The Preppy Palagi: Winter Solstice 2014

It has been a year of transition, although even saying so sounds cliché. Is there ever a year without transition? 2014 was marked by a false start, to use a running metaphor, apt considering that we were to be in western Kenya this year, one of the world’s running capitals, a place I fell hard for, even as it was almost immediately clear that my job there was all wrong.

The year’s synopsis: I quit a job. I looked for a job. I found a new job. There were growing pains: a farewell to academia; an adjustment to corporate regulations and oversight. My wife left her own business and went back to school. There were growing pains: instructors who didn’t really teach; arbitrary exam questions. Our daughter started her final year of elementary school. There were growing pains: a flight by herself that she was sure she wouldn’t survive; a week of sleepaway camp; plans for middle school. We all survived.

Too often this past year the world itself felt unmoored, like we collectively wouldn’t survive, and I haven’t always been sure, these past months, with gun violence and a literal plague and fear and incivility and racism, how we continue, as a species, to light the candle.

I just finished Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic novel about how the world forges on after life as we know it has ended, how one can and should find grace and gratitude in everyday life. It is a deeply humane work, and so on this, the longest night, the winter solstice, I want to catalogue some of my many blessings this year.

The homeless man who serenaded me with “Love Me Tender” after a group of us from the Unitarian Church had served dinner to him and his fellow shelter residents. Did we like Elvis? he asked us. Yes, I said. The discovery, last spring, in my regular morning rambles during my months of underemployment, that Northern Flickers had made a nest in a dead tree along the bike path. Finding out I have a Kenyan namesake and knowing that, despite whatever else happened during my long January in Eldoret, I will always be anchored to that place and that little boy.

The botanical gardens at my alma mater, riotous and tropical. The friendly old security guard at the MFA Boston, a Navy vet from WWII, with whom I swapped stories when I sat down to give my blistered feet a break after a job interview. Finding shards of antique pottery on the beach, a robin’s eggshell on a walk. Black raspberry ice cream cones after swimming in the ocean; baby praying mantises hatching in our neglected garden. The wonderful vintage sign I “rescued” from the front yard of a long-abandoned antiques store that now hangs in my den. Meeting my favorite band (Lucero) at the Newport Folk Festival and finding out that they're not just hard-drinking, tattooed womanizers. (Or at least they're really polite ones.) A butterfly bush I “rescued” from a construction site that eventually bloomed in my yard.

Dahlias. Oh, the dahlias, at the farmers’ market; at our dear ones’ beach house in Weekapaug; for sale, $2 a stem, along a rural road. Stevie Wonder in concert, and singing along to "Sir Duke" with thousands of others. The Georgian doors and fanlights of Dublin. standing on the site where Handel’s “Messiah” was first performed in 1742 and honoring that work by singing a few bars of “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion,” my favorite piece from that oratorio.

“O Thou...” is in 6/8 time, and those who know me well are aware that I have an unusual affinity for this time signature, that indeed I can pick it out from the merest background Muzak in a store. That “O Thou” is what I willed myself to hear the rhythm of as I was emerging from anesthesia after brain surgery a little over four years ago, and how, when I could still count it in my head, I knew that I would be okay. Blessings then. Blessings now.

Most of all, the blessings of connection this year. The broad and lovely way that I define family, my parents, my wife and daughter and my daughter’s father and his parents and sisters and my sister and her family and my father-in-law and my brother-in-law and his family. The friends so dear that they are aunties and uncles and cousins to my daughter, family in spirit if not law. The pals from my happy childhood in a close-knit town, many of whom I was able to reminisce with at my 25^th high school reunion; my beloved colleagues and students at Brown; my new compatriots at work who crack wise with me; our church communities; the good people at the kung fu studio; the women from Smith who remind me how each one of us is still finding her way; the fellow parents who make us laugh and pinch hit as babysitters and whose families we adore. So many connections, sometimes in person, sometimes epistolary, sometimes only briefly after years, sometimes merely on social media but not, as critics would have it, meaningless. So many beloveds, everyone with their own struggles and moments of clarity. I am grateful for you all.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. Keep lighting the candle.

Namaste,

Kelley