Geiger Counter

There is a lot of talk about empathy these days, but I, for one, think it’s a terrible way to pick a Christmas tree.  Sure, feeling the pain of others can help us understand the fragile bond living things share. But I simply cannot get on board with the fact that we should pile into the truck, head to a forest of pine trees, and select the one we pity the most – the ones whose anguish really speaks to us - so we can display it in our living room to celebrate the holidays and carry some light into winter’s dark center.  But that is exactly what my wife does. She walks around, like some arborist Dr. Kevorkian, looking for sickly, bare, brown, prickly trees to put out of their misery. If looking at it makes us feel sad, she wants to take it home. But even Dr. Kevorkian didn’t festoon his victims with silver tinsel, colored lights and playful ornaments.  We don’t use pity as our criteria for any other interior decorating decisions. Imagine if we did.  “Look at that terrible three-legged chair! It would look great in our living room!”  “That chicken breast is a strange color; let’s make it the centerpiece of our dinner.” “That dog over there is throwing up. Let’s adopt it!” But for some reason, my wife’s compassion overwhelms her at this time of year as we stroll through the pines.  “Look at this one!” she calls out with a strange, gleeful commiseration, pointing to a dead vertical twig that’s so dry it will burst into flames if it catches even a glancing blow from direct sunlight. I try to point out that we are actually paying for this tree, so we should try to, you know, get a good one.  I, a reasonable person in the prime of mental health, select our Christmas tree very differently. I try to find the largest, heaviest behemoth of a tree that ever lived. Something that will fill and render unusable one or more rooms in our home from now until I finally take it outside and toss it into the springtime mud, many months from now. I don’t want something small or sick or sad. I want something huge and ridiculous.  But our marital bonds are strong, and despite our differences, we agree on the most important thing: the tree must be alive and real. My wife’s favorites are usually on the verge of death, but even that implies they are, for the time being, at least, among us, the living.  In a time and place where nearly all people, regardless of political affiliation, seem equally intent on destroying the very last vestiges of anything wild or undeveloped or unique and untouched by human hands, each Christmas tree serves as the most incredible symbol, each year, of the most incredible truth: That the world outside - the “unimproved” world that has not been paved or cluttered with homes and businesses - is beautiful. It exists in majesty regardless of us. Not because of our existence, but not despite it, either. The tree, which is a completely renewable, living thing, which will always grow again from the soil after we cut it down. It is a symbol of the wilderness from which we come, the atavism that still resides inside us no matter how hard we try to pretend we are fully civilized and housebroken. Trees, which have been here for 400 million years, are generally considered far too wild to come into our homes. They are part of the ancient world, the world businesspeople and governments try so hard to stamp out, the Earth as it was for all its history, full of things we did not make and could not control. Beautiful, mysterious things. They remind us of how stunning the world was before we “developed” it, and how incredible it will be after all the pavement has crumbled. Yet they are also a reminder that it remains beautiful, even now. They are the wilderness, and once a year we – a species that spends much of its time fighting and being scared of the wild – suddenly say, “Come on in.” The fact that so many of us, in so many countries and from so many cultures, suddenly change the rules each December and welcome wild pine trees into our houses is strange and wonderful. It’s no less weird than if every September, we all suddenly decided it was time to go find a grizzly bear or wildebeest and bring it home, where it could live for the remainder of the holiday season, wrapped in bright lights and draped with trinkets that tell our family’s unique but familiar human story.  These trees, whether they are sickly and pathetic, the way my wife likes them, or bombastic and far too big to fit through the door, the way I like them, are annual reminders that the world is a place that is wild and real. It was so long before we arrived here, so recently, and will remain so long after we are gone.  Each year, I reread Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” It’s about a little boy and a cognitively disabled woman, best friends, who each year make fruitcakes together and give them to friends and strangers alike. Near the end of the story, they go to fly a homemade kite together, when they realize this same thing. That all of Creation is right outside all our doors, throughout the duration of our individual and collective stories. In every single tree, in everything under the sun and the moon, is the real world.  “My, how foolish I am!” my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. “You know what I’ve always thought?” she asks in a tone of discovery and not smiling at me but a point beyond. “I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when he came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie [the dog] pawing earth over her bone—“just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”  We compromised again this year. The tree in our living room is not the smallest or most pathetic specimen we saw. It’s also not the 20-foot monster I wanted to buy. Instead, it’s somewhere in between. It’s perfect. A pagan symbol of our deepest roots and a glimpse into our future. A piece of real life wilderness presiding over our domestic lives.  And every time I look at it, adorned with our personal ornaments, lit up as if eternally on fire, its branches shadowing a pile of presents, I hope that one day I’m lucky enough to leave the world with it, and all it represents, in my eyes.