Saturday, December 23, 2006

HOLIDAZE

Off to the usual visits in the tri-state area: DE, NJ, PA. Some time it might be interesting to spend Christmas somewhere completely different, but the only aspect of the holidays that makes them "traditional" is the fact that they find me inevitably back where I started from. It seems fitting somehow that the end of the year be marked by a return to origins. I suppose somewhere new for the new year would make sense too, but... that usually takes more energy than I can muster. Besides, there's something appealing about being in a college town in "the between days" after one semester and before the next.

New Year's resolution: to finish Against the Day and write about it in the first week of 2007. I'd hoped to make it before the year ended, but too many other things impinged.

No grand pronouncements for year's end, so I'll just leave with some lines of Berryman's that occurred to me this week, for some reason:

Working & children & pals are the point of the thing,
for the grand sea awaits us, which will then us toss
& endlessly us undo.
-- Dream Song, 303

2 comments:

Andrew Shields said...

We go to Kassel at Christmas, to Andrea's parents. Where would I go in the U.S.? No old haunts: Detroit, where I was born? Nobody there. Palo Alto, where I lived the most before moving to Europe? No family there. Toledo, of the late seventies? God forbid (at least since my Dad finally escaped there to go to Seattle). Ann Arbor? My Mom moved to Wisconsin.

So wherever I would go, it would not be to haunts from childhood and university!

Donald Brown said...

wow, that is pretty nomadic of you and your folks. Actually, I can't imagine wanting to visit Detroit or Toledo even if family was there. Palo Alto might be cool, but not what I'd call "christmasy." My daughter at least has DE as the same frame of reference, "home for the holidays-wise," as I do.