New Year's Day

I was a teenage fan of the band U2, and this was the first U2 song I fell in love with, but certainly not the last. I remember the New Year's Day video, the cold, blunt, wintry landscape, and I lived in the Ravenscroft house where the nearby park suggested something similar. I had teenage angst to spare and even then was more likely to look back than forward. I think this comes of having moved so much. You're always looking back at the place you left, as a means of settling into the place you've now arrived at. I lived in the Ravenscroft house longer than I've ever lived anywhere and many of my happiest memories are memories of growing up in that house with my three siblings. A tv show called The New Music had just launched and U2 was all the rage, and New Year's Day had that wonderful solidly pinging piano that felt like it was knocking against your head and your heart at the same time. Without having the slightest idea what that song was about, it became about my own life. I associate it even now with a time and a set of circumstances I can never get back. Instead of resolutions and vaulting ambitions for myself, New Year's Day -- the song and the time -- always makes me think of the Ravenscroft house. And the view from my sister's window looking out at the snow all the way down to the neighbourhood creek. It's something that Esa might have felt in the silent snowbound vastness of Algonquin Park in The Language of Secrets. I try to make myself -- and Esa -- turn the page, move on, accept the forward motion of life. But I love the intangible, bittersweet happiness that New Year's Day recalls. And sometimes, there's a quiet grace in looking back.