Scrooge and the next minute

Poor Elijah has always relied on fashion consultants. Most of them are 14 years old. They’d like to see him teaching adverbs in baggy shorts with pockets the size of interoffice mailers.

Not that he lacks style in his own right. Very few twenty-first century men can dress like Rasputin and get away with it. My favorite is his 1910 formal cutaway coat. Then, of course, there’s his trademark pinstripes and jackboots ensemble. For outerwear he favors an old navy bridge coat, and he’s currently searching for a Civil War general’s hat, just to top the whole thing off.

He claims his taste is conservative. I tell him raiding Ulysses Grant’s closet doesn’t make him conservative.

Actually, when it comes to neckwear, he draws the line on adventure. Every tie he owns is a regimental stripe. I’d be less surprised to see him parachute into recess than to catch him sporting anything less old school.

That’s why I almost collapsed when he showed up after school last week bedecked in Santa Clauses.

True, his shirt was black, as was the background of the tie in question. But there they were, unmistakably festive in red and green, a host of smiling Santas, knotted around his neck, merrily parading up and down his sternum.

Poor Elijah sat me down until my eyes could focus. “Things change, you know,” he told me.

Yes, they do.

Things surely changed for Scrooge. He metamorphosed from a “grasping, covetous old sinner” into a good man and a good friend. He saw his life race before him – past, present, and future – and he resolved to make the awful shadows different. No, he couldn’t change the past. He couldn’t erase the years of neglect and calculated malice. He couldn’t raise his orphaned nephew, Fred. He couldn’t regain his lost love, Alice. And he could never find all the nameless faces he’d hurt along the way, let alone make amends to them.

So much irreparable misery – and yet, such a happy ending. How is that possible?

It’s possible because joy can travel in tandem with the deepest sorrow. It’s possible because life always offers the next minute. And the next minute can make all the difference.

Life is founded on suffering, all the way back to the Garden. But the next minute has always held the promise.

For Scrooge the next minute came that Christmas. He stood on his head. He provided a turkey for the Cratchits’ dinner. He tipped the street urchin. He pressed a golden Christmas present on Mrs. Dilber. And he pressed on his nephew his own long-absent company and affection.

Good for Scrooge.

But what about everyone else? What were their expectations when the bells chimed that morning? How did the day turn out different for them?

The new Scrooge caromed through London, touching lives wherever he went, lives that weren’t prepared for him. We think of Scrooge as the spirits’ primary beneficiary. But from that night on, he changed the lives of friends and strangers around him, just as unexpectedly as the spirits had changed his.

He rescued them.

Where did the urchin go with his half crown? What sort of man did Tiny Tim become? What distant tables did Scrooge’s charity set?

The point here isn’t to talk about the multiplier effect of Ebenezer’s good works. The point is Scrooge changed without warning, in the twinkling of an eye. And with him so did the lives of others, also without warning.

Before the spirits’ visits, two men called on Scrooge, soliciting a donation. They told him that need is most keenly felt at this time of the rolling year. The trappings of joy can make our sorrows sadder.

Our human bodies need food and warmth. But even more, even with our bellies full, our human hearts need hope. So often we spend our lives in despair, forlorn in a world that grinds on day to day. Sometimes, even in good times, we’re waiting for the other foot to fall, for the bad thing to happen.

Sometimes it does. There’s no point in dissembling. We do walk through the valley of the shadow of death. But we also walk through the valley of possibility. Tomorrow may bring calamity. But it may also bring the love of your life, or your firstborn, or the job you need, or healing, or salvation at a stranger’s hand.

Scrooge, Destiny, and Providence are alive and well.

None of this is meant to say that resisting evil is a passive matter, or that doing what’s right is easy or painless or without risk. Life’s obstacles are imposing, and they aren’t always surmountable, but living is the deed of trying to surmount them.

Hopelessness is a common affliction. But don’t give up. You never know when Scrooge will throw open his bedroom window and call down to you. Hold on, and when you think your strength is gone, hold on still.

The next minute may make all the difference.