Dangerous pavements.

But I face the ice this year

With my father’s stick.

~ Seamus Heaney

On New Year’s Eve, a year ago, Chinese health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in Wuhan city. Since then – as we all now know – the virus has spread to nearly every country, killing over 1.8 million people and decimating the world’s economies.  How do we bid farewell to all of that? I’m not sure we can. Not really.  Not as over 1.8 million ghosts step into 2021 with us, reminding us as we turn the calendar page, of what we have lost and the hard road ahead. 

In taking what it took from us, COVID-19 also revealed the best and worst  in our hearts and minds. It brought seismic changes, our routines and rituals no longer relevant or at times even allowable in a world in quarantine. Changing the rules for gathering, how we say goodbye and hello, it altered the way we go to school and church and the way we show up at the office or the polling booth.  Those of us privileged to do so were afforded the luxury of virtual living in the realm of the internet, our days and months slipping by without shape and structure, online the lines blurred between work and play. Up close and personal in-person contact all but disappeared – no clammy handshakes sealing deals – no deals – no high-fives and hugs, no weddings or wakes, no graduations, no funerals, no way to do them the way we always did. If we were fortunate enough to do so, from our living rooms we ordered our groceries and meals from restaurants desperate to stay afloat. We binge-watched Netflix originals and rediscovered classics. From the best seats in the house, we saw The Rolling Stones deliver perhaps their best performance of “You Can’t Always Get What you Want.” We came up with ways for the show to go on. And, in many ways, it did. Meanwhile many of us didn’t get what we needed. 

Amid the disruption, so many of us were lucky, spared the pain that continues to batter millions of lives and livelihoods. So many of us weren’t and many more won’t be. Along with our good fortune, we might also have discovered a resilience, a way to approach our altered circumstances that we otherwise wouldn’t have known was in us. Whatever it was that brought us unscathed to the end of 2020, here we are. We made it. We’re older now. We’re wiser. We know better, or we should, on the brink of a new year:

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

It’s as good a day as any to contemplate what we might accomplish with all we have learned. New Year‘s Eve, a day designated for reminiscing and resolving; for holding on and letting go; for Auld Lang Syne and cups of kindness. COVID loves a crowd, so the traditional celebrations in places that know how to party have been curtailed by curfews and lockdowns and strict social distancing measures. On Broadway, the crystal ball will drop to a small audience of essential workers and front-line responders, their families kept six feet away in socially distanced areas. And, if we got them in on time, our wishes for 2021 will be added to thousands of bits of confetti that flutters down in the heart of Times Square at midnight. We can watch on TV, the way we always do. Across the Atlantic, instead of fireworks lighting up the sky over the River Thames, Big Ben will ring out 12 times at midnight.

Without the rowdy revelers and strangers kissing at midnight in cities all over the world, this will be a New Year’s Eve like no other, like so many  “. . . like no others” of this passing year.

Alone, missing your own ones or maybe even feeling a little lost, you might find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead –  where the world is waiting for us:

Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.

There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.

So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.

But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.

And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?

The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.

But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.”

Ready to step into the club car, I am hopeful. There you are, waiting for me, glasses raised. We know what matters in the year ahead, don’t we? 

Together, we can do this.

yvonne

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