13 I 2004 - 23:29 - sol occidit

As the old year enters its final days...

It hit me today: at this time next year, my mother's emails about the approach of the New Year, the injunctions not to vacuum or sweep on New Year's Eve, the question to make sure I wear red - all of that will actually matter, for the first time in my life. And sure, as far as connection to ancestral cultures go, I'm doing pretty poorly - I fall asleep (for shame!) whenever I try to bone up on the history of China - but the food-based festivals are still events in my life, have been since birth. And next year? I don't want that to change, but I can't say it won't, because I simply don't know what being away will do to me.

(Food-based, I say, mostly because we don't really celebrate the festivals that are a little more difficult to put into practice - for instance, the Lantern Festival [1/15], because we don't really bother about hanging lanterns around, or Tomb Sweeping Day [105 days after the winter solstice] - I have no graves of ancestors here to sweep, or even Double Nine Day [my informational guide from Taiwan says that 'people have the custom of climbing high mountains and appreciating chrysanthemums']. But there's the New Year, and the Dragon Boat Festival [5/5], with the zongzi, and the Mid-Autumn Festival [8/15] with its moon cakes.)

Which is something that is increasingly on my mind, these days - the change approaching, not the Chinese festival calendar, no matter how much I might like to clutch at what is in truth only marginally familiar.

It struck me again this evening, as I was watching the sun set over the Pacific - clouds covered most of the sky, but there was a line of golden orange starting at mid-sky and slashing across to the south, and then above that you could see, through the clouds, the glow of the sun, with a brilliant tawniness to it that kept sticking the phrase 'Pale Fire' in mind, though I have not yet read anything by Nabokov. And behind the buildings, below the sky, trees, looking as if they would march to the ocean, which stretched open and grey beyond, as if to receive them; and for a moment, the world was mine, I belonged here in a way that I never really felt I have, and everything was open, and all was possibility.

That is the sort of thing that grounds me here, and I am glad for it; but I cannot help wondering, just a little, if I will learn to love the sunrise from the Atlantic, that here can paint the town in glorious colors but does not give me the boundlessness of the ocean-set. And worse, I do not know if I can learn to appreciate that northern, landbound sunset, which must at first be foreign to me. But now - no matter what I tell myself - it is really only a matter of time.