A letter

Dear January 1, 2011,

The 364 days following you have a lot to live up to. I have spent nearly 24 other years full of joy and beauty and grace and mercy and love and wonder and blessings. I have spent countless hours nestled in the sand and good books and the love of my family, feeling God and the world wash over me and wrap around me and I know what happiness is about. Just this last year, a hundred little blossoms in my life bloomed, for better and for worse. But mostly for better.

The prospects of things to come are enough to make my heart and mind do back flips every time I think of them. I have little inklings of where I will go and what I will do, and a hundred million emotions to go along with the inklings, mostly fear and excitement and a couple different kinds of bittersweet. But they are merely inklings and the real prospect of 2011 for me is all the wild, unruly, boundless uncertainty of it. The 364 days to come, dear January 1, hold a lot of responsibility in that boundless uncertainty.

I wrote once that 2010 would be either the best or the worst year of my life. It was neither. That was a frivolous, theatrical remark to make to begin with, and entirely impossible to quantify (though quantification is not nearly as relevant as it is sometimes supposed to be). But 2010 was beautiful and surprising and the grave fears with which I started it out were alleviated. 2010 was remarkable and unremarkable, as the best years are, and, what’s more important I love it with the fullness of my heart. This, too, places high expectations on the 364 days to come (large shoes to fill and all that).

Besides all this, the world is tens of billions of years old, and the pressure a single year must have to make a difference in the whole huge vastness of it must be rather daunting. Nor am I the only living thing placing a hundred million conscious and subconscious bets on the coming year (even excluding all the new year’s resolutions pertaining to exercise or weight loss). I don’t envy you the universe’s demands, 2011, although I suspect that they are linked exponentially to the greatness of your potential.

And I have no particular words of encouragement. Certainly the year is more adept at its own success than I. So long as it is reckless and upright and paradoxical, it must succeed magnificently and as for the amount of work we will all put it through, well that is the nature of its existence and I extend no pity. Like people, 2011 is entitled to nothing. Life is for living.

But this letter is to you, January 1, 2011. (Because perhaps the writing of a letter to an entire year is too intimidating for me.) But also because – if I may be so presumptuous – there are things I wish for you. Small day. Small moment. Things that are more within my realm than the hugeness of this whole year which will, ultimately, do-with-me-as-it-will.

Here are the things I want to tell you:

Wiggle your toes, January 1. Wiggle your toes in the Milky Way or in the Nile, or in some small, obscure, marshmallow cloud or creek somewhere and indulge in just being you.

The grave responsibilities of the world are not yours, though you play a hand in them. Play your hand with grace, but don’t let it weigh down your heart. The smallest of things – even one 365th of a whole – can make an enormous difference. Make that difference, but have faith that others will make a difference too.

You can be a sleepy day, January 1. With the whole year ahead. Be sleepy and gentle and soft, but also kind and generous and wonderful for you are setting this year’s stage, you are planting the year’s wildflowers, you are making the first impression.

Though you are small and fleeting, flourish, dear day. Be gusty and charming and confident. Don’t shy from challenge or sadness or change or other things-which-make-us-grow. Learn everything you can and if you must err (and you must), err toward sensibility before apathy and credulity before mistrust.

In truth, these are things I wish for you and me, both, January 1. And all “the good ones,” whatever corners and grand moments they occupy this year. It is nothing like the wisdom of the mountains or the ubiquity of the wind. It has neither the wit nor the timelessness of the writer-I-hope-to-be. It is, January 1, merely-me to merely-you.

With Love,

R.E.A.

P.S. Please write back.

It’s Christmastime and I don’t want to be like those people in the parking lots at the mall

I am an angry driver. I know this because, for example, the other day I spent ten minutes parked in a parking lot writing down how I feel about turn signals. This is what I wrote:

“Turn signals are not optional. They’re a part of driving – or at least driving-as-we-know-it. If you’re the type of person who drives, you don’t just randomly get to be the type of person who doesn't use your turn signal. There’s a reason we don’t give six year olds driver’s licenses, besides the fact that their feet won’t reach the peddles. A car is a piece of heavy machinery that, without competent supervision, can drive over a cliff at 100 miles per hour, or ricochet around corners without warning the life-loving humans in the general vicinity.

“Putting on your turn signal should practically be a reflex. Like turning the lock before running out the front door, or shutting the toilet lid before you flush. Not doing it should feel more conspicuous than doing it.

“I understand that there are situations where a turn signal is not necessary – driving up the 15, for example, between Nowhere and Barstow, when you haven’t seen another car in 157 miles. But seeing as how the last time I drove around Long Beach without seeing another car for 157 miles was...never, I don’t understand why turn signals are so scarce around here.”

