You couldn’t call it a Christmas miracle, because it happened in March – but it had Christmas written all over it.
This was a few decades ago, but the spirit of it still burns bright, which is what miracles tend to do. And adding intrigue to the tale is whether it really involved a miracle at all.
It occurred at a spot familiar to many Rhode Islanders: the salty confluence near Narragansett’s beach where Narrow River swirls into the ocean.
One windswept March day, three men of middle age walked out to the rocks there. Subdued by regret over past conflict, and bearing expressions of love, they scattered the ashes of their father.
On that first anniversary of their dad‘s death, it was appropriate that they bequeathed him to the sea.
I met their father years before, as I fretted in the Providence Journal’s South County Bureau because December 25 was approaching and I had yet to find a good Christmas column.
As if on cue, the office door flew open and in burst an embodiment of the season: a white-whiskered, plaid-shirted specter holding a luxuriant wreath draped with red ribbon and exuding the fragrance of balsam.
He announced: “I’m Hap Hazard and I’m here to decorate the ocean. Come on, it’ll make a good picture.“
“What’s this all about?” I asked.
Replied Hap Hazard: “It’s my way of giving thanks for the sea, and thanks for Christmas. It’s like saying thanks to whatever power there is that makes the laurel and the evergreens.”
I learned that friends called him Hap even though his given name was Earl, that he was estranged from a family he wouldn’t talk about, and that he lived a nomadic existence that took him, like a snowflake on the wind, as far away as Alaska and back.
He wrested a living from the stonemason’s trade and the wreaths he made. When I asked his age, he said he didn’t have a birth certificate and was glad of it: “If you have no way to tell your age, you can be any age you want – I’m either a young 93 or an old 57,” he said.
We drove to the Towers in Narragansett, where he trekked over shoreline rocks to the water and hung his lush wreath on a weathered piling, as he had apparently been doing at Christmastime for years.
“Don’t you wonder what will happen to it?“ I asked.
“ I have no way of knowing,” he said. “I want to put it there and let Nature take care of it, like when you build a sand castle on the beach.”
Hap Hazard dropped by for years afterward, and we occasionally put his picture in the paper. Then, one December he told me he would be decorating the ocean for a final time. When I asked why, he said medical tests revealed that he had used up all his Christmases.
By then he was so weak that he asked a friend to help him shuffle across the rocks with his abundant Christmas wreath.
He died the following March, which brings us to that first anniversary when three of his five sons committed him to the sea he so loved.
Afterward, one of those sons told me of wishes that things had gone better among them. He reflected on how conflict can tear families apart, and how that rite on the rocks reaffirmed the value of love.
“It sounds a little corny,” he said, “but we had a bottle of wine, and we toasted him, and we spilled a little on the rocks – for Dad.”
It was then that they saw it, in a small tidal pool: a fresh-cut bough of balsam, draped with red ribbon.
A better reporter than I might have taken this with a grain of sea salt, perhaps conjecturing that earlier that day another son, or a friend, stopped by and left such an anniversary offering.
But Christmas is no time for pragmatism, and besides, what matters is not how that spray of balsam got there, but the healing spirit in which it was left.
So without further investigation we’ll leave the story as it lies, with best wishes for a Merry Christmas from me, and – wherever he’s weaving his glossy wreaths for the sea – from Hap Hazard.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a former Providence Journal editor and columnist.
