systems we used to put out our product.
We were an odd pair; me from Tennessee, a little town called Harriman, just off I-40. My family, for a couple of generations, worked at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility. I used to hear my grandfathers on both sides of the family joke about what they called the flashlight benefit—that is, they never need to buy flashlights because they all glowed in the dark. The joke lost its punch as one family member after another died of cancer.
Jill came from the Dells area in Wisconsin; her family had made its money catering to tourists. Her mom ran the miniature golf park and her dad ran a fleet of “ducks,” those odd amphibious military vehicles that looked like tanks but could navigate through water as well. Great for a quick survey of the scenery.
Besides being “duck” runners, Jill’s family was Catholic. Nothing wrong with that, but my family had embraced homespun Methodism for several generations, very revival come-to-Jesus oriented. And even though I thought I had moved beyond that type of parochial religion to something broader (I was studying Augustine, after all), I still couldn’t quite swallow the crazy-for-the-saints attitude of her family.
They lived on a hundred acres. I swear, there were more shrines per acre there than any place in Europe during the Middle Ages, that’d be my guess. The substantial money they made went to building little chapels all over their property. Each one was a work of quality, beautifully appointed inside and out, enough room for five or six adults to fit comfortably inside. Each chapel had a kneeler, a place to light candles, and quite good statuettes of the various saints. They had a fortune in shrines.
Jill’s mom, after she retired, held nun day on Mondays and Thursdays, when she’d bring out a cohort of sisters from the local convent and they’d do the chapels, praying the rosary, lighting the candles. That tells you how many of those things they had—it took two full days of hard praying to do all of them, and Jill’s mom thought it a shame to let such nice chapels go for more than a week without being used.
Which is to say, a boy who grew up thinking that all you needed was a heart strangely warmed, as that Methodist saint John Wesley preached, probably shouldn’t count on fitting into that type of religious world.
Jill no longer felt comfortable with her family’s take on true salvation either, and so we were not married in the Church; of course, that meant we were not married at all, in the eyes of Jill’s parents. I was the son of a bitch who caused their daughter to live in mortal sin, so I never made it too high on the “son-in-law’s we’re glad to have” list.
Of course, Jill may have been a bit of a lapsed Catholic, but that didn’t mean she’d put up with some Protestant parading around in a robe doing her wedding. She was still Catholic enough to think that, if it was going to be a religious service, it should be performed by someone ordained properly; that is, by a bishop who stood within the line of apostolic succession. So, my family got rubbed the wrong way as well, because I was the miracle child, the only one born to a couple who were never supposed to have children. “Are you going to deny your mother the opportunity to see her only child properly, reverently, and respectably married?” My mother did, in fact, talk like that. Few people in Harriman did, but she taught English at the high school, and sometimes her words came out sounding like a textbook.
Jill and I eloped and essentially created a situation where no one, on either side of the family, liked either of us very much, though they still loved us because their religion said they had to, no matter the terrible thing we had done to them. I know this to be the case because they told us.
Everyone should have a happy wedding, but because we carried the expectations of both our families on our shoulders the weight of guilt took the shine off the day a little. We were happy, but maybe not as joyful as we could have been. I tried to ease the tension with a joke. “Why was the boy melon sad?”
Her eyes rolled. “Not a down-home attempt at humor,” she muttered.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Why was the boy melon sad?”
She gave in. “Why?” she asked impatiently, expecting not to laugh. That’s always bad when you’re trying to tell a joke.
“Because his girlfriend said, ‘I can’t elope.’” I waited for a laugh; I thought, since it was our wedding day, she’d indulge me with a pity laugh at least. Nothing.
I tried too hard. “Get it? Can’t elope. Melons. Canteloupe.” I gave her a big grin. She returned a blank look.
I moved on with what I considered to be a better joke.
“What did the French chef say to his pretty assistant?” I asked, a bit too expectantly, given her previous reaction.
She simply arched an eyebrow.
“How about a little quiche, baby?”
With puppy dog eyes, I looked toward her, yearning for approval. The silence made me think perhaps she had not gotten the joke.
“Quiche. Kiss. Get it? They sound a little alike.”
She sighed and gave me a pity smile.
Seven years later we went our separate ways. Well, she went her separate way. I stayed pretty much where I was.
Of course, that’s because where I was meant a nice penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, just up from the Museum of Science and Industry on Lake Shore Drive. My books had made me a fairly well-to-do person; though I was an enigma in Hyde Park. Grey matter practically boiled out of the heads of all the professors, students, and ex-students associated with the University. I had been part of that world. But now I was a hanger on, and a bad one at that, because of my gift book writing. The intellectuals scorned me; others envied me. I should have moved, but I couldn’t. Jill said that was what was wrong—I was stuck, and it didn’t have to do just with physical location.
She left, letting me know that emotionally, mentally, artistically (though she said that with a bit of irony, I think), spiritually, and in every other way I was stunted. A scrub tree in the great forest of life. I wanted to be more; she said I was too comfortable to be more. Maybe she was right.
So there I sat, trying to put the final couple of pages together for my book, 101 Good Things about Labor Day. Six years before, I had a cute idea: 101 Good Things about Christmas. Even Jill thought it was cute. Though no graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, my drawing had a wispish quality to it that drew people’s attention to it for a few seconds before they moved on. But, turns out, that sort of time span makes for great commercial property. A few seconds is all most folks are willing to give to a drawing.
For fun, saying it’d make us rich, I’d thrown the first book together. Full of sweet little nothings, Christmas confections, for the Christmas consumer. Every page started the same: “One good thing about Christmas is . . .” The sayings were centered on the page, surrounded by a border that illustrated the words. “One good thing about Christmas is, if you decorate the old-fashioned way with popcorn and candy canes, you can eat the decorations.” Trees marched around the edges of the page, all done up in little candy canes and strings of popcorn. The book had 101 pages of that kind of stuff, each page devoted to one saying.
There are nine million copies in print now.
So the “101 industry,” as I started calling it, began. We did the major holidays—Thanksgiving, Easter, etc. Then we started in on the minor holidays. By the time I hit Labor Day, I thought I’d die from the saccharine sweetness. But there was no way out. My agent and publisher, realizing that the holidays were at an end, had come up
