"Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   

lists of vegetables, partial poems.   

Orange swirling flame of days,   

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies.

Rx bottle

Sometimes when you are hiking barefoot you need to put on a pair of shoes. This is one of the things I have learned so far during these nearly two weeks in Los Angeles.

I am so homesick, so much more painfully than I anticipated. I thought I would luxuriate in having a quiet room and a bed to myself for 12 nights, but instead I sleep barely at all and anxiety has taken up permanent residence in my throat.

I turn on the TV and mute it just for the sense that the silent people on the screen in the corner of my right eye are here with me too.

I think partly I am scared of being evaluated after so many years of being (to an extent) the sole arbiter of my success

I think partly I am overwhelmed by the pressure to live up to the standard established by my former student self: unmitigated perfection

Of course I am not perfect now and I wasn't then, not in any way other than grades on paper, and today I'm a wiser and more conscious and more self-aware person and I can breathe into that and feel my feet on the ground and remember who I am and provide my own validation

Also I am stressed about time--about getting it all done when I am feeling in many respects so utterly burnt out

Probably more than anything else it's that I want this so badly, and I did it. I'm here. And because happiness or "getting" what I have for so long wanted, for lack of a more articulate way to say it at the end of this long and sleep-deprived day, feels so foreign to me that whenever I do feel it I quickly begin feeling the anticipatory pain of losing it

Maybe I don't need to assume that everything good that happens to me will soon be gone

Maybe I should keep my focus on the reality of my situation at this moment, which is that I am endlessly lucky and enormously grateful

Crash

Because I crashed for the first time on downhill skis I now know that I can crash while downhill skiing and that the act of crashing, inherently, does not spell disaster. What's more, I can now be certain that the woman who serviced my skis did so according to my DIN specifications, meaning that my skis will eject me from their grasp in the event that I crash and an ejection proves necessary. This is why I ejected from my left ski when I crashed, but not my right: Because my right leg remained perpendicularly oriented toward my ski at the time of the crash, while my left leg smashed into the snowy bank at an odd angle and thus required ejection from its ski in order to avoid twisting my leg into ghastly proportions. Because my left ski did eject me, this gives me comfort that my skis are likely to function properly and helpfully in the event of future crashes. While I still hope to avoid crashing whenever possible, the experience of having crashed leads me to believe that I am likely to be okay in the rare event that I crash again in the future. This has proven a great comfort to me, as prior to crashing for the first time on downhill skis I had been greatly resistant to the possibility of a crash.

Walk-a-thon

The people whose lives are affected by Alzheimer's, whether because they themselves are slowly losing the mind and personality and memories they've long held to be their own or because they love someone who is thus affected, don purple shirts, grip the strings of purple helium balloons, and set off together on a mile-long walk along paved neighborhood walking paths. In the months prior to outfitting themselves with purple shirts and purple balloons, the people who are now walking have asked, or maybe even implored, their friends, colleagues, and families to support their efforts by donating maybe $10 or $25 or even $50 toward their cause. They have set what feel like ambitious fundraising goals: $150 or $250 or, more rarely, 1,000 dollars. They hope their months of effort and ingratiation and, in the cases of people who are otherwise not accustomed to walking one mile at a time, physical preparation will aid the people and organizations that study Alzheimer's and perhaps expedite research into possible and effective treatments for the disease that is gradually or, in some cases, swiftly stealing their lives or the life of a person or several persons whom they love.

The paths on which the purple-appareled people are walking wind their way along a quick-moving creek that is fed by snowmelt from the mountains above before meandering through a local neighborhood. The neighborhood is filled with multimillion-dollar mansions situated on plots of lands that alone cost sometimes a quarter or half a million dollars. The mansions are inhabited for perhaps two weeks or two months or, in exceptionally rare cases, six months out of each year. During the months in which the mansions are not inhabited, the buildings' owners reside instead in their multimillion-dollar mansions elsewhere in the country. They fly between their two homes on private jets that are given special takeoff and landing privileges, even if it means inconveniencing the hundreds of passengers who sit waiting aboard the commercial aircraft that depart occasionally from the valley floor.