HOLLY DAYS

I’ve commented in previous posts that Holly Days is quartet of trinities, but have never fully deconstructed its serendipitous symmetry. There is something about groups of three that we humans seem to appreciate, with the holy trinity, troikas, our political balance of power, and trilogies being common forms in literature and film. Similar serendipities have made Holly Days feel fated: that the 12 days of Christmas matches the 1 2 days between the solstice and New Years day, that evergreen holly is a common symbols of winter ‘hollydays’, that Christmas follows the solstice by three days (though to be fair, the solstice does not last a day, but an instant, so can occasionally fall some minutes before or after midnight on the 21st), as the eve of New Year’s Eve follows Christmas. We have three holidays here in succession making it just feel symmetrical to give each of them their own before and after, forming a trio of trinities, which begs to manufacture fourth for this pause between Christmas and New Years. Hence Truth, Love, and Courage the etiology of which I have discussed many times before.

Sam Harris, (of recent Free Will fame) in his short book, Lying, built a philosophical case for never telling a lie. He describes a Stanford seminar lead by Prof Ronald A Howard which he attended and which examined a single ethical question: “Is it wrong to lie?” Most folks readily appreciate the tangled web argument, but Sam also argues that lying, even white lying, can do to harm to our relationships. I think Sam underappreciates one of the worst dangers of lying: the erosion of self respect, and even of a realistic world view. In keeping with my newer, less professorial and pompous, and more papa-ish approach to these writings, I’m trying to use anecdotes of personal history, hoping this can help my descendents to know me better.

I was once in the street in front of my house working on a car when a I heard a someone wailing and saw a friend of mine walking up the road, crying and struggling to carry a young boy covered in blood. I ran and took the boy from her then brought and laid him down in the back seat of the car. I checked him and saw that he had a large gash in his scalp but seemed otherwise alright. I ran into the house and called the boy’s mom and asked her to meet us at the Hollywood Presbyterian ER, then jumped in the car and drove him there. We were both about 20 years old and my friend had been babysitting the boy, who was about 8 or 9, though unable to read, write, speak or hear after a case of encephalitis a few years before. I too had babysat him on occasion and knew that he had other neurological and behavioral problems so there was no way for him to letus what had happened. The mom showed up shortly after we arrived. My friend was extremely distressed and couldn’t stop crying, but told the mom that he had fallen out of the window of her car. We left the boy with his mom and the doctors and I drove her back to my home.

On the way home, still in tears, I was finally able to get her explain a bit more about what had happened. She said he been hanging out of the window of her car, and that she had been scolding him trying to get him to sit back down, then when she rounded a bend, he fell out. When we got back to my house I went and got her car which she had left at the site of the accident, about a block from my home and partially blocking traffic. I knew that he could be defiant and that in any event it was hard to get his attention and communicate with him, which made handling his defiance and tantrums extremely difficult, I knew how frustrating working with him was, and so I sympathised. When I got back inside, she was still crying but also defensive, repeating her story and blaming him for her anguish. I was kind of surprised by how defensive she had become and how extreme her reaction was, as well as the way she had left her car and chose to carry him the last 100 yards or so to my house rather than putting him back in the car to drive him. I wondered if she was telling the whole story.

Neither of us was ever asked to babysit for him again, but a few months later we ran into the now fully recovered boy and his mom. I tried to make some small talk, ask how he was doing, but he just stood in front of my friend making the shame-on-you finger gesture to her. She recoiled, then walked away, and the mom told me he had been blaming her, but that given his mental condition, she didn’t really hold her responsible. I had often seen my friend fib to folks to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, and had even asked me on other occasions to support her in such little lies. In that context, I wondered if there was more to the story, and could easily imagine her, frustrated and angry, hitting the brakes to scare him, and causing him to fall out.

Not long after she lost a job she had as a counter person at a retail store, which had been given to her by a family friend who was the manager of the store. One day a secret shopper hired by the owners of the store had observed her pocketing some cash rather than putting it in the register, reported it to the owners who had the manager fire her. She was indignant and repeatedly and complained about the unfairness claiming that she was just trying to save time during a rush. Knowing her, I suspected she was probably lying, and as I became more distrustful of her, our relationship waned.

As time went on, I heard her make increasingly fantastic claims about situations I had witnessed and that I knew she was misrepresenting. In retrospect I felt more certain that she had been responsible for the boy falling out of the car, even came to wonder if she had actually pushed him. She became increasingly unstable, began to drink and use drugs heavily, and her confabulations became increasingly unrealistic. Finally after a conflict we had, she cut off all contact with me, and I haven’t seen her since.

She certainly had damaged our relationship and reputation with her little fibs, but more seriously, I think she had damaged her relationship with herself. I suspect she may have begun on some level to believe her own lies, while in her heart of hearts she knew the truth and blamed herself. I wonder if this guilt could lead to some sort of cognitive dissonance that finally disconnected her from reality, it certainly disconnected her from me as well as other folks in her life whose relationships followed about the same path as mine. I think Sam does not really communicate, perhaps even grasp, how corrosive lying can become to our self image. He does discuss how honesty, despite how fearful we may be of the consequences of confessing or speaking the truth, it can actually result in deepening relationship, and whatever blame or consequence we might have feared may be shrugged off or easily healed by a simple earnest apology, strengthening a friendship. I wonder if it can get harder and harder for a liar to even know what’s true.

Take a chance, stand up for your self respect, and in us in trying to always tell the truth, though not the whole truth, and more than nothing but the truth.

Have a Happy Holly Days, and Terrific Truth!