DichotomiesThe other night was a festive one. There are things I used to do to mark the turning of one year into the next. When I was with someone, our habit was to build a meal in a cuisine neither of us knew. More recently, I've noted the penchant for walking a roadway until either it or the year ends. Sometimes to mark the turn there are visits to gatherings, sometimes with cocoa, sometimes with stronger things.
Five days away on horseback, my brother lives in a deep swell of people and place. In the particular bit of it where he sets his hat these days, there is also a fair amount of stiff drink to be had, and many places to get it. The other night he stepped wobbly through all of that, the edges of the new year blurring with bright lights in the darkness, insistent rhythms on speakers set to Loud in a fight with the undercurrent of shouted conversation, rooms filled with tumblers of glass held swaying. I have no complaint with any of this: he has a knack for being in good places at such events, for which I gently envy him from time to time.
Anyway: this is not what I did.
I was still recovering from some transient bug, but able to walk: I walked. I walked up the little ridge line of the far hill out of my neighborhood into another, and stood on the edge of it all, the river and the city spread out in lights. I sat down on a railroad tie to wait, if I would be able to see the fireworks, down there where the waters meet behind the tall buildings.
If any were set off there, I missed them.
This turned out to be okay. We live in a patchwork of little townships, here, each with their own notion of how to run themselves. I can attest that a very great many of them count fireworks as a part of properly doing so: when the minute and hour hands swing through the twelve, the reports of the mortars began, most of them distant, but all present in that place. The sky above the ridge line across the river (patches of it as far as miles away) lit up with garlands and spears of every and any color, small but bright and each shining through the smoke of the one before it.
So, then: let it be a happy new year.
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