Back Home for Christmas
Screen 1 of 4One Sunday morning in mid-December, I took a long walk through Central Park before sitting down on one of its many benches. It was quite chilly, but the sun was bright, and I was warmly dressed. I had come there to think things through -- all by myself. Earlier in the fall, I had found that park to be a good place for meditation. There I could be alone in the midst of a crowd.
People of all ages, ducks, dogs, pigeons, and bicyclers were all about, but they were not paying any attention to me, as I sat at one end of a long bench beneath a giant oak tree. Even the bridle paths were busy. Well-groomed saddle horses proudly carrying their riders trotted by now and then, but they too did not bother me, even though I could not resist looking at those magnificent animals. None of these things seemed to interfere with my soliloquy.
"What in my life has given me the most genuine satisfaction?" I asked myself. "What have I done up to now that I really enjoyed the most? And would I perhaps like to do that kind of thing again?" I was posing these questions while I drew designs in the gravel with a stick I had picked up along the way. Such questions seemed appropriate, since I was now seriously in doubt whether I could continue my present state of unhappiness in New York.
I soon learned my private soliloquy was not a silent one. My musing must have been overheard by an old man who was sitting on the other end of the bench and throwing crumbs to pigeons. For he responded quietly, as he gazed up at the spreading oak, "That's a good question, young man. I've wondered the same thing many times," he continued, "but I've never found a satisfactory answer, and now I'm too near the end even to ask the question." The dialogue ended there. Neither of us had intended to speak to the other. We had just been thinking out loud. The old man soon rose and without looking at me moved away silently with a slight limp, his weather-beaten felt hat turned down against the rising breeze, his tattered topcoat pulled close around him.
His reference to the shortness of his time reminded me with a jolt that my own questions must be answered soon. There were good reasons why I had asked myself these questions. The most obvious reason was my present predicament there in New York. I had not been at all successful during the previous three months in holding any job connected with the professional stage. The empty promises of agents and producers, along with the dead-end rehearsals and premature closings had been extremely disappointing and discouraging. And, of course, neither the ushering job at the Jefferson nor the graduate course at New York University was directly connected with any of my long-range goals. Yet setbacks and temporary failures were not new to me. In earlier years, I had met and somehow gotten around many of them. So the gnawing doubt about continuing my pursuit of an acting career -- as formidable as that doubt was -- was not principally caused by current troubles related to the stage. I really felt quite confident that if I would stick to that pursuit, I could and would eventually be successful and have a satisfying career in the theatre and motion pictures. This confidence had been gradually built up over the years by my successes on stage, and it had been considerably boosted during the previous summer by my successful experience with the Barter Theatre.
Something deeper and much more compelling was pushing me to reexamine where I has in that fall of 1933 and what I wanted to do in the years ahead. At first, I could not identify what this inner urge was, as I was asking myself those questions that Sunday morning in Central Park. The massive oak above my bench and the blue sky beyond provided a quiet and peaceful setting in which to contemplate these things. Also, I recalled what Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick had said the Sunday before when I listened to him at Riverside Church. A Great Power exists beyond that blue abyss, he had said with conviction, a very real Power most people call God who can and will rescue us from any predicament, if we have faith and ask for His help. And as I sat there on that park bench, I turned that thought over and over in my mind.
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