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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Holiday trip on memory lane with O. Henry Last year, just before Christmas, Nora made copies of the sheet music for a number of Christmas carols. We then took them around to an adult foster care home in the neighborhood, and we all had a great time singing the songs of the season. At the house, a woman named May is confined to a hospital bed next to a front window. For years, Nora and I have walked past the house as many as six days a week as part of our exercise routine. Since carol singing last year, we have added a daily short walk up the curved driveway at the foster home to wave at May and other residents. A few days ago, we repeated last year's Christmas caroling with May and the others at the home. Again, Nora distributed the sheet music and we sang carols with the bed-bound patients. Without a tuning fork to keep us in tune, our melodies had an ad-lib quality. All of us were probably off-key at one time or another in each song. Yet that didn't bother us. It was the spirit that counted. The caroling reminded me of a couple of short stories by O. Henry that I read almost 60 years ago in a high school English class in Austin, Texas. The local schools really held the author in high esteem because he had lived in the city and was considered a "local boy made good," in spite of the fact that he was not actually a born-and-bred local, and that his local stay ended disastrously. Born William Sidney Porter, he spent much of his early adult life in Austin. He really wanted to become an author, and chose O. Henry as his pen name. He tried to start a weekly humor magazine, but it failed. It was in Austin that he was later sentenced to three years in prison for mishandling accounts while a clerk at an Austin bank. O. Henry began writing short stories in prison, and after his discharge he eventually moved to New York. There he earned a magnificent salary from a national weekly magazine for writing a short story for almost every issue. Most of his stories had "surprise endings" in their final paragraphs. The first story I remember was not strictly a Christmas story, but it reads like one. It was set in a tenement house in New York at the turn of the century. A little girl had a lung disease which doctors were unable to cure. The window of her tenement room opened on the brick wall of the next building, some 10 feet away. A vine had attached itself to a drain pipe which was the only thing on the brick wall. In the summer, the vine had produced many leaves, but with winter coming on, only one leaf remained. The little girl told an old man when he visited from his own apartment down the hall that she was sure she would die when the last leaf fell from the vine. Every day she would awaken and immediately open the blinds to find that the leaf was still there. It stayed there throughout the winter. The little girl did not die, and the next spring the leaf was joined by others on the vine. The final paragraph of the story reveals that the old man who had visited her was an artist. During the time when the girl was asleep and the blinds were closed, he had taken his paints and brushes, a long ladder and a lantern and painted a leaf to replace the real leaf on the brick wall. The second O. Henry creation is really a Christmas story. "The Gift of the Magi" is about a recently married couple in a cheap flat in New York. Each wanted to buy the other a fine Christmas present, but they were broke. I won't reveal the plot, but you can read it at the library in any O. Henry anthology. It does put you in the mood for the season. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.