I like to think that I’d have learned by now that no amount of resolutions I make at the start of every year will ever change who I really am. Why do we bother? Why do we keep insisting that there’s so much about ourselves we need to change? I suppose it’s because most of the time we’re all ready for something different, recognizing the things we lack in, the things we need to work on and do better at, that somehow along the way throughout those 364 days of our lives we give up on, or forget, or find new things to be upset about or frustrated with and promise ourselves we’ll fix and never do. I suppose there’s nothing like being able to see the actual passing of time the way you do when the clock strikes twelve at the start of a new year where you can almost see the past year of your life fly out the window and become lost, that makes you want to do something.
I wonder what most of us will be thinking as the countdown begins. All the anticipation, the expectations of where we should be in order to say so long to the past and welcome in the future. Does it matter more where we’re standing or who’s standing beside us? Traffic is blocked off in midtown, people have been outside in huddled masses next to strangers in almost single degree temperatures for hours just to watch a ball drop from the sky.
In this crazy world where things that are important can slip away from us so easily, I wonder why we bother celebrating the end of something as much as we do today over champagne and over-priced dinners and over-hyped spectacles in the middle of 42nd street. I suppose it’s the hope of starting over again or starting fresh with a clean slate that has us all in a frenzy, calling friends across the world with well wishes at midnight while enjoying a drink at an overcrowded and overpriced bar we paid too much to get into.
As the seconds slip down 10...9...8...7...6 I like to think I’ll be feeling OK about how this year has come to pass, fully accepting that while there are great many things I’ll resolve to do, almost none of them will get accomplished. 5...4...3...2...another day, another chance, another night without cabs, without inhibitions, without lost hope, without regret. Happy New Year.
December 31, 2008
December 21, 2008
Home for the holidays.
Every family has their Christmas traditions and mine is no different. Growing up my sister and I believed in Santa Claus, we had faith that, despite our sometimes bad attitudes, on the whole we were good kids which meant we should be rewarded with the toys we diligently selected from the Macy’s catalogue.
However what I remember most was every Christmas Eve, my parents, sister and I would sit on the couch in our pajamas after having gone to church, and watch the 1983 performance of the holiday Boston Pops Orchestra that my father taped off of PBS. John Williams was the conductor and led the Pops through the typical holiday favorites, at one point the audience (and us) would join in on a sing-a-long, Lorne Greene would read T’was the Night Before Christmas, and at the end Santa Claus (who my sister and I always insisted was the "real" Santa) would come through the back doors of Symphony Hall, give out candy canes on his way up to the podium, before brandishing Maestro Williams with a miniature E.T. in black tie holding a conductors baton. Every year it was the same, the same performance with audience members whose clothes and hairstyles began to look more and more dated as the years progressed.
As fate would have it, I ended up going to college right down the street from Symphony Hall, and every year my parents would say we would get tickets to the real thing, and every year we didn’t get around to it and said: "we’ll do it next year."
A few years ago, my sister and I feeling too old to be bothered with sitting through yet another performance, muttering things like "this is lame," while texting friends from our cell phones, watched distractedly until my parents gave up and turned it off. The next morning the old 1983 tape was accidently taped over, and the look of loss in my mother’s eyes had been acute. Looking back I know it wasn’t just the pain of losing this old recording that each of us had by that point memorized, rather, she was mourning the loss of our childhoods, of time, of the past parts of our lives that you only recognize you can’t ever get back again until you lose something real.
Of course after I lost my mother and last year being the first Christmas without her, I felt compelled to try to reclaim something my family had lost. I made calls, left countless messages and emails with the main offices of Symphony Hall until finally, just five days before Christmas, a woman in their offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston wrote me back. She told me that my story touched the hearts of everyone in their office, that it's the reason they keep doing their holiday concerts, and she would overnight me the tape. So, there we were on Christmas Eve, my Dad, sister and I watching it tearfully in the painful emptiness of the living room that was now showing us the one thing we took for granted the most - time.
