The Reading Man remembers readings past

Dylan Thomas

As it was wont to do, Mr. Apotienne's mind had again run off with him.  Kidnapped, he thought, Robert Lewis Stephenson, spirited away  He wasn't aware of the abduction while it was in progress, only noticed after the fact, reacting like a chloroform victim just regaining his senses.  All it took was thinking about the fairy lights, how they would not-quite illuminate the dance site.  Summer fairy lights led him to memories of Christmas lights.  He weighed the image of tonight's warm, firefly-like glow against reflections on rain-puddled asphalt.

Photo by Hanna Gordon-Smith.

He had nearly lost heart for Dylan Thomas during his years of membership in one Unitarian Universalist Church.  Each summer before his sabbatical - and don't think there wasn't grumbling about a contract which gave an annual sabbatical - the minister, in costume, gave a reading from Ralph Waldo Emerson.  On Christmas eve, when he could have read them Dickens or the newspaper editor's essay which affirmed, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," or, perhaps, the Bible,  he read to them from "A Child's Christmas in Wales."  Eventually Mr. Apotienne stopped attending. 

Robert arrived at the church near the end of the previous minister's tenure, stayed based on a spirit of compassion and good works that he modeled.  And he continued when Dr. Harmon retired, determined to give the new man a chance. But as each Christmas began to shine on the horizon, Robert's spirits started to sink.  He wished for just a bit more of the absent fragrant greens, "God bless us every one," singing of the carols he'd learned in grade school and less of what came on him like frostbite, an extinguishing of his cheerful flame.  He nearly grew to loathe Thomas and the story.  He developed an aversion. 

His nostalgia was for Perry Como,  department store Santas, decorations from the five-and-dime and a mug of cocoa consumed at a formica-topped kitchen table.  Of course one couldn't blame Dylan Thomas for an emotionless, husk-dry recitation of a work that in the hands of another would be stirring, visually rich and could speak, child to child across the years.  Those nights when he wished for a semi-adult version of visions of sugarplums, even the strands of white lights woven through the parking lot oak tree seemed like part of  a Russian landscape seen from the night train to St. Petersburg.

Then Robert shook himself, or was it a shiver, and focused on where he was - now - and what awaited. He'd allowed himself a respite from thoughts about THE DANCE.  He identified with Jason Robard's speech as Ben Bradlee on the front lawn in his bathrobe in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, telling Woodward and Bernstein that, "...there's nothing riding on this except, uh, the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country."  No wonder he needed to wander off for a while.