Houdini of the Holidays

The man who ditched emails for eggnog.

This is the holiday swing — the Bermuda Triangle of the calendar year, when people leave the office for lunch and don’t return; when 8 tabs are open on the work laptop and 7 of them are Amazon, Wayfair, and a minimalist baking blog; when hand-wringing salesmen try earnestly to close The Deal only to find out that the prospect and The Deal and any and all mention of The Deal have vanished before their eyes like the ghost of Christmas past.

I have seen some disappearing acts in my day, but none better, and certainly none more joyous than a man I dubbed in latter years…The Houdini of the Holidays. Whenever this festive season draws near I think of him. He was an accomplished and well regarded businessman who, from the time beginning on Thanksgiving day, running though the New Year, and sometimes well into January — would simply drop off the face of the corporate earth. Say peace. Go AWOL. Skip town.

There was no funny business going on. He had the time to take and he took it. All of it. That’s to his credit. Usually his getaway ruffled some feathers. But the feathers he ruffled were due solely to the fact that he absconded so mysteriously, and dare I say, so smoothly. There were no grand goodbyes. No announcements at meetings. He left no pralines in the break room. As far as I know he was the one who knew his plans.

Good for him. Houdini threw off the fetters of his business affairs so quickly and nonchalantly, I began to wonder if this was really some stunt he pulled for sheer effect. Well, if he was looking for effects, he got them.

The rest of us, of course, did not throw our cares to the wind so readily; though we wished we did. From the shadowy corners of our cubicles we watched him with fishy eyes, wondering if today was the day he was leaving for good. The moment Houdini left, we felt lost. The wind left our sails. Some good spirit departed and some stale kettle-cooked smell took its place. Our thoughts lingered after him like a litter of puppies, hoping he would take us with him, wherever he went.

Naturally we filled the time he was gone wondering where he went and what he did and who he saw and above all, why. It stunned our white collar minds that someone would just leave on a whim; leave without reason and leave with a smile on their face.

But the why was the least mysterious part of his getaway. I speculate that his plans were this: that he left, drove 10 minutes down the road, opened the door to his house and sat down on his couch in the living room. Really it does not matter what he did. Because whether he was on his own couch or a couch in Cambodia, the cold, unsettling truth is: he was free. Free in the best sense of the word; not just with his time, but in his spirit. He was too jolly for productivity. Too busy for business. Too festive for finances. Too merry for moneymaking.

In an office of donkeys and dunces, he was the wise man. Years hence I have not met anyone like him. He savored the season wholeheartedly and slipped all the chummy office attempts to squeeze half hearted work out of half hearted workers. He was the most impressive example of someone who took his worklife seriously — that is, unseriously, as a slice, and only a slice of a much larger and sweeter pie called LIFE. He had things to do, and he was off. With a flair of good humor he locked his door and grabbed his coat knowing that the work would be there when he returned.

The one exception to his long hiatus was the Christmas party, which he attended faithfully and which, in many ways, served to invigorate his mystique. I can see him clearly now, floating in, shaking a couple of hands, swapping a couple of jokes, sipping his spiked eggnog and floating off again as blithely as he came.

In the New Year he was back as fresh as ever. He would turn up with a new haircut, a ruddy glow on his cheeks and a merry twinkle in his eye. He looked like a man who had hung his holly where it needed to be hung, who tackled a pine tree, smoked a pipe with St. Nick, buried the trifles of yesteryear and renewed his soul in the springs of Rest. In short, he looked like a man who taken a long holiday. The rest of us looked like we had taken a long happy hour.

What can I say? I miss him. He awed me then. He awes me now.

There are other wonders in the world beside work, and it takes an odd duck, a Houdini among us to remind us they’re out there and that we need to hustle to them. The bells are jiggling from afar. Today, at the start of Advent, I applaud him across time and space. I hope that a little of his magic rubs off on me this season, and when the time comes to skip in the snow, I go.