Photo by Luke Frazier
On New Year’s Eve we watched the sky explode over the Beaufort River in a phantasmagoria of better-than-expected fireworks; on New Year’s Day I plunged into the Atlantic out on Hunting Island with hundreds of co-celebrants for The Pelican Plunge. It was a stellar 17 hour stretch.
The mood was holiday-jaunty at both, strangers united in singular pursuit of an experience, a marking of meaning, a shout into the abyss, a peak moment. The year was over/the year began and there we were: alive and accounted for. Remember this night, I thought, remember this day.
What made the fireworks so dang good was the layering effects produced in the pirouettes of pyrotechnic artistry. There were swirls within circles, staggered sparkling twists, slow-fading golden extensions with pops & flashes and sizzling celestial starfish. There was a nice crowd but it wasn’t overwhelming, and the ease of getting in and out of downtown was like butter cream frosting on my sometimes cranky in crowds attitude cake.
Late the next morning we arrived at Hunting Island and joined a line of cars snaking to the north beach parking lots, it was a backup that I was happy to be a part of. The sun had broken strong with its own new year’s resolution to provide rays of comfort that made the mid-fifties air temperature feel just fine. The food trucks were cranking and we got hot chocolates loaded with marshmallows. Wondering if we would see anyone we knew after moving here just last August we soon bumped into our next door neighbors, joking about carpooling next time.
Among the crowd were a family of crab-head hats, a jellyfish umbrella collective with colorful, shimmery streamers, flamingo-human hybrids, a few pajamas and new year’s tiaras, a man on horseback sporting an American flag, the Pelican of the Plunge themselves, and a grandma who got run over by a reindeer (it was mounted on her back to prove it).
I chatted with a woman dressed as a turtle who told me she switched costumes after last year’s dragon tail got stepped on too much and laughed at a kid in a hot dog costume telling a joke. Mostly I wandered around the beach smiling while we waited on the countdown.
The moment arrived and everyone took off, kids screaming and adults beaming. The initial rush was tempered by adrenalin, and as the cold rose up my legs my only thought was when I would let go and dive. Then I was under and up and consumed in the brightness of a body reacting to a radical change in circumstances. I looked around in laughter.
Collectively we worshipped in 53 degree holy water, witnessing via tingling extremities and gasping yelps of surrender. We believed in this freezing moment like holy rollers stomping out the devil (temperature differentials notwithstanding). I had that thought that comes up more often as I get older: you need to fix this memory in your mind and heart—this is what living large means and it doesn’t last forever.
One of the most stunning aspects of aging for me is the double-edged ability to consider whole chunks of time—the melding of
Photo by Allison Schaffer
days into weeks then seasons, followed by years becoming decades and more. Even when there are specific facts to hang on life’s timeline the edges fray and wear, fading comfortably in some cases, other times with pointy memories best avoided. Often we’re left with an amalgamation of fact and fiction, something the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett tagged back in the early 1930’s as “imaginative reconstruction,” a feature of which is our internal drive to compose stories that feel coherent. We so want things to make sense.
Modern research has validated Bartlett’s insight by showing that neural circuits linked to imagination are active when we are in the process of remembering. In his book “Why We Remember” neuropsychologist Charan Ranganath notes how emotion impacts episodic memory, the recall of experiences rather than facts or knowledge. Ranganath seems to suggest that the combination of imagination and emotion makes memory more akin to a dynamic phenomenon, and qualitatively more than just a repository of records.
As I look back on those chunks of time (and holidays seem to be a natural time to steep in memory) I can certainly sense how many specific facts have dissolved and gone away. What has not gone away are the feelings associated with experiences I remember. Textured layers of meaning added to those decades reduced to days, hours and distilled moments. That is what we have to hold close.
I spent maybe 10 minutes in the water on New Year’s Day, offering a little prayer for those I love to be protected in the coming year. I thanked my higher power for being able to take part in such an event, starting with waking up at all. The less I take for granted the more I get to enjoy.
Time is a dream we try to hold on to and will inevitably fail. Instead we will have a recollection, a hodgepodge of what happened and might have happened. A perfectly imperfect memory to feel again and again. Hallelujah anyway.
