Away In A Manger
It’s Christmastime, and – if you’ll briefly allow yourself – the waning days of your freshman Fall semester at one of the Tri-State’s Premier Catholic Learning and College Preparatory Institutions, where Boys that Learn grow into Men that Serve (and, on that continuum, you feel lightyears closer to learning than serving). In retrospect, there’s something endearing to be found in this stretch of growing pain, this 14-year old feeling of vague discomfort – in eczema-dry arms from swim team practices and pajama pants layered under your Dockers khakis to protect from the winter wind – but at this moment, double-socked boat shoes shortcutting over pink-salted parking lot asphalt, the only thing you can focus on is the feeling of abject fucking dread given what awaits you next period.
The worst kept secret on campus, Men’s Chorus with Mr. Pellegrini is the once-in-a-lifetime, perfect storm, Looney Toons nonsense class that even you can recognize in your freshman naivete. To fulfill your Fine Arts requirement, for 40 minutes each day, you sit in the same blue plastic chair alongside the same twenty other space cadets, mouthing the words to the same ten or so songs. On Eagle’s Wings, O Come O Come Emmanuel, To God Be the Glory. No quizzes, no homework, really never any critique from Mr. P regarding our halfhearted attempts at the songs, his almost-vibrato and piano rising above whatever we could collectively produce. The usual suspect class clowns find the wind knocked out of them in this implicit, unspoken, surreal teacher-student apathy. Stare dead-eyed at your cell phone, contemplate your clunky sexual frustration, reach nirvana in the haze of body odor and not-so-subtly-exhaled strawberry vape smoke – the time’s yours.
But on this bitter afternoon, you must answer for your decision to sell your soul to this daily daydreaming. The ten songs weren’t entirely the fruitless endeavor you imagined them to be – they comprise the program for the upcoming Christmas Concert, an event whose historic absurdity almost exceeds that of the class itself. You can bear the mandatory red bowtie and will gladly take on the duty of propping up the classmate next to you when he begins to faint under the heat of the ancient stage lights. But as you swung your backpack around your blazered shoulder walking out of class last week, Mr. P slipped in a “check-ins on Monday, boys” in between the routine “God bless yous” and “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” You could have sworn you had imagined it, like when the house settles and wakes you up in the middle of the night. A fucking check-in? You consult the elders, and the gangly, lanyard-spinning seniors confirm your worst fears. Rifling back to the first printed pages of your homework folder, you see something sinister in the syllabus you couldn’t pretend to look over in September, supplementing the half of your easy A not determined by participation/punctuality. There, in lowercase Times New Roman: “50%: check-ins, determine solos for xmas concert.”
And so today, in from the cold, you find your plastic chair, one row back and all the way to the left (your left, the piano’s right), with no progress made on the conundrum. The reality is simple enough – you can’t afford to completely bomb the check-in (it’s half your grade after all, and based on your last Pre-Calc test alone, you know a Men’s Chorus A+ needs to be a sure thing), but the prospect of a solo performance in front of the entire school would be a nightmare unlike anything you’ve experienced in your (albeit limited) high school career. Not only do you lack the vocal chops for such a spotlight, but you’re panicked about your ability to shake the mark of Christmas Concert soloist over the next three-and-a-half years at this godforsaken place. Mr. P shuffles into the room and drops his bomber and blank baseball cap – both different shades of denim – onto a stool. He reminds you of a Peanuts character, both in the roundness of his bald head and the kind of womp-wompiness of his voice when he addresses the class. It appears the only feasible option at this point is to aim for some sort of sweet spot – a performance not so laughable as to jeopardize your potential A, but not so enthusiastic as to communicate you desire or deserve a solo. You try to read the faces of the poor souls next to you, and you can’t tell ignorance from indifference. You’re under the impression that the vast majority of them are neither academic nor musical all-stars, which of course, complicates the execution of this aforementioned sweet spot further.
“Check-ins today, gentlemen,” he says, clenching and uncrumpling the sheet music and clearing his throat. We Three Kings as a class warm-up. He squints at the printed pages like he hasn’t seen them a thousand times before and glances over to my side of the room.
