If it were a normal year, I would be entertaining this morning. It wouldn’t be as effortless as DeeDee, or as elegant as Helen, or as exuberant as Kitty, but despite being a self- avowed reluctant entertainer it still would be a celebration. But normal is in short supply, so this reluctant entertainer is reluctantly not entertaining in this, the Age of Corona.
You might wonder, “What’s with the emphasis on reluctance?” Reluctance is what got me going- a paradox that has heretofore escaped me. Robin’s Rules came about only after a stab at the book I thought I wanted to write-The Reluctant Entertainer. This book resisted. It did not wish to be. When asked why she wrote only one book, Harper Lee replied, “I only had one story to tell.” Turns out, she had two, but I had only one, and it was not about entertaining.
My friends will not gather this morning to read Truman Capote’s luminous story, A Christmas Memory. Surely next year, my Christmas Memory party (among a million other things) will not be squelched by an invisible virus. It’s unlikely that my party will “blaze like a Baptist window”. But that’s ok. At my core I’m less is more. A glow will be enough.
Miss Sook, Capote’s sixty-something year old cousin, was right. “There’s never two of anything.” Be yourself. It will make things easier. And besides, everyone else is already taken.
Same time next year with different memories.