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Saturday, December 25, 2010
Hope Is What Drives December Dreams
By Andy Tiemann
Albuquerque freelance writer
When I was in college, I had the chance to meet the playwright Sam Shepard and ask him a question. "Do you try to give your characters hope?" I wondered.
Mr. Shepard looked at me as if I had just shot his dog. "Hope...what good is hope? Courage!"
I felt a bit humiliated at the time, but later, from a literary standpoint, I understood his reasoning.
Plays such as "The Glass Menagerie" and "The Iceman Cometh" have done people a favor by showing us how hope can become an alluring yet debilitating narcotic. It often convinces us that "All things come to those who wait."
So we wait and wait and wait for the mountain to come to Mohammed and of course it never does. Nor does Mr. or Ms. Right ever descend from the heavens.
Meanwhile, the keyboard and the power saw and the canvas and the night school brochure gather more and more dust each year, and we gather dust as well, until, if we're lucky, we come to our senses, summon up courage from God knows where, and venture into the unknown.
Yes, indeed, courage is the quintessential elixir and Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa wouldn't exist without it. And yet, these holidays fuel the hopes of December and the hopes of December fuel us.
Often, we experience the hopes of December through music.
Few among us can stand cold against the lyric "I'll be home for Christmas — if only in my dreams." The words apply perhaps most directly to soldiers and inmates, but also to people who are no longer on speaking terms with friends, relatives and spouses that they continue to pray for.
Whenever I listen to hopeful music, I'm reminded of the year I spent with Up With People. The tour climaxed with a visit to Argentina, during the South American winter of 1979, when the country was under military rule.
On a bitterly cold night, we sang to a packed house in Buenos Aires and ended the show with the song "What color is God's skin?"
As we sang the words "Everyone's the same in the good Lord's sight," the audience rose and cheered.
After the show, many in the crowd waited patiently in line so they could kiss us on both cheeks.
I'm sure that, at the end of 1979, the people of Argentina hoped in unison for a government that was worthy of their dignity.
I'm also sure that, had Sam Shepard been in that audience and seen those magnificent faces, he might have given me a very different answer when we met a year later.
He might have even admitted, albeit grudgingly, that hope, warts and all, is frequently the father of courage and that, during the holidays, he's quite adept at taking our breath away.
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