"The Least Sane Person . . . Ever" (12/23/2004)
I
t's Thursday, and as regularly and reliably as a
Tourette's Syndrome tic reappears, Peggy
"Dolphin Lady" Noonan's
weekly musing graces the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today Peggy peers back into her (quite distant) childhood and remembers Christmas when she was 7 years old:
I was 7 years old and what I wanted for Christmas was a desk. I don't know why. I think I had it in my head that grown-up women who were glamorous had desks.
She wanted a desk? What seven year old, you ask, wants a desk? But this is Peggy we're talking about and, for once, I believe her. Just as the
Bad Seed would have wanted an axe for Christmas, Peggers wanted a desk, the instrument by which she too would begin her own criminal career as a writer if not stopped.
But I didn't expect to get it because desks were huge and expensive and shiny and . . . well, it was unlikely.
That "well, it was unlikely" is rather ominous when you think about it. I suppose the Peggers had done something really, really bad, like drowning a classmate for winning the penmanship competition when everyone knew Peggy had the best handwriting. But, then it's Christmas and
shit unexpected things happen:
And yet that Christmas morning I ran to the tree with my sisters and over on the side was a desk. . . . It was small, maybe two feet high, and beige, and made of plywood. It had a drawer for pencils. The plywood wasn't finished and if you rubbed against it the wrong way you'd get a splinter, but it was the most beautiful desk in human history.
An infected splinter could be fatal when Peggy was seven and antibiotics were unheard of. Now we can guess what Momma and Pappa Noonan were up to, but a century or so later it's apparent that their original plan to have a filthy splinter save the world from Peggy didn't quite work out.
I was overwhelmed. I got a kitchen chair and sat at it. It was fabulous. It is my favorite Christmas moment. What followed was better. I sat there, closed my eyes, put my hands over them, and tried to imagine the first Christmas. And I saw it. I saw it like a movie. It was a blue black night and . . . .
I'm not going to subject you to Peggy's florid description of the nativity which involves a wooden shanty and some steamy cow breath.
And I thought: It's all true. It's not just a story, it's true, it really happened. This struck me like a thunderbolt
Peggy gets a plywood desk and finds Jesus, all at once! Just imagine if she'd gotten, say, just a doll instead. She would have become a Hare Krishna, last seen dancing in a saffron robe and banging a tambourine in La Guardia before mercifully disappearing from public view. But Peggy got a desk and the rest, unfortunately, is history.
