Since I was five years old, New Year's has always signified a sort of detente. In elementary school, I never wrote a daily journal entry on New Year's. At that point, the concept of homework at all was daunting, never mind homework during vacation. In middle school, I had no spelling tests or reading quizzes. In high school and college, I read. For over fifteen years, I never wrote down the date on New Year's Day. I waited until a week or so later, in Social Studies class or English, when I would inevitably write 1999 instead of 2000 or 2006 instead of 2007. I'm sure if you go back and look at my writing assignments for around January 7th of each year, you would find a series of bemused scribbles and numbers.
Today, New Year's Day, I wrote down the date for the first time. January 1, 2011. I didn't hesitate or scribble or scratch. A 2, a 0, two 1's, curiously altered by a little hook on the top of each, a result of adapting to French handwriting. I don't know why I had no trouble with it. Maybe because the concept of New Year's is much more apparent on the day than a week later. Maybe because eleven is so much more symmetrical than ten. Maybe because I just notice time passing more now than I did last year or six years ago.
One afternoon this past week, while enjoying a quiet, unassuming ten days at my home in Massachusetts, I sat at the kitchen table and watched my mother gently lift dried flowers from a little hand-operated flower press. She used a spatula, the same one my father uses to flip pancakes, to peel the fragile stems from the page. Every once in a while, a stem would slip through a hole in the spatula and sort of dangle there, half stuck to the page, half suspended; a tenuous balance. Sometimes the stems would break. Sometimes they wouldn't. As my mother carefully and deliberately glued each petal to a page in her notebook, a sort of 2D flower arranging, I noticed the purple sticky note on the flower press. June 2010. When my family was still living in Sweden. In June, in Sweden, my mother tightened the screws on the flower press and in December, in America, she released them.
Last New Year's, I woke up in Stockholm in 2010. And now it is 2011 and I am in France. Time and place do a funny little dance.
Sometimes I think that, one day in June, I will stop in the middle of one of the many things I do at Williams and pluck a sticky note off my back that says January, 2011. And it will give me pause and I will remember the person I was today and the person I am today and the person I will be then and whatever other confusing grammatical combination I can come up with. With which I can come up.
And then I'll keep on doing what I'm doing.
Happy New Year, everyone. May you all have joy and laughter and surprise and the pleasure of continuing to do what it is that you're doing.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
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