The thing is, every year it’s the same and every year we buy presents and spend too much money and lose our minds while losing sight of what really matters. We grow up and grow bitter and let ourselves forget that at the end of the day we’re all packing and traveling and gift-giving because of the people in our lives that we love driven by the hopeful idea that something small, like an old recording of a concert, can bring a family together. We say "as soon as," and "next time," and "next year," when we know we shouldn’t be wasting another minute. We stop believing, in people and the innocence of youth, and become accustomed to coming home to certain things that once are gone leave holes in our hearts no amount of time can repair.
They say you can’t go home again, but we all keep going home every year to a place that constantly changes, a concept that means different things to each of us in different parts of our lives. But it’s important to remember as we go home and start to count down the final days of yet another year, of time continuing to get away from us, the memories of how things used to be, and the realization that in the end not everything has to become lost.
However what I remember most was every Christmas Eve, my parents, sister and I would sit on the couch in our pajamas after having gone to church, and watch the 1983 performance of the holiday Boston Pops Orchestra that my father taped off of PBS. John Williams was the conductor and led the Pops through the typical holiday favorites, at one point the audience (and us) would join in on a sing-a-long, Lorne Greene would read T’was the Night Before Christmas, and at the end Santa Claus (who my sister and I always insisted was the "real" Santa) would come through the back doors of Symphony Hall, give out candy canes on his way up to the podium, before brandishing Maestro Williams with a miniature E.T. in black tie holding a conductors baton. Every year it was the same, the same performance with audience members whose clothes and hairstyles began to look more and more dated as the years progressed.
As fate would have it, I ended up going to college right down the street from Symphony Hall, and every year my parents would say we would get tickets to the real thing, and every year we didn’t get around to it and said: "we’ll do it next year."
A few years ago, my sister and I feeling too old to be bothered with sitting through yet another performance, muttering things like "this is lame," while texting friends from our cell phones, watched distractedly until my parents gave up and turned it off. The next morning the old 1983 tape was accidently taped over, and the look of loss in my mother’s eyes had been acute. Looking back I know it wasn’t just the pain of losing this old recording that each of us had by that point memorized, rather, she was mourning the loss of our childhoods, of time, of the past parts of our lives that you only recognize you can’t ever get back again until you lose something real.
Of course after I lost my mother and last year being the first Christmas without her, I felt compelled to try to reclaim something my family had lost. I made calls, left countless messages and emails with the main offices of Symphony Hall until finally, just five days before Christmas, a woman in their offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston wrote me back. She told me that my story touched the hearts of everyone in their office, that it's the reason they keep doing their holiday concerts, and she would overnight me the tape. So, there we were on Christmas Eve, my Dad, sister and I watching it tearfully in the painful emptiness of the living room that was now showing us the one thing we took for granted the most - time.
The thing is, every year it’s the same and every year we buy presents and spend too much money and lose our minds while losing sight of what really matters. We grow up and grow bitter and let ourselves forget that at the end of the day we’re all packing and traveling and gift-giving because of the people in our lives that we love driven by the hopeful idea that something small, like an old recording of a concert, can bring a family together. We say "as soon as," and "next time," and "next year," when we know we shouldn’t be wasting another minute. We stop believing, in people and the innocence of youth, and become accustomed to coming home to certain things that once are gone leave holes in our hearts no amount of time can repair.
They say you can’t go home again, but we all keep going home every year to a place that constantly changes, a concept that means different things to each of us in different parts of our lives. But it’s important to remember as we go home and start to count down the final days of yet another year, of time continuing to get away from us, the memories of how things used to be, and the realization that in the end not everything has to become lost.
December 10, 2008
You can plan all you want to.
You can lie in your bed
and fill whole notebooks
with schemes and intentions.
