Christmas Future

Redemption. I have often walked carrying the burden of regret.

The past remains vivid to me. There are events and relationships aplenty that I did not handle well. The idea that you can reverse the bad, cast off that guilt, has a special meaning in our religion-based culture.

And within me.

So around this time of year, I watch the musical "Scrooge" where Albert Finney transforms with the character from sensitive youth to bitter skinflint.

In the story, based on the 1843 Charles Dickens novella, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future lead Scrooge to a joyful celebration of repentance and redemption.

So how do you get that feeling?

How do you cast off the burden of the past, the load of memory, the memory of my father dying slowly and my mother dying suddenly. When I wish I had spent more time with them in their last years and days.

And all the times I have screwed something up by not slowing down, thinking as deep as I am capable.  How do I leave that behind.

But lately, mostly, I have given up on redemption. All those times, those old disasters, I have started to slough them off my shoulders.

Time is zipping along, and I am running out of that precious commodity. More and more, I am convinced there is nothing left to do but lift off the burden of the past and set it down.

And all I can think is that it is because I sense that what cometh. When I look at the young folks standing on the busy Old Town corner near my work, headed for a bar or restaurant, I think they are different.

They haven’t felt it yet, they haven’t heard the knocking.

Contrary to how it might sound, though, that frame of mind is not mournful. It at least partly brings relief from the influence of regret, the sorrow over the people and times that linger and dance around me in delicate filigrees of thought.

It is time, I think, to rest easy. Ok, to try.

So if, as in Scrooge, the ghost of the past took hold of me, she would take me to grammar school in France where I am sitting at a wooden desk worn by decades of young forearms. I stand at my desk and recite an essay written by a French author about the carrot.

The ghost might then take me to a cafe in Denmark where, warm and comfortable as the winter cold lay on the square outside the window, I drink a Christmas beer, waiting to meet my lithe Danish girlfriend.

Then the ghost would take me to the press room in federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles from where I order takeout pizza around midnight and work until dawn on an early edition of this publication.

Another ghost would then take me around the present where my nephews have moved away to Tennessee and North Carolina, along with their children.

It would show Courthouse News offices in Pasadena where we are undergoing a painful, expensive, but necessary, upheaval of the software tied to every stage of our publishing business.

It would show me living in a house after renting an apartment for the entire life of the Almanac. In the present, I go outside in the morning and pick up my newspapers on the driveway.

But, as Finney’s character says, “Ghost of the future, you are the one I fear the most.” Or as the bard put it, “Mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

So like Scrooge did, I wake up and ask, do I still have time. Yes. Some.

But later in the company of red wine and — for they never really leave — the old ghosts, I wonder too, how much time do we all have, how much time does the human race have here on earth.

As the world around us, the one we have created, closes in on us, I see every day new news about our possible survivors. Today in the bureau chiefs’ meeting we discussed a science story involving a transistor that mimics the brain.

I admit, we laughed.

The other day, when I picked up my newspapers, I read about a biological brain-like substance that is married to a computer underneath. These innovations move past the language models of artificial intelligence.

They are on the way to replicating us.

So I wonder, will the robots wish for redemption.

Subscribe to our columns

Want new op-eds sent directly to your inbox? Subscribe below!

Email *

Author

Submit