So already, happy New Year's Eve Sunday. I've been reflecting a lot on change since Christmas Eve, which was last Sunday.
How much has to change before someone feeling surprised and betrayed by that change proclaims angrily or despondently, "Everything has changed"? I contend that though lots can change--including the person lamenting that everything has changed--seldom does everything change. That said, enough can change to make the world feel different and disorienting, even indifferent and disorienting--until what's changed becomes the normal and expected. For better or for worse.
As I mused on how I'd slipped into accepting the new normal of damp, temperate late December weather and Donald's absence, I recalled several other things I've adjusted to in the last few years: the knowledge that the voice I hear when I pick up my landline phone will never again belong to my father; the understanding that old, good friendships can go through phases when they feel less good and require lots of good faith effort to feel good again; the realization that the person with whom I most often need to spend more time when I'm plagued with feelings of indifference and disorientation is me--though I wouldn't act on that realization nearly so much were Scott not there to encourage me.
I was thinking about all of this while he and I were driving through the Cambridge neighborhood where I had lived for thirteen years in an apartment building next to the Graham and Parks Alternative School (which had been Peabody School when I lived there; schools change, too). We were heading to dinner in that same neighborhood at the home of a really good old friend--she and I have been confidants for more than forty years--at whose house I'd been a Christmas Eve guest at least twenty-five times.
This year, because my friend has had some health issues, her daughter was serving as both cook and hostess. It seemed the natural order of things that Christmas Eve dinner was changing in some ways and remaining the same in others: it had done so many times over the years.
At the earliest Christmas Eve dinners I attended, the only guest in addition to me was the Jewish friend of my friend's oldest daughter who, like me, understandably, didn't have family Christmas Eve plans. In the ensuing years, the group expanded, gradually at first to include a few others, and then in leaps and bounds with the addition of the recently widowed, the recently divorced, the children of both, and several others who didn't have their usual Christmas Eve places to go. Somehow, my friend always managed to make room at the inn and to keep the loaves and fishes multiplying when some invited guest appeared at the door with "someone else."
Always, a group of teenage girls sequestered themselves in a bedroom, preferring one another's company to that of the old people in the living room. Eventually they became adults with homes of their own, and that, combined with other natural forces, caused the group to contract in size. What remained constant while my friend was the chief cook and baker, whether those assembled numbered ten or thirty, was the flaming plum pudding at dessert time.
After saying thank you and good night at the conclusion of what had been a happy, festive, delicious, different Christmas Eve, Scott and I headed out into the night. And I thought about my old apartment building, which we'd driven by earlier.