NEW YEAR’S DAY [W, 1-1-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—NEW YEAR’S DAY [W, 1-1-25]

 

[I came across this column that I started on the first day of 2014. I didn’t post it then, though, because I didn’t finish it...]

I know of a man, a Quaker, 90 years old, who, when he awakes in the morning, lies in bed a while “getting in sync with the universe.” I would like to do that, but when I awake in the morning, I need to get in sync with the bathroom, without waiting for the universe to come around. Maybe that’s the difference between Quakers and Methodists.

I’m not very often in sync with the universe, and it’s usually my body, or some part of my body, that is the cause of my dis-synchronicity.

It is the first morning of the new year, 2014, as I write this. I grew up with the understanding that what happens the first day of the year will be the agenda for the rest of the year. Grandma Pond always served cabbage on New Year’s Day, for that meant one would have money the rest of the year. If gaseous emissions are money, then she was right; otherwise, not so much.

What I most need to do in this new year of my winter season is to get rid of stuff I don’t need for the future. [And perhaps work on making my sentences less convoluted and obfuscatory.] Maybe that is how one who cannot lie in bed in the morning gets in sync with the universe, by getting rid of stuff the universe doesn’t need.

 

Since the Salvation Army and the recycling center are not open today to receive my excess t-shirts and newspapers, I am looking through file folders, the kind that hold papers, those things that only old people remember, those thin sheets of stuff on which we wrote great ideas in the days of yore, with a thing called a pen, and putting into the “office paper only” basket those paper sheets on which are written literally thousands of wonderful ideas for stories and books and poems and sermons that will never come to screen, and which now do not look nearly as insightful or necessary to share as they did at the time I wrote them down.

Here is where I stopped writing on 1-1-14.

So, has anything changed in these last 11 years? What was the point I was going to make in this column?

Well, in addition to moving from Iron Mountain, Michigan to Bloomington, Indiana, I really have gotten rid of a lot of stuff. You have to do that when you move all your stuff from a seven-room house with a full basement and a three-car garage into a six-room condo with no basement and a shimmy garage. [It’s so narrow you have to shimmy sideways to get past it. We’ve got to get a Morris Minor!] And we’ve continued to winnow. I follow the rule of one in, two out, whether it’s a book or a piece of paper or anything else.

I think I’ll just go back to Grandma Pond’s belief. Well, not cabbage. But I’ll get this day in sync with the rest of the year. I’ll do today what I want to do all the other days. I think that pie for breakfast makes perfectly good sense…

 

John Robert McFarland

Bonus Folk Music Note—An Irregular and Irrelevant Series: Odetta. 

MLK called Odetta “The Queen of American Folk Music.” From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanack I learned that a reviewer once said of her: “She really can’t sing folk, because she doesn’t sound like a person singing. She sounds like The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” In the 1960s, she often appeared with our friends, The Chad Mitchell Trio, both in concert and at Civil Rights events.