But,
within a single afternoon,
within hours or minutes,
everything you plan
and everything you have fought to make yourself
can be undone
as a slug is undone
when salt is poured on him.
And right up to the moment
when you find yourself dissolving into foam
you can still believe
you are doing fine.
and fill whole notebooks
with schemes and intentions.
But,
within a single afternoon,
within hours or minutes,
everything you plan
and everything you have fought to make yourself
can be undone
as a slug is undone
when salt is poured on him.
And right up to the moment
when you find yourself dissolving into foam
you can still believe
you are doing fine.
December 7, 2008
21 degrees, and none of us can feel a thing.
"Cold out?" he asked, concerned. Seemed like a rather obvious question to me, what with the tip of my nose bright red and my teeth in the early stages of uncontrollable chattering. "Quite," I said.
I know that in this city we’re constantly surrounded by nameless faces, strangers and unrecognizable shapes in thickly insulated jackets, that on cold nights sometimes all we need to know is that we’re not alone. When the air dips below unable-to-walk-ten-blocks-without-hypothermia, we need reach out to a fellow New Yorker just to make sure that we’re not the only ones who are hurting, not the only ones who can feel the cold that aches like unrequited love on the sidewalks, (if only they could just feel how I feel then they would know how it feels...).
We need to know (tough as we are) that someone else, one of these nameless faces who so intimately share our seats on the subway (legs touching) and stand beside us at crosswalks (shoulders brushing) and in elevators (is that your hand on my...?) every day of our lives, are real too.
"Well I hope you get home ok," he said. See, we’re not as mean here as people think we are. We’re just as lost and scared and confused and lonely and hopeful and concerned and desperate as everyone else is on cold nights where you can’t feel your nose and all you want to do is get home to something or someone (whether you have them or not) whose face doesn’t seem quite so foreign.
Feel that? Yeah, me too.
I know that in this city we’re constantly surrounded by nameless faces, strangers and unrecognizable shapes in thickly insulated jackets, that on cold nights sometimes all we need to know is that we’re not alone. When the air dips below unable-to-walk-ten-blocks-without-hypothermia, we need reach out to a fellow New Yorker just to make sure that we’re not the only ones who are hurting, not the only ones who can feel the cold that aches like unrequited love on the sidewalks, (if only they could just feel how I feel then they would know how it feels...).
We need to know (tough as we are) that someone else, one of these nameless faces who so intimately share our seats on the subway (legs touching) and stand beside us at crosswalks (shoulders brushing) and in elevators (is that your hand on my...?) every day of our lives, are real too.
"Well I hope you get home ok," he said. See, we’re not as mean here as people think we are. We’re just as lost and scared and confused and lonely and hopeful and concerned and desperate as everyone else is on cold nights where you can’t feel your nose and all you want to do is get home to something or someone (whether you have them or not) whose face doesn’t seem quite so foreign.
Feel that? Yeah, me too.
December 1, 2008
December.
It was 55 degrees in Manhattan today and it doesn't feel like Christmas is only 24 days away. The tree sellers are already out on the sidewalks making long lines of green against the grey pavement, and it's nice to inhale deep the scent of pine you walk by. What is it about the smell of pine trees that makes me feel like a kid again? This will be my third Christmas in New York and the first year I won't have a tree. What is it about the lost memories of the past that pulls the holiday spirit of youth away from you? Perhaps it’s inevitable that after all this time the sound of Burl Ives humming from overhead speakers in the grocery store only ends up making me feel depressed.
The Rockefeller Center tree lighting is Wednesday. My first year here I tried to go see it, but like most things in this city the tourists ruined it, packing into the place well before 3PM making it impossible for locals to swing by six hours later – the time of the actual turning of the switch (I only live 20 blocks away!). Inevitably once 48th to 51st streets get lit, the rest of the city goes up in holiday flames as well, and there's no escaping it (and it doesn't help that my friend just got a job working weekends at this place of which I have strict instructions to visit on Saturdays anytime from 12-6).
