Bi-Weekly Topic for Jan. 1, 2005
On the road
By P.
I have a long history of adventures on New Year’s eve.
You know, the kind defined as “someone else having a bad time a long ways away.”
In college, a roommate and I once trekked to New Jersey to visit a girlfriend of his who turned out to have no plans for the party she had invited him to. We spent the night in the fog, driving home through the Catskills.
Afterward, my wife and I gathered with friends of hers who were more reliable about following through with their plans. We’d meet somewhere, sit drinking and telling stories through the evening, and go home, counting ourselves as having had a good time.
Then the friends began to scatter, shedding wives or jobs and acquiring religion, kids or paunches. We kept up the tradition for a while, making lightning trips to New York City or Washington, D.C. to meet. I had my first — and last — experience of deep-fried calamari on one of those trips. My stomach still squirms a little at the recollection, to this day my strongest impression of Newark, N.J.
On another, we went to the top of the World Trade Center and watched from the observation deck through the gathering mists as the lights came on at the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. Yet another trip led to a night of storytelling in Arlington, Va. I think that one was notable for our taking an inadvertant and slightly scary tour of the Poconos on the way home.
Then things came unglued. We joined a different friend in Toronto once and had an uneventful supper at a downtown club, where they asked us to step out of the way as they moved our table to make a dance floor. We wandered into the lobby, where our waitress forgot about us. When we sought her for champagne and our check (the couch in the lobby was quieter and more comfortable than the dining room), she said she thought we had skipped out on her. The trip home was memorable for a tiny beeping sound from the back of the car that followed us all the way through Buffalo. Much rummaging led to a clock that somehow got set.
We invited that same friend to Cleveland, where once we stood in the rain to watch fireworks downtown and got thoroughly soaked. The friend was a good sport about it. I went indoors to warm up and spent a chilling quarter-hour listening to cops debating the merits of pepper spray vs. collapsible batons.
A later adventure took us to a coffeehouse that offered free pastries and a blues band for the night. It sounded promising till we heard the band and observed that the crowd consisted of the band’s families and us. After a couple of cacaphonous numbers, we fled. I always wondered how long the families stuck it out. The coffeehouse itself disappeared soon from its suburban corner — though, Lord knows, we still have plenty of coffeehouses.
While our daughter was still in diapers, we were invited to ring in the millennium, (or the old one’s last year, depending on whether you start counting at 0 or 1) at a gracious mansion near our house. The glittering space, with pale gray carpet and multiple fireplaces and display cases full of glass, was peopled with well-dressed, soft-spoken, well-to-do folk, but the promised baby-sitters were absent. We retired to the TV room to keep the kids out of trouble.
Cold sober, I remember sampling caviar and realizing an anecdote I was telling to a laser-thin woman in a black dress was stupid before I finished it; I shudder to remember a thoroughly dull conversation I inflicted on the fellow who invited us.
Naturally, amid all this elegance, my daughter had a diaper explosion. Appalled at what happened to the velour pants, my wife was ready to go home, but our hosts persuaded her to stay. Then, invigorated by all the attention and perhaps feeling lighter by a pound of the unmentionable, our girl then began playing tag all around the place with the one other kid there — in and out on the soft carpet, among the soft-spoken, impeccably dressed pillars of the Upper Crust. I had to follow, full of anxiety lest a tottering 3-year-old might collide with one of those display cases. My wife stewed.
When at last she had had enough, I grabbed our sans-culotte marathoner and we fled, half an hour short of the historic moment.
On the whole for new year's, give me the couch, an old video, and some hot chocolate.
And leave but a kiss within the cup, and I’ll not look for Guy Lombardo.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Newyear.html
No Stopping Anytime
By Hoarded Ordinaries
When Gary and I went to Manhattan several weekends ago, we spent part of our first (cold) night in the city walking the neon-lit streets of Times Square. Although I’d visited Times Square before, I’d never wandered its streets at night on foot. Tonight while Gary and I celebrate the New Year safely ensconced here in humble little Keene (which does, nevertheless, drop a lit ball at midnight while marking the occasion with fireworks), over half a million alcohol-warmed revelers will crowd Times Square to greet the arrival of 2005 in properly boisterous fashion.
Although Gary’s Times Square photos are sharper and brighter than mine (and that’s sparing any comment about that first photo of Yours Truly hamming it up with a pizzeria mannequin, or Gary’s final shot of Annette and me leaving him in the dust), I cherish my snapshots for several reasons. Looking at these images, I remember how cold we were as we stood in front of the illuminated Prudential Financial marquee waiting for it to cycle through various advertisements culminating in a glowing shot of falling snowflakes. (Again, Gary’s camera captured that precise moment whereas mine did not.)
