A Child's Christmas in Wales

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

And they are wonderfully evocative of his Welsh youth.

But for me they also evoked another memory, of a trip that Bud Rouse and I made up to Saratoga. We visited friends of his who worked at the track and had a horse of their own (Double Russian was the name, if memory serves). We had fun at the races, hanging on the far side with all the Hispanic groomsmen and walkers and cussing out prima donna jockeys. And after dinner and a few frosties that night, our host took down a collection of Dylan Thomas poems and we took turns reading them aloud. It was precisely the kind of affected scene that you'd expect in a Manhattan novel or like something out of a gutter version of Jane Austen, but I'll be damned if we didn't have fun.

The best, most treasured, books and writers of our lives become entwined in our existence in just such odd and unique ways. Then any time we encounter them again, they trigger a cascade of memories. For no reason that will ever matter to anyone else, Dylan Thomas is such a writer for me. But I think everyone will enjoy this short but terrific memoir.

GRADE: A