In With The New

01/01/2012

It's eight oclock in the morning on New Years day. I'm standing in my brother's backyard waiting for my dogs to pee. The city is entirely silent, it seems, except for the church bells ringing two blocks away. The church has a bell tower, but I'm guessing there are just speakers hanging where the bells used to be, and that I'm hearing a recording of bells rung a long time ago. Probably decades.

As holidays go, New Years demands as much pretense as any of the others. Maybe even more. The effort to summarize a year as if it had a cohesive essence has always been a ridiculous contrivance to me. How can I give a shape to a span of time that only randomly frames the events of my life? The whole situation is a bit like one of those timed tests back in grade school, where you're writing an essay and it's turning out pretty well, but the clock runs out and the proctor shouts "Pencils down!" and you are expected to just drop your thought, right then and there, and to move on to the next part of the test. If you took the time to name the thing that you are feeling, it might be insult.

The dogs finish peeing and chase a squirrel to the far corner of the yard where it escapes over a fence and up a bare tree. The Dogs don't know it is New Years day. Neither does the squirrel. All around me are little brick bungalows with thin wisps of vapor drifting from their rooftops. Wires crowd the sky at all angles. From here to the horizon thousands of hangovers are just beginning to make themselves known.

The problem with deconstructing holidays, or with trying to sweep all traces of superstition clean from your life, or trying to live ideology-free, or with adhering to any strictly rational habit of mind, is that it will lead you straight down a path of total alienation. The onion has no core, and you know that before you begin to peel it. And if you proceed anyway, all you end up with is fragments of onion. So if you're looking for the truth at the center of things, you're going to come up empty, but at least you'll still have an onion to cook with, so to speak.

A few hours later I am surprised to find the church down the block does in fact have bells in its tower. At the moment they are motionless, silhouetted in their little window against the sky. I decide this day is as good as any other to revisit the myth of new beginnings, and to join the many who have once again dared to re-imagine themselves slimmer, healthier, more generous, and more thankful - if only for the next couple of weeks. Whether any of my resolutions actually stick shall remain to be seen. For the moment I can at least say that I'm happy to be welcome in the home of my brother, that I'm blessed by the love of my family and friends, and that I managed to slip into 2012 without a trace of a hangover. That in itself feels like a serious head start.

Happy New Year