I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, breaking and entering wouldn’t be one of them. Less than two hours into the New Year, I found myself shoeless, shimmying through a window of my house. No alcohol was involved.
Besides not making resolutions, I also normally don’t enter my home like a burglar, climbing up drainpipes or rappelling down from the ceiling, finding the most inconvenient means of entering. I was just locked out.
Fortunately, a living room window was unlocked. I poked my head through the window to judge the distance to the couch below.
For a moment, I pictured myself catching my high-heeled shoes on the curtains, tumbling through the window and banging my head on the coffee table.
Not having resolved to die in the new year, I kicked off my high-heeled shoes, so as not to entangle them in the curtains.
There weren’t any lights on in the living room, but enough hazy moonlight glowed from outside, illuminating the familiar forms. It was strange, looking in from the outside of my home.
Everything in the room was recognizable as my own: the couch, the pictures on the walls, the potentially deadly coffee table. But it was like looking at a painting of the room I knew, only all the colors were murky or everything was shifted to the right.
Something was off. I was looking at my home like a stranger would.
I had just come home from a New Year’s Eve party that I decided to leave shortly after midnight. There were a bunch of my friends from high school there. It’s only been about two and a half years since we graduated, so we don’t loathe each other enough yet to make hanging out during vacations intensely awkward.
All my friends looked the same, but there was something different, something off about each of them. Like the girl I could always trust to keep a secret who was itching to gossip about the sexploits of another, absent, friend.
Or the guy who was a math genius, who could find the derivative of anything, who has dropped out of college.
I recognized these people, even though I don’t see them much anymore, but getting a glimpse of them at that party was like seeing them with my eyes squinted. I could make them out, but just barely. But was I seeing anything new, or was I just getting a new perspective on something familiar?
I suppose I could chalk this all up to getting older. Times change, people change, we all get older, blah, blah, blah.
The great poets Simon and Garfunkel sang, “After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same,” and I had always hoped that that was true. But Simon and Garfunkel also don’t talk to each other anymore, so perhaps they can’t be trusted.
But maybe they’re right, and for the same reason that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Things feel different for a moment at the beginning of each year, but then someone will act stupid or let me down, and I realize that nothing has really changed. Nothing will change simply by virtue of having to buy a new calendar.
Joe Hertel, our resident Old Man on Campus, wrote a column in this space for years. He has seen a lot, and if he didn’t have the answers to life’s questions, he had advice about how to find them.
But me, I’m all questions, which is why I’ve decided to give this columnist thing a try. I don’t hope to dispense any wisdom, but I’ll try to sort through all the questions that pop up in what that other great poet Prince termed “this thing called life.”
One of my first questions this year was “How the hell am I going to get into my house?” I answered that one fairly easily, but the other questions will have to wait for now. Or at least until my next column.