Looking Forward to Letting Go

The new year starts now.

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

What do you hear when someone opens a bottle of champagne?

Most people associate the sound of a popped cork with joy. To me, it’s a dull thud, like a door pulled shut. Admittedly, I haven’t imbibed enough real Champagne to grasp the fuss and ritual surrounding it. I don’t hate the small-c fizzy stuff. But what is the magic of the popping sound, that mild little prelude to a celebration? Is there a difference between uncorking a bottle of Taittinger and twisting the lid off a jar of pickles?

New Year’s Eve is ten days away.

How to prepare? Bake cookies, send Christmas cards, make under-the-wire charity donations? Yes. No. Later. I decide to vacuum the house.

I finish the upstairs. Downstairs. My machine has amazing suction. I need to empty the container after every area rug. But it’s great! I’m picking up dirt that’s probably older than my 1913 house. It takes two hours. I’m on a roll. I decide to do the basement.

The basement requires a trash-can-sized Shop Vac, which I do not own. As I make my way down the steps, the Shark whines, giving off a dentist’s drill smell. Oof.

Back in the kitchen, I heat my coffee in the microwave. Staring through the unwashed windows at the unraked lawn, I ponder the local rabbit/coyote imbalance. The rabbits are winning.

The Shark sucked up Ritalin tablets from a gap in the floorboards. Two decades ago, that’s where my son hid them. Now he has adult ADHD, a disorder that apparently undergoes puberty, just as he did. Would he still have it, if I’d paid attention to where he was stashing his medication? Am I implicated by genetics?

(The negative self-talk is late today. Usually it wakes me up at eight and won’t let me out of bed until noon.)

Get out the chicken-wire cages. Look at those shrubs with the nursery tags on. You bought them to replace the ones that got eaten to the ground last winter. And the two hundred tulip and daffodil bulbs? It’s December in Minnesota. Should the ground be frozen? Yes. But the ground is not frozen. Lucky for you, it’s the warmest December on record.

I open the Amazon app. Shop vac. Rodent repellent. Wait on the Shark, check the warranty. Coffee warmer coaster thing. Done.

No. Not done. That lilac bush, the one the rabbits gave a mullet. The one you glanced at and declared, Like all bad haircuts, it will grow back?

Hedge trimmers, heavy duty.

I look out the window again, this time at the two turquoise Adirondack chairs. We’d sat in them in on his birthday in October 2022. We drank Champagne. He died the following April.

I lean over and pull open the drawer full of dead batteries, rubber bands, and useless remotes. Wine corks. Did I save it?

I think so. This one? Not sure.

The voice keeps yammering after I close the drawer. Oh, for crying out loud. Stop crying out loud. Stop crying. Stop.

I feel a punishing wave of exhaustion.

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Because warmed-up coffee tastes nasty, I’m going to make myself a fresh cup and tell you a story. Unfortunately for my sleep hygiene routine, it won’t be the one I was going to tell.

I’ve been working on an essay for weeks. Working and working on it. You know how anyone who’s ever gotten an MFA has been advised countless times to “kill your darlings?” I resist the impulse. I tweak and polish and curse until I hate the piece so much that to kill my darlings becomes an imperative that fills me with subversive joy.

You can “show, don’t tell” me until the cows come home or whatever other soulless cliché comes to mind. But once my brain has been eaten by zombie ampersands I’ve given myself permission, I just love to kill my darlings. I bury them in files where they’ll never be found. Here on Substack, I have a “dead darlings” file posing as a draft post. I promise never to publish it. If I do, consider it a cry for help. Please don’t unsubscribe.

Three dead darlings. Clockwise from top: Santa Lucia, Jemima Puddleduck, and the Suicidal Angel.

The serial killer in me will occasionally take a photo before cutting and pasting text. Sometimes my victims characters shine so vividly in my imagination that, just like the Velveteen Rabbit, love makes them real. Look at this trio of beauties. Santa Lucia’s hairdresser lived in an age before battery candles. (Bonus: pretty blue glaze. I chose it to match her eyes). Jemima Puddleduck was easy. You can’t cross a street around here in spring without falling into a pothole that will take you straight to hell. The Suicidal Angel? Tough to call 988 when you have no mouth, eyes, or opposable thumbs. I had more fun than my daughter did when she made Barbie stew.

Because I was trying so hard to write this thing that I’m now going to bombard with CO2-propelled corks flash-bang grenades and thermonuclear weapons set aside with a sigh of resignation, I have not mailed a single Christmas card. I haven’t baked cookies, though I did buy ingredients. Some are in my cupboards. The rest are divided between two refrigerators. Given this separation, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to measure, weigh, sift, mix, blend, beat, soften, chill, chop, bake, and roll themselves in Demerara, turbinado, or powdered sugar or make gluten substitutions all by themselves.

(Side note: do you remember when it was shocking to read that Donald Trump, on at least one occasion, demanded to know the location of his Roy Cohn? No one could find it, just as no one can find my Keebler Elf. I know I have not yet been assigned a personal elf, but please? I just want one. He doesn’t have to be ruthless. Just ruthlessly precise when converting imperial to metric weights).

I did take some time this afternoon to shop for Christmas gifts. My children will be getting socks and alcohol.

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Here’s the ending to that POS I worked on for so long that I’m going to have to spent the next seventy-two hours in Christmas hell. I’m going to strike it through entirely, because that seem to be my modus operandi these days. And this guy deserves a public execution.

I don’t remember why I was at his New Year’s Eve party, forty-four years ago. Nor can I say for certain that he aimed the bottle of Cold Duck in my direction. The cork hit me in the side of the head. My hair was drenched with a sticky pink liquid. My new jacket, the best piece of clothing I owned, was ruined. The rich wife held out her glass. He kissed her and filled it with what was left of the small-c champagne.

Here is this story’s ending:

I look out the window at those Adirondack chairs.

When we finished the champagne, he grabbed my wrist. I placed my hand under his elbow and helped him stand.

“Here’s what I want for my birthday.” He swayed, nearly fell. I handed him his cane. “Don’t stop writing,” he said.

Now that I’ve told you this story, I’m letting the other one go. Happy New Year to my beloved readers.

Mary