time to time a twinge
unacknowledged wish to be
a better person
Once a year at least, we all enjoy Dickens’ happy absurdity of taking a tough, malicious, shrewd businessman and making him over, overnight, into a genial, gregarious, almost saintly old man.
No matter how much A Christmas Carol may be dismissed as a rollicking good story but a deeply sentimental one, I believe it has stayed alive for a hundred and sixty years because in even the most cynical, rational, irreligious human, there is from time to time a twinge, even an unacknowledged wish, to be a better person.
From Ringing the Changes 4 January, 2002 in Letter from America. Vol 2, by Cooke, Alistair, London, Penguin, 2007.
Mr. Cooke, for me, is something of a pair with Orson Welles, as someone always being there at the beginning of so much of the American past.
Just less well remembered.
Mr. Cooke died today back in 2004.
I would not have known that but that I had been searching out something about Thomas Hardy for another post in FINDAGAVE and on that website it announced that Mr. Cooke had died on this day in 2004.
It brought to mind what I knew of his burial.
If you know anything about Mr. Cooke and his television program America, or his hosting of Masterpiece Theater or his weekly audio Letter From America for the BBC, you might have picked up on the fact that for a good part of his life he lived in an apartment that overlooked Central Park.
Central Park was such a reoccurring theme in all of his writers and appearances that when he died, his children felt that it would be appropriate to have his ashes scattered in Central Park.
Then those ugly rules, regulations and permissions raised their ugly head.
Rather than fight this triumvirate, the family just went around them.
On the morning of the funeral, the children met at the apartment.
One of them stopped at Starbucks and grabbed a stack of large, okay, vente or grande, I still don’t know, cups.
The ashes of Mr. Cooke where then poured into the cups and the family strolled through the park , leaving the remains of Mr. Cooke behind.
Not a bad way for a man who wrote that in even the most cynical, rational, irreligious human, there is from time to time a twinge, even an unacknowledged wish, to be a better person.
I hope you rest in peace.
No Haiku For You 