Epiphanic mathomry.
So I think it goes that Shmendrick showed up a couple of days after everybody else, and the innkeeper was sweeping out the stable. Schmendrick asks him if there’s been a man and a woman, pregnant, stopping by. With a donkey. Maybe some shepherds. And these three other guys, dressed kind of like me, camels, Balthasar, Casper, Melchior, ring any bells? There was this star? And the innkeeper says oh, hey, you just missed them, nice guys. Good tippers. And Schmendrick’s like, oh, gee, really? Did they maybe leave some kind of forwarding address? I’ve got this stuff for them, see, the guy and his wife, the pregnant woman, I mean, except I don’t think she’s pregnant anymore, that what the star was about, you know? And the innkeeper shrugs and leans on his broom and says, you know, they said something about Egypt. And Schmendrick, he says, Egypt? Geeze. I mean, I can’t keep going all the way to frickin’ Egypt. Well, damn. And he kicks the dust and then he says, hey. You wouldn’t want some cinnamon and pepper, would you? Spices, you know, from the East? They’re good for if you’ve got some meat that’s gone a little gamey, you sprinkle it with a little of this, takes the edge off, very tasty. And I don’t really remember how it all ends, but anyway, that’s why we don’t celebrate Epiphany on Jan. 6.
As to why we celebrate Epiphany at all—
The first one was in Boston, and even though most of us had dropped out of college for one reason or another at that point (most of us would eventually go back, don’t worry), we were still on enough of a college schedule—and enough of us were still making Yuletide trips back home—that we couldn’t get everyone in the same room for a gift exchange until early January. So what the heck. Epiphany. And we’ve been doing it ever since, though now I think it has more to do with taking advantage of post-holiday clearance sales.
So: some pear brandy, and Ken MacLeod; a silk shirt in some lovely nameless harvest color; some plates with Warhol’s Monroe on them, a perfect fit our Hindipop kitchen; a fountain for the library (as soon as the library gets new paint and a new ceiling and new shelves, we’ll have a place to put it); some Poe, who is worth Becca’s hype (her squeals of delight at receiving Tomb Raider on DVD aside: remember, she can be cheerfully pragmatic about her entertainment), and whose brother all unknown to me is the guy who wrote that book, or assembled it, more like; a lovely Kahimi Karie EP from Spain, the jetset cosmopolitanry of which pleases me inordinately, and anyway, there’s a killer version of “Giapponese a Roma” on there; and ganged up and dropped in my lap, Taschen’s gorgeous reproduction of the Nuremberg Chronicles, and if I’m a little quiet here in my corner, well. —And if I miss the days when Barry used to wrap his presents in glass bottles and duct tape, I don’t so much miss the days he wrapped them in dirty socks, which was, all told, pretty much the same day. (It was a conceptual piece.) Still: books; music; software (pirated and otherwise); cheerfully useless toys, trinkets and oddments; a 20-gallon aquarium; services rendered or coerced; a copy of Plotto and a cast-iron lamp shaped like a giant housefly. You know: mathomry. But lovingly so. Epiphanic, even.
