The thirteenth has come and it has now gone. The scallops offered in sacrifice to the celebration of the passage of time- the passage of another, the sixty-seventh, year - are mostly gone, although some wait in refrigerators hither and refrigerators yon for their ultimate – one would hope- inclusion in Sunday omelets or Sunday scrambles. Whatever their ultimate fate, they are certainly gone from the immediate arena, of the immediate celebration of the immediate passage of yet another immediately-gone year.
And before the dawn, even though the fourteenth is a Saturday it will be a Wednesday and then almost without noticeable boundary it will be Thursday and the recycling trucks will be forwarding and the recycling trucks will be backwarding and there will be the crashes of glass and the interludes of silence and the interludes of the bells. And soon it will fade to Wednesday again. And the shortest day of the year will be imminent; and it will almost immediately fade to the longest, and then the shortest, and then the longest. Who knows for how long, but it is certain that the days will so fade, and will so fade until they stop. And what then? Indeed. What then?
And the cycle of the chestnuts and the cycle of the mountain ashes provide the flashes of silent wallpaper-like color for the motion of the days and the sounds of the trucks and the bells and the silences. For silences, we have been told, have sounds.
And the pictures on the variously abandoned drivers licenses rattle their arrangement – oldest to youngest, youngest to oldest, back and forth, back and forth in the panic drawer of my life and the panic drawer of my bedroom and in my field of vision.
It seems to continue rather than to cease, so who am I to judge its merit or its value or its meaning, or even its actual existence? Who after all am I? Indeed.
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