Mince Pie | Page 8

TO FATHER TIME

(NEW YEAR'S EVE)
Dear Father Time--This is your night of triumph, and it seems only fair
to pay you a little tribute. Some people, in a noble mood of bravado,
consider New Year's Eve an occasion of festivity. Long, long in
advance they reserve a table at their favorite café; and becomingly
habited in boiled shirts or gowns of the lowest visibility, and well
armed with a commodity which is said to be synonymous with
yourself--money--they seek to outwit you by crowding a month of
merriment into half a dozen hours. Yet their victory is brief and
fallacious, for if hours spin too fast by night they will move grindingly
on the axle the next morning. None of us can beat you in the end. Even
the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray and dies at last babbling of
greenbacks.
To my own taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a
season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies
of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good
resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a
certain grim satisfaction in thinking how we all--every human being of
us--share alike in bondage to your oppression. There is the only true
and complete democracy, the only absolute brotherhood of man. The
great ones of the earth--Charley Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks,
General Pershing and Miss Amy Lowell--all these are in service to the
same tyranny. Day after day slips or jolts past, joins the Great Majority;
suddenly we wake with a start to find that the best of it is gone by.
Surely it seems but a day ago that Stevenson set out to write a little
book that was to be called "Life at Twenty-five"--before he got it
written he was long past the delectable age--and now we rub our eyes
and see he has been dead longer than the span of life he then so
delightfully contemplated. If there is one meditation common to every
adult on this globe it is this, so variously phrased, "Well, bo, Time sure
does hustle."
Some of them have scurvily entreated you, old Time! The thief of
youth, they have called you; a highwayman, a gipsy, a grim reaper. It
seems a little unfair. For you have your kindly moods, too. Without

your gentle passage where were Memory, the sweetest of lesser
pleasures? You are the only medicine for many a woe, many a sore
heart. And surely you have a right to reap where you alone have sown?
Our strength, our wit, our comeliness, all those virtues and graces that
you pilfer with such gentle hand, did you not give them to us in the first
place? Give, do I say? Nay, we knew, even as we clutched them, they
were but a loan. And the great immortality of the race endures, for
every day that we see taken away from ourselves we see added to our
children or our grandchildren. It was Shakespeare, who thought a great
deal about you, who put it best:
Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being
crowned, Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight And Time that gave
doth now his gift confound--
It is to be hoped, my dear Time, that you have read Shakespeare's
sonnets, because they will teach you a deal about the dignity of your
career, and also suggest to you the only way we have of keeping up
with you. There is no way of outwitting Time, Shakespeare tells his
young friend, "Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence." Or,
as a poor bungling parodist revamped it:
Pep is the stuff to put Old Time on skids-- Pep in your copy, yes, and
lots of kids.
It is true that Shakespeare hints another way of doing you in, which is
to write sonnets as good as his. This way, needless to add, is open to
few.
Well, my dear Time, you are not going to fool me into making myself
ridiculous this New Year's Eve with a lot of bonny but impossible
resolutions. I know that you are playing with me just as a cat plays with
a mouse; yet even the most piteous mousekin sometimes causes his
tormentor surprise or disappointment by getting under a bureau or
behind the stove, where, for the moment, she cannot paw him. Every
now and then, with a little luck, I shall pull off just such a scurry into
temporary immortality. It may come by reading Dickens or by seeing a
sunset, or by lunching with friends, or by forgetting to wind the alarm

clock, or by contemplating the rosy little pate of my daughter, who is
still only a