act of averting another, or of simply making a fouled-up situation worse by maladroitly rendering the assistance she was asked for. On occasions of relatively minor cheerlessness, Hope might be simply the bearer of dire report -- someone's house burglarized, auto stolen, or pet animal killed. But when trouble's gravitational pull was stronger, and if the fates were working in diabolical connivance with misfortune, Hope might find herself directly caught up in the event as a sort of secondary victim. How soon, and to what extent, Halcyon Somerset's troubles would become Hope Gaines's troubles, no one could at the moment predict.