Many of us have annual traditions this time of the year. They usually involve special celebrations with friends and family, unpacking treasured ornaments for a tree, and bringing out dog-eared pages from magazines and cookbooks to prepare holiday dishes. My tradition is pulling out a diary that records the year and my perspective of it. I write down where I spent Christmas, New Years and my birthday, who I was with, how the world was doing and how I was doing in general. I have a small library of diaries, five to be exact, recorded over two decades.
I have been grappling with how to write the last chapter of this year. The final quarter started with the vast devastation of Hurricane Sandy and concluded with the unimaginable slaughter of six and seven year olds (and six trusted stewards) at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Ct. And in a sweep of time, all the petty things that bothered me the rest of the year no longer seemed relevant.
The two Sandys left me in a state of “sixes and sevens,” a British idiom referring to a state of confusion. How can I find meaning out of these tragedies? What are the lessons to share? How can I celebrate the joy of the season when so many people are suffering? I think as adults we take it harder than the children. We carry the burden and the guilt. We seek the answers in the hope we’ll find solace. Children will continue to run and play and wonder and dream.
This week I said to myself, “what would it be like to feel six again, instead of sixes and sevens?” When I was six I was truly fearless and totally inquisitive. Daddy was “the man.” I made cake and went clothes shopping with my mother. My dog Bouffant was my best friend. School was a safe haven where we chased boys and learned to write cursive. Going to the movies was a family outing followed by a “grown up” meal at a restaurant. There were no malls back then, only department stores downtown that dressed up their windows for Christmas, and we dressed up to go downtown. I wanted to grow up to be a teacher, a dancer, an actress. There were no computers, no internet. We read books and communicated by talking to each other. There was TV, but mainly funny shows not phony “reality” shows. My mind was free of concerns and full of imagination. An imagination that could take me anywhere, and did, always to good places.
When I was six I made my stage debut at the Chattanooga Little Theater as Trixie, the no-neck monster in “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.” My Dad presented me with a bouquet of flowers when I took my curtain call. When I was six the world was my oyster.
Wouldn’t it all be nice if we could clear our heads from time to time and feel six again? In an attempt to find solace after Sandy and Sandy Hook, I gave it a try while visiting my mother and hometown of Chattanooga with my husband, David. We went to the zoo, watched a community theater performance of “Annie,” played with the dogs, drove around looking at Christmas decorations, and visited childhood places. We also sat around the living room and just chatted, sharing stories and memories; and ultimately, as we somehow knew it would, re-kindled the bonds that have always tied us together, distanced over the past year by geography. And slowly my “sixes and sevens” settled down.
As I write the last chapter of the year in my diary, I will write that the lessons I learned from the two Sandys are this: The greatest gifts we have are family, friends, health, and home. And, that they are also our greatest obligations.
When I was six I felt invincible. Would that we could all feel that way again?
When I was six, this poem by A. A. Milne, written through the eyes of a child, aged six, was my favorite poem:
THE END
When I was one I had just begun.
When I was two I was barely new.
When I was three I was hardly me.
When I was four I was not much more.
When I was five I was just alive.
But now that I am six, I’m as clever as clever;
So I think I will be six for ever and ever.
It will be in my diary this year.