“Jamie, why don’t you start us off,” gesturing with an open palm to a spot on the tile floor where Jamie – who’s sitting right in front of you – can stand next to the bench. God, fuck. OK. You imagine Mr. P will just work his way down the row – Jamie, then you. Looking up from his phone, Jamie stands and makes the two-step journey to the piano, indifferent. You take a mental inventory, and you realize you’re worse off than you had previously thought. In addition to being a nose tackle for the JV team, Jamie’s actually a decent singer, so more likely than not, he’s gunning for the A/solo spot, and that gives you no insight as to how you should play your cards when it’s your turn. You’ve never seen Jamie in anything other than the Premier Catholic Learning and College Preparatory Institution standard short sleeve button down (complete with left breast monogram), and standing at the front of the room, you can make out the white stain boundaries where past armpit sweat made its furthest northward advances. Jamie looks calm enough. More throat clearing. Then, chords – Away in a Manger. They dive into the song, and, no joke, he’s bellowing up there. Mr. P sings along, matching Jamie’s volume. You allow yourself to briefly consider whether this has been his sadistic plan all along, putting kids on the spot like this. But watching the way he earnestly sings and sways at the piano forces you to concede the student-torture theory, you can’t imagine the man behaving with any kind of malice.
A round, louder final note and then silence. “Thank you, son,” and just as soon as it started, Jamie is seated – the whole interaction feeling far too casual to warrant the ball of stress in your throat. But then the man at the piano makes eye contact with you and silently waves you towards him, and your ears feel hot and your gut tightens. You rise and move in his direction, stepping over a thick nylon puffer coat in the aisle. You nervously retuck your shirt midstride. You reach the bench, and someone snaps their gum. Wordlessly, you’re presented with the outstretched “Away in a Manger” sheet music from the sitting Mr. P. Standing this close, you smell the cigarettes and anisey old person cologne on him. In your understanding, he wouldn’t be caught dead smoking at school, but Pat told you that he saw the dude at Wawa last month buying a pack of Newports and ordering, like, the grossest fucking hoagie ever. Like, a tuna melt or something. You glance down at Mr. P’s hairless hands searching, then settling on the keyboard. He looks up at you. “All ready, son?” You nod at him, gnawing at the inside of your cheek. Your ears feel hotter. His fingers crease and press down, and the song begins.
***
Growing up sucks for a million reasons. The people and structures you trusted to lead you through life’s to-do list start doing so less and less. You feel around in the dark, you try attitudes on for size – How exactly am I supposed to live life every day? For me, one way to manage this crisis was to regard the things my world handed me with a kind of center-of-the-Universe, debilitating importance. Looking back, it was painfully obvious (to perhaps everyone in the room but me) that I was neither at risk of flunking, nor a serviceable option for the Christmas Concert solo roster, nor would either of those realities bring my world crashing down. Later, on the other side of this binary, out of a sense of defiance or fatigue, I was ready to adopt an easier, stickier, eye-roll-worthy teenage cynicism. At its most unbearable, this manifested itself in unironic retweets critiquing religion and the idea that after skimming Wikipedia articles on nihilism, I was en route to Figuring It Out. But even today, after trying to shed the ego, it’s difficult at times to refuse the shrugging siren song of autopilot, of 40+ hours of Outlook, 12 Coors Banquets (cumulative), rinse/repeat.
At the heart of Sufjan Stevens’ music, there is a sincere rejection of both ends of this perspective-binary, and with it, the reasons why life is worth living. It is not because your choices decide the fate of the universe, and not because this is your one chance in the sandbox of earthly delights and nothing more. Instead, in Sufjan’s endless discography, we find the things that comprise the lifelong task of finding your footing – in the work you do, in the people you love, in the choices you make – and their unexpected profoundness.
Maybe this is why the singer and holiday music seem like such a natural marriage, here in plucky guitar strings and soft harmonies and a little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay. Imagine: God’s grace in plain sight, in at-first-unremarkable moments of togetherness, in returning to red-and-green-accented rituals with the people and places that (for better or worse) made who you are and where you’re going. Your days, present in their goofy and beautiful specificity, matter. In tradition, in the familiar sensory dance of the season, the holiday season reveals itself as an opportunity to reflect on this specificity.
With “Away in a Manger” – if you’ll briefly allow yourself – concede a nostalgia you could have never seen coming, feeling so totally, standing here at the front of the class, soft opening notes beginning to sound from the piano.
By Anonymous