Another New Year, Another Resolution to Break

I started keeping diaries when I was seven or eight years old and I didn’t stop my daily recordings until I was in my late twenties. I guess I thought I’d grow up to be someone famous like my ancestors---James Otis Jr., Mercy Otis Warren, or Amelia Earhart---and in the distance sea of humanity someone would care about the naïve and disjointed ramblings of my youth. I’m nearly seventy now and I’ve barely read about the American Revolution let alone done anything as history book noteworthy as James Otis, a patriot and friend to Thomas Paine. Nor have I ever been pen pals with someone as famous as Abigail Adams or written anything as important as the first history book on the Revolutionary War like Mercy Warren did. As for Amelia, aviator extraordinaire---God, I’ve been afraid to get on an airplane every since I did it once and survived the ‘trauma’ back in the 60s. And the most adventurous thing I’ve done in recent years is to walk down our hilly driveway after an ice storm to get the mail. I’m such a disappointment to the little girl still deep inside me.

Even after I stopped writing daily diary enters I’ve still been relatively faithful about doing a list of New Years resolutions at the beginning of each year with a few paragraphs added updating my life’s journey This is my 2010 entry:

I woke up New Years morning with a dream still hanging on the edge of consciousness. I was lost and looking for an apartment where I lived. Being lost has been a life long reoccurring dream for me. Sometimes I'm in a school and I’m late for class. Sometimes I’m lost in the streets looking for my purse. Sometimes I’m lost and looking for a door out of a house of mirrors. There’s a dozen versions of my ‘lost’ dream. They say that being lost in a dream is really about the anxiety of leaving something familiar behind or about losing something of value. I can buy those theories as an explanation. But sometimes I have dreams that keeping me thinking all day long: Where the hell did that come from!

What made my New Years dream so different from the generic versions is what I was carrying around. While I was lost and looking for where I lived I ran into someone who asked me to baby sit their newborn. I said “yes” and then ducked into a copy center, stuck the baby in a copy machine and made myself a living, breathing baby of my own. Always a detail person, even in my dreams, I put a check mark on the forehead of one of the babies so I wouldn’t get the copy mixed up with the original then I continued on my way, looking for where I lived. Okay, I don’t know why I’m recording this for my infamous hereafter but what the heck, I’m old so I can get away with doing irrational things.

Now on to my New Years resolutions, most of which are pretty universal: Lose weight, get more physically fit, and finally get an accurate count on the number of legs on that centipede who lives under our filing cabinet. In addition I’d like to get back to blogging more often because I’ve always found writing to be therapeutic, and I’d like to stop hanging around a particular political forum that has been taking up a lot of my time this winter. Being there is like being thrown into a modge pit full of angry Hell’s Angels and that’s no place for an elderly woman carrying around a cloned copy of a newborn baby with a check mark on her forehead.

Happy New Year!

.