I’ve always thought January 2 a less than savory date. The universal going-back-to-school (and work) after the holidays date. This year most of us got a one-day reprieve, so today is the day of reckoning.
Suddenly the world seems dark and cold again. Holiday lights are down, boxed up till next year. Christmas trees line the street, stripped of their decorations, with only a few forlorn scraps of tinsel or a forgotten ornament or two as evidence of their former glory.
It seems a good, contrary move then to post a Christmas photo, a shot of our kitchen table, the sun streaming in, the warmth of the season captured.
I look for fresh starts throughout the year, so when I’m handed one as obvious as New Year’s Day I’d rather downplay the thing. It’s hard to this year, however, with such a splendid date to contemplate — this string of ones, nice tidy digits, straight arrows pointing us toward the future.
And that’s what today is about, of course — the future, moving ahead whether we’re ready to or not. Moving ahead with optimism and purpose, with a list of resolutions tattered from folding and unfolding, one we drag out every year and check off an item or two a year if we’re lucky.
December 31 usually finds me taking stock of the old year and making resolutions for the new. This year is no exception. But there is a big difference. This year I actually kept one of my resolutions — I started a blog.
I’d thought about blogging for years, but last New Year’s was the first time I resolved to start one — and without the back-to-back blizzards we had in February, A Walker in the Suburbs might be just another “worry less” or “exercise more” — one of those good intentions I carry quietly into the next year.
But it wasn’t. And it has given me more than I could have hoped. After a career of writing for editors — and being an editor — this blog is blissfully editor-free. Well, almost. There’s still the little devil who sits on my shoulder and whispers in my ear: “Do you want to reveal so much?” or “How could you leave that out?” But even that bothersome editor, self doubt, is less intrusive than she used to be.
I started A Walker in the Suburbs not knowing where it would lead or even how often I would post. And it has surprised and encouraged me. Thanks to all of you who stop by this little corner of the blogosphere. May your resolutions come true, too.
Yesterday I traveled to Maryland to see my parents, who are visiting from Kentucky. My mother is starting a museum; my father is planning his next Eighth Air Force reunion. They are proof that getting older is not just about loss; it may also be about gain.
Mom and Dad are children of the Depression — but they are not depressed. They come from an era where people largely stayed in their hometowns, where most interaction was face-to-face. They are old enough to tell it like it is. After I’m with them I feel clear-headed and strong. I feel optimistic.
The winter walk is full of sounds: the cawing of crows, the whir of a distant chainsaw, the crunch of frozen ground underfoot. Along the woods path are pockets of crunchiness, where leaves have splintered and crumbled, become packed and moistened and are now brittle and fun to pop.
I think of winter as a silent season — and it is. But try as hard as I might, the fall of foot on land is never noiseless.
My office is closed, the year is winding down. I wake up and realize: There is no place I have to be, nothing I have to do. And so, I read.
I just finished Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. Subtitled “A Memoir of Friendship,” it chronicles the author’s relationship with the late Caroline Knapp. I read Knapp’s book Drinking: A Love Story a while ago and enjoyed it so much I immediately searched for other books she’d written. I was sad to learn of her death of lung cancer at age 42. Especially sad because Knapp had beaten anorexia and alcoholism — only to be beaten by cancer.
I approached Caldwell’s book warily at first, since she covers ground Knapp covered in her writing — addiction to alcohol, love of dogs. But I warmed to the author and to the friendship she shared with Knapp and by the end of the book was completely hooked. By sharing her fears and her inside jokes and even her occasional spats with Knapp, Caldwell brings her friend to life, the slant of Knapp’s back as she rowed on the Charles River, her habit of playing computer solitaire during a boring phone conversation.
Like all good memoirs, though, the book is about much more than the subjects at hand. It is ultimately a lens through which we view ourselves and those we love.
“Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the ‘and then’ of narrative itself, but without it — without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control — consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode. The universe insists that what is fixed is also finite.”
We rushed home from Maryland to beat the snow, six to eight inches predicted and the flurries already flying as we raced around the Beltway. But by western Fairfax they had died down, and though it snowed off and on the rest of the day nothing much stuck. Instead the wind raged in from the west, blowing the few flakes sideways. I felt strangely disappointed; I was looking forward to the excitement of a big snow. But this morning comes the payback: no shoveling, a full house, a full pantry.
Watch a movie every year and soon you will be able to predict each comment long before it’s made. All of us marvel at Bing’s mellifluous voice and Danny Kaye’s smooth dancing. There will be a disparaging word or two about Rosemary Clooney, despite my reminders that she was George Clooney’s aunt. And it’s true, this film is probably not her finest.
Her sister, played by a dancer named Vera-Ellen, earns the most comments for her impossibly long legs and tiny waist. It’s not easy to pig out on Christmas cookies while watching this movie.
Every year I get the giggles when the housekeeper, played by the great character actress Mary Wickes, just happens to be reading Variety while tending the phones. “What housekeeper reads Variety?” I shriek. “Mom, you say that every year!”
But we all do. That’s the joy of watching this movie together. The ritual of repetition, of small family traditions that come around each year — part of the joy of Christmas.
Celia and I were talking in the car the other day about the meaning of Christmas. I was distracted, negotiating the traffic, thinking about what I had to do after I dropped her off. I mentioned the word “family.”
“I thought Thanksgiving was about family. It seems like every holiday is about family,” she said. And of course to me every holiday is about family, but in varying degrees.
What I should have said, what I wish I’d said, is that Christmas is about hope. It celebrates the birth of a baby king. Not a full-grown king but a king-in-making, and as such is more about the potential than the actual. It celebrates our turn back to the sun and days of warmth and light we can only dream of at this time of year.
It is, then, a day to celebrate something often in short supply in government, in families and in daily human lives — a belief in the unseen.
Cold weather keeps a walker close to home. This means I’m once again a student of minute differences, noticing small changes to the landscape around me, a tree down in the forest, a garland on a mailbox, a new gathering spot for crows.
It is good to focus on what is in front of me; it doesn’t seem limiting in the least. The familiar can be full of surprises.