Standing slack-jawed with camera in hand like any gawking tourist, I didn’t notice all of the nuances of Times Square until I transferred my digipix to my laptop and reviewed them afterward in (warm) leisure. I chuckled to realize, for instance, that there is an Armed Forces Recruiting Station smack dab in the middle of the madness of Times Square, as this photo reveals:
And near the center of this last image, I love the red sign (visible as well as at the far left of the second photo, above, of a tourist-laden bicycle-rickshaw) that reads “No Stopping Anytime.”
At the heart of the City That Never Sleeps, Times Square is a perpetual motion machine, with taxis and tourists and recruiters and rickshaws buzzing and blurring without ceasing: moving, moving, moving. Tonight for New Year’s Eve, those of us in Manhattan or Keene or points elsewhere raise a glass to celebrate the fact that Father Time himself never stops for anyone. The ultimate rickshaw-driver, Time keeps pedaling, wheels perpetually turning, whether you’re smart enough to step out of the way or not. Wherever you and yours are ensconced, here’s hoping you’re warm, safe, and looking ahead as Time and his traffic honks and hurries into 2005.
This entry is my one-day-early contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic New Year and Place.Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/12/31/no-stopping-anytime/
Another sunrise
By Via Negativa
I wake around 6:00 and am out on the porch by 6:30, in time for the last 20 minutes of darkness. Most mornings this time of year, the transition from night to day is virtually imperceptible. But this dawn lurches dramatically from dark to light and back again as breaks open and close in the fast-moving clouds. By 6:55 I can see well enough to write between the lines in my pocket notebook. My first page of the New Year, however, will be an almost unreadable mess. It's unseasonably warm - 50 degrees (F) - and breezy. By 7:00 o'clock, a large portion of the sky has cleared off, revealing the gibbous moon and one star or planet, maybe Jupiter. A hunter walks up the driveway, headed for his tree stand. (In Pennsylvania, muzzleloader deer season resumed the Monday after Christmas.) "A little late, aren't you?" I call out. He mutters something I don't catch, then says, "The way I figure it, everyone else probably has a hangover, so I'll be the first one out here." A couple minutes after he heads up into the woods, it occurs to me that I ought to try and watch the sunrise, assuming it will be visible. I tuck a sitting mat under my arm and set off for the crest of the higher of the two ridges, the one to the west, which we call Sapsucker Ridge. Crossing the field, I hear the twitter of waking songbirds, and just as I enter the woods, a white-throated sparrow calls. For once, it doesn't sound the least bit melancholy. Nor do I hear either of the two popular onomatopoeic interpretations, just the song itself. It stutters a bit at the end, as if the bird still has a bit of sleep stuck in its throat. I reach the ridgetop by 7:15 and spread the mat at the base of a smallish chestnut oak, some 25 feet away from the mammoth red oak that we refer to simply as the Big Tree. I had thought I might sit against it, but decided I'd rather watch the sunrise through its massive spread of limbs. Who knows how many more years we'll have it with us? I feel sorry now that I didn't bring a bottle of champagne to toast the New Year. I would've gladly given some to this tree, poured it into the ground around its trunk. The tree I'm sitting against is a creaker. I look straight up and realize I've got company: a dead cherry tree is leaning against it, too. Only one thin branch stands between me and a world of hurt. Fortunately, on this side of the ridge, the wind is erratic, and the rubbing of tree against tree yields only an occasional eeeeeek, or a lower-pitched uk . . . uk . . . uk. A hundred feet to the west, some other creaker is going erk erk erk erk, as regular as a metronome. The whole time I'm sitting there, it doesn't let up. Shortly after I get settled in, a crow calls - Here, here - and another answers in the same fashion, like British members of parliament after a stirring speech. Well, what's not to applaud? As it turns out, I'm very lucky. There's one, small break in an otherwise solid curtain of cloud above the eastern horizon. From my perspective that break is right in the middle of the Little Juniata Water Gap in Tussey Mountain, some seven miles away as the crow flies. And through that break I'm able to watch the sunrise. By 7:30 the hole in the clouds has turned deep crimson. At a few seconds before 7:35, the first retina-burning edge of the sun pops into view. It takes only a few minutes to traverse the narrow gap and enter the clouds above. In fact, the leading edge has already disappeared before the bottom of the orb clears the horizon, and at the point where the greatest part is visible, I notice a very thin band of additional cloud bisecting it. I feel as if I'm watching a strip tease through a peephole (not that I've ever done such a thing, of course). Hmm, O.K. - I say to myself - I'm watching the ball rise. By 7:38 the bottom