How to Keep Beginning Again

The Yearly Trick of Looking New

The new year came in warm and wet in New York. We woke to the horizons and the tops of the buildings wearing fog, as if 2022 was embarrassed to be here. It was late morning, almost noon, but M&Q were still in their beds taking advantage of the break from school to teen-sleep off the old year.

My body has seen too many mornings to miss them now, and I’ve been up for a while looking at the river. Like always, the turning over of the year invites thoughts about the possible. At the height of the pandemic, from the tops of all the terrible curves it seemed possible to see far ahead into a welcome future, one with better government, better policing, more equality and equity, more public and proper care. But as the curves descended so did the vision, and all anyone could see was the rickety normal from before.

Anything was bound to seem preferable to 2020, and in some ways 2021 was. M went off to college in California and began to build a rich life for himself there under that odd and ubiquitous sun. The virus ebbed (again) in NYC, and with it the knots in our chests twisted a little less often or with less torque. Q was able to go to fine arts camp in the Adirondacks, getting her out of the city and her head and into the woods with her people. M’s band snagged gigs across the city, including at a bar in the East Village where their music sent the crowd back to a time before breathing carried the risk of death. Good futures seemed visible again.

But in looking for something new in 2022, or at least newness, the firsts that come immediately to mind are not that welcome. This was the first new year with M in the house living out of a carry-on bag. We know that each time he leaves, he goes further away, which is what’s supposed to happen, but still. It was the first year without my grandmother, who made it to 100 and through catching COVID in a nursing home, but who left us before the first month of 2021 ended. It was the first new year without an aunt and two uncles. It was the first new year without my father.

Besides, too much of 2022 still seems old. We are once again at the top of a spike, for a while the highest in the country if not the world, and the view from this altitude is less idyllic than before. M’s semester has started with the drudgery of remote classes, and Q’s school is struggling to deal with absences due to illness. Not enough of our leaders provide hope that anything will substantively change for the better in most people’s lives, even though we’ve all seen the need for such change to how we work and care for each other. Inequalities have deepened, skewed priorities remain entrenched, our politics still broken and now perhaps unfixable.

We’re all tired. The knot twists in my chest like before, and my thoughts can’t find traction these days, slipping from every surface. After all that has happened and is continuing to happen, how can we keep beginning again?

There are worse places to begin than poetry. Thinking about beginnings this year reminds me of Philip Larkin’s poem “The Trees”:

How are trees so new each year? Outwardly they look born again, but Larkin says it’s just a trick: Trees record their time and experience inside themselves — thick rings in plentiful times, slim ones in struggle. We are no different, of course. The effects of these many many months will no doubt always be inside us, part of us, readable by the right dendrochronologists, however new we may make ourselves.

After a couple of warm days, deep cold arrives to remind us of January. I walk along the Hudson, as I do most days, my mask keeping my face warm and my breath to myself. I like this bit of the river in downtown New York where it grows wide, gathering itself up to meet the sea on its own terms. You can’t see a bridge across from here, and you end up having to imagine the other side full of lives like and unlike your own.

Sometimes I wear shirts borrowed from my father, and I wrote some of these sentences, or some version of them, with my father’s mechanical pencil given to me by my mother on her holiday trip to NYC. She knows me well. Since he’s no longer in the world, I find myself putting him back here in useful things. In perhaps our most audacious act in some time, we signed Q up for a summer class in Paris with a friend. We are allowing ourselves to believe that we can make a new truce with the world, that when May comes we might be nearer to fullgrown thickness.

Here we are in 2022. The river of me is full, and I will imagine the other side. Last year is dead, and we have written it down inside us. In the one to come, let’s try to rhyme grief with leaf. Let’s try to keep talking to ourselves. Let’s try, somehow, to begin afresh, afresh, afresh.