Mince Pie

A Letter 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 caf; 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:

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 nine days' wonder--so young that she doesn't even know what

you are doing to her. But you are not going to have the laugh on me by

luring me into resolutions. I know my weaknesses. I know that I shall

probably continue to annoy newsdealers by reading the magazines on the

stalls instead of buying them; that I shall put off having my hair cut;

drop tobacco cinders on my waistcoat; feel bored at the idea of having

to shave and get dressed; be nervous when the gas burner pops when

turned off; buy more Liberty Bonds than I can afford and have to hock

them at a grievous loss. I shall continue to be pleasant to insurance

agents, from sheer lack of manhood; and to keep library books out over

the date and so incur a fine. My only hope, you see, is resolutely to

determine to persist in these failings. Then, by sheer perversity, I may

grow out of them.

What avail, indeed, for any of us to make good resolutions when one

contemplates the grand pageant of human frailty? Observe what I noticed

the other day in the Lost and Found column of the New York _Times_:

Your obedient servant!