Death Of A Decade

Being twenty years old, it was my intention to celebrate the entrance of 2011 in a more sensational manner than watching the ball drop whilst sipping iced tea with my grandparents. I supposed I would like to exercise my social side and join the throngs bustling through the streets of old Sacramento to watch the fireworks over the Tower Bridge, or join in at a house party (events at which I rarely appear.) As I stood on the drive in the crisp afternoon at 000 Treehouse Lane and watched the sky darken, I felt a change of heart. This New Years, as in several past, I would stay home, accompanied only by my grandparents. This night marks the 65th New Year's Eve my grandparents have spent together, and it brings me great joy to be able to witness this transition with them.

The clouds dimmed from a dull gray to a deeper ashen shade and then to black; a subtle and unspectacular conclusion to another year. Another decade in fact--a decade as chaotic as any prior, as filled with death and birth, misery and tragedy, triumph and overwhelming exultation as the human presence can comprehend. I glanced upward at a 737 in the departure pattern from Sacramento International, nearly identical to one of several hijacked on the morning of September 11, 2001. The earliest event of the decade, it seems, that has failed to escape my memory--not the entrance of the new millenium nor the first day of middle school remain. Just that unusually bright, blue morning.

A decade ago it seems, and so it was. So much has happened--one wonders how time has the capacity to contain all of the happenings of the world. Unnoticeable, such changes are, in the blurred continuum in which we move onward, at varying speeds it seems. Sometimes we sprint, sometimes crawl--yet always keeping pace with the clock, being hindered or accelerated by the laws of our existence. At times like these we take a glance over the shoulder, shocked to see our place of origination and the distance we have traveled. New Year's for me has always been one of these turning points, a station along a railroad through the heartland of my life, and past the events destined to define the past of the future. At such stations I attempt to recall the monuments passed along the way. Much is simply lost to the truck driver's amnesia of life as an unvaried landscape, largely unmemorable however beautiful.

My entire youthhood--middle school, high school, half of college--has somehow dissolved with the acidic nature of time's progression in the past ten years. Looking through my Facebook photos (and even Myspace,) I recall each and every one "as if it were yesterday." As if it were just this afternoon. Behind the camera and in the frame, my memory unfreezes the stills and allows those events to replay like a video montage of my experiences. Fascinating.

New Year's is a celebration of sorts, as a perhaps solemn personal accomplishment of surviving another year. But it is for me more a time of bittersweet reflection--sometimes sweeter, sometimes overpoweringly bitter--for auld lang syne. This year, as in all 18 of my January firsts, I did not receive a New Year's kiss in the traditional sense. But in a sagacious, almost sarcastic sense, I did receive a kiss--the kiss of life, a deep breath with the promise of another decade of the most fulfilling experiences chance may offer. And as much as I strain to forget the pain inflicted upon me by the past ten years, I cannot help but feel satiated by the positive experiences bestowed unto me, like the celebrating of this new year with my grandparents. Perhaps not the most adrenaline-packed New Year's, but symbolic in every way.

Current Mood: Reflective

Listening To: Auld Lang Syne by Robert Burns