December 1st and all is well, hopefully. Of all dates in the year, I find this among the most significant. It is a signpost and, as today, comes without warning, seemingly another day in another month until you realise it is the first day of the last month of another year.
You know how it is. Who really sees that face in the mirror as you shave away the previous 24 hours? Other than, possibly, the gash on your lower chin, which you slashed weeks before as your thoughts flew up while the razor dug deep below. So much blood. Who knew?
Does anyone notice those accumulating wrinkles as they emerge until, maybe, a photograph is thrust upon us? Then, suddenly there they are, all those years that have passed and are passing. Or, you could be within earshot of the usual less-than-subtle colleague, as s/he remarks: “He’s looking older, isn ’t he?”
December 1st is like such moments. It jolts you into the reality of time, another year almost gone and you hadn’t noticed. For some of us, gratefully, it’s just the stride of life.
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On my sixth birthday my parents got me a bicycle. It was second-hand and painted blue. Thereafter, on Fridays, I would cycle to the nearby grand metropolis of Frenchpark, where I’d get “the messages” for my mother.
The three kilometres there was some distance for a small boy on a child’s bike but a long straight stretch on it seemed to go on forever. It seemed as long as the year after December 25th before Santy Claus would come again.
In winter, the lower fields on either side of that stretch of road would flood, adding a certain frisson as I dreaded losing balance and probable drowning.
Once past that, it was, like December, downhill all the way and I’d freewheel into Frenchpark alive with excitement over those slated houses with stairs (a passion in my childhood), the shops, pubs, post office, church, people.
Very different from those endless rushy fields in the quiet townland where we lived.
December 1st brings me back to that grand entrance to Frenchpark back then, with its promise of the vagaries of a small village and, today, the expectation of another happy Christmas to come.
Time passeth, having no alternative.
Expectation, from Latin expectationem, for “anticipation”