edge is visible above the horizon. Happy New Year! Less than four minutes later, the sun's gone and the red is rapidly draining from the aperture through which I was fortunate enough to verify one possible, arbitrary beginning point of another complete circuit of the earth 'round the sun. Is this why the Quiché Maya think of the sun as a mirror, I wonder - because its original radiance has been obscured by the host of calendrical contrivances we read into its (apparent) daily round? The real sun showed its face only once, they say, at the beginning of time. Since then the Day Lords have been ascendant. I pick up my sitting-mat and continue my walk, heading southwest along the ridge to the so-called vernal ponds. The largest - less than 25 feet across at its widest point - is still just barely frozen. A pool of melt water has formed on top of the ice, which has sunk down so that only the outermost three to four feet of ice are still above the water. The exposed ring of ice bears a striking pattern of what look like the interlocking footprints of large birds. But it's the water in the middle that draws my attention. Again, the sense of an aperture: this time, a window into a world of sharper contrasts and greater mutability than the one we know, that dim reflection frozen in the mind's eye. The tree trunks are silhouettes against a grayish-white sky, with here and there a patch of pale blue or creamy yellow. The slightest movement of air sets the horizontal branches shivering; electric impulses pass from trunk to trunk. It's never enough to make them really waver, though. They stand, solid citizens, with their heads downward, roots hidden somewhere beyond the edge, behind the clouds. At 8:20 I leave the pond and circle around behind the grove of Norway spruce at the top of the field. I'm struck suddenly by how quiet it is, apart from a few train whistles. I stop to admire a small patch of milkweed: straight stalks projecting stiffly at various angles to the ground, gray pods still spilling seed-flecked down. A few of the tufts look as if they're barely holding on, but it'll take a stronger breeze than this to lift them free. Half the sky is now clear. In less than a minute the sun will at last emerge into that clearing - and into this one. The milkweed fluff will glisten like snow, which on other years would lie several inches deep by now. In a few seconds the sun will shine full in my face, all of it, for the first time this year. It's already happening, before I've finished writing about it in my pocket notebook. At how many countless points on the planet is another sunrise just now beginning? Sunroot . . . treeshine . . . whatever might have been here, unsayable, in the always present moment - you know - by the time I get it all down, has been here and gone. __________ A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic, New Year and Place.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060506062351/neithernor.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_neithernor_archive.html
New Year's Resolutions
By Feathes of Hope (Pica)
I sat next to a young woman on the plane to Chicago the other day. She pulled out a sketchbook even before we were asked to turn off our electronic devices. It turned out she was working through Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, a book I've seen many times but never actually read. During the flight we each drew people we weren't looking at and our hands as two of the four "pre-instruction drawings" -- a self-portrait and a chair weren't really possible that day in row 24 on the port side -- but when I got home I looked for Numenius' copy, the 1989 edition (there's a new edition out now).
At left is my copy of Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky, drawn upside-down, which Edwards claims is the fastest way to disengage left-brain activity.
Among all the resolutions I haven't quite formulated for the new year but which hang in the background as nagging perennials such as eat better exercise more get a better handle on the cash flow, draw more is one that feels like an invitation. Draw more of here.
Ecotone has been sadly bombarded with spam but this is my entry for the New Year.
Posted by Pica at January 4, 2005 08:44 PM | TrackBackComments
So what's the writer's equivalent of drawing upside down?
I'm pretty sure it's not writing upside down. Backwards nor.
Posted by: Jarrett at January 5, 2005 10:00 PMI don't know, but my guess is that it would be meditating.
Which I suck at, so this is a good way to short-circuit my head without spending money or using drugs.
:)
Posted by: Pica at January 6, 2005 11:24 AM Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2005/01/04/new_years_resolu.html
Liz
By RipRap
New Years Day I rise early and steal the house for myself, solitary reading and Coltrane’s “Blue Train”. I read Gary Snyder’s “Danger On Peaks”. He’s so specific: “…yarrow, scotch broom…” Memories indexed by names. A scent, a color, moment in the hot sun.
splayed pile of sprigs
air of scotch broom
your silver hair
January 01, 2005 at 09:44 AM in Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20050216024930/thezone.blogs.com/riprap/2005/01/index.html