I also know I am an angry driver because I am only half kidding when I say I’m going to attach a light-up neon sign to my bumper that blinks the word MERGE in enormous letters every time someone fails to merge properly, a fairly simple task that a surprisingly large percentage of the driving population apparently never learned.

Every time I am stuck in traffic I am not only annoyed, I begin contemplating the dangers of overpopulation and considering the possibilities of launching the worst of the drivers around me into orbit around some other planet, not only relieving the traffic, but also relieving the human race on earth of a portion of its stupid gene. The only way to refocus my brain to anything less homicidal is to roll down my windows and start singing “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” at the top of my lungs. I’m serious. I do all of these things.

I know my spontaneous anger at random drivers is (at least sometimes) irrational. I know I make driving mistakes all the time and have no way to communicate my apology to the person in the other car who is probably contemplating the possibility of launching me into orbit, or something much worse. Somehow I can’t seem to give anyone else who’s driving the benefit of the doubt. If you see my glaring, glazed-over face and my angry white knuckles death-gripped to the wheel, I am probably in the process of summoning the wrath of karma from wherever it resides in my dark mind down upon your head and - assuming karma even remotely listens to me, which I’m pretty sure it does not - you had better hope that you have done something in your life akin to saving starving orphans, as this is your only chance of redemption.

Anyway, the point is that I’m trying to be a less angry driver. I like driving. I like listening to my music loud and rolling my windows down and blasting the heater on my feet so my toes don’t freeze off (which, between the months of September and May they are consistently at the risk of doing). I like being lost and passing through places I never knew or cared existed and suddenly finding that I do care. It’s not the driving that I dislike. It’s the other drivers. And if I get right down to the root of the problem, it’s not even the other drivers themselves, the mothers-fathers-sisters-brothers-aunts-uncles-friends who are driving down the road. It’s the shameless, spineless, vast rudeness of the other drivers that really gets me.

I’ll be honest, when I first realized I had a problem, I considered alternatives to the obvious learn-how-to-manage-your-rage solution. For several months, I decided to try using my horn as a signal of my aggravation, not only in times of danger, but also when the driver in the other car was obviously a moron and needed to be taken down a peg or two. I realized this was a bad solution for two reasons. One, I never think to use the horn until it is too late, even in situations that are actually dangerous and where the horn could really come in handy. Somehow, I am unable to locate the great, giant anywhere-in-the-middle of my wheel and pound down on it quickly enough to make any sense. Come to think of it, perhaps I should get my reflexes or hand/eye coordination checked out by a doctor, as I can see how this could be detrimental in other aspects of my life. Second, the situations in which I contemplated using the horn began to get out of control. There are many, many let’s-walk-out-into-oncoming-traffic-with-our-two-strollers-and-fifteen-kid pedestrians I really wouldn't mind scaring the dumb out of instead of politely slowing down to a halt to accommodate their stupidity. The same is true for some bikers, skateboarders, and police cars...you can see how the idea was becoming more and more dangerous.

The thing is, I’m never actually rude to other people in traffic. I don’t believe in that stuff. I’m just blood-boiling mad by the time I finally get home and I’m really not thinking very kind thoughts about my neighbors either. In fact, I’m generally thinking that a planet with no such thing as neighbors – or any kind of people – might not be a bad idea. I've lived in suburbs my entire life and somehow I am still not even remotely used to how darn many people are here. We’re seriously like ants, teeming all over the earth, except we’re bigger, more colorful, and less organized. It’s not like road rage is my first hint that I should be living somewhere in the middle of 60,000 acres in Wyoming where my only company is the people I don’t wave off my property with a shotgun. And I don’t count PCH in any of my complaining here because I’m pretty sure I could drive 60,000 miles on PCH – people or no people – and not feel upset about it. It’s just that driving bumper to bumper down the street with obscene quantities of retail stores on either side of the road is pretty much the height of depressing. It’s so easy to begin contemplating all the numberless gorgeous places in the world that you've ever been, or never been and only dreamt about. And that way lies insanity.

But here’s the thing, it’s Christmastime, and, as you may have heard me mention before, I really don’t want to be like all those people in the parking lots at the mall. Besides which, I haven’t yet received a memo from God or the universe letting me know when the opportunity to squat on 60,000 acres in the middle of Wyoming may come my way, which means that, for the time being at least, suburbs are my fate. Seal Beach Boulevard, Tustin Avenue, Freeways 405, and 22, all the wonderful people of Southern California, these are my routes and driving buddies on the current road trip of my life. And since I have neither the power – nor probably, when all is said and done, the heart – to really send all these people into orbit around another planet, there are really only a couple things left for me to do if I have any chance of keeping my sanity through 2011: toss the map in the back seat, roll down the windows, turn up the heat, and hit play...”Santa Monica Freeeeewaaaaaaaaaaay, sometimes makes a country girl, bluuuuuuuue...”

-R.E.A.