Another Year Over & a New One Has Just Begun
Another Year Over & a New One Has Just Begun
On melancholic Christmas songs, getting older, and the words that will inform my upcoming year.
Written between my childhood bedroom, an airport bar, and my home.
For the last few weeks, John Lennon has lived inside my mind. Which feels ironic because he isn’t even close to being my second favorite Beatle, but nonetheless.
After the sibling Christmas Day walk this year, we stood in our parent’s driveway and listened to my brother’s tales of road rage and musings on survival skills (of which he assured me, I have none), accompanied by the live musical stylings of Delia and I. We spun in circles and sang Happy Xmas (War is Over), but only the same part over and over.
“So this is Christmas / And what have you done? / Another year over / And a new one just begun / And so this is Christmas / I hope you had fun / The near and the dear ones / The old and the young.”
Plus a lot of “A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS / AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR / LET’S HOPE IT’S A GOOD ONE / WITHOUT ANY FEAR” for good measure and stage presence.
Three days after Christmas, I was sitting in my favorite market-bar hybrid near the A gates at DTW. Sipping a tight Alberino. Munching some chocolate covered blueberries. I like the Detroit Airport a lot. I feel community, all of these speed walkers in UofM garb. Everyone either looks like my paternal relatives or like they went to my high school. But I like it. I don’t even mind the outliers fleeing Ann Arbor, as told by their dunks and sweat sets. I am Midwestern through and through, goddamn it.
Thinking of home and community and family, I think of my sister. And John Lennon. Because it WAS Christmas. And what have I done? Another year is over, after all.
I feel so focused on that line. Another year over. How will I refer to my year in future storytelling? The Year I Was Twenty-Two (if only half the year)? The Year I Moved to LA? The Year I Moved to RI (#throwback)? I suppose it’s all context.
Regardless, I don’t want to play the game of “another year over, what have you done.” It feels melancholic to me, not hopeful. I hear “let me measure myself,” rather than “let me reflect.” I urge you to stay reflective rather than critical when it comes to the unchangeable like a year past. Play fair.
Perhaps I’ve just developed a sensitivity about time recently. At family Christmas, I sit pretty at the head of the kid’s table, between four and fifteen years older than everyone else. There, I am an ageless capital A Adult, somewhere between 20-26 to my cousins who can’t grasp difference in age after your teens. I sit on the couch with my grandma, who lost her husband eleven years ago and is eager to tell the story of how she and my grandfather met. There, I am a vessel of opportunity, so young, so naïve, about to undergo the same simulation she just exited. I stand around the kitchen island, chatting with my sister’s seventeen-year-old friends, unable to decide through conversation if they are children or adults. There, I am a near future, the Older Sister who gets a little too much affirmation as a reward for oversharing, like a personified Cosmo.
Que the older people, yelling out to me, “Welcome! This is what life is like from now on!”
To that I say, thank you for the warm welcome. I’m brand new.
As for next year - what did Hemingway say? “Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.” And what did my mother say? “Love shows up.” Those are my “resolutions.” To rise to the occasion and to show up for others. Which reminds me of what Coach Taylor says – “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” That about covers it.
Happy New Year, my friends. Thank you listening. I love you too.