Welcoming in 2007

When I search my memory, I can recall only a few memorable New Year's Eves. The teenage one when I emptied my father's liquor cabinet, smoked weed and spent the next few days puking. The first New Years in love with the man who would later become my husband. The raw, dazed and crazed New Year's eve when I knew for sure that the marriage was over. The first New Years as a new mom and the one a few months after we moved to Santa Cruz. The city used to have a First Night with all sorts of musical and theater events taking place in the downtown area. My last few New Year's Eves have felt frantic as I've attempted to come up with distractions that keep me from obsessing about what my teenagers are doing out there. Are they being safe? Are they using good common sense?

But most of the Dec. 31st of my life have blurred together as a night to get through, a night of feeling unsettled and disatisfied. I know a lot of people feel that way, that no matter how we say "it's just another night," it remains a touchstone of where we are and where we want to be and where we have been.

Last night, I turned down a few invitations and spent the time alone. It felt right to give in to my sense of aloneness around this particular holiday. During the day, a few friends gathered at a local cafe to write what my daughter dubbed our New Year's "evolutions." I like the term better than "resolutions," in that it honors the process of change and the decision to point life in a particular direction and then to see what happens, or what doesn't happen.
Maybe New Year's Revolutions? Or Convolutions? Or Restitutions? I wonder how those phrases would alter and shape my own formidable list.

I was boogie-boarding in the ocean as darkness fell and the moon came up, and I stayed in the waves until dark, finally making my way through the kelp and around the rocks to get out of the water. Luckily, it was a low tide. As I pedaled home, my fingers and toes lost all feeling and I swear I could feel ice flakes forming on my wetsuit.

I spent an hour or so cleaning house, no metaphor, real scrubbing and dusting to welcome a new year. Then, I bundled up and took a long walk along West Cliff accompanied by Michael Pollan www.michaelpollan.com on my iPod. I've been listening to his incredible natural history of food and the food industry, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and feel both sickened and empowered by his findings. It was an odd--or maybe perfect--choice for New Year's Eve reading, since so many people were no doubt filling up on corn-fed beef and salmon and high fructose corn syrup in its many disguises. Everyone should read this book. It may -- it should -- change the way you eat-- or at least change the way you think about what you eat. One more personal "evolution" for the year--to be more aware of the connections between the earth's plants and animals and what I put in my mouth that keeps me alive, to really understand and accept my place as a predator, even a vegetarian one.

At midnight, I was warm in bed, connected to the firecrackers and shouts and drunken, happy cheers by a half-remembered dream.