Money (for John Berger) Until this grisly season of forced good cheer, I had come to my fortieth year with- out thinking of money as more than something to buy time with, enables its possessors to go on and do what they deem most important to get done before our cruelly limited life-span drives home its final...tour-de- force.... The season is-- the season. Gluttony frees everyone to lapse into silence or indulge in banter so impersonal those with the least to say--flourish--as lights enhance the winter trees. Then this Christmas card arrived, postmarked from the town where my wife spent her teens. I took one look and looked away. And left it on top of the pile. She came in, took one look, and said oh my god. It was something about what the card signified. Money joined hands with philosophy: the card moved us somewhere beyond language; her exclamation was homage to being wordless in the world. I didn’t dare calculate the cost of having the children’s portraits painted and then photographed for the card. Looking at the triptych from left to right a figure emerges: the older you become the more power and confidence you will have. I don’t think I have progressed beyond the panel on the left: the hesitant expression of the youngest child beside a storm-colored urn. Not even the portrait artist can disguise the slight rigidity in his posture, the way his arms do not dangle freely but conform only outwardly to the pose that has been chosen for him--as if he were saying here, take my shell, I’ll hold on to my soul, thank you--or am I too much projecting my way of keeping myself to myself when as a child someone I hadn’t authorized was looking at me with a design, or about to shoot my picture and the timing was off and I wanted to be elsewhere: out of my body. My wife’s long hair fell over the mail. A Christmas card sent in all innocence. With the best intentions! I put my arm around her waist, my hand on her hip (--I knew how hard she was taking the triptych--) while we greeted each other in the dark foyer, her winter coat--still--on her back....