…and we were in Squamish, in Pete’s cosy apartment that stares out at a canvas of floor-to-sky granite wall rising out of the earth, and with the beautiful thick-grey-white-gray furred husky Sky ever gently pacing around.
I’d be up early in the pre-dawn silent darkness, cuddling a pot of coffee at Pete’s elegant kitchen wooden kitchen table, ‘live-edge’ in its cut honoring the raw bark line on one side, and trying to write this and that. Gently hallucinating with the after-fumes of that New Year’s eve second whiskey I needn’t have had, that woke you up early, and for which I know the best cure is getting up and a short walk, deep slugs of fresh air, and a stretch outside, in the darkness, all of which winds up the spring of optimism in a day, and a New Year.
The old man Sky would stir gently on the floor by the tree, and then quieten back into a fluffy silence. A stunning athlete of a dog in the late autumn of his years, who would look wise with his eyes open or closed.
And then from his corner a second stir, this gentle scratching sound as if Sky was re-considering waking, but more rhythmic and scratchy. I’d look over to see him back fast asleep but running his paws along the floor in rhythmic neural twitches. Clearly dreaming of younger days charging across tundra in the middle of a line of brothers, his pack of huskies, or perhaps still in his own Christmas nostalgia and dreaming of being a reindeer with the jingling bells of taking flight and streaking across the night sky.
Dad stayed down the corridor in another apartment, with carefully placed books and everything else carefully placed too. And from my otherwise quiet kitchen table island of awake-ness, I remembered wondering if this old man (well, not that old…) was in his gentle rhythmic snore or yet winding his mind up into the day with the newspaper’s digital edition on an iPad, head just up from horizontal on the pillow. That angle at which you could just about take a sip of water, and smile, but at which it hardly looked like you might get up for the day…
Pete would never stir, or make a noise, pure still log in a blissfully relaxed sloth of just lying there…
On New Year’s Day it was all my way of hiding from Pete’s idea that our Donegal ritual of a ‘polar bear’ ocean dip was a ritual that should slide right over to Squamish, BC. At exactly 10am on New Year’s Day. An hour before cold water gives me these thoughts of ‘how the fuck do I get out of this’…just like a piano exam would.
Anyway, Christmas in Squamish had so many fine memories that we were left with a long carousel of photo-swipes on our phones. Smiling moments in different corners of the landscapes around the Howe Sound and giddy adventures like free-falling on a metal cable into the Cascade Mountains forest in ‘zip-lining’, and snow-shoeing, and eating steak together at the top of Whistler Mountain on Christmas Day, and being back home gathered around a tree with a wide pile of presents, even though we pledged “we’ll keep it light this year”…again this year…
There’s a wonderful sense of renewal that we get at New Year, right? And yet how the whole concept of ‘it’s a New Year today’ is simply our minds slotting into the framework of days and weeks and months invented by the Egyptians and adjusted by Julius Caesar, and corrected one last time by Pope Gregory the Thirteenth in 1582. It’s all made up in our heads, right? And usefully so, in the dance of human ritual and repetition.
The dance that actually gifts us a sense of renewal to play with every single day…
