'The Richly Wrapped Gift of Times We’ve Shared'

December was the warmest on record in Houston. The average temperature was 67.5° F. A meteorologist acquaintance referred to the month as “our spring fling.” I’ve been taking photos of butterflies in the garden, mostly monarchs, and sending them to friends in the North. The temperature on Friday hit the low 80s. I found a toad under leaves and pine needles in the front yard. By tonight, New Year’s Day, the temperature will have abruptly dropped into the 30s and even the 20s in some areas. Sunday will be windy and cold with highs in the 40s. Time to say goodbye to butterflies and toads.

L.E. Sissman was born on New Year’s Day 1928 and died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age forty-eight. In his essay “Auld Acquaintance” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975), Sissman notes that he and his wife seldom go out on New Year’s Eve:

 

“[I]n New Year’s and through the gelid, isolated month of January, I often think, with an involuntary smile, of friends. Some live fairly nearby; others are a continent or more away. Some I’ve seen fairly frequently and recently; others, not for many years. But all, if they were here with me, would immediately, without hesitation or embarrassment, proceed to open the richly wrapped gift of times we’ve shared, and, in cutting up old touches, advance the state of our relationship. Even in their absence, I can see and hear them now.”

 

As a former but now abstaining party-goer, my sole custom on New Year’s Eve and Day is thinking with gratitude of friends and acquaintances, some of whom I call or write. A few I haven’t seen in decades and others I have never met. The one undeniable blessing 0f the internet is friendship with readers I would once have known only as strangers. There’s another category of friends, ever growing -- the dead. In his first poetry collection, Dying: An Introduction (1968), Sissman includes a sequence of four sonnets, “The Tree Warden.” The third is titled “December Thirty-First”:

 

“The days drew in this fall with infinite art,

Making minutely earlier the stroke

Of night each evening, muting what awoke

Us later every morning: the red heart

 

“Of sun. December's miniature day

Is borne out on its stretcher to be hung,

Dim, minor, and derivative, among

Great august canvases now locked away.

 

“Opposed to dated day, the modern moon

Comes up to demonstrate its graphic skill:

Laying its white-on-white on with a will,

Its backward prism makes a monotone.

 

“In the New Year, night after night will wane;

Color will conquer; art will be long again.”

I long ago adopted that final phrase as one of my mottoes, a variation on Ars longa, vita brevis. I'm no idealist but I know what works and what's important.