Number 130: New Year’s Day, Holy Chaos

The day came down like a carnival tent — one moment bright in a dusty field, the next a dusty field, only. Sunset just a flurry of men about their business. Unsentimental pulling up of stakes, rolling canvas, and laying it flat in trucks that rumbled away leaving night in their wake.

We were left in the night they left, watching the surface of a pond that reflected a muted moon. Brighter in that blackness were the silver highway lights, held aloft on poles we could not see at such a distance. 

The day itself is growing distant now, so I must put it down. I must tell you a story. 

New Year’s Day: A day that should be nothing special, but that comes every year like a newborn I didn’t know I was waiting for. It giggles and coos at me until I, dark surface that I am, begin against my better judgment to reflect delight.

I was delighted when I wrote, offhand-like, in a journal that morning, “Stand at the ready, and I will do marvelous things.” I thought, “I am ready for marvelous things.” 

And when it turned out that I had misread the schedule, taken us to a church service already over, I was ready to find another. We tried the Lutherans who had finished hours ago, and the Catholics who were rising late, found ourselves at last with the Presbyterians, which seemed fitting, since, after all, they’d raised me, years ago, in a city no longer my own.  

A Korean man wished us Happy New Year at the door, and the Korean pastor, laughing, told us not to worry if we couldn’t understand. “God is God, regardless,” he said. “It will be a holy chaos.” 

It was a holy chaos. We sang the English words to all the hymns, the other language pulling ours in to its embrace and all of it rising up, untranslatable, but also, since it was the language of love, requiring no translation.

We ate kimchi and rice cake soup in the basement with people we’d never met before and most probably never would again. I was given a bible verse on blue paper with gold corners in a pretty cream envelope and told it was a blessing for the New Year. “May he grant you your heart’s desire,” these strangers told me. “May he fulfill all your plans.” 

I had no plans other than to be filled with the day, which was already going, already running through my hands. 

We stopped at a Mexican bakery where we met Alicia who tried to sell us everything and, when we said we could take no more, began giving it away — loaves of bread. “It’s too good for you to miss,” she said. “It’s on the house!”. 

In the afternoon, we ate bread. 

I find myself thinking now about bread. Bread of life and bread from heaven. A profusion of loaves and fishes. Body and bread. The daily bread I ask for most days and receive, taking it from the bottom shelf in the back, where it has grown stale, a little. Eating it mechanically, giving mechanical thanks. 

And missing (for lack of readiness, I suppose) the carnival tent; the laughing baby at the carousel; the music rising up, yearning to take me in its embrace. Alicia’s voice saying, “Come! Take and eat.” 

The day will come down like a carnival tent. The night which I know not will fall. But while it is light, let me be ready for all its holy chaos, for all its brightest delights.