It's only a matter of time before chestnuts roasting on a open fire will be painfully ingrained on my brain despite the fact that I’ve never actually roasted chestnuts before, on a fire or otherwise. And don't even get me started on The 12 Days of Christmas, the song nobody knows the lyrics to but insists on singing loudly regardless, coming in from other rooms just to shout fiiiiive goooold riiiiings (yeah, that's the only part I know too). The Salvation Army bell will now be ringing on every street corner, making me feel guiltier than ever with every cling-clang cling-clang about not wanting to give up what little Starbucks money I have left after rent. More people than ever will be crowding onto the subway with big shopping bags all getting in my way and reminding me that gifts and bags and boxes with bows aren’t nearly as important as people make them out to be. I'll send out Christmas cards to friends, needing to ask again for the new addresses of those who have sadly left Manhattan since last year, causing me to question why I'm still here...
And then it will snow. Sure, maybe sometimes all anybody needs to feel better about the approaching holiday and the amount of money they're going to have to spend on the people in their lives just to prove they care about them in this financial crisis, is a nice soft blanket of white – but I have a feeling that just won't work for me this year. Because once the snow lands in Manhattan it turns dirty fast, creating brown mountains on the sidewalks alongside the mountains of trash bags that pile up after the blizzard stops the garbage trucks from getting through. Quelle disaster.
No, it's 55 degrees in Manhattan today and the last thing in the world I want to think about is the approaching holiday and the ending of a year I can't help but feel I wasted. Maybe a miracle of George Bailey proportions will happen between now and the end of the month to change the way I feel - but I'm afraid I’m about as confident in that as I am in knowing what comes after a partridge in a pear tree.
The Rockefeller Center tree lighting is Wednesday. My first year here I tried to go see it, but like most things in this city the tourists ruined it, packing into the place well before 3PM making it impossible for locals to swing by six hours later – the time of the actual turning of the switch (I only live 20 blocks away!). Inevitably once 48th to 51st streets get lit, the rest of the city goes up in holiday flames as well, and there's no escaping it (and it doesn't help that my friend just got a job working weekends at this place of which I have strict instructions to visit on Saturdays anytime from 12-6).
It's only a matter of time before chestnuts roasting on a open fire will be painfully ingrained on my brain despite the fact that I’ve never actually roasted chestnuts before, on a fire or otherwise. And don't even get me started on The 12 Days of Christmas, the song nobody knows the lyrics to but insists on singing loudly regardless, coming in from other rooms just to shout fiiiiive goooold riiiiings (yeah, that's the only part I know too). The Salvation Army bell will now be ringing on every street corner, making me feel guiltier than ever with every cling-clang cling-clang about not wanting to give up what little Starbucks money I have left after rent. More people than ever will be crowding onto the subway with big shopping bags all getting in my way and reminding me that gifts and bags and boxes with bows aren’t nearly as important as people make them out to be. I'll send out Christmas cards to friends, needing to ask again for the new addresses of those who have sadly left Manhattan since last year, causing me to question why I'm still here...
And then it will snow. Sure, maybe sometimes all anybody needs to feel better about the approaching holiday and the amount of money they're going to have to spend on the people in their lives just to prove they care about them in this financial crisis, is a nice soft blanket of white – but I have a feeling that just won't work for me this year. Because once the snow lands in Manhattan it turns dirty fast, creating brown mountains on the sidewalks alongside the mountains of trash bags that pile up after the blizzard stops the garbage trucks from getting through. Quelle disaster.
No, it's 55 degrees in Manhattan today and the last thing in the world I want to think about is the approaching holiday and the ending of a year I can't help but feel I wasted. Maybe a miracle of George Bailey proportions will happen between now and the end of the month to change the way I feel - but I'm afraid I’m about as confident in that as I am in knowing what comes after a partridge in a pear tree.
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