All I Want for Christmas

All I want for Christmas is, what: intellectual justifications, emotional rationalizations, and the big box of all-purpose excuses?

Those would be good, but I want more, a lot more.
I know, I know, I want too much. But what’s wrong with that?
Maybe if they had waited until Christmas to announce that Bolton was going to resign, that Rumsfeld was headed out the door, and that Frist’s Presidential campaign was over before it had begun, I might have been satisfied.
You know how it is with your kids: if you open up any presents early, they’re still going to want the same amount of presents under the tree. You’re not going to be able to argue with them reasonably, because the great gift of childhood is the absence of reason, or logic, from every facet of their lives.
And, to be perfectly frank, that’s what I really want for Christmas: that feeling that anything is possible, no matter what.
I want it not to matter whether I’ve been good or bad.
I want it not to matter if I’ve been naughty or nice.
And so it doesn’t really matter what I get: I just want the gift of feeling that I can ask for anything.

Okay, so I accept that this sounds a bit pathetic, a bit too much like the guy who suddenly wakes up on his fortieth birthday and has an uncontrollable desire for a Porsche. But I swear it’s not like that.
Maybe it’s like that new fangled laughter therapy.
I personally don’t think much of a bunch of middle aged people getting together on the beach and pretending to laugh.
I look at those people and think, laugh now, but as soon as you get home from your Laughter Course, the phone is going to ring and it’s going to be the police saying that your kid’s been picked up for speeding and..
I don’t think you can fake laughter.
I don’t think you can fake tears.
But you have to start somewhere.
For adults it’s easy to get out of the habit of laughing or crying, or asking for things we can’t afford.
But I think there’s a point in just asking.
I believe there is a value in understanding and then openly expressing your desires.
There may be nothing worse than losing touch with what you really want. Because if you do, and suddenly someone or something reminds you what it is you really want – you’re going to be angry and looking for someone to blame.

So I am going to make a point this year of asking - out loud, for things I really want: whether there’s any chance they’ll be in my stocking Christmas morning.
Ready?
I want a Karmann Ghia.
I once heard someone call it, the ‘poor man’s Porsche’.
But it’s less than that.
The Karmann Ghia is a kind of automotive transvestite.
It’s a Volkswagen Beetle trapped in a sport’s cards body.
It’s a slow, unsophisticated antique of a car, but I’ve always loved the way it looks. I like cheap things that are well made. Like a toy ray gun that makes a cool whirring noise and lights up: the Karmann Ghia is the toy raygun of cars.
I want to go to India – for at least a month.
Yes, it’s a mess of a country, with hundreds of millions of desperately poor people, a history so rich it makes ours look like the footnotes on a baseball card, and beauty that I fully expect would overwhelm me.
But I like being overwhelmed.
I’d like to record a blues album. I say this to my friends, fairly regularly, and they don’t take me seriously. But I have a feel for the blues, a passable voice, and friends that are musically gifted.
Instead of blowing a few hundred dollars on a few hours of golf, let’s get some studio time instead.
Which reminds me: I’d like to take saxophone lessons.
I once sat outside the Baltimore Civic Center and realized that the screech of tires that I heard echoing through the concrete city plaza where we were recovering from the intensity of the concert that had just finished, sounded very much like the notes that saxophonist Wayne Shorter had voiced earlier that evening.
The saxophone, I thought at that moment, was the voice of the world: it could sound like a woman in love, a man pretending not to be afraid, a car rounding a corner, or a distant rain cloud perforated by lightning.
Oh, and I’ll need a saxophone too.
Time Travel.
I want to go back in time to several places where I was not able to say just what I wanted, or express myself with sufficient clarity at a critical time: the places where I disappointed myself.
On the afternoon a few days before Christmas in 1975 - for example, when my mother first became sick and, lacking the proper words, I instead made her a grilled peanut butter and banana sandwich that she promptly threw up;
On the day of my best friend Mike’s wedding when, as Best Man, I was supposed to say something meaningful;
In Chestnut Hill, when Mary and I first decided to get married and I just took it for granted we would.
I guess I am philosophical enough to accept that I was young and stupid – once, but I’d still like the ability to go back and, at the very least, apologize for my lack of eloquence.
It would be nice, too, to have a little shack out back, in the woods behind our house, where I could devote myself more seriously to asking for things.
I’d like to tell my friends Mike and Patty how much I love them,.
I’d like you to know how sweet my friends Dan and Sally are.
I’d like to be better father, a better husband, and have the time to hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.
Yeah, I know, I want a lot: but it feels good to want so much; it makes me feel like a kid, again.
Who could ask for anything more?