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An essay by Dallas Lore Sharp |
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Our Calendar |
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Title: Our Calendar Author: Dallas Lore Sharp [More Titles by Sharp] There are four red-lettered calendars about the house: one with the Sundays in red; one with Sundays and the legal holidays in red; one with the Thursdays in red,--Thursday being publication day for the periodical sending out the calendar,--and one, our own calendar, with several sorts of days in red--all the high festival days here on Mullein Hill, the last to be added being the Pup's birthday which falls on September 15. Pup's Christian name is Jersey,--because he came to us from that dear land by express when he was about the size of two pounds of sugar,--an explanation that in no manner accounts for all we went through in naming him. The christening hung fire from week to week, everybody calling him anything, until New Year's. It had to stop here. Returning from the city New Year's day I found, posted on the stand of my table-lamp, the cognomen done in red, this declaration:--
No person can call Jersey any other name but JERSEY.
We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already on the calendar the day is red--red, with the deep deep red of our six hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixed Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough yet to wrestle with a woodchuck, but able to shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that is because I am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my first dog! And the boys--this is their first dog, too, every stray and tramp dog that they have brought home, having wandered off again. One can hardly imagine what that means exactly. Of course, we have had other things, chickens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams, the woods and fields, books and kindling--and I have had Her and the four boys,--the family that is,--till at times, I will say, I have not felt the need of anything more. But none of these things is a dog, not even the boys. A dog is one of man's primal needs. "We want a dog!" had been a kind of family cry until Babe's last birthday. Some six months before that birthday Babe came to me and said:-- "Father, will you guess what I want for my birthday?" "A new pair of skates with a key fore and aft," I replied. "Skates in August!" he shouted in derision. "Try again." "A fast-flyer sled with automatic steering-gear and an electric self-starter and stopper." "No. Now, Father,"--and the little face in its Dutch-cut frame sobered seriously,--"it's something with four legs." "A duck," I suggested. "That has only two." "An armadillo, then." "No." "A donkey." "No." "An elephant?" "No." "An alligator?" "No." "A h-i-p hip, p-o, po, hippo, p-o-t pot, hippopot, a hippopota, m-u-s mus--hippopotamus, _that's_ what it is!" This had always made him laugh, being the way, as I had told him, that I learned to spell when I went to school; but to-day there was something deep and solemn in his heart, and he turned away from my lightness with close-sealed lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed suspiciously open. I was half inclined to call him back and guess again. But had not every one of the four boys been making me guess at that four-legged thing since they could talk about birthdays? And were not the conditions of our living as unfit now for four-legged things as ever? Besides, they already had the cow and the pig and a hundred two-legged hens. More live stock was simply out of the question at present. The next day Babe snuggled down beside me at the fire. "Father," he said, "have you guessed yet?" "Guessed what?" I asked. "What I want for my birthday?" "A nice little chair to sit before the fire in?" "Horrors! a chair! why, I said a four-legged thing." "Well, how many legs has a chair?" "Father," he said, "has a rocking-chair four legs?" "Certainly." "Then it must have four feet, hasn't it?" "Cert--why--I--don't--know exactly about that," I stammered. "But if you want a rocking-chair for your birthday, you shall have it, feet or fins, four legs or two, though I must confess that I don't exactly know, according to legs, just where a rocking-chair does belong." "I don't want any chair, nor anything else with wooden legs." "What kind of legs, then?" "Bone ones." "Why! why! I don't know any bone-legged things." "Bones with hair on them." "Oh, you want a Teddybear--_you_, and coming eight! Well! Well! But Teddybears have wire legs, I think, instead of bone." The set look settled once more on his little, square face and the talk ceased. But the fight was on. Day after day, week after week, he had me guessing--through all the living quadrupeds--through all the fossil forms--through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, had Adam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names. Gently, persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, though long since my only question had been--What breed? August came finally, and a few days before the 24th we started by automobile for New Jersey. We were speeding along the road for Princeton when all four boys leaned forward from the back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said:-- "Shall I have any birthday down here, Father?" "Certainly." "Have you guessed _what_ yet?" I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle till the words were snatched from his teeth by the swirling dust behind and conversation was made impossible. Two days later, the birthday found us at Uncle Joe's. Babe was playing with Trouble, the little Scotch-Irish terrier, when Uncle Joe and I came into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe looked up and asked:-- "Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged thing I want for my birthday?" "You want a dog," said Uncle Joe, and I caught up the dear child in my arms and kept back his cries with kisses. "And you shall have one, too, if you will give me three or four weeks to get him for you. Trouble here is the daddy of--goodness! I suppose he is--of I don't know how many little puppies--but a good many--and I am giving you one of them right now, for this birthday, only, you will wait till their mother weans them, of course?" "Yes, yes, of course!" And so it happened that several weeks later a tiny black-and-tan puppy with nothing much of a tail came through from New Jersey to Hingham to hearts that had waited for him very, very long. Pup's birthday makes the seventh red-letter day of that kind on the calendar. These are only the beginning of such days, our own peculiar days when we keep tryst with ourselves, because in one way or another these days celebrate some trial or triumph, some deep experience of the soul. There is Melon Day, for example,--a movable feast-day in August, if indeed it come so early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, you ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of the soul? This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields of Jersey. Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who, walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongated ellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine--even to the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is of something out of Eden before the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah, the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight I fight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vines themselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) the heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready to split at the sight of a knife, answering to the thump with a far-off, muffled thud,--the family, I say, when that melon is brought in crisp and cool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into the doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna and quail gathered daily at the grocer's. We have been (once) to the circus, but that day is not in red. That is everybody's day, while the red-letter days on our calendar--Storm-Door-and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the day close to Christmas when we begin, "Marley was dead, to begin with"; or the Day of the First Snow--these days are peculiarly, privately our own, and these are red. 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