Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Mutlu Yıllar

Aşağıdaki hikayeyi editörlüğünü Paul Auster'ın yaptığı "True Stories of American Life" adlı kitaptan aldım -üşenmedim kendi ellerimle dizdim. 2000'li yılların başında yaptığı bir radyo programı için yazar dinleyicilerinden kendisine yaşanmış kısa hikayeler göndermelerini istemiş. Kitap gelen 4000 kadar hikayenin içinden seçtiği 179 öyküyü içeriyor.

"Smoke"un senaryosunu okuduğum gün(ler) hala aklımdadır. O hafta sonu, bir defa, bir defa daha okuyup her seferinde zevkten kendimden geçmiştim. O da bir Noel hikayesi içeriyordu malumunuz.

Hepinize mutlu yıllar dilerim.   

A Family Christmas


"My father told me this story. It accurred in the early 1920s in Seattle, before I was born. He was the oldest of six brothers and a sister, some of whom had moved away from home."

The family finances had taken a real beating. My father's bussiness had collapsed, jobs were almost nonexistent, and the country was in a near depression. We had a tree for Christmas that year but no presents. We simply couldn't afford them. On Christmas Eve, we all went to bed in pretty low spirits.
Unbelievably, when we woke up on Christmas morning there was a mound of presents under the tree. We tried to control ourselves at breakfast, but we rushed through the meal in record time.
Then the fun began. My mother went first. We surrounded her in anticipation, and when she opened her package, we saw that she had been given and old shawl that she had "misplaced" several months earlier.My father got an old axe with a broken handle. My sister got her old slippers. One of the boys got a pair of patched and wrinkled trousers. I got a hat, the same hat I thought I had left in a restaurant back in November.
Each old castoff came as a total surprise. Before long, we were laughing so hard that we could barely pull the strings on the next package. But where had this largesse from? It was my brother Morris. For several months, he had been secreting away old things that he knew we wouldn't miss. Then, on Christmas Eve, after the rest of us had gone to bed, he had quietly wrapped up the presents and placed them under the tree.
I remember this as one of the finest Christmases we ever had.


Don Graves
Anchorage, Alaska

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