NOT JUST ANOTHER YEAR, SURELY.
It is that time of year when he thinks he
must take stock, looking back at what has been and looking forward to what will
be. He scratches his head and sighs – not for any other reason than he is
tired, having slept later than usual. The day, if it had been bright, is
already tipped over into grey and he sits under a yellow light writing things
down in a small black book.
He makes a list of all the good and all of
the bad things in the year, as if he is searching for some balance, like an
accountant who must make the figures add up and at the end of the year be in
the black. A son graduated art college in the summer and that was a bright
starry moment and a moment of some pride; then at the end of summer another son
was sick and spent time in hospital and the doctors wore serious faces and he
thought ‘not again’ and though he is not religious he found himself praying.
And wasn’t there something important in the
Easter break? He’d walked from one side of the country to the other in five
days. His feet had blistered so badly that he’d limped the last miles but he’d
dropped a stone carried from the west coast into the water on the east, and that felt
like something.
Things at work changed this year under the
banner of ‘more for less’. He thought he should feel lucky for he still had a
job, but his head aches sometimes from all that ‘more’ he has to do and he has ‘less’
space in his thinking for the things that matter most to him.
He kept up with the writing and there were
some sunny successes, but he feels a little lost there sometimes. He’s reading
something by John Berger and something about art that is for its own sake
rather than for fame or for money, and he thinks he recognizes something in
that. And he thinks about making connections and trying to understand who he is and what his life amounts to, and his writing helps there.
And he read ‘Independent People’ again and
was confirmed in his belief that it is the greatest novel he has ever read and
he wants to give the book to everyone he knows and even to people he does not know. And he cried through the last
twenty minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ last night, even though he knows that
it is sentimental hogwash and James Stewart is pretty enough to never need to
act, which is just as well. And he saw ‘Frances Ha,’ and ‘Nebraska’ and ‘The
Artist and the Model’ and they were this year’s films and they were all shot in
black and white and he wonders if his liking them was for that reason.
Looking forward, he thinks he needs
resolutions, something to shake up his life a little, but he isn’t sure what
they should be. He’s not shaving at the moment, but that just makes his skin
itch and he hasn’t the patience to stick with that; he’s putting money by in a
jar, but he’s not sure for what, yet - for a rainy day, he might once have said, but now he thinks he is putting his money away for a sunny day. He wants to paint in bright colours, and
to write happy, and to take risks. But mostly he wants to laugh, and he thinks
this year he just might do all of those